THE FUNDAMENTAL OF AFFILIATE MARKETING

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting another company's product (or service). 

You find a product, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

In other words, when you help another company generate sales, you get a cut! 

The best part is that you don’t have to spend the time and money to create your own products, because someone else has already done the hard work. You can begin making money as an affiliate as soon as you have a place to recommend products, whether that's a website you have, a podcast, or even on social media

So, all you have to do is send traffic through a link to that product, and everything after that is out of your hands . . . right?

Wrong. There's so much more involved to make this work well. So stay and read this through.

So,to wake up in the morning, open their laptop, and look at something like this:

CLICKBANK Affiliate 

AMAZON Affiliate

CLICKFUNNELS Affiliate

Passive income.

That’s the dream, right?

Make money while you sleep.

For 99% of people, affiliate marketing is how they get started.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

YOU KNOW WHAT?

Affiliate marketing is all around us—and you’ve probably been involved in affiliate marketing without realizing it! If you’ve ever clicked on a link in a blog post like this one, to a product or service being offered on another website, there’s a good chance the owner of the website where you originally clicked the link received a commission from your purchase.

Yes, affiliate marketing is everywhere—but here’s the thing: few people understand how to take full advantage of it. In fact, I believe affiliate marketing is the world’s most untapped source for generating passive income! It’s a beautiful process that’s completely underutilized, and I’m excited to share with you exactly how it all works.

So, FIRST OF ALL, affiliate marketing can be a great choice for online entrepreneurs, bloggers, and really anyone who has a website and is willing to build an audience they can serve authentically.

If this describes you, products exist right now that people in your target market are probably already buying, and if you can become the resource that recommends those products, you can generate a commission as a result.

Affiliate marketing can be an especially good option if you’re not ready to create your own product or service, but you want to serve your audience by recommending products that may be helpful to them.

Affiliate marketing can also be a good fit for a wide range of people because you can apply a bunch of different marketing methods to promote affiliate products and services. These include the same marketing methods you may already be using—things like search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, content marketing, software and display ads. You can even take advantage of other nifty ways to market products, like product reviews and unboxings.

Finally, it’s important to remember that affiliate marketing works best when you’re sincere and confident about the product you’re promoting. You’d only sell your own product if you knew it could help people, and it’s the same with affiliate marketing. If you go in with a get-rich-quick mentality, you’re not going to be impressed with your results.

HOW IT WORKS? 

Let’s get into the details. There are three main players in an affiliate marketing arrangement:

1. You and your website—the “affiliate.”
2. The affiliate company (or network). In the simplest affiliate arrangements, you work directly with a single company to promote one or more of their products. There are more complex affiliate networks that provide an opportunity to earn affiliate revenue on a range of products, such as Amazon, Rakuten, ClickBank, and ShareASale.
3. The customer. This is a member of your audience who uses your affiliate link to purchase a product from the affiliate company or network.

A company that offers an affiliate marketing program may call it by a different name—these programs are also commonly called partner programs or referral programs.

Here’s how each party benefits from affiliate marketing:

1. From your recommendation, your audience learns about a product, course, or tool that may be useful to them;
2. From your recommendation, the company selling the product, course, or tool gets new customers they may not have found otherwise;
3. As a result of the sales to your audience, the company gives you a commission.

When done the right way, affiliate marketing can be a win–win–win. But at the center of this is one thing: your audience’s trust. When your audience believes you have their best interests at heart and trusts your recommendations, then all three parties in the affiliate marketing relationship ultimately benefit.

What does affiliate marketing look like? 

If you’ve visited my blog, you may have come across my posts about some products. This post contains a list of recommended resources/product to help you choose- video games, major appliances etc

You could easily find tons of other examples of affiliate marketing “in the wild.” That’s because affiliate marketing is essentially about sharing your affiliate links, so however you choose to share those links—whether on your website, on social media like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, or via emails to your list—well, that’s affiliate marketing in action!

Amazon Associates program

Many how-to guides for affiliate marketing suggest a series of steps similar to this:

1. Find a company and product you want to promote.
2. Sign up as an affiliate.
3. Get your unique affiliate link and add it to your site.
4. A visitor to your website clicks the link, which takes them to a third-party page.
5. If the visitor makes a purchase, you receive a commission based on the value of the item purchased.

Now, these steps are definitely accurate—you can’t earn money with affiliate marketing without first finding a product to promote! But more importantly, you shouldn’t be affiliate marketing without first establishing trust with your audience. Audience first, always.

That’s why my methodology for successful affiliate marketing goes like this:

1. First, build a relationship with your audience.
2. Then, identify a product that might fit your audience’s needs.
3. Next, use and test the product yourself, to ensure it’s truly something worth recommending to your audience, so you don’t risk taking advantage of their trust.
4. Show your audience tangible proof that the product does what it promises via a blog post or case study on your website or YouTube channel.
5. Then—and only then!—you can start to promote the product to your audience and hopefully start earning some affiliate revenue when they purchase it.

This approach puts your audience’s needs front and center, setting you up for success with affiliate marketing.


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PROS AND CONS

As with anything, affiliate marketing has its upsides and its downsides. In this series, I’ll give you the guidance you need to go about affiliate marketing smartly so you can make the most of the opportunities out there and avoid the potential downsides. Here are the main pros and cons of affiliate marketing.

Pros:

• Low barrier to entry. Affiliate marketing is easy to get started with, and costs little. Most affiliate programs are free to join, and you don’t have to create, stock, or ship products, which also means less hassle/responsibility.

• Low risk. You’re not the product owner, so you don’t lose anything if a customer doesn’t buy.

• Passive income potential. Affiliate marketing provides the potential for passive income.

• More freedom. When you start earning passive income, you can work anytime and from anywhere, as long as you have internet access.

Cons:

• Not a quick fix. It can take time to generate the amount of traffic needed to result in substantial income.

• Less control. You don’t own or control the product/service you’re recommending, so you can’t control quality or customer experience.

• Competition and audience fatigue. An attractive affiliate program means you might be competing with others for customers.

• Offer fatigue. Audiences can also get “offer fatigue” if they see too much ongoing promotion from you.

• Not all affiliate programs are created equal. While most companies that offer affiliate commissions are stable and ethical, there are shady companies out there too, some of which may not pay what they say they will. It’s important to do your homework.

• Risk of link highjacking. Unscrupulous individuals may hijack your affiliate links, known as “linkjacking,” potentially stealing your commission in the process.

HOW MUCH CAN YOUR EARN

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that you don't have to invest the time and effort to create a product to sell. You can begin selling something as an affiliate as soon as you have a platform to sell it on. In this way, affiliate marketing can be a great way to earn some extra income without a lot of hassle or upfront cost.

That said, it’s not a way to get rich quick. Like all passive income strategies, it takes time and effort to create a decent revenue stream.It took me a while to build close relationships with the companies I’m an affiliate for and I'm still building the trust.Well, I'm a doctor, I do believe trust between person is the most essential.

Below are the example of earnings you could be making..

 From CLICKBANK

From AMAZON

HOW TO START?

1. Put Your Audience First (Build Trust)
2. The Soft Pitch Pipeline
3. Segment 1: Relationships
4. Segment 2: Products
5. Segment 3: Experience
6. Segment 4: Proof
7. Segment 5: Pitch

1) Build Trust

 Follow these two major rules:

1. I only recommend products that I’m very familiar with. Preferably, these are products I’ve used before and that have helped me achieve something. If I’m not confident in the product and I don’t feel it will help people, I will not promote it.
2. I never directly tell anyone to buy a product. I always recommend products based on my experience and in the context of what I’ve done or what I’m doing with it.

What does following these two rules achieve? Trust. By doing these two things, my audience knows that I only want them to buy the tools that they need, at the time they need them. They know that I’ve used and believe in the products I recommend. And they know there’s no pressure, because I’m only looking out for their best interests.

Many affiliate marketers choose not to follow these rules—and I think that’s why affiliate marketing has a bad reputation. We can do better, and so I hope you’ll join me in following these rules.

Every affiliate marketer needs to understand the importance of establishing and maintaining trust with their audience before they get started with affiliate marketing. 

2) Soft Pitch Pipeline

My approach to affiliate marketing is built around something I call the soft pitch pipeline. This approach is designed to do two main things: build trust, and reduce the amount of “hard selling” needed to promote your affiliate products (hence the “soft pitch” part).

Imagine a series of pipes. These pipes represent the experience or “flow” people go through when they visit your site or are introduced to you and your brand. On one end is traffic entering the pipeline, and on the other “exit” end of the pipeline is the sale or conversion.

Between these two points, there are five segments that combine to make up the total experience of your brand:

1. The Relationships you cultivate with your audience- Identify a target audience that has a specific pain, issue, problem, or goal.The key is to not go into it with the aim of finding an affiliate product, but to get to know your audience and find solutions they can use.Start with the pain, not the product. Become friends with the people who visit your site and interact with you on social media. So, be reasonable, tell stories. That's it.
2. The Products you decide to promote- Identified what you want to help your  visitor to achieve, think about how they’re going to get there. What’s their roadmap or path to success? Defining the steps on this path will help you determine exactly what kinds of products will help your audience at different points along the path.Best places to start identifying these products is through ones you’ve used yourself. Whatever niche you’re in, spend a little time making a list of the tools and services you use. Those things that you used to help you achieve your goals can help your audience achieve their goals too. Just about any product or service can work, including:

• Courses

• Books

• Physical products

• Software

• Coaching services

Remember: don’t start with the products; start with your audience’s goals and pain points. Then find the products to help them get where they want to be.

3.  The Experience you have with those products- Before you start promoting your product to your audience, you need to get to know it yourself, inside and out. Affiliate marketing works best when you treat the products you’re promoting as your own. You need to know firsthand the experience your audience will have using this product.So, I really encourage you to use and test a product thoroughly before you promote it.

4.  The Proof you share that those products work- Proof is similar to experience, but it’s about focusing on the positive outcomes of using a product. If experience is about seeing the product in action, proof is about seeing it work. Show the success you’ve had with a product, your audience will be excited about the possibility of achieving the same success.Give your audience tangible proof—data and demonstration—that the products you’re promoting can change their lives for the better.

5.  The Pitch or “sell” of those products to your audience - You can reduce the amount of pitching you have to do by focusing on the first four stages of the pipeline. But at a minimum, you’ll still need to enable the sale. You need to make sure people have a way to click on your affiliate link to buy the product! This means creating a point of sale where you insert one or more calls to action (CTAs) to click on the affiliate link and purchase the product. Remember, to be HONEST, OFFER SUPPORT, PROVIDE MULTIPLE OPPURTUNITIES and OFFER BONUS (a quick pdf guide on how to use product, free reports or a coupon code) .So, you have lots of options in terms of where to put these links and CTAs:

• Emails

• Blog posts

• Landing pages (ClickFunnels)

• Podcast show notes

• Webinars

• Social media messages

Also remember , beyond just blog posts, there are lots of ways and places to share your affiliate links, including:

• YouTube videos

• Emails

• Podcasts

These segments can vary in strength and size. For example, if you have an amazing relationship with someone, it doesn’t take much to convince that person to do something for you. In this case, the relationship segment is extremely long, so the pitch segment doesn’t have to be long at all. For example, say your wife is pregnant. It’s two in the morning and she wants you to go to the store and buy a Chipsmore . Well, you’re probably off to the store to buy a Chipsmore—there’s not much pitch or convincing needed at all.

Now take the other extreme: a company you’ve never heard of before. Since you hardly have any relationship with this company, they’re going to have to work a lot harder to pitch you—to convince you to try them out. And many companies pitch really aggressively, which can backfire and make people uncomfortable or even annoyed.

That’s exactly what we try to avoid with the soft pitch pipeline. By focusing on the first four segments of the pipeline—the relationships you cultivate with your audience, the products you promote, the experience you have with those products, and the proof you can share with your audience that the products work—you can make the pitch phase shorter and less aggressive.

If you set up the first four segments of the pipeline the right way, hardly any pitch will be needed to get your audience to click through your affiliate links and make a purchase.

CONCLUSION

Finally, remember why you got into affiliate marketing. It’s not for the commissions. It’s for your audience—to help them achieve something. It’s your responsibility, as someone with a platform and an audience that trusts you, to give them the products they need to achieve success.

Your commissions are ultimately a byproduct of how helpful you are to your audience. So aim to be incredibly helpful, and you will earn more in the long run. When you approach affiliate marketing in a way that keeps people around and doesn’t rely on the pitch, but rather everything that happens before that—the relationship, the product, the experience, and the proof—you’ll set yourself up for maximum success.

Remember: Use affiliate marketing as a tool to help your audience, and the commissions will come!

PS: I hope this post will help you to start your own business and be successful at it.

If you want to learn more and discover the secrets of affiliate marketing 

>>> CLICK HERE