trafficmansionThe affiliate marketing industry is constantly growing. According to Rakuten Affiliate Network’s study, the overall size of the market is expected to reach an impressive $6.8 billion by the beginning of 2020.
If nothing else, these numbers prove that the future is bright for affiliate marketers. All that aside, however; affiliate marketing is not a “get rich fast” scheme—far from it. It requires a lot of your time, hard work, and focus.
If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, the first thing you need to accept is that this not a 9 to 5 job. You will need to invest your mind, body, and soul into building your network. However, what makes affiliate marketing an outstanding career choice for many people is the ability to earn a decent, passive income.
Most affiliate programs out there are broadly divided into two categories:
- One-time commission model
- Recurring commission model
The first one is a simple model. You promote a product online and if anyone acts on your advertisements and buys the item, you’re rewarded with a fixed commission. The more your referrals buy, the more commissions you earn.
The latter is a bit a more complicated model. These types of programs don’t just pay you per conversion, they also pay you at the end of every month as long as the referrals continue to use their subscription. In this scenario, you get your monthly share without having to do anything. As long as the subscription continues, you’ll get paid. Pretty sweet, right?
Recurring affiliate programs are also great for people who freelance or run a business. They make a great way to monetize and increase your monthly revenue. In the following segments of this article, we are going to share with you a couple of tips on how to generate passive income as an affiliate:
1. Select the Right Products to Promote
The product is everything here. If you want to earn passive income as an affiliate, you need to be quite selective when it comes to brands and products you are going to promote. We recommend that you start small and select one, maybe two products at first to promote on your site and channels. Try to pick products that could be of great value to your existing audience.
If you talk about SEO on your domain and social media accounts, for example, you need to think about what kind of products your followers would be interested in buying. If you had a well-read article about YouTube marketing for beginners, it would make sense to promote cameras or microphones on that page.
Even though you can earn passive income with any type of product if you’re creative enough, most affiliates go for digital products because they operate on a subscription model.
For example, if you’re promoting a startup that has developed a tool for, let’s say, keyword research, you’re going to look for digital agencies and freelancers who will benefit from using such a product on a long-term basis. The same goes for dating websites. If you find a deal where you get a steady cut of the price for every member you brought pays on monthly basis, you can earn some serious passive income here.
Regardless of what you decide to promote, you want to talk about specific products in a way like they’re your own. You want to share all the things about it so your followers feel comfortable with making that purchase.
2. Getting that Affiliate Link
As we already mentioned at the beginning of this article, many companies now invest in affiliate marketing. In almost any niche today, you can find websites that, through their own affiliate programs, offer fixed commissions to those who bring them new customers.
However, if you’re experiencing difficulties finding the right partners manually (which tends to be an exhausting process), look for big affiliate, a.k.a. referral programs, where you can easily sign up and apply to get into a big database of affiliate links.
There are numerous benefits of signing up to an affiliate program. All of them offer a vast pool of digital products from which to choose. Whatever your niche is, you should be able to find a related product to sell on your website, even if it is something relatively obscure. Another, and probably the biggest benefit that comes with signing with an affiliate program, is the great earning potential. If you’re good at what you do, you can earn large commissions that will make all of your efforts worthwhile.
Once you get your account sorted, you can easily find brands with whom you can partner up to earn some cash. While we are still on the subject of affiliate programs, however; selecting the right one for you is of great importance. Not many of them offer the same type of deals for marketers who operate in different industries.
For example, if you operate in the online dating space and choose to promote Traffic Mansion’s websites, you’ll find yourself earning a lot of profit very quickly. Our dating sites are some of the best converting sites in the industry. They are time and traffic tested to ensure they convert your visitors into actual, paying members. When your referred visitors join one of our sites, you are paid 75 percent of the initial sales price and 50 percent of each re-bill for that member. When added up, the total income per sale often exceeds $100!
Online dating is a great industry for affiliate marketers who want to live from a passive income. Why? Because most sites operate on a membership model. We at Traffic Mansion offer commissions for two types of actions: a signup and a sale. When a user who clicked on your referral link completes the free profile signup form and clicks submit, we recognize that as a “signup.” When that free profile user upgrades to a paid membership—that’s a “sale.” A paid membership can be a trial, 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 1-year or lifetime membership, if it is offered. If you’re skilled enough to constantly upsell your prospects, you could make a sweet living solely by promoting our sites on your channels.
3. The Promotion
Once you find the products and brands that you’re comfortable promoting, it’s time to come up with the right game plan that will help you convince your audience to spend money based on your recommendations.
This is the tricky part. Regardless of how good or affordable certain products and services are, it’s never easy to promote them. Today’s Internet users hate to have a sales pitch. They’re constantly bombarded with all sorts of advertisements that try to convince them to spend their money on a wide range of products and services. In a world where more than 200 million Internet users rely on some sort of an ad-blocking software to save them from an incoming tidal wave of advertisements, affiliate marketers have to think of new, clever ways to reach out to their desired audiences and get them to interact with their proposals.
We recommend that you start with a video in which you talk about the products. You do a straight up review, a comparison video, or maybe something completely different that better fits what you do on the Web. Video is huge now—a lot of affiliates have made a lot of money today by embracing this type of format and its potential.
YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and third most visited site after Google and Facebook. Millions of people from around the globe visit this platform every single day for different purposes. Even though a large percentage of YouTubers are mostly looking for entertainment, there’s also a significant number of people who use YouTube for learning more about particular products and services. If you create a good enough video, you’ll certainly generate loads of traffic from this platform. If you go a step further and insert your affiliate link in the description space of your video, well that’s an opportunity to earn an additional income from every single new view.
Naturally, this is just the starting point. Even though it’s now almost essential to start your promotional strategy with a video, it’s not nearly enough to just produce a single piece of content and expect for people to start eating from your hand. If you want to engage people on today’s Web, you really need to invest in promotion.
First and foremost, you need to come up with a plan that takes into consideration different content formats and platforms on which to push your material. Try developing videos, blog posts, guest posts, even a podcast, and invest in producing original content for social media. Think about different places where people can stumble upon your link and how to make the product appealing to them.
Every product/service has its own strengths and weaknesses. Your job here is to figure out how to make those strengths transparent to people who come into contact with the material you’re promoting.
Closing Words
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. As you can see from everything written above, there are legitimate options out there for people who are interested in living from passive income.
Of course, if you read the article carefully, you have probably noticed that in order to ensure that their steady commissions continue to drip into their accounts, affiliates cannot really afford to completely neglect their business and spend their days on the beach.
Even the best of pages and content can stop converting if you don’t check up on it regularly.
In order to ensure that your passive commissions continue to come in, you must invest some effort into educating yourself, optimizing your deals and capitalizing on new opportunities.
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