Awesome! You are the Affiliate Marketer.
Affiliate marketing generally involves referring people to other products or services and earning income from making recommendations of those products.
In this post I will break down some examples and show you some people who are doing this successfully online to make a living.
Amazon Products
You’ve been shopping on Amazon before right?
Well Amazon has an affiliate program where you can refer people to purchase products through a special affiliate link you can create for specific products.
Generally the most common ways people promote products on Amazon are by using:
- Video – This could be reviewing a product with a video, publishing it on YouTube or elsewhere and every time someone buys that product through your link you will earn a small commission from Amazon. Here is a video of me reviewing a Nintendo 64 Controller for the PC that has earned me commissions every time someone purchased through my link.
Below you can see I got this video ranking on Google for a review and it’s gotten roughly 10,000 views at the time of writing this. Inside the video description is a special Amazon link that earns me money every time someone buys the controller.
- Blogging Or Authority Site: The most common way that people earn money online with Amazon’s program is by building a site around a specific niche. An example might be my Skull Clothing store. It’s a site themed entirely around ‘skull’ based accessories, clothing, Halloween products and much more.
I used a combination of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and building a Pinterest profile to drive traffic to the site. Anytime someone adds a product to their cart and purchases on Amazon I earn a commission.
The most common way people drive traffic to these ‘niche’ based sites is through very targeted keyword focused content and lots of SEO to get evergreen traffic to their websites each and every month.
Pretty cool huh?
Every year around Halloween my site gets a ton of traffic and I make money on auto-pilot from people buying products on my store.
Promoting Other Niche Products Using Affiliate Networks
There is no lack of products out there that you can promote. One of the most common networks out there is the Clickbank Marketplace, you can literally promote anything from skin care products to someone teaching you how to do SEO.
An example might be you decide to build an authority ‘niche’ site around Dogs or specific Dog Breeds. You could monetize your website by offering products like this German Shepard Handbook.
You would be getting traffic to your website through the means of blog content (which had proper SEO) and likely social media (maybe you build a huge Instagram fan page for Dogs). The idea would be to monetize this traffic and every time someone buys through your special affiliate link you would earn a commission.
I highly suggest if this is a path you want to take, you start really thinking about a specific area you want to focus on. You can very easily try to build multiple websites at once but it’s not at all practical, that extra effort being put into 1 site could mean more traffic or sales for an already established website you just keep working on over time.
Promoting Internet Marketing Products
One of the most lucrative ways to make money online today is by promoting popular internet marketing products. You can use networks like Jvzoo and WarriorPlus to see what is currently popular, while Muncheye will give you a list of upcoming products that are about to launch in the online space.
The most popular way to monetize this is by doing a combination of video reviews and written product reviews.
Here is an example of a product called Leadz.io that I promoted through a written product review and a video I also published to YouTube. When the product launched I announced this to people on my email list and got a fraction of people to purchase the product through my link earning me a commission on every sale.
The best part about this is the product creator is the one who put all the hard work into creating the product, the sales page, the sales funnel (generally these products include upsells trying to get you to purchase even more stuff = more money for you!).
Once you’ve established some authority doing these product reviews (I’d start out buying a few personally) you can reach out to the product creators to interview them or at minimum ask for a “review copy” meaning you have every intention of reviewing the product and sharing your thoughts about it.
Some examples of people doing this successfully:
Mike Thomas aka Mike From Maine – Mike runs a daily interview show where he interviews product creators. He has over 10,000 people on his email list which he built up over many years of doing his show. Each interview allows him to not only build a relationship with the product creator but also get some insight into their product while also promoting the product to his email list in a very non-pushy kind of way.
Brett Rutecky – Brett whom also happens to be Mike’s partner focuses more on honest product reviews sharing both the good and the bad letting his audience make a decision based on his own review.
Mike shares some seriously awesome income reports of how much he earns with affiliate marketing. Regardless if you decide to go down the path of Amazon, niche products or sticking to the online marketing space there is plenty of money to be made online as an affiliate marketer.
This is all just a quick glimpse into what’s possible with this business model, over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sending you some emails on how you can get started with Affiliate marketing if this is the path you wish to take as an entrepreneur.
If you filled out my quiz, you are already tagged in my email system and you will receive emails related to affiliate marketing. If you didn’t take the quiz, go do that now.
-John