3 Affiliate Marketing Secrets to Make Money Online
Affiliate marketing isn’t a new idea but it’s become very popular recently with the growth of social media and the Internet. So today I’m going to go over three affiliate marketing secrets on how you can make some money, or even a living as an affiliate marketer. But really quick let me go or what affiliate marketing is so we’re all on the same page.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
When you become an affiliate you essentially become a commission sales agent for a company. You can become an affiliate for almost any type of product whether it’s a physical product, a digital product or a service. The company will give you a special link that tracks who makes a purchase. Any time somebody makes a purchase with your link you get paid. now that we have that down here are three steps that will help you build a profitable affiliate marketing business.
NOTE: The above reflects the typical scenario. There are other affiliate marketing models however. For example, you can become an affiliate of Effortless Web Cash Formula, but you get your own reseller website. With this program, when people buy from your site, you get paid instantly and directly to your PayPal account, whereas the typical scenario has you getting paid once a month or once every couple of weeks. Which would you prefer?
Find a Niche
First figure out what niche you want to be in. You want to do this before you even start looking for affiliate offers. Too many times I see people jump from affiliate offer to affiliate offer because they find the next amazing offer that’s gonna make them so much money. Then two weeks later they’re all trying to find a new affiliate promotion because somehow the last promotion didn’t work.
Build Your Brand
Focus instead on building a brand in your particular niche whether it’s fitness, spirituality, health, travel, education or whatever and then let your brand promote your affiliate offers. Treat affiliate marketing like a business because it is one.
Finding Affiliate Offers to Sell
You want to promote something that you’ve already used and tried so you can give an honest review that will promote your product. You don’t want to get into a new legal trouble, so I put a link to some of the endorsement laws below. Make sure you check them out and speak to an attorney if you have any legal questions.
Endorsement Laws:
How do you find an affiliate promotion?
It’s a lot easier than you think. If you have something in mind that you want to promote go on to their website and see if they have an affiliate program publicized. A lot of places are going to require you to apply to their affiliate program and they’re going to require you to have website which again is why it’s super important for you to build your own brand first. These affiliate programs are just products that your brand promotes.
If a business does not have an affiliate program publicized send them an email.
There’s not a lot of businesses out there that don’t want commission sales people promoting their products. You can also use an affiliate database like Clickbank.com to find a digital affiliate offer in pretty much any niche. Or, if you’re looking for physical products to promote, you can become an affiliate for Amazon.com and have access to tons of physical products.
The only downfall with this is your commission is typically going to be a lot smaller with physical products. As of today, Amazon says that the highest commission product pays a 10% affiliate commission, while most Clickbank products pay about 50% commission.
How to Make Money – How to Sell Your Affiliate Offer
Now it’s time for what you’ve been waiting for, how to actually make some money with affiliate marketing. I find that you make the most money if you’re not focused on just selling your affiliate offer.
Let me explain what I mean…
I see a lot of beginners using their social media accounts to send people directly to their affiliate offer. The problem with this is you are NOT building YOUR brand or YOUR customer list. Instead of sending people directly to an affiliate offer send them to your website or an opt-in page where you give the customer something for free related to the affiliate offer in exchange for their email.
For Example: If I’m in the fitness niche and I want to promote a weight loss product, I would create a free guide on 3 tips to burn fat and then I would give that away for free in exchange for my customers email address. Now that I know that they’re interested in weight loss, I can send them a email promoting that affiliate offer or I can send them to a blog post where I promote that affiliate offer.
TOP TIP: If you can’t design your own lead capture page, or create your own autoresponder messages, you can get niche specific pre-written autoresponder messages and lead capture pages for email marketing here: http://prewrittenemailmarketing.com
So Why Do I Do it Like This?
Because before, if I could send 100 people to my affiliate promotion and get 3 purchases that would be considered really good. The problem is, I don’t know who those other 97 people are and I have no way to contact them. So now if I wanted to remarket my promotion I can’t do that. And if I wanted to market another affiliate promotion, or market my own product, I don’t have a customer list or anybody to market that to.
So now if I wanted to promote something else, I’d have to find new customers for my new products and do that again and again and again. That’s not very efficient and it makes it very tough to be profitable. But if you have your own list and you want to promote a new affiliate offer, all you have to do is send out a new email because you know these people are already interested in your niche.
Email Marketing
If you’re looking for an email software that’s going to do everything for you AWeber is a great place to start. I’ve used them for Clickbank affiliate offers and for my own products. AWeber works really good and it’s going to give you the best bang for your buck.
The best part about AWeber isn’t just that you can capture people’s emails with their opt-in page and landing page builders, but you can actually set up pre-written autoresponder messages that are going to do your selling for you and it’s all included.
So when someone signs up for your free gift they get added to your list. Then you can have an automated email go out to promote your affiliate offer on day 1, day 3 day 5, etc. There’s really no limit to how far ahead you can plan.
I know some people that have a year’s worth of automated email setup and then every two weeks or so their emails promote a different affiliate offer. I hope you’re starting to see how your profits can multiply when you do this because you can sell multiple offers and it’s all automated.
I don’t have time to get into how to structure your emails as that’s a completely different science, but don’t be overly salesy, nobody likes that and mix up your emails. If your email subscribers know that every single email is just going to promote something and sell something they’re not going to open your emails. Be different.
Final Thoughts
My last bit of affiliate marketing secrets advice is don’t promote things you don’t trust. Listen to me carefully, there’s a lot of crap on the internet. So if you really want to build a profitable business don’t promote that crap. Think if you were in your customer’s shoes what would you like to see?