What if there was a way that you could build your confidence and learn stuff that will help your business, while making money…oh and with virtually no overhead? Sounds kind of like a scam, right? Actually, it’s affiliate marketing and today I’m sharing five more reasons why you should start doing it right now.
This is part three of a four-part series on why should you start affiliate marketing right now. Read part one here, part two here and part four here.
1. It Proves You Can Sell
In yesterday’s post, reason number five for immediately getting into affiliate marketing is that it teaches you to sell.
You learn how to sell when you are promoting affiliate offers. That helps you in the long run with your own products.
But what about the confidence it builds? And the proof it provides that your audience will buy stuff online.
A lot of people get into online business with the attitude that their audience is somehow “special.” Their audience just doesn’t buy things online.
All I hear are excuses why they’ll never sell anything online. And then, like me, they do one affiliate promotion and make $586 (or $1,000…or $5,000+).
Nine times out of ten, people are surprised at how much they can make promoting affiliate offers. They are even more surprised at how easy it is and that their audience is actually responsive.
Suddenly, as happened with me when I made my first $586, seeing those commissions roll in lights a fire in them. They have confidence and proof that their audience will buy.
They become selling machines.
2. You Learn What Works for Your List
Affiliate marketing is a great way to learn what offers work for your list. This can help you decide what products and courses to release on your own.
Let’s say you have a list of stay-at-home moms, for example. All you know about them is a few demographic data points, such as:
- Average household income of $75,000-100,000
- Average number of kids is 2-4
- 60% of them homeschool their kids
That’s it. That’s all you have to go on. And the reality is that it would be difficult starting off to get much more granular than that.
So what would sell well to them? Well, homeschool products might, but 40% of your audience won’t care about that. Still worth a shot, but that can’t be all there is.
A great way to find out what they are interested in buying is to promote various affiliate offers to them.
Maybe their families would like to learn goal-setting with Michael Hyatt. Maybe not.
Maybe the moms would like to start a blog, so Jeff Goins’ Tribe Writers would be a good fit. Perhaps it’s a terrible fit, though.
Or maybe they want to learn how to have more peace in their family, so Ziglar Family’s course is a good fit (that’s a safe bet, actually).
If you promote ten offers over the course of a year, five might sell very well to your audience and five might bomb. This tells you something about your audience.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What price points did they buy at?
- What times of year did they buy?
- What topics were they most interested in?
- Did they buy from male or female product creators?
- What kind of payment plans were they most interested in?
- Did they like webinars or video series? Ebooks or live AMAs?
- How many emails did you send them? What worked?
And so on…you can glean so much information from these promotions that benefit you in the long run.
PRO TIP: Make sure to tag your subscribers based on what they opt in to and what they buy for later use. Over time, you might find that you can promote certain offers only to a segment of your list.
3. No Customer Service
Here’s how affiliate marketing works:
Step 1: You make the sale.
Step 2: You are done.
Again, don’t get me wrong…having your own products is great. It’s smart. It’s very profitable.
But there are a lot of headaches. Headaches you don’t have with affiliate promotions.
I love serving customers and we do our best to super-serve everyone we come in contact with, including our buyers. But, sometimes it’s nice to sell something and not have to worry about login issues, videos not working, credit cards not processing, or just rude customers (yes, we have a few, but not you. You are awesome!).
4. A lot of Affiliate Income is Passive Income
I love passive income. Right now, I’m probably making money while writing this post, because someone, somewhere is buying something through my affiliate link.
It might be a $0.52 commission from Amazon or an $1,000 commission from a course I recommend on my resources page. Whatever it is, it’s passive. I’m not actively promoting anything today.
A good chunk of our affiliate income each year is passive income. The work was done once, often years ago, and we continue to make money on it today.
That’s the great thing about working on a resources page or a review post. They are up forever and continue to make you money long after the work is done.
Yes, your own products can (and should) sell passively at least some of the time, but again you have all of the overhead to deal with. You don’t get to keep all the money and you have ongoing customer service and staffing concerns.
I love that every month, we get 7-10 PayPal deposits ranging from $50-$5,000+ for work we did at least six months ago.
That is the power of passive income.
5. You Learn How to Run Launches and Affiliate Programs
Remember what Picasso said:
One of the best ways to learn any skill is by modeling (OK, copying…OK, fine…stealing, geesh). And promoting affiliate offers allows you to see other affiliate managers and product creators in action.
How are they engaging their affiliates?
What tools are they providing their affiliates?
How are they running their launch?
When you promote affiliate offers, make sure to look out for the success clues they leave behind.
What makes them successful (or not)?
Are there things that you see others doing and you want to copy? Then copy it.
Are there things that you see others doing that drive you crazy? Then fix it.
At least 50% (probably more) of what we do for our clients is copied from others or modeled after something they did. Great people such as:
- Stu McLaren
- Danny Iny
- Josh Turner and Ryan Farrell (Case Study)
- Jeff Walker
- Chandler Bolt
- Steve Olsher
- And so many more. I am probably forgetting at least two dozen people on this list.
Another good chunk of what we do is the result of seeing others doing things wrong. Often, we’re doing the same thing ourselves. I just don’t know how bad it is until I’m in the affiliate’s shoes.
Yes, we have innovated in many ways, but the majority of our best practices come from watching a lot of other people run launches and learning from them.
Promote as many affiliate offers as you can (within reason, of course) and watch and learn. After even a few, you’ll be full of great ideas.
The Rest of the Series
Click Here to go back and read reasons 1-5
Click Here to go back and read reasons 6-10
Click Here to read reasons 16-20
Which of these five reasons excites you the most about affiliate marketing?
