Earn Money at Home

This is one of the most in-depth videos I’ve shot on how to start affiliate marketing, so tune in while you read this post: What is Affiliate Marketing? This is one of the most common questions we receive, and it’s really quite simple: Affiliate marketing is a way for you (the affiliate) to earn a commission for recommending products or services to your friends or readers. To simplify it, here’s the 5 step process for how to start affiliate marketing: You find a product you want to promote Do a search for “product name” affiliate program. If it’s on Amazon, you can also promote it Sign up for their affiliate program You get a special link that allows the merchant to track the people who clicked your link If they buy the product, you get a commission. Pretty simple, right? It can get much more advanced, but in this post, we’re just going to start with the fundamentals and get you to the point where you’re ready to make your first commission. Does this still not make sense? Check out “What is Affiliate Marketing” for a little more detail. How Does Affiliate Marketing Work? There are a lot of different ways to track affiliates these days, but nearly all of them are based on someone clicking your special tracking link. Cookies are the most common and fundamental method of tracking. When an affiliate link is clicked, a small file called a cookie is stored on the user’s computer. Then they buy a product, the merchant can see that they were referred by you. There are also more advanced methods based on the email used or IP address – but we won’t get into those here, we’ll stick to the most important stuff you need to know. How Much Money Can You Make With Affiliate Marketing? Ok, they’re is probably a part of you saying, “How much money can you actually make affiliate marketing? Is it worth my time to figure out how to do this?” The nice thing about affiliate marketing is the sky’s kind of the limit. You can really make as much or as little as you want because there are all sorts of products out there that you can promote. Here’s an example from my golf site, Breaking Eighty. Now, I’m not saying this to brag, but just to give you an idea. I promote dozens of products and just this one product. So this is the commission on one product for just slightly less than six months. That’s a pretty big number. And so if that’s just one of a lot of different products, you can kind of see where there’s a ton of potential here. I’ve been doing this for years. This doesn’t happen overnight. But if you start getting serious about affiliate marketing now and building your brand using this strategy, it can be a great way to build passive income and give you freedom, flexibility, and time to do more of the things you want to do. That’s why I’m such a fan of affiliate marketing as a business. How Do You Become an Affiliate Marketer? Here’s the thing, you can pick just about any product that you can buy online, and there will be an affiliate program that will pay you a finders fee for referring a sale. However, just because you can promote anything, doesn’t mean you should.  The most important thing to consider when selecting a product to market is,“is it relevant to your audience?” For instance, for me to try and advertise for dumbbells on Location Rebel probably isn’t the smartest thing, because 99% of my audience could care less about them. However, for me to promote, say, WP Engine a WordPress hosting company – makes much more sense, since almost every one of my readers either have or have considered starting a website. Just recently, we promoted Streak as an awesome tool for freelancers to use to monitor leads right from their inbox. Once again, that’s something that speaks directly to the audience. Here’s How to Start Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog in 8 Steps: Step 1: Create a Website or A BlogStep 2: Choose an Industry, and then Niche DownStep 3: Research Products in Your Niche that You Can ReviewStep 4: Sign Up for the Amazon Affiliate ProgramStep 5: Find affiliate programs for the other products you want to reviewStep 6: Create content in the form of tutorials, review posts, resource pages, or emails and use your affiliate linkStep 7: Optimize the page and track your rankings in GoogleStep 8: Rinse and Repeat! I thought about walking you through this whole process within this post, but honestly, it’s all pretty straight forward and a lot of that is stuff you probably already know. So rather than do that, I want to really focus on the specifics of understanding what makes a good affiliate product, and how to successfully promote it. Products: Physical and Digital Information vs. Services There are three different types of affiliate products you can promote as a marketer Services, Informational Products, and Physical Products Each of these has pros and cons, and we’re going to look at those now. How to Promote Physical Products as an Marketer Physical products are probably the easiest thing to promote for one reason, and one reason only: Amazon. Once you sign up for Amazon's largest affiliate program, you can get a link for any product on the site and earn a small commission on it! As it sits currently, you can earn between 1 and 4.5% on any product you promote through the Amazon affiliate program. What that percentage is depends on the category it falls into.  You can see that breakdown here. Most of the stuff I promote I get a 3% commission on. One of the nice things about promoting via Amazon is that you get a commission on everything the buyer purchases – not just the specific product link they clicked on. So let’s say that I’m promoting some golf balls on my golf website. The balls cost $50, so I’ll only earn $1.50. But, what if that same person also buys a set of golf clubs for $1,000, and a new golf rangefinder for $300? Then all of a sudden that $1.50 turns into $41.50. Amazon has a 24 hour cookie. So what that means is that if someone clicks on your link, they then have 24 hours to make a purchase in order for you to get credit. It also doesn’t have to be for the product they clicked on. If they click on your golf ball link and then buy a new TV? You still get credit! Lately it seems Amazon is injecting a bit of life back into their affiliate program as they are offering cash bonuses to some marketers for hitting referral goals. The bonuses were larger than I expected, so this has been nice to see after they slashed their commissions a few years ago. Other Ways to Promote Physical Products In a lot of ways, Amazon is like the gateway drug to promoting affiliate products because it’s very easy, and hundreds of millions of people use it on a daily basis. But as you get more experienced, you’ll find there are more lucrative ways to promote physical products. For instance, the REI affiliate program has a 5% commission and a 15-day cookie. If you have an outdoor-themed website, you have the potential to make nearly twice as much money on the products you promote, and you’re able to give people more time to buy. Are REI and Amazon both popular places to shop? No, but within your niche, you may find REI to be preferred and more trusted by your readers. Additionally, numerous businesses provide their own affiliate program, which pays even higher commissions. In the golf world, I work with over 30 companies directly that have affiliate commissions of between 5-20%. With most falling in the 10-15% range. To give an example I promote golf rangefinders. With one brand, if I sell a $500 rangefinder on Amazon? I make $15. But if I sell that same one directly through a company’s affiliate program? I make $50. Not as many people buy directly from the website, but considering I make over 3 times as much per sale, it’s worth it to promote it there! In a recent month for this specific brand, I sold 140 rangefinders with commissions of $1,377.15 on Amazon. I also promoted it directly through their website, where I only sold 53 rangefinders, but made a commission of $1,687.83. This doesn’t take into account other products people bought at the same time on Amazon – but it gives you an idea of how expanding to other physical product affiliate programs can be beneficial. How to Sign Up for Amazon’s Partner ProgramL Signing up for Amazon’s affiliate program is an excellent starting point. Why? Because the chances are good you already use Amazon, are familiar with it, and your readers are too. You can sign up and get links immediately from the Amazon Affiliate program right here. We’ve got you covered as well if you want to learn more about Amazon Affiliate Marketing. Other Affiliate Networks to Consider Most larger companies will use what’s called an affiliate network to host their products. These are sites you sign up for that might represent dozens of brands, and it’s how you get your special links and marketing materials. Other smaller companies might do this in-house, so it’s worth reaching out and doing a little research here. But the major affiliate networks that I’ve used are: Flex OffersCommission JunctionShareASaleRakutenImpact Many of the largest companies work with them (for instance many of the golf companies I work with), and building a relationship with a larger affiliate network can lead to more opportunities that you might not have found otherwise. Affiliate Marketing for Information Products Honestly? I love promoting information products. What is an information product? It’s a digital product, course, or community that is created by an expert in their field. For instance, our flagship product Location Rebel Academy is an information product. There are a lot of reasons that information products are so great to promote: Often they are higher priced, which means higher commissionsThey can have a personality behind them, which builds trust and makes them easier to sellThere are often full marketing funnels behind them aiding in salesThey solve a problem or provide a solution that your readers are looking for Generally, it can be a little bit more work to become an affiliate for these products because often the creator is a bit more protective of who they let market the products. There’s also no central place you can go to join like you could with Amazon. In most cases, you will need to speak directly with the author or look for an "affiliates" page on their product website. The fact that information products typically earn higher commissions than physical products is yet another significant advantage of promoting them. 30-50% is fairly standard when it comes to promoting info products. Why? There are no hard costs associated with it. And if a product creator can pay a percentage of any sale to an affiliate rather than have to spend significant amounts of money on ads? That’s a win for everyone involved. When I promote information products I usually look for high-priced products created by people who are good at marketing. Why? Because all I have to do is send traffic to their funnel, and they convert the sale. My work is relatively minimal. One of my first really big wins came from marketing an information product for building software businesses, as I mentioned in my Bangkok story above. Over 12 months I made over $20k in commissions from a blog post, 2 webinars, and a handful of dedicated emails. That’s it. So if you have a course or product that you’ve personally used and seen a lot of success from, check and see if there’s an affiliate program – because if you’re going to recommend it anyway, you might as well get paid for it! So if you have a course or product that you’ve personally used and seen a lot of success from, check and see if there’s an affiliate program – because if you’re going to recommend it anyway, you might as well get paid for it! Affiliate Marketing for Service Products The third type of product you can promote is a service. This is another big one for me, because of the nature of what I write about here. My business doesn’t function without hosting, a theme, email software etc. So it can be easy to make a sale on services because if I personally love and use them, there’s a good chance you will too. If you’re lucky, you can find a service that pays recurring commissions based on monthly payments. For instance, SEMrush for years paid 40% referral fees each month for the life of the account. Therefore, if someone I refer signs up for $99 per month? I’d be making nearly $40/month for as long as they were a customer. These days we’ve seen a lot of companies shift to one-time payments. Now, SEMrush pays a flat fee of $200 for each new customer. Still, not terrible.