What Is Affiliate Marketing

What Is Affiliate Marketing : According to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

Ever since Tim Ferriss wrote the 4-Hour Work Week (remember it was one of the first books we read) everyone seems to have the same goal… to work less and earn more.  To wake up each day, open their laptop and see their commission income for the previous day or while they were sleeping…

And that’s the dream, isn’t it.  To make money while you sleep… it was us too

And for us and 99% of people, affiliate marketing is we got started… because it’s the simplest way to begin.  Like Wikipedia says, the idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing…

And that’s the key MARKETING (we’ll get to that in a minute)

It’s easy to get started with because when you are new because you have no product and want to make money.  All you need to do is promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

It attracted us to the model and although we have since gone on to create products of our own we still love nothing more than to promote an offer we feel is of value to the marketplace and earn money from doing so.

Marketing – that’s what you have to do and what you earn the commission for.  As an affiliate you can promotes one or multiple affiliate products and  attract potential customers to the product so that they actually end up buying it.  It’s a win-win for you and the creator or merchant as they are sometimes called as they get a customer (who they can carry on marketing to at a later date with other offers) and you get a commission for the sale.

There are affiliate networks like Clickbank and JV Zoo which serves as a database of lots of products, out of which the affiliate marketer can choose which to promote. Some networks have just digital products while others have both digital and physical products.

In the case of promoting consumer products, like tools, books, toys and household items, the biggest affiliate network, by far, is Amazon. Their Amazon Associates affiliate program lets you promote any item that is sold on their platform…you may be promoting a book you’ve read (like The 4 Hour Work Week we mentioned above) and sending a reader to check it out… and while they are there the customer might buy a TV or a bed …. and YOU earn the commission!

For someone starting out there are certain things that are important to know and we’ve learned this from the questions we get asked and the crazy things we see people do.  If they actually spent some money on getting the right education like we did life would be a lot simpler and they would make money far quicker than they actually do.

Your Steps To Starting An Affiliate Marketing Business

Step ONE : Decide what niche you want to work in to get started.  By example we wanted to work in the business education and training / make money online niche.  Your’s might be health and wellness or dating etc.

Step TWO: Build an email list to collect name/email of prospects. This is very important as not everyone buys the first time they see your offer and you will want to “warm them up” so they are persuaded to buy.  For this you will need simple tools like Aweber (to store the prospect details) and LeadPages (a way to capture prospect information).

In or experience newbie affiliate marketers try to skip Step TWO and think that a few posts on social media will bring them a stream of buyers!  It won’t!

Since you’re collecting names/email addresses around a very specific topic you don’t need a big list to start profiting. Just make sure that you keep your subscribers engaged, by sending them regular updates, ideally once a week.  Don’t make it all sales – keep them entertained as well with reviews of similar products, stories etc.

You can:

• present the product’s features
• show different use cases of the product
• talk about its benefits and drawbacks
• tell people your personal history with the product
• help your audience get the most out of it

And much more… Quite often sales will come unexpectedly and then you earn a nice juicy commission.

Affiiate Marketing is a great choice for an online business for any age but given we started in our mid 50’s and it’s still our principle income generation online then all we can say is age holds no barriers so if you’re in or approaching retirement it’s time to jump on the bandwagon!

Thanks for joining us today – we’ll get into the tools and strategies to promote your affiliate products on our next post