Affiliate Marketing - The Online Referral Business
Affiliate marketing is an online based business in which affiliates refer products and services to customers online. Anyone can become an affiliate and it allows you to make money online even without any products of your own to sell.
Amazon, for example has an affiliate program. Most people are familiar with Amazon and have bought products from the site. To sell products from Amazon and earn commissions you simply need to sign up to the affiliate program and get your affiliate link. The affiliate link is tracked back to you and identifies you when you make a sale.
To make sales online using affiliate links you can place them in content, send them in emails or use a variety of other methods to put them in front of customers.
Blogging, video blogging, email marketing and pay per click advertising are just a few of the tactics which affiliate marketers use to get their products in front of paying customers.
But how difficult is it to make money with affiliate marketing? Is it worth it and how long will it take?
Depending on your approach to affiliate marketing, the products you use and the tactics you sell them with, it can take several months or even years to start generating consistent sales. You could also post a link and have a sale come in the same day - although this is unlikely!
The two main types of marketing which affiliates use are free and paid. With free marketing methods, affiliates will generate content (e.g. blogging) and with paid they run ads and send customers directly to their products. They might also use email marketing and collect subscribers to promote affiliate products to.
With paid marketing you can get traction much more quickly, while organic marketing (content creation) tends to take a lot longer.
The types of products too have a bearing on how well you can do as an affiliate. Amazon’s products for example pay very low levels of commission (between1% and 10% in most cases). By finding high ticket affiliate products you can make much larger commissions on sales, particularly if they are digital products, since digital products pay larger levels of commission (30-40%).
You can also promote subscription products too, which pay recurring commissions. Subscription products are a good idea, especially for beginner affiliates because they allow the affiliate to earn regular income quite quickly. A good subscription products might be a business course or a business software. Business software is needed for online businesses so customers are likely to maintain their memberships for several years.
Initially, affiliate marketing can seem very difficult because you’ll start out with no content or email subscribers. Ideally, aim to focus on getting 1000 subscribers on to your email list before you make a decision about quitting! Most affiliates will quit at the beginning stage after not getting any results. But if you persevere long enough, you’ll start to gain some knowledge and experience, which will make all the difference.
When you start learning which campaigns work and which aren’t so good, you can cut back the bad and scale up the good ones! Over time, you can also build content which can work for you giving you a passive income. When subscription sales are made this gives you a monthly recurring income, and you can use this to build advertising campaigns and grow your business.
Ultimately affiliate marketing can give you an income which you can grow over time and scale up. Using automation and other people’s products means your business can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Although you won’t get an instant paycheque with affiliate marketing, your income can eventually exceed that of a job, and it can come it whether you work or not.
This makes affiliate marketing a very attractive idea. But most people (95%) will quit! Around 5% of affiliates stick at it long enough to make it pay.
For more information about affiliate marketing check out my website at Affiliate Marketing Mentors.