Module 10: And, Maybe, Selling Other People’s Products with Affiliate Marketing

Professional practices use affiliate marketing by taking advantage of existing traffic to their site and the reach of their email list. You then join an affiliate network and choose someone else’s products to promote based on what your readers and subscribers like. The network gives you an affiliate link, and whenever customers click it, you get paid.

Affiliate marketing is performance-based. This means that you get paid when a certain action occurs. There are many types of actions and they don’t have to be sales.

With Pay Per Click (PPC), you get paid each time visitors click on your link. Companies may pay you for each link a lead clicks, each phone call from a prospect, or each person who signs up for their list. In these cases, you’re helping the merchant by harvesting prospects for them.

One of the most attractive benefits of affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to create the products or deliver the services yourself. Affiliate marketing offers an easy way to monetize a blog or website that already has a following. All you have to do is start writing about products or services that your visitors would like.

Affiliate networks are usually free to join, and you can run an affiliate campaign with very little money up front. All you need to pay for are web hosting and any tools you’ll use. Networks offer all kinds of support and security, and they often give you other resources to work with. It’s as close to ‘plug and play’ as any online business can be.

The main downside is that affiliate marketing income is usually fairly sporadic, even if you have a site with plenty of traffic. It’s not a way to quit your day job. There are also many affiliate marketers who rely on spammy or unethical tactics, so search engines like Google don’t particularly always like affiliate sites.

If you want to do well, offer something original and unique that nobody else is offering and which is helpful to your audience. Fill a gap in the market. Really zero in on your audience and give them exactly what they want.

Like most forms of marketing, affiliate marketing is all about long-term relationship building. If you have a hungry crowd that knows you as someone who offers quality, you’ll eventually make good sales and a sustainable second income.

When you are ready to really dig into this stuff, remember that there’s a real mix of marketing advice out there. Some of it’s awesome, some of it’s half-baked, lots of it is outdated, and a whole lot of it is designed to help sell products, not professionals services.

We’ve filtered through the best of what is available to provide you with actionable advice in our Deep Dive recommendations that are from the most trusted resources and are designed specifically to promote professional services like yours.

Neil Patel’s Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-By-Step Guide

Whether you are ready to jump in or are just exploring whether this kind of income stream is right for your business, exploring Neil Patel’s Affiliate Marketing Made Simple is a great way to learn pretty much all of the basics from someone who knows his stuff and is willing to share.

This step-by-step guide walks you right through the basics of how it all works and choosing your first partnerships on through getting the right type of attention from your audience through building a scaleable affiliate process that won’t detract from your practice’s primary priorities.