Passive income has become one of the biggest ways of life for a lot of people all around the world, and people are coming up with several ways to offer the public options of this. There may be a lot of different ways of earning a passive income, but the one that has taken over almost 90% of the economy is known as affiliate marketing.
Perhaps you have heard of it or maybe not yet. This article will give you some insight into it and perhaps even throw in an item or two to help you get started if that’s what you choose. Let’s start at the beginning and without boring you with the details we will explain what it is.
Affiliate Marketing – The Idea
The simplest way to explain this is through the idea behind it, which is the promoting of other people’s goods and services through a platform and earning a commission once people purchase that item or service. That’s simple, isn’t it?
Now you must be wondering what more we could have to say about it because it is so simple and you can jump on the band-wagon. It may be true but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As with every project you have ever taken upon, you need certain steps or actions to take that will ensure you get it done correctly and benefit from it. Understanding everything that goes in it will be worth every penny.
If you have an existing product and want to sell more of it, this is a good way to go, however, if you do not have any product or service offering, the basic idea is to promote someone else’s, this is known as revenue sharing. The good thing about this is if you choose a product that has the potential to sell frequently, you will get some bang out of your buck! This will take some research on your part.
Who are Involved?
This process typically involves not just you, but three other people too.
- The Customer – Makes the wheels go round. Without them, there would be no affiliate purchases or commissions handed over.
- The Affiliate Marketer i.e. You – Also known as a publisher. It can be an individual or a company. This person promotes the product(s) or service and tries to do everything to attract the customers into purchasing something. Some further information is also online https://www.thebalancesmb.com/can-you-really-make-money-with-affiliate-marketing-1794168
- The Network – Acts as the middle man between the publisher and the merchant.
- The Merchant – the brand, or the retailer who creates the product for example Printers or online courses for instance.
Ways to Promote A Product or Service the Affiliate Way
The amazing thing about this concept is that one can choose to promote just about anything that available online, from shoes, books, online courses, massage services, hand-made crafts, household items, the list is endless.
Some choose to do it obviously, while others tend to be more strategically transparent so you don’t even know your part of it, or that you have clicked on a link created by a marketer. Don’t worry -Both are harmless.
The basic actions required are to come up with an idea, validate it, create a product, or look for an existing one and find platforms to promote it on. It does sound simple, but somehow it does take some work to get it going.
Below are some recommendations
- Create an entire website or landing page around it. You can start with a Blog Page, add links in it to the amazon page or YouTube Channel that has the product(s), to entice people to it. If you create great content, you will be able to drive traffic to your website and start getting clicks, these clicks will then convert into sales.
Writing a blog page is a relatively simple and easy step for anyone. Once you do some research and add important information that people will find helpful, your off to a good start. You may want to optimize for SEO as well. This means adding the right keywords and links to the articles so that Google picks it up.
- You can create videos of anything, for instance, a ‘How To’ do things – How to change a car tire for newbies or How to teach your kid Yoga, there are tons of niches you can tap into. Making a video and uploading it to YouTube with a few links in the description can work well and has been a proven strategy for a lot of millionaires.
Creating and uploading the video to this platform is free and once you hit a certain number of clicks on your video, you start earning cash. This is however a very transparent option because the FTC – federal trace Commissions require participants to disclose whether they will be earning an income from affiliate links. The easy thing to do is to include it in your description.
- Starting an Online Course. Another highly-popular concept is one of the online courses. So many people have done it and made tons of bucks from it. Find the ‘gap’ in the market where people want to learn things such as a course in coding or vegan cooking for example, and run with it. Prepare some useful information with a nice design and a downloadable PDF version of it, and place it on your website or a social media platform. Make sure you add relevant and factual information.
These are only three of the most famous and easiest ideas that people get good income from, there may be others out there, so take some initiative and let your creative juices flow!