One of the best ways to escape 9 to 5 is with affiliate marketing. So what is affiliate marketing and how can you use it to escape your 9 to 5 job? Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest online business models. Anyone can become an affiliate and earn money online through product promotion.
You don’t need your own product with affiliate marketing because you can “partner” or “affiliate” with existing product manufacturers or owners. When you join an affiliate program you get a unique link (affiliate link) which attributes your online referrals to your account. So when you successfully promote and sell an affiliate product (through using your link) you get paid a commission based on the sale.
There’s literally thousands of products you can choose to promote as an affiliate, and many ways to promote them.
Escape 9 To 5 With Affiliate Marketing – Amazon
Amazon is a popular place for new affiliates and has its own affiliate program. So you can find any product on Amazon, and become an affiliate for that product. Despite Amazon often being the cited website for affiliate marketers, it’s not the best in terms of its commission structure. In fact, some of the products you can promote on Amazon pay as little as 1%! Amazon is also known to have slashed it’s affiliate commissions over the years. So affiliates have earned less and less through product promotion using Amazon.
But even if Amazon isn’t the best place for affiliates, that doesn’t mean affiliate marketing can’t bring great rewards. You just need to find programs which pay higher levels of commission. If you’re going to be working on promoting your affiliate link, you want to make it worthwhile. So it’s a good idea to spend some time learning about the different affiliate programs and what they offer in terms of commission structure.
Escape 9 To 5 With Affiliate Marketing – Commission Levels & Types Of Products
Different types of products also offer differing levels of commission structure to affiliates. For example, physical products typically offer between 1% and 10% commission. Digital products offer much higher rates – typically between 20% and 40% commission. With a digital product there’s less cost in manufacturing and distribution.
With a physical product, you need to physically post it somewhere, incurring greater costs. But with a digital product, you can access it immediately over the internet. Digital products such as training courses, ebooks and online tutorials, for example offer the ability to purchase directly without any physical postage being involved.
The main cost of a digital product is in its creation. After that, there’s little in the way of manufacturing or delivery costs. The main cost in selling a digital product is in its advertising. This is why affiliates get paid a larger commission for selling digital products. They are effectively bearing the risk of the advertising costs.
Affiliates can earn 8% on products like these if they are able to sell them – that’s $31,600!
Certain products too carry a much higher price than average. High ticket (physical and digital) products are a good idea for affiliates because they can earn much larger commissions per sale than a standard product.
Other products worth considering for affiliate marketers are subscription products which carry recurring payments. Membership products, such as software or training, are a good bet for affiliate marketers. Especially if the software is necessary for running a business, for example.
Product Promotion
The most important skill to learn if you’re going to be successful with affiliate marketing is product promotion. There’s a variety of ways of promoting products as an affiliate including blogging, video, email marketing, paid advertising, social media and organic marketing. Depending on your particular circumstances and leanings you can pick one which is suitable. However, it’s definitely a good idea to build an email list, whatever method of promotion you use. An email list allows you to build a subscriber base and help them with a particular problem through your email messages.
As your list grows and when you align your topic with a carefully chosen affiliate product, you will start to see sales coming in. With a small list, you’ll see only a limited number of sales. But as your list grows you should see an exponential rise in your bottom line. Affiliates build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
When you offer a product which carries a recurring payment, you can see the potential for earnings goes up massively. Particularly if it’s a hugely valuable and needed product which solves a big enough problem for your subscribers.
Building An Email List
One of the most effective ways to get started with affiliate marketing is through the building of an email list and offering some kind of service through your messages. This is usually done by sending targeted website traffic to a landing page where you can collect subscribers information. Checkout the landing page on this website here to learn more.
A landing page is a page specifically designed to capture email details so the affiliate can follow up with information via email messages. Traffic can be bought using a paid advertising platform or, you can build traffic organically through blogging or some form of content creation. Using paid advertising is the fastest way to build an email list for the purposes of building an affiliate marketing business. It’s well worth getting training and support during this phase of your learning.
Get Started
To get started with affiliate marketing checkout these free videos. You’ll learn about product type, how to set up a sales funnel, run paid campaigns and much more.