If you’re wondering how to make money selling other people’s products this one’s for you! Anyone can become an affiliate and sell a product online for a share of the profit. Affiliate marketers are third parties who promote products and services worldwide over the internet.
You don’t need any products of your own to become an affiliate either. One of the most well known affiliate programs is Amazon’s. Amazon’s affiliate program lets anyone earn commission through promotion of any one of thousands of products available on Amazon’s website.
Once you’ve joined a program, you will get access to an online portal, or back office. Here you’ll find resources to help you make sales such as banners, images and other marketing resources. It is through your unique identifying link, or affiliate link, that you receive credit for online referrals.
When a sale is attributed to your efforts and made through your link, you earn a portion of the sale.
How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products
Affiliates use all kinds of marketing strategies to find customers to sell to. Some affiliates are bloggers, some use videos and others build huge email lists of subscribers and sell products through their emails. Some affiliates will use paid marketing methods, and others use free, organic strategies.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models because anyone can use it from anywhere in the world. You can get started relatively cheaply and most affiliate programs let you join for free. The downside is that the low barrier to entry for affiliate marketing means there’s a lot of competition. There’s a large drop out rate with affiliates and around only 5% of affiliate marketers stick at it.
The main problem for affiliates is marketing. It’s easy to join a program and get your affiliate link. But to place that link in front of a buying customer requires more skill and effort. So it’s worth investing in training and education for the mastering of this skill.
How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Types Of Product
There’s more than just one kind of affiliate product you can sell and although many new affiliates will flock to Amazon because it’s well known, it’s not the best program.
Amazon pays relatively small commissions to affiliates. If you successfully sell a product from Amazon, you could earn as little as 1% commission. So for all your efforts, if you sell a $100 item you may only earn $1! Some products will pay more though and Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 20%. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.
There’s many other affiliate programs you can find online. Clickbank for example is often another stop for affiliate marketers who are finding their feet. Clickbank.com is a digital product marketplace and you’ll find digital products in most niches. The advantage of digital products is that they pay much more – typically from 30% to 40% commission. So choosing to sell them can be more lucrative if you are successful.
The most lucrative affiliate programs offer high ticket commissions and recurring income affiliate programs are good for affiliates. A recurring income program is a product which carries a subscription such as a software or a membership product.
Popular Marketing Methods For Affiliates
Depending on the types of product you choose to sell as an affiliate, and your marketing budget, there’s several ways you can sell. Most top affiliates will build an email list and use paid advertising to build their list using a landing page and a paid marketing platform; such as Google Adwords or Facebook.
This is definitely one of the fastest ways to build an affiliate business, if you have the capital to invest. But there’s cheaper ways to do it too; such as blogging and content creation. Some affiliates will create video or written content, like this blog post, for example. When they start to attract larger numbers of visitors to their content, they can monetise that traffic through selling suitable affiliate products for their audience.
The target audience in affiliate marketing is one of the most important things for beginners to grasp. The target market persona for one particular product will differ to another, depending on the product you sell. So it’s important to understand who you’re aiming your marketing at, so you don’t waste time/resources attracting the wrong audience for your products.
Traffic & Sales
One of the biggest barriers for new affiliates is finding a strategy they can stick to and which brings in traffic. Blogging, for example can be frustrating in the beginning because there’s so much competition. In a competitive niche, it can take much longer to get traction. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, you can imagine new bloggers struggling to get traffic to their websites.
Paid marketing is much faster, but again competitive. The competition for advertising pushes up prices. With your own email list you can step out of the competition in either organic traffic or paid traffic and communicate directly to your subscriber list. This is why it’s so important to build an email list as an affiliate. With an email list you can build trust with potential customers over a longer timeframe than is possible from only a website.
With so many marketers pushing sales online, it’s a buyers market. Trust is a valuable asset in the online world which is why it’s important to build trust with your email list by offering value in your messaging.
