After having spent close to a decade earning income through affiliate marketing and other partnership methods, this is one of my favorite ways to generate income online.
The idea behind affiliate marketing is fairly simple - you earn money online by promoting the products of another company for a commission on each sale you make. So in theory, all you have to do is partner up with affiliate programs, get their affiliate links, and start promoting them everywhere.
Simple, right? Well, the idea is simple but there's much more to it than just posting affiliate links on Facebook, twitter or your website.
You see, you might make a sale or two but if you’re looking for consistent income you’ll need to approach it strategically and build a trusting relationship with your audience.
In that regard, I highly recommend you build your own email list. By building an email subscriber list using a service like AWeber. you’re essentially creating a list of people that trust you and want to hear about your affiliate products' recommendations. Check out my free course on how to build your subscriber email list if you want to learn more about it.
With this in mind, here are some of the top ways to generate income in this category.
1. Promote Clickbank products
It is probably the biggest digital products marketplace online. Clickbank uses a very helpful measure called ‘gravity’ to represent how well a product sells, based on how many sales have been made and how recent these sales were. There’s one thing you want to be aware of though! ClickBank will withhold payment of any balance until an account shows a minimum of 5 sales using at least two types of payment methods. Not only that, if you made a sale but had no earnings for an extended period of time, your account will be subject to an ongoing penalty. This means that your affiliate earnings can potentially drop to zero. Nowadays, I rarely promote Clickbank products.
2. Promote Amazon Products
Amazon affiliate program is a great way to promote physical products through a reliable, trustworthy, and well-known online store. The fact that everyone knows Amazon is probably their biggest advantage. On the downside, commissions are fairly small - they start at 4% for most products and can go as high as 8% depending upon how many sales you make. However, when you send someone to Amazon. you earn a commission on whatever they buy within 24 hours of clicking your link, whether they end up buying the product you promoted or not. So, for example, if you promoted a book but the person you sent to Amazon ended up buying an expensive camera as well, you’ll get the commission for both the book and the camera. This can add up.
3. Promote Commission Junction Products
Commission Junction (CJ in short) is one of the oldest, largest affiliate networks out there. Most of the merchants in CJ are well established which can be an advantage if you’re looking to promote bigger brands. Another advantage of using CJ is that besides the typical Pay-Per-Sale offer, you can also find Pay-Per-Lead and other type of offers.
4. Promote DigiResults Products
This company mainly focuses online business and internet marketing products, but there are also other products ranging from health and fitness to travel. One of the great things about DigiResults is that both vendors and affiliates get paid at the point of sale, and not a month or two later like most affiliate marketplaces. I’ve been using their system and so far it’s one of my favorites.
