How to Make Money as an Affiliate Marketer

Internet Marketing Mozie
Nov 6 · 10 min read

Discover the secrets to making money with affiliate marketing the RIGHT way.

Find my proven strategies and tips that will help you achieve success as an affiliate marketer.

There are many ways to earn money online, one of the most lucrative ways is to become an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and receive a percentage of sales. An affiliate marketer can promote products on their blogs, websites, social media and email.

The way it works is that you search for businesses that have affiliate programs for products that your audience needs, join the program, and start promoting. Usually, the affiliate program provides art work and other information that makes it simple for you to promote their products and / or services.

Types of Products You Can Promote

There really is no limit on the types of products that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. What you want to do though is focus on a specific specialty or niche. For instance, if you have a cooking blog you probably will do well to promote the tools and ingredients that you use in your kitchen. There are a couple of different ways that you can find products.

1. Products You Use — If you use a particular product that you’d like to promote, go directly to their website to find out if they have an affiliate program. If you don’t see one listed, email them directly to ask. More than likely they will lead you to the right affiliate network for that product.

2. Search Affiliate Networks — There are many affiliate networks like Clickbank.com, CommisionJunction.com, Shareasale.com, Amazon.com, JVZoo.com, WarriorPlus.com and more on which you can search by category to find products to promote to your audience.

The important thing is to choose only products that your audience wants and needs. This requires that you research your audience and become an expert about them. You’ll need to know why they need the product and be able to explain to them why they need it.

The other question people often ask is if they should promote physical products or digital products. The answer to that question is that it depends. Everything depends on your audience. You are going to make more money on digital products than physical but if you have a blog such as the cooking blog mentioned earlier, selling and promoting physical products such as a high speed blender or yogurt maker might turn out to be quite lucrative.

Best Practices in Affiliate Marketing

Promoting affiliate products is a lot easier than creating your own products and then selling them. You can get right to marketing instead of worrying about product development. But, there are a few best practices to consider.

· Use The Product — In most cases it’s important that you use the products you promote so that you know the product inside and out and can talk about it intelligently. If you used and loved at least one product produced by the developer you can at least speak to the quality of the product.

· Know Your Audience — It’s imperative that you understand your audience enough to be able to recommend the right products to them and explain to them why a particular item is something they want to buy. If you can tell your audience how a product solves a problem for them and why, you’ll be more successful.

· Quality Over Quantity — When promoting affiliate products its best if you choose fewer products to promote than many. It can be confusing to your audience if your blog or website has too many different types of products to choose from. Promote each product until you are making money before moving on to the next.

· Build a Targeted Email List — The money is still in the email list. Social media, blogs, and all the other ways to sell products are additions to the email list. Everything you do should be designed to get your target audience to get on your email list where you can market to them more personally.

· Build Trust With Your Audience — The way you build trust is to only promote products you truly believe in that deliver what is promised. You will make more sales with repeat buyers than you will from one time buyers. You can build a legion of fans that are ready to purchase the next product you promote.

· Create Your Own Blog / Website — It’s important that you have a blog or website that is your home base to promote products from. Don’t try to be involved in too many niches at a time. Instead focus on one niche website and / or blog in which to promote the right products for your audience.

The same economic principals involved in creating and distributing products still exist when you are promoting products that someone else made. They have to solve a problem for your audience, be the right price, and be of high quality.

How to Promote Affiliate Products

Once you locate the products you want to promote, and have signed up and been approved for the affiliate programs it’s time to start promoting. There are several ways to promote an affiliate product.

Blog Regularly

Use your blog to promote affiliate products by putting links within the text of a blog post, putting banner ads, button ads, and other promotions on your blog. Blogging directly about a particular product is a good way to get interest too. You don’t have to beat around the bush. You can be direct.

Writing a review blog post and providing an honest opinion that tells both the pros and the cons of any product will always work better than only talking about how perfect a product is. In addition, you can use your blog to educate your audience about their needs and problems. This will better able you to also provide answers for your audience in the form of products that you promote.

Make Informative Videos

A great way to promote products, especially physical products is to do a video demonstration. If you have a cooking blog you can prepare a recipe using the products that you want to promote, ensuring that you make direct comments about the products, and provide the right links so they can order the product. This will give your audience a true view of how the product works especially if you are honest. It’s easy to be honest if you pick products that are high quality that you can be proud to promote.

Build a Targeted Email List

It’s imperative that you work to build a strong email list full of people who need and want the type of products you want to promote. Use the email list to distribute information, remind readers of your blog posts, and to link them directly to the products that you are promoting. Pay per click ads are a great way to build your email list, as are free white papers, and other free items of interest to your niche audience.

Promote Yourself on Social Media

You want to become known as an expert in your niche so that people trust you when you recommend a product. A great way to do that is to also promote yourself and your work on social media. Create cohesive profiles on each network where your audience spends time. Contribute to discussions and be free with advice.

Conduct Interviews of Experts

People love listening to and reading interviews of experts. You can do them as a podcast, or even via Google Hangout. Open your interview to the public. You can if you want to use interviews to build your email list, collect email addresses to build your email list as they sign up to listen to the interview.

Create Targeted and Regular Content

Blog posts, articles, social media updates, white papers, special reports, forum comments, blog comments and so forth are all content that you should create on a regular basis based off the products that you want to promote. You should plan out your content in advance, working about three months ahead of time is a good goal to have.

Using all the avenues available to you to market the products you want to sell is important. But, also be sure to measure the results so that you can do more of what is working and less of the ideas that don’t work.

How to Choose High Value Programs

One key to success is to choose high value programs to promote. A program that is high value to you might not be high value to someone in another niche. The program has to be relevant to your niche to be high value to your audience.

1. What Does Your Audience Want to Buy?

2. What Are Your Competitors Selling?

3. What Problems Can You Solve for Your Audience?

Ask yourself these three questions, and do the research necessary to answer the questions. Then using that information start your search for affiliate programs to promote. As you discover products either buy it to try it, or email the creator and ask for a review copy of the product. This is the same whether it’s a digital product or a physical product. It’s important to have real experience with products that you want to promote.

You can find affiliate programs through networks like Commission Junction, Clickbank.com, Shareasale.com, e-junkie, and so forth. You can also find self-run affiliate programs where individuals are promoting their products using an affiliate program run through their shopping cart like 1shoppingcart.com or Amember.com.

If you have used a product that you like using, that will work for your audience you can contact the creator directly to find out if they have an affiliate program. Sometimes you can find a link to their affiliate program right on their site. Try looking in the footer. Some other terms used for affiliates are “associates” and “resellers”.

When you find products to promote you want to also look at what they offer affiliates in terms of commission, sales support, and how they perform at customer service to the people who buy from them. Because, even though you will send your customer to their site to buy, they are the ones who are going to provide customer service regarding the product, not you. Therefore, it’s important to know how they handle client issues, problems, and returns.

Before promoting a product you should know the answers to the following questions:

1. How much commission do you get for each sale?

Understanding how much you can make from each sale is important because it costs money and time to promote a product. If you’re only going to make a dollar on each sale, it needs to cost you much less than a dollar to get that sale.

2. When is the commission paid and how?

All products pay different amounts in commission with some offering higher returns the more you sell. The typical going rate for a digital product is a lot higher than for a physical product. It’s not uncommon to see 50 to 80 percent commission rates for digital products and only 20 percent or less for physical products.

3. What happens if there are product returns?

Most of the time, if something is returned the affiliate is responsible for the money which is why most affiliate programs pay out after the guarantee time to account for returns. Some affiliate programs pay immediately and when a return happens the pay comes back from you immediately so be prepared for that and don’t spend the immediate money until you know there can’t be more returns.

4. In what ways are you permitted to market the products?

Some programs have so many rules and regulations that basically end any real way of promoting the product so be sure to read the fine print so that you know that you can market the product in the manner you planned.

5. What tools (like graphics) does the creator offer its affiliates to help with marketing?

Many affiliate programs are run very professionally even if they are independently run and not on an affiliate network. They will offer art work, private label content that you can edit, and even webinars and other promotions to help you make the sale. Go with programs that offer more to their affiliates and you will be able to promote easier.

Knowing the answers to these questions can help you determine if it’s a product you want to take the time to promote. Even if it’s a perfect product, if the numbers don’t work out, then you want to move on to another product.

Earning money through affiliate marketing is something almost any person can do if they have knowledge about the niche, understand their competition, and choose the right products that solve problems for their audience for a price that the audience can afford and is willing to pay. Just a couple of hours a day can build a business that can give you freedom you never thought possible.

Secret To Affiliate Success #1: In order to be successful as an affiliate, you need be KNOW your audience and they problems they’re having.

Secret to Affiliate Success #2: Once you know your audience and what they need help with, you need to provide them with the BEST solution. This can be done by creating your own products, or promoting affiliate products as the solution.

Secret to Affiliate Success #3: You Need to be building your email list from the start. Don’t just sell, build your list and you’ll have repeat buyers if you’re offering good solutions. Your list is your number one affiliate asset

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed and learned from this affiliate marketer guide. Steps to take next if you want to learn more.

  1. Visit my blog at IMMozie.com to get more free affiliate training and other cool stuff. (lots more secrets waiting for you on the inside)
  2. Choose your niche, research your audience, find their problems on forums and search for affiliate products that are the BEST solution.
  3. Promote the affiliate offer with high quality bonuses — You can use bonuses to bribe your audience to buy through your links. Find bonuses in the most profitable niches here. Best source for bonuses.

Till next time,

Mozie

Internet Marketing Mozie

Written by

Digital marketer for more than 12 years. Online business coach, digital products creator and home business owner.

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