Free Sneak Preview of my latest book
Below is Chapter 7 of my all-new-for-a-new-generation classic, Homemade Business: A Woman’s Step-by-Step Guide to Earning Money at Home. The original sold 100,000 copies. Focus on the Family will re-release the totally re-written version later this year. Here’s a sneak peak:
It’s easy to get involved with Internet marketing, even without developing your own product or service, by specializing in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers don’t sell their own products or services. Instead, they serve as informal representatives for a wide variety of other web-based marketers. Major corporations, from Apple to Zappos, have spent millions developing Affiliate Marketing programs. Why? Because it’s profitable for all involved. They win because you send customers their way; you win because you get paid for influencing people to buy a particular product or service.
Basically, you earn referral fees. This has got to be one of the easiest ways ever devised to make money. You never even interact with the customers. You could be sound asleep and someone in China clicks a button and stumbles on your website or blog, clicks a button that takes him or her to a website offering products you recommend, clicks another button to buy the product. Three clicks and you are getting paid. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
The most obvious example is Amazon.com. You can create an informative website about a topic of interest to you. Say, for example, cooking. Then you provide a list of recommended cookbooks and a direct link to Amazon. Amazon stocks the books, ships the books, bills the customer and pays you. That’s what passive income is all about: earning money while you sleep. Of course affiliate marketers have to provide links to lots of websites if they hope to make significant income.
Three Ways to Earn
There are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing: pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale.
Pay Per Click: Interestingly enough, you can even get paid if the person doesn’t buy anything. Some companies will pay you for every person you send their way who clicks around on their site. Not much per click, but it might just add up.
Pay Per Lead: You’ll earn a little more from companies who pay per lead. Your referral becomes a qualified lead the moment they provide the merchant with information about themselves via an online form.
Pay Per Sale: Obviously, the highest commission rates are earned when someone you have referred actually purchases the product you suggest.
Although it would seem that you’d make the most money from pay per sale, that is not always the case. People do a lot more clicking than buying. All those little clicks and completed forms can add up even faster than actual sales. Why not try all three approaches to earning money through affiliate marketing?
Getting Started
Take a look at your education, career experience, talents, hobbies and other things you enjoy thinking, talking or writing about. What types of products would someone like you want or need? Imagine you are the customer now. What would you like to purchase related to any or all of the potential businesses you identified? Make a list. Now you just need to track down companies that are offering those types of products via affiliate programs.
Let’s say you love tennis. One of your lists might look something like this:
Tennis balls
Tennis rackets
Tennis shoes
Tennis apparel
Find a tennis coach
Tennis tournaments
Tennis elbow
How to win tournaments*
Tennis improve your serve*
Avoid common tennis injuries*
*These might be available as an ebook for sale
Commission Junction
Your first stop should be Commission Junction at www.cj.com, currently the largest and most reputable affiliate marketing clearinghouse. This is where you’ll find traditional retail-store products like tennis equipment, clothing, shoes and more. It only takes a few minutes to create a free account. One excellent feature of Commission Junction is that they tell you, upfront, the average earnings per 100 clicks so you can choose accordingly. Of course, don’t choose a product simply because someone else is making money with it. Choose a product you can get excited about recommending to others.
Once you’ve chosen the products you want to recommend, you’ll need to cut and paste banner ads onto your website or blog. Then when people either click, fill out a form or buy a product, you have the chance to earn some extra money from home.
Of course, if no one comes to your website or blog, there won’t be much clicking going on. So please re-read Chapter __ carefully. Your mission is to drive as much traffic as you can to your site to maximize the clicking!
ClickBank
Speaking of clicking, a great place to find electronic products and services (for example, how-to ebooks or internet-based training programs) to recommend is ClickBank.com, a clearinghouse for online affiliate products. You can set up a free account then browse through countless thousands of e-product listings. Be sure you believe in the product and study the company behind it before you begin spreading the word.
The top products are those that teach people how to make money. There is a certain irony that people are making millions telling other people how to make millions by telling people how to make millions. (See more under Warnings.) Nevertheless, if you want to succeed, be sure to choose a topic people are willing to invest money in. Think training rather than just informing or entertaining.
ClickBank collects payment over their secure server, delivers the electronic product to the buyer, monitors all earnings and pays both you and your Affiliates weekly via direct deposit each week (or a twice-monthly check, if you prefer).
Warnings
A few warnings are in order. You should know that there are some deceptive companies in the affiliate marketing business who will accept your referrals and never pay you a dime. The other is what I call “the internet version of envelop stuffing.” You remember those envelop stuffing ads that said you could make big money stuffing envelopes? When you sent money for the information on how to make money, they gave you instructions on how you could place an ad promoting envelop stuffing. In other words, no one ever stuffed envelopes (machines do that at a rate of a zillion per second—hello!) It was just a scam. Garbage like that abounds in the world of affiliate marketing.
The other problem is hype. Spend an hour reading some of the information products on ClickBank and you’ll see what I mean. There are countless ebooks for sale that promise the moon but really contain very little substance. Particularly in the area of making money on the internet, there’s far more heat than light. So stay alert. Thoroughly research every product you recommend to make sure it delivers real value and not a bunch of fluff.
Setting Up Affiliates to Market Your Products
Thus far, we have looked at the option of earning money by referring customers to products or services you recommend. But there is yet another way to earn money with affiliate marketing. That’s by recruiting affiliates to market your products and services. You can set up a simple program whereby you’ll pay your affiliates a commission fee for sales they drive to your website. Your main goal should be to find affiliates who’ll reach people you would not otherwise be in contact with. (In other words, you don’t want to pay people to compete with you.)
You can start with just a few affiliates and if you find it’s profitable and not difficult to manage, you can expand from there. Remember that affiliates are like having your own sales force and they represent you and your company to the world. That’s good news but it also means you need to choose your partners carefully. You don’t want someone out there giving you a bad name.
To set up your own Affiliate Program, you can go to ClickBank.com and upload the information about your product. (Developing your own Information Products to market via the internet is the subject of the next chapter.
NOTE: I have just created my own Affiliate Program, Team Partow, and we will pay you $25 for everyone you refer to my online intensive training program called the Exclusive Access Club. You’ll receive an additional $3 for everyone recruited by those you recruit.
The Exclusive Access Club is NOT a Bible study, although we certainly study the Bible. It is a total life make-over covering everything from personal finances and retirement planning, to developing multiple streams of income, simplifying your wardrobe, health and fitness, managing family, household and Kingdom service. Less comprehensive church-based programs (for example just finances, just weight loss/healthy eating) charge more and offer less! It’s free to become an affiliate, so check it out.
Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Tips
1. Choose a reliable Affiliate clearinghouse and let them do the initial work of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
2. Stay focused on items related to your core business concept. Don’t be distracted by the vast array of goods and services offered.
3. Start slow. Look for a few traditional products with a good profit margin and one or two information products that pay a generous commission. Resist the temptation to sign-up for a boatload of affiliate programs.
4. When you are ready to expand, select a broad range of products within your niche.
5. Be sure to pick items in all price ranges, from a few dollars to a few thousand.
6. Don’t inadvertently promote fraudulent businesses or useless information products. You’ll kill your credibility.
7. Buy and try products yourself so you can sincerely endorse them.
8. Remember: people buy based on emotions. Your sincere enthusiasm is your best marketing tool.
9. Research the company and the people behind. Even if their products are great, it does you no good if they cheat their affiliates out of commissions.
10. Don’t be afraid to re-write the suggested promotional material to suit your personal style. The information products, in particular, sometimes include incredibly tacky hit-you-over-the-head sales tactics.
10 Tips for Success on the Publishing Side of Affiliate Marketing
If you’ve developed your own information product, you can dramatically expand your sphere of influence while multiplying your income by recruiting affiliates to promote your product. Here’s how to go about it:
- Choose a Powerful Topic. Address a pressing felt need experienced by a large group of people.
- Research the market. Will people pay for the type of information you’re selling?
- Pick an Irresistible Title.
- Write a compelling sales page. You must convince potential affiliate marketers that people won’t be able to resist buying your information product.
- Be easy to find. Place your product in the right category and use accurate keywords.
- Be Patient. Don’t expect an army of affiliates to join you overnight. It may take six months to a year before your Information Product gets noticed.
- Market with Diligence. Do at least one thing every day to spread the word to potential affiliates about your information product.
- Price it Right. Reasonable enough that end-users will buy it; but high enough that the potential profit will motivate affiliates to market aggressively to their elists.
- Offer a 50/50% split to your affiliates. It’s passive income for you, so don’t be greedy!
- Recognize the Competition is Fierce. There are literally hundreds of thousands of information products on the internet. Your product had better be unique and deliver real solutions. Spend more time developing the product than you do trying to recruit other people to sell it. Ultimately, the product must sell itself by delivering on what you promise.
