Why use affiliate marketing for digital products? Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties can earn commissions selling other people’s products and services, mostly online. Digital products are popular with affiliates because you can earn considerably more from a sale with them than their physical counterparts. A typical physical affiliate product will pay between 1% and 10% commission. A digital product on the other hand will pay between 30% and 40% commission.
So for the same valued product at say $100, you can earn as little as only $1 for the sale with a physical product. With a digital product you can expect to earn from $30-$40 for the sale. When much of the work is the same, it makes total sense to choose the better paying product, as an affiliate marketer.
Affiliate Marketing For Digital Products – Subscriptions
Another key element for top earning affiliates is to choose products which pay out recurring commissions. A physical product will only pay you once for the referral. But with digital items (which carry memberships or a subscription), you can continue earning if there’s an ongoing payment scheme involved in the purchase.
Software products such as business tools, training and education resources tend to offer recurring payments for affiliates. These are a good choice because they are necessary for online businesses. Things such as email autoresponders, software for online businesses and training and education tools often carry memberships and are essential for some businesses.
Affiliate Marketing For Digital Products : Selling A Digital Product
With a physical product selling can be fairly straight forward because the customer generally knows what they’re getting. So you can sell a physical product from a website directly. But digital product can be a little more obscure. This is why a lot of affiliates will build an email list in order to sell their digital products.
With a website, the visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. Once they leave your website, they are gone forever. But if you can get them on your email list, you can build a relationship, give value through your messages and give them more information about the value of your product/s.
Email lists are used to nurture, engage and build trust with potential customers over a longer timeframe. This just isn’t possible on a website. They are particularly useful for the sale of digital products because you can offer more information about your products to those who are unsure of the value or need for such a product.
Sale Of Digital Products
Digital products can be sold globally too, which is another reason they are so appealing. Not only can affiliate earn over twice the amount from the same valued product, but there’s no limit to where you can sell them.
Someone on the other side of the world can find your website and buy something digitally, all completely online. No postage, no international shipping costs, far fewer manufacturing costs. Hence why affiliates earn more from the selling of digital products.
With a website you can automate sales to an unlimited number of customers which makes digital products one of the best business models you can use with affiliate marketing.
How To Sell A Digital Products
Affiliates use several different marketing techniques to sell their affiliate products and not all affiliates use the same strategies. Most however will use online strategies and send customers to products through their unique affiliate links. Affiliates use digital marketing techniques such as landing pages, advertising platforms, blogging and content creation or social media strategies to bring targeted customers to products and services.
One strategy used by affiliates is to use an advertising platform such as Google Adwords to set up adverts targeted towards specific keyword searches on Google. When someone clicks on the advert, they are take to a landing page where they collect the visitor’s email address. They then follow up with an email marketing campaign. This strategy can be easily scaled up to a large number of subscribers with a large enough marketing budget. See also PPC vs organic marketing.
