What is affiliate marketing? The short answer is simple. Affiliate marketing is simply promoting somebody else’s product. There are many things that you can promote and you get a commission every time someone makes a purchase through you. Different platforms have different requirements and procedures to follow to promote. They also have different methods of payment. I won’t go into being an affiliate for Amazon in this post because, quite simply, I have never looked into it. What I have heard though, is that you get a small percentage for a commission when promoting physical products. Is this true? I don’t know for a fact if it is or not. Some do very well for themselves doing that and some not so well. It is the same in every niche and space. It really does depend on the individual. I will say that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to get started with internet marketing.
Since I am in the internet marketing or, make money online niche, I will be focusing on digital downloadable products. For example, eBooks, videos, training courses, etc. Again, with digital marketing, some do very well for themselves and some don’t do as well. There are many factors that come into play with this, work ethic, email list, social media following and it goes on.
Many choose to be affiliate marketers because they feel that they don’t have to have a web site, they don’t have to deal with customer support, and they don’t have to create products. Make no mistake, an email list is the most important thing you can have to do affiliate marketing. How do you get an email list? By having a squeeze page, web site, that you send leads to to give them a free item that is worth enough to get them to give you their name and email address.
This brings the next question, what do you give them? You can give them a free report, an email newsletter, a video training, just about anything as long as it provides value to your niche. This also bears on what type of products you promote. For example, if you are giving away an eBook on how to improve your golf game, you would not send emails to your list for offers about dog training. Choose your niche and stay focused on that.
Where do you get the item to give away to build your list? You can purchase products with resale and give away rights, but read the license carefully. Just because it has resale rights doesn’t mean you can give it away for free. If the license doesn’t say you can give it away for free to build a list, don’t. So what is the best option? Either research and create your own product from scratch, purchase a product from your niche with PLR rights, for those that don’t know, PLR stands for private label rights and, depending on the license, allows you to change it, edit it, rewrite it and put your name on it as the author. You can get articles and eBooks and combine them into one product. The key is to make it unique to you. You can also outsource the task but, proof read it when it is done if you outsource. Either way, you will be creating a product basically.
Now I know that many people will say that they can’t do affiliate marketing because they don’t have an email list. That isn’t true. Do you have an account on social media sites? Do you have friends with the same interests as you do? Have you chosen a niche that many of your friends are interested in? You can market to them. Now do jump the gun, social media sites don’t like affiliate links. Facebook for instance, will not permit an affiliate link to be posted. There are ways around that though. The best way is with a bridge page. I know, a new term you haven’t heard before. A bridge page is a page that forms a bridge between social media and the offer you are promoting. It goes back to you will need a website. Like your squeeze page your bridge page is your site and you can post the link on social media. I myself use a WordPress plugin to create my bridge pages. You can see an example of it here.
As a final note, if you are looking at affiliate marketing, then you are looking at internet marketing. Have you ever opened and email and seen someone talking about their bonus for a product they are promoting? Yes, you will do much better at affiliate marketing in the digital space by offering bonuses. Again you are creating a product. Actually you should have at least a few products to give as bonuses. Do make sure that your bonuses are something that goes with what you are promoting. Use the reference I made about golf and dog training as an example. You can as I mentioned before outsource the creation, use products you purchased that say you can bundle them together and give away as a bonus, or once again, use PLR to create your own. These will then be added to another page on your site called a bonus page. Like the Bridge page, you can send people to your bonus page and from there to the offer. Ideally you would send the social media traffic to your bridge page with a video about your bonus, then to your bonus page, then to the offer. This essentially will warm them up to the offer before they get to the sales page and you can get higher conversions resulting in more commissions.
You are probably wondering by now why I told you all these things about websites and products that you have to create. You want to know if I am trying to scare you away from internet marketing. No I am not trying to scare you off, I am trying to help you. You see, there is no such thing as get rich quick. Everything that creates an income requires time, work and yes even financial investment. The beauty of internet marketing is that you can build a business with much less investment that say getting a McDonald’s franchise. I simply want to tell you from the start that it isn’t as hard as it sounds but, you aren’t going to buy a product and instantly turn your computer into an ATM.
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