Affiliate marketing is arguably the best option for anyone looking to make money from the web, especially passive income. Affiliate marketing networks are what make this possible, so lets take a look at what they are, what their role is and how you can use them to generate money easily online.
Affiliate marketing means earning commission on the sale of goods usually digital goods that are sold online. This means youll promote a product, say an ebook or an online course, and youll then provide a link to where your readers can buy that product.
Each time that someone clicks on that link and then goes on to buy the product, you get paid. This means you can earn just as much money as you would do selling your own product, but without needing to know how to create a digital product and without needing to invest money into an idea that might not sell.
Affiliate Marketing Networks
An affiliate marketing network then is where you find these affiliate programs. Some of the most popular options include:
JVZoo
ClickBank
Commission Junction
Warrior Forum
On these sites, youll be able to find lists of affiliate products for you to sell and this system will then be managed by those networks.
There are man y different advantages to using an affiliate network. Firstly, it means that you have a company you can trust managing the process, so you know you wont be a victim of affiliate fraud. At the same time, affiliate marketing networks give you one place where you can find lots of products and then compare what they have to offer you can see how they directly compete in terms of the commission they are offering, the number of sales, the prices, the extra marketing materials for you to use, any competitions etc.
Likewise, when you use an affiliate marketing network, you will have a single console where you can manage and see all of your different sales and products.
Affiliate marketing networks also have a lot of benefits for the product creators themselves. If you have an ebook or a course and youre looking for more marketers to help you sell it, then youll be able to use an affiliate marketing network and that way you can simply write your pitch, create the marketing materials and then upload everything to the site. Youll then not have to deal with the marketers directly (other than to give them the go ahead to represent you) and youll not have to manage things like payouts, cookies etc.
There are other options for affiliate marketing networks that work a little differently too, such as Amazons partnership program that will allow marketers to sell their digital products for a considerably smaller commission. This is a powerful option for selling pretty much anything from computers, to toasters, to protein shake. The commission is much lower (4-8%) but the fact remains that physical products still sell much more than digital ones. This is therefore the best way to sell to the broadest audience possible, including older generations and those that might not be used to reading online.
Of course you can also sell affiliate products without going through an affiliate network however, in which case you will likely contact the product creator directly and ask them for an affiliate link you can work with.
How to Profit Easily From Affiliate Networks
There are many different business models and strategies you can use to make money from a website. One of these of course is to sell a product either one that youve created yourself or an affiliate product that you are selling on in order to get a commission. This is a highly effective way to make money and means that you can do so without directing the traffic away from your site, and while making a much larger cut of the profit than youd get from an ad network. However, in order for that to be effective you need to be able to get people to actually buy what you are selling, and this is where the clever part comes in.
Unfortunately, the reality of the situation here isnt a case of whats good will sell. Rather its more a matter of if youre good at selling, youll make sales. In other words, the difference between success and failure really comes down to your sales patter and your site design and how many people you get to read your blurb.
Fulcrum-Tip: One of the tried and tested methods is to use a landing page where you direct as much traffic as possible from your own site but also from links on other sites etc. Here you will then do your best to convince anyone who stops by that they need to buy your book or your course or whatever it is, and that all comes down to the way you lay it out and how convincing you can be in your writing.
If you have a really great sales speech on your site, and if you are getting highly targeted traffic, then theres no reason to think that you cant get 1-2% of people to buy an e-book worth $30. If you are then paying .20 cents per visitor using an ad network, then youll be making a tidy (and scalable) profit without having to do
well anything really.
All that is left for you to do is to send people to that page and that often means using PPC advertising. This means using Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, setting your budget and then watching those visitors turn into customers. Because PPC ads let you set how much you pay per click, that means you choose how much to pay for each visitor.
Then, if you know how much you make per sale, and you know what percentage of visitors buy from you you can choose a budget that will guarantee you make profit. Then you just need to increase your conversions, increase your budget and continue to earn more and more. Again without lifting a finger!
Making Your Landing Page Work
But thats all reliant on the work you put in to start with and how good you want to make your landing page. If youre going to make a good profit, then this needs to be able to convince people who land to buy.
Take some time and look around other landing pages selling e-books etc. You will notice right away that many of them have a very narrow site design that forces you to scroll down the page. Theres no menu and no other buttons because of course that would enable you to navigate away, and the point of the narrow and linear page layout is that it forces you to commit by scrolling. If you spend a while reading and if you scroll down the page as you go, then youre visitor wont want to then just leave without having done anything.
You should litter your buy button then throughout the page so that people can click it at any point, and you need to appeal to the emotions of the person buying. Note that most purchases are not logical or sensible (except maybe a new toothbrush) but rather are emotional and impulsive. Throughout the course of your text then you want to try and subtly manipulate those emotions to work the person into a frenzy where they will click buy.
To do this you need to create a feeling of panic and urgency by stating that there is a time limit on this, you need to make them feel envious and make your product seem exclusive, you need to outline what it is they will get from your product and how it will make their life better, and you need to allay their fears and recognize their barriers to purchasing.