When someone creates a product, they can promote and sell the product from their own website and keep the entire sales amount themselves. One problem with this is their website likely won’t have nearly as much traffic as other options available. As a result, they won’t make as many sales as possible through other means.
In its simplest form, one solution to that is to enlist the aid of an army of marketers who will gladly promote the product to their email lists and online followers in exchange for a fee, or commission. These marketers are known as “affiliates”.
Affiliates typically receive a percentage of the sales price. The actual percentage, commission, or referral fee varies from merchant to merchant across the various platforms.
These platforms include (just some examples to help you become familiar with how widespread the use of affiliate marketing has become):
Amazon
Wal-Mart
Target
The concept is pretty simple. Here is a typical example.
You fill out a form on their website. Once approved, you will have a unique “affiliate ID”. At Amazon you would be called an Associate vs Affiliate but it’s still the same concept.
Then, you find an item you would like to promote, say a particular infant car seat (could be anything), grab your affiliate link for that item, paste that link on your website where you will have posted an article reviewing that car seat.
When a visitor (to your website) clicks on that link, they are taken to the page on the platform (such as Amazon) where that product is displayed. If they then click to purchase while on that site, you will have earned a commission. The commission might range from 4% to 10% so you can see that you’re not going to get rich from just a few affiliate sales.
For strictly digital, or downloadable, products you might become an affiliate for platforms such as:
JVZoo
Clickbank
Warrior Plus
… as well as several other digital marketplaces. The just happen to be the platforms most commonly used by internet marketers when launching their products. Many of these products fall in the make money online niche.
Here, you can easily find products to promote that pay a 100% affiliate commission. The price ranges for these products (that pay the 100% commission) could be from $7 to $27. Products with higher sales prices usually pay commissions ranging from 35% to 75%, but like I said, the sales price is higher to begin with. Still beats a 4% to 10% commission at some of the other platforms that do not market these make money online products.
So this is affiliate marketing.
You do not need a product of your own. You will be promoting other people’s products.
You do not need an email list to start.
You do not need a website to start.
However, any of the above would make things easier and generate income faster.
That said, you will need to obtain traffic that you can send to your affiliate link.
And, you will want to take some steps to maximize on your traffic-getting efforts and help ensure future income.
Both of these last items are subjects of separate trainings.
So, in this article, we’ve learned about affiliate marketing as an income model. This is, perhaps, the fastest way to generate an online income with the least amount of expense.