It’s a term that you have probably heard thrown around a lot, you might have even seen me mention it in my Side Hustle Income Reports, but what actually is affiliate marketing? Let’s take a look at what exactly this billion dollar global industry is, how you can become part of it and how you can earn money.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
On its most basic level, affiliate marketing is when you promote a company’s products and get paid a commission when someone buys via your unique link. You’re essentially a sales person for a business, by helping them sell products and being rewarded when they do. One of the absolute best parts of affiliate marketing is the fact you don’t have to stick with just one company. Rather than just selling one product or one range of products, you can choose whatever affiliate schemes you want, earning commissions from all of them.
How Does It Work?
There are a range of affiliate marketing programs you can join, we’ll talk about those in a minute. Some affiliate’s want to promote a range of products that they believe in, that they perhaps use and can talk about. Others just want to promote as many products as possible to scale up their ability to make money. However you want to do it, the premise is the same. You use a unique affiliate link which will track what is purchased. The commission rates of those sales will be paid to the affiliate.
How Much Can You Earn?
There is no upper limit to what you can earn. Of course, people who are featured on those internet clickbait news story headlines about how they earn $50k a month in affiliate commission, have likely worked hard building their brand and driving traffic to it, so their affiliate links get plenty of clicks. You won’t get rich with affiliate marketing overnight. The payments you get to begin with might be the odd twenty pence here or £1.40 there. This soon adds up though and once you start adding links to the content you create, you’ll carry on as you’ll begin to see it working.
What Are The Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing?
One of the massive benefits is that it’s a passive income. Once the link is set up on your blog, website, newsletter or social media pages, it’s there for good and can be clicked whenever. You don’t have to do any extra work once that link is in place. It can start earning income for you with every click. The initial bit of time used to set up the link and post it wherever you want to, sees ten-fold returns and a steady flow of income whilst you’re not even in front of your laptop. You can literally be earning money whilst you sleep!
Another benefit is that it’s easy to start and you don’t need to shell out a lot of money. Joining affiliate schemes is free and you don’t need to create products, just the links to those products. You can work the hours you want, from wherever you want. You also don’t have to provide any customer support. You’re just sending visitors to the products, the customer support is done by the company itself.
Affiliate Marketing Programs You Can Sign Up To
There are a lot of affiliate marketing schemes you can sign up to. One of the most common is Amazon Associates. You can include a link to pretty much any product currently available to buy. eBay has a program too that they call the eBay Partner Network. You can even become an affiliate of credit cards and bank accounts, downloadable computer software, insurance plans and cashback sites. Of course, you need to find something that works for you and you can make the most of.
This could be high paying and low volume. So you’d get a decent chunk of money but it’s more a niche product, so it’s less often. A low paying, high volume one would be the likes of Amazon, as mentioned above. You might get a lot of £2 payments when people buy a new Xbox game. Of course, there are also high paying, high volume like credit cards. However, there will be a lot of competition on these schemes so you have to try and make your content and links stand out.
Start Affiliate Marketing
Does affiliate marketing sound like something you want to try? Get signed up to some programs and you will soon start earning a passive income you can be proud of.
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