How Online affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing is about making money

If you are looking for a kind of short cut to start an online business, affiliate marketing is the way to go for you. Here are the main advantages of this business model on how online affiliate marketing works.

The bright side of affiliate marketing.

First you can work from home. You don’t have the immobilization expenses that a brick and mortar business faces every month. You don’t need a lot of money to start with and you may start literally with no money at all using free online services.

Second, you can work at your convenience meaning when you want, the hours you want, the time of the day that suits you, anywhere in the world and take any break or vacation you feel you need.

Third, the earning potential is limitless. You can make the amount of money you want with some skills and perseverance.

Fourth, you can expect to quit a day job in a matter of month if you follow a proven strategy until it pays off. In short, if you don’t quit too early.

Fifth and it is the main advantage, you don’t have to have your own product. You don’t have to buy some, you don’t need to do customer services. You don’t need thousands of dollars to start your business.

You use someone else product. You do the promotion, they do the selling and you collect a commission. That is it…

The dark side of affiliate marketing

Well there is not much. But you are going to put the work and effort. And you need some basic internet skills.

The earning potential is big but not as much as if you sell your own product. But to start and gain the skills, affiliate marketing is the logical first step.

Affiliate marketing network

Now that you know that affiliates are people who promote someone else products, you may want to know where can I find them.

The answer is from affiliate network. There are some incontestable like Clickbank and Warrior plus for digital products and a countless number of stores for physical products. Amazon, Walmart, Etsy are amongst the most popular.

They all have their affiliate program. Meaning that you register with the program and you get a personal affiliate code embedded with the product code you want to promote. Then the program automatically take care of the traffic you send to the sale page or to the store and the sales they make through the personal affiliate link they provide you with.

There is something that you should keep in mind when you choose between digital and physical products. For beginners it is easier to start with digital products. Just because of the payout. You will only make a few percent of commission with physical products compare to as 50% average on digital products.

What about Clickbank

Clickbank exists for a long long time. It is like a big big store. There are thousands of products to promote in dozen of niches. Could it be ebooks, courses and softwares. If you are passionate about something, there is a good chance that you will find a number of products to promote.

The most popular are make money, health, fitness, spirituality and software. There are numerous products to choose from in those niche and this is what you want. Because if you build a list of customers over time, you want to have some more to sell to them.

There is also a lot of products in cat and dogs, hobbies, dating and niche alike where people are passionate about. So you get the picture. It is likely that you can find a niche that interest you and where you have skill and knowledge. This will make the promotions easier for you.

ClickBank offers Direct Deposit, Wire and Checks as payment methods for clients to receive their funds. Accounts receiving direct deposit and wire payments (US or International) are eligible for once per week or once per two week payments. Check payments are available once every two weeks.

Clickbank also has its own affiliate marketing course to complement their marketplace and help anybody who wants complete guidance to start their profitable online affiliate business.

Check out Clickbank University here. This is serious stuff.

Promoting digital products

Usually digital product owners have a huge promotion strategy in place. It begins with an endless sale page with videos, proof of success, ton of texts, special discount, bonuses, upsells and downsells, scarcity and all the selling tricks to enroll the customer in their net.

This is huge. Meaning that the affiliate work only consists at sending traffic to this monster with some kind of presell to entice them to click the link.

So promotions are made by talking, writing, making videos about the subject. You can write a review and post it anywhere online where you have access to. Free strategies could be posting affiliate links on your blog, social media, forums, making Youtube videos with the link in the description etc.

You can also build an email list in a specific niche and make your promotion through emails. You can use an online software autoresponder service like Getresponse to do this. This is by far the easiest way to make money assuming that you already have a big enough list. You don’t have to write long reviews to do this so you can promote more products more often.

You can also send Facebook, Google paid traffic to a presell review article with links to the product sale page. This is the fastest way to make money but it is a little complicated and cost a lot of money for testing before being profitable. For positive results you need to build a sale funnel with gifts and bonuses to get profitable and choose an higher ticket product. This strategy works better with your own product where your profit margin is higher.

What about Amazon

Amazon is the behemoth. If you send traffic to the website, you get commission on every article they buy in the session and sometimes the customer is cookied for a month or so. But the commission is very low.

For beginners the promotion takes time and effort in the way that you will need to write product reviews. Although you don’t need your own website to do this, promotion strategies are limited unless you have a minimum audience online could it be from blog or social media.

You don’t really need to have the product in hand to write a review. All you need to do is to find some reviews online, read them and then make your own version in your own words.

But maybe an easy way for you is making Youtube product reviews. Ideally you should have the product in hand and talk about it and put the affiliate link in the description.

So you get your hand on the product, use it for a while and then talk about what you like and don’t in regards of quality, usability or whatever. There are tons of product reviews on Youtube to show you the way.

So in short this is how online affiliate marketing works. You find an affiliate product to promote, put high a high quality review online, put your affiliate link and wait for the commission.

Some more affiliate marketing strategies

Assuming that you are a beginner and you are looking for a free promotion strategy. Here is what you can do.

With Youtube

Like I wrote higher, you can make Youtube videos for physical products. You find a good long written review in a blog about a product you want to promote, and you use a screen capture software like Obs Studio to record your screen when you go through the article, read a little bit, comment on you own, enlarge pictures and so on.

Then publish the video on your channel with a basic Seo job. Put your affiliate link in the description. You don’t have to put your face in the video.

You can do quite the same over the usually huge sale page of a digital product. It is even easier. You just have to show what the product is, what the product can do for the customer, the benefits and what you want your visitors to do at the end. You load the sale page on your computer and with Obs Studio you record the screen and yourself talking over the sale page, making comments, reading some parts and making appreciations and recommendations. A lot of Youtubers are doing just that and it works.

With medium.com

Medium.com is a free to use website where you can have a section under your name and post content like if you have your own blog.

Medium is a high authority website, meaning that you benefit from this. When you post an article on the platform, there are better chances for the article to rank higher in Google and in the first page for long tail keywords than on a blog you just started.

So write products reviews and post them on Medium. I already gave you hints for physical products. For digital ones, just search Google for the product reviews you want to promote, read the articles, find the relevant parts in regards of what the product is, what he can do for the buyer, the benefits and the like. Read the product sale page and take the relevant parts you want for your article. Write a review in your own words and put affiliate links throughout the article.

In regards of the competition. You want to do a bit of seo. Meaning that you want to choose long tail keywords in your title and write around it. This will eliminate competition although there is less potential traffic available. Long tail keywords is something like a long phrase with a main general keyword in it.

Like in the title for this article. Affiliate marketing is the main general keyword impossible to rank for in Google unless on are in an high authority website. But you have more chance to rank in the first page with the long tail: “How online affiliate marketing works.”

You can use this website Answerthepublic to find this kind of phrases and look for low competition making a search in Google for the long tail phrase you want to write about.

So, write a review, and another one and another one. Write two, three, four reviews in a month, in a week and the first thing you will know is that money will start to come in. That is the way it is.

Start your own blog

Do the same thing you do with Medium, it will take more time to get visitors, it will be more complicated technically to install and maintain, but you will be the owner. You will be at home and you will build an asset that has value. Meaning that it will be possible to sell the website. The more visitors a month, the more value it has. The value could be 10 times the amount of the yearly revenues. So keep this in mind.

Action steps

So the starting point is to choose a domain name. A good place to go is Namecheap.com. There you will be able to see if the domain you choose is available and register it to yourself.

Then you need a hosting company like SiteGround to host your website. The easiest way to build a website is with WordPress. It is easy to install, easy to post content, easy to secure, has a ton of themes free or paid like… available for every niche that exists, has powerful professional editors like… if you need more in depth power to suit your needs.

Then you may need a marketing software like Profit Builder specialized in make optin forms, landing pages, sales page and the like.

Then you need to collect emails with an autoresponder company like Getresponse so you can send promotions to your subscribers on the long term and make money on demand.

That is a lot things to learn and put together. It takes time en effort to put all this together and you may want some guidance or in depth course to help you going along.

The Affiliate King is Clickbank

I gave you a lot to consider in this article. I think you get the big picture about how online affiliate marketing works. But there are more to it and it is impossible to put everything in an article like this.

Clickbank University

So if you feel you need help and if feel that you need a complete full blown course to show you step by step and teach you every aspects of affiliate marketing. I recommend that you check out the course that Clickbank put together for you. Clickbank is the affiliate king and helped its affiliates to make billions of dollars altogether.

Check out Clickbank University course here. Look at the video and start your affiliate business right now.

This is serious stuff.

To your success

Chriss Lance

Check out similar article on our website:

http://chrisslance.com/free-affiliate-marketing-course-a-tutorial-for-beginners-2020/