Waking up to money made from your affiliate commission while you’re holidaying on a beach, somewhere in the Caribbean islands.
At least, this is the impression many people have about affiliate marketing. Along with the endless ads you get on your favorite blog or YouTube channel – affiliate marketing seems the dream job for anyone.
While this is partly true because for many bloggers and content creators, promoting affiliate products has been the best way to make money off their content.
On that note, I guess it’s safe that joining a profitable affiliate program is, by far, the easiest way to make money on the internet without having to spend capital in developing your own product.
Table of Contents:
What is affiliate marketing and how can you get started?
Affiliate is a way to earn commissions by recommending a product or service to web visitors. Affiliate marketers earn money by helping vendors sell their products or services by pointing them to their ideal customers.
Statistic show – affiliate marketing as a global industry is worth $12 billion. More than this, in the U.S, affiliate market spending is expected to grow by more than 10 percent in 2021.
Interested?!
Here’s how affiliate marketing works
As an affiliate marketer, you drive traffic to products or services. Once these products get sold via your traffic, you earn an affiliate commission. When you sign up for an affiliate program, pick a product, you get a special affiliate link. Usually, a simple URL. A typical affiliate link consists of a random series of numbers and letters, your username, or other means of identification. When someone clicks on your link and goes ahead to make a purchase of the affiliate product you are promoting, you earn a commission of the sale.
The commission you’ll earn from the sale of different affiliate offers differs. Some affiliate programs offer up to 50% of each sale, while others offer less than 10%. However, there are affiliate programs that offer 100% for a sale.
Basically, the idea behind affiliate marketing is to gain customers, not only sales. Some companies are looking to make a sale upfront, while others are looking to maximize the lifetime value of the customer. Such companies will gladly pay the affiliate marketer 100% in affiliate commissions for helping to win a new customer. However, such affiliate offers are rare, but they do exist. So keep your eyes wide open.
Ideally, you’ll be looking to promote high ticket affiliate offers – to earn high commissions off each sale.
The key to making money promoting affiliate offers is finding a suitable and proven way to promote your offer, so you drive up traffic and convert your audience to paying customers.
Luckily for you, the internet gives us many ways to reach thousands of people. We’ll show you how.
But first, let’s go over some of the pros and cons of promoting Affiliate products.
Pros:
- Minimal investment need to start
- Easy to setup
- No risk on your investment
- High-income potential
- Extensive marketplace and products to promote
- No need of customer support
- Highly scalable business
Cons:
- Requires patience and consistency in driving traffic
- Commission-based business
- No control over product development
- High competition
Affiliate offers worth promoting right now
To get started promoting these products or services, pick the niche you feel most comfortable and know something about. Don’t just pick those, who pay a lot, because you will get stuck: you will not be able to create content around the topic, quickly lose interest, spread misleading information/claims.
What does it take for you to sell a $1000 product or $10? Actually, it takes the same amount of effort. Sure not everyone will buy 1K product if the audience doesn’t really know, trust, and like you. Usually, most vendors make offers with upsells, down-sells, or even high ticket programs. In my opinion, that’s great looking from an affiliate marketer’s perspective. Recurring offers are also a great deal- you can be paid over and over as long as customers pay to the vendor- you’ll get commissions as well.
Typically, if you are new to affiliate marketing, you’ll be lost for where to start promoting your affiliate products.
We’ll show you how.
Read on.
Harsh truth about traffic
Many people consider promoting affiliate products difficult.
Let’s get this out of the way, like any business – you’ll either spend money or spend loads of time to get rolling. If you have some sort of established traffic source like a popular blog, Facebook page, or community, TikTok account YouTube channel- that’s great and you are way ahead of others, who are just starting out.
However, if you have the capital to invest and want to get traffic fast you can use paid advertising. This method requires specific knowledge about every platform you pick. Advertising campaign done wrong just burn your cash without any ROI. Make sure you know what you’re doing.
10 Ways how to promote affiliate products
1. Blogging
Creating content and optimizing your website to gain traffic is one of the more sustainable ways of promoting your offer. However, though this method requires little investment, it can incredibly tedious to rank and gain traffic. It requires a ton of effort and consistency.
There are many advantages to using blogging for promoting your affiliate offers:
- Organic traffic from search engines.
- Showing yourself as an authority in specific niche.
- Visitors already “warm”- they know what the content was about and what to expect.
Here’s a short plan on using a blog to promote your affiliate products:
Choose a niche: As we’ve discussed, choose a niche you are passionate about or at least a niche that excites you. And also has high demand or has lots of high-ticket products.
Keyword research tools can help you find niches with high demand and low competition.
This will help to craft precise content for SEO purposes. You can find exact words and phrases using SEO tools such as SEMrush, keyword finder, Ubersuggest, Ahref, Moz, etc.
Get a domain name: the sad truth is all good short names will not be available or will cost so much you will not be able to afford to pay. Yes in the 2000s domain name was an important ranking factor, yet now more important is what content is published on your website and does it help people to solve their problems.
I get my domains from NameCheap
Web Hosting: There are tons of web hosting services today. However, as a beginner, you will not get a ton of traffic straight away, pick a less expensive one.
I recommend: Bluehost
Use the best SEO practices: This is perhaps the most important step for promoting your affiliate offer with SEO. Implementing the best on-page and technical SEO practices ensure that you rank high on the search engine ranking. This helps to drive traffic to your website.
Check this Google released guide: Google SEO best practice guide download
2. Social media
Using social media to promote your affiliate products involves posting content to create interest. To expand organic reach you can try to find specific Facebook groups and post/ live stream content communities that may work great.
However, with many social media channels, organic reach has been on a decline in recent years. This means – to gain visibility you need to spend money on ads.
Did you know: on average one person sees from 2000 ads a day and more.
BTW Most Social media platforms have strict rules. Facebook and Instagram hate affiliate marketing, so if you plan just to send traffic from Facebook ads directly to the product- forget about this idea. Most likely ads will not go through the review process. The worst that can happen is your advertising account can be shut down.
You also can’t use before & after images- most used in the weight loss niche.
Can’t use shocking images and income claims- e.g. How to make 10K a day from Amazon FBA.
Advertising is not easy depending on what niche you are in, yet I suggest reading Facebook advertising TOS about what is allowed before you even start.
3. Influencer Marketing
You can pay influencers to promote your affiliate offers. Internet stars have the ability to boost your promotion by reaching thousands of people. They can be found on various social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Most influencers are within a certain niche, whether it be fashion, makeup, skincare, fitness, travel, wellness, tech, DIY, etc. Depending on your affiliate niche, influencers might be the best channel for running social media campaigns.
More: How to use Influencers to grow your business
4. Native ads
This advertising method is widely used in CPA and affiliate marketing and is different from Google ads or Facebook ads, got less strict rules. Yet you have to make sure the vendor does not mind using this traffic source.
5. Email marketing
One of the more popular ways of promoting affiliate products is by advertising via email. If you’ve been into making money on the internet long enough, you’ve probably heard the phrase -“the money is in the list.”
Email marketing allows you to start conversations as well as actively engage with your audience. With this traffic source, you can directly reach people who may be interested in your affiliate product. This makes email one of the most powerful ways to promote your affiliate products.
This is the traffic you own when you have your own email list, so when you are ready- traffic is just one click of a button. However, if you don’t have a contact list you can buy solo ads, leverage other people’s contacts to build your own database, and sell at the same time.
More: Udimi Solo Ads
6. Video marketing
Whether creating YouTube videos or videos on other social media platforms, providing value is a great way to drive traffic to your affiliate products.
This works for a number of reasons:
- Creating videos gives you and your offer much-needed credibility.
- By providing value such as helpful tips, you create sense of trust.
- Information about the product help them to overcome objections they may have.
Giving an honest video review, guide, comparison and another type of content of the product that you are promoting goes a long way to drive sales. This ties in with building credibility and can help you profit from your affiliate marketing business for years to come.
BTW follow me: PeakMinute on YouTube
Bonus stack
Offering promos, coupons, incentives or some sort of bonus is a great way to gain awareness for your affiliate offer. More than that- it can also be a great way to capture emails to build an audience.
Everyone likes free stuff. So if you want to sell a cookware set from Amazon- why not offer a recipe book as a bonus.
7. Podcasting
Many of the top affiliate marketers generate a huge portion of their affiliate marketing income from their podcasts. Podcasting is a great way to promote your affiliate marketing offers.
Here’s why.
Podcasting works well in building an audience. A podcasting audience is more likely to try a product you recommend because they trust and like you. Moreover, your podcast communities are built based on specific interests and a sense of commonalities.
Usually, podcast content is created by a host breaking down a specific topic or making an interview with another person, who’s telling their own story. This often leads to sorting specific problems and recommending products or services.
8. Webinars
By showing yourself, and talking live to people you can make a big impact and persuade attendees to get what you have to offer. This method requires knowledge from onboarding the audience to selling.
You can find more: Expert Secrets Book
9. Push traffic
You’ve probably seen these popups a lot.
So there are advertising networks where you can buy this type of traffic like RichPush, ZeroPark, or Propellerads.
10. Q&A sites and Forums
Answering questions on Q&A Websites like Quora Yahoo answers and Reddit is also one of the options.
Did you know?
- Quora got 300 million active users a month
- Yahoo answers got around 200 million a month.
- Reddit has 330 million.
Forums are pushed away a little bit because social media taking place, but still… There are forums in every niche. Just need to find them, so go to your best friend Google and write a query e.g. “photography forum” or “mom forum” register and start interacting with other people. Solve problems and recommend products if these can help.
11. How to promote affiliate products Offline (old school ways)
Don’t forget about the opportunity to advertise “old school” methods. If you have a product or service dedicated to a broad audience you can advertise in newspapers, magazines, tv, or radio. People still watching Tv, listening to the radio and reading,
Conclusion
You will have to try different channels for promoting your offers until you find one that you can settle on. Affiliate marketing is an easy way to get started making money online. Even if you don’t have a lot of capital, with a lot of effort and creativity you can earn real cash if you do it the right way. I hope you’ve found at least one source you did not know about on how to promote affiliate products.
