Simple Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Supplement Your Income

The key in both cases is to find the right partners. Once you do, you’ll need to track what’s working and what’s not with the right tools.

There are multiple platforms dedicated to finding affiliate offers such as Clickbank, Flexoffers, and even Amazon.

Before choosing an actual offer, make a choice about what type of affiliate offer you’d like to promote. This will help you narrow your choices to a manageable few within your niche.

1. Digital Downloads

This class of affiliate products pays a higher percentage of the sale amount because the cost of delivery and hosting is negligible. They also tend to be cheaper.

They’re online resources that customers can access instantly after paying for them.

They range from audio files, video files, or PDF files. An example is the entire Amazon Ebook marketplace or software such as WordPress plugins.

Since they’re relatively inexpensive, it’s easier to get the sale but you’ll have to sell a high volume to receive a sizeable income.

2. Hosted or professional services

Professional services are a great way to achieve another stream of income through affiliate marketing. Before you settle on a provider, it’s important that you can vouch for their services.

Professional services tend to be more expensive than digital downloads. Hosted services, on the other hand, are cheaper but tend to follow a recurring subscription model.

Choose services that can cater to a worldwide audience as opposed to only local clientele. These are professional services like digital marketing or SEO (search engine optimization). An example of a hosted service would be a product like Leadpages or Convertkit.

As an affiliate for a professional service, you’re usually paid for the initial referral and that payment is much larger than what you can expect from a digital download. Hosted services tend to pay over the life of the subscriber you refer so the payments are small but add up over time.

3. Online courses

This is a great way to earn a large affiliate income. Online courses are becoming more and more acceptable for adult skills development.

Everything from photography and gardening to digital marketing and productivity is being taught using online courses. In fact, the online education space is a multibillion-dollar industry.

Many of them have a premium price point and pay close to half of the revenue in affiliate income. They’re very similar to digital products but with one distinction – they’re not downloadable.

Choose online courses from reputable providers in your space and market them to your current audience. Within a short time, you’ll have enough extra income to offset more costs in your business.

4. Physical products

Affiliate marketing started with physical products. They’ve adapted very well to the internet. The first thing you’ll notice about physical products is they pay a much smaller percentage than other types of affiliate products.

This is natural because there are more costs associated with manufacturing, storage, and delivery.

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Choose products that are unique, premium, and noteworthy. Commodity products aren’t worth your time because the commissions will be too small.

Marketing your Affiliate Products (without distracting from your core business).

Affiliate marketing can be a full-time business and it is for many people. That’s not what we’re after. We’re going to look at a few ways to promote your affiliate products to increase your revenue without taking away time and energy from your core business.

I’d recommend not placing them as a direct offer on your website. This may dilute the effectiveness of your core offer. Instead, we’ll mainly market to existing audience members.

There are two ways to go about this.

1. The thank you page

There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the confirmation bias. This is a when we give more weight to things that confirm our current beliefs.

What does that have to do with affiliate marketing?

When people sign up for your email list or certain offers, they hold a belief in their head. Most times, that belief is you know what you’re doing and have good products.

On the thank you page, you can confirm this belief. Use copy that reinforces what they already feel by inviting them to get something you only offer exclusive members.

What is that something?

A low-cost affiliate product such as a digital download.

These should be less than a hundred dollars and directly related to what they just bought or signed up for.

Jigsaw Health uses this opportunity to give a discount to customers. Though it’s not an affiliate product, the same principles apply.

2. Email sequence

Email marketing should never be ignored. It’s an efficient and effective way to deliver your message at scale.

Naturally, it works to sell tons of affiliate products.

It’s tempting to get a new email subscriber and bombard them with as many relevant offers as you can. The logic is they’ll bite on something.

What’s more likely to happen is a massive amount of unsubscribes and spam complaints. Instead, build a relationship with your subscribers, choose a few products you believe in, and sell them over the long term.

There are a few things to keep in mind about email marketing:

1. The relationship is more important than a quick buck. If you treat your people right and recommend good products then they’ll stick around for the long haul and spend more money with you.
2. Find a good email frequency and stick with it. If you email too much then people will unsubscribe. If you don’t email enough then people will forget about you.
3. One call to action per email. The more calls to action you have, the less likely people are to click on anyone. It’s the paradox of choice
4. Automate it. Set up an automated email sequence for new subscribers. Introduce them to your brand, let them know what to expect, and recommend products that will help them right now.
5. Segment your email list. This is important so you’re always sending relevant emails to relevant people.
6. Constantly track and improve. You won’t be perfect on your first time around and nobody expects you to be. Keep tracking and testing your campaigns over time.

These are the most important things you need to think about when you’re setting up your email sequences. Over time, you’ll get better at it and you’ll see your income increase as a result.

Conclusion

There are countless demands on the time and resources of a business. Affiliate marketing is a proven way to increase your income with minimal effort.

Though it can be tempting, don’t allow affiliate marketing to take over your core business. That would be counterproductive.

There are a few essentials to keep in mind:

1. Choose a type of affiliate product that makes the most sense for you
2. Promote it as a complement to your core offer
3. Utilize email marketing as much as possible to sell and build relationships

Do you know any other ways to use affiliate marketing to supplement your income? What’s your take on affiliate marketing as a whole? Let me know and don’t forget to share.

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