You might have already heard of affiliate marketing but for those of you who haven’t, I wanted to give a brief overview of what affiliate marketing is, and how it can help you make extra money without tons of babysitting and maintenance, also known as passive income.
What Is Passive Income
Passive Income is and is not what it sounds like. When someone thinks about passive income, they might have visions of sitting back and watching money roll into their bank account without any effort. This can be true but what usually isn’t mentioned is the immense amount of work that goes into generating the passive income. This type of revenue stream requires the majority of the work up front with continual follow-up maintenance work to allow for the passive income that arrives at a later date.
Earning Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way to generate passive income through the process of earning a commission from the sale or promotion of another company’s product or service.
Some benefits of affiliate marketing are that you don’t need to spend time and effort in creating your own products to sell, setup and manage an e-commerce website, or handle the overhead of customer support.
You can begin Affiliate Marketing today, selling on platforms such as a blog like this website, vlogging with affiliate links in your video descriptions on YouTube, or on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can use (and I recommend this) multiple platforms for your affiliate marketing business. A blog post on your website might refer to or generate a vlog post on your YouTube page, which might generate an Instagram post with links to your blog post!
Use multiple platforms such as a Blog Website, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. to extend the reach of your affiliate marketing content.
Affiliate Marketing Examples
There are numerous ways to do affiliate marketing. One way that I’ve had success with making money with is that I recommend products on my website through an affiliate link.
For example, you could create a video channel on YouTube where you review consumer electronics and at the end of the review, direct viewers to click an affiliate link in the video description, which would take them to the order page of the product you recommended. If they make a purchase, you receive a commission (a percentage usually) from the completed sale.
These commissions may be small at first, but over time and at scale, they can bring in significant revenue.
Imagine a product that you recommend that sells for $100. You receive a small 5% commission on that sale (or $5) which may not be a lot for the large amount of work you put into the blog, video post, and marketing efforts.
However, now imagine you work hard for a year to gain 100,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel, and 7,000 of them like your video blog post and make a purchase using your affiliate link. Your commission check is now $35,000. See how that works?
So for affiliate marketing to work as a viable revenue stream you have to put in a ton of smart work up front and only then can you reap the rewards of any commissions you may make on your affiliate sales.
Be Honorable In Your Marketing
You may think it’s easy to just throw some random statements together, add an affiliate link, and then sit back and collect the affiliate checks but that is certainly not how it works in reality.
First, people want you to be honest with them. They want real opinions on the product you’re presenting. People will see right through your bullshit.
Some simple rules are to always be honest and honorable in your marketing. If you recommend a product, make sure it’s because you believe in that product, not because of an affiliation you may have.
Never tell the viewer to buy a product. Always recommend it. Give valid and truthful reasons why.
Finally, always let your viewers know that the affiliate links you’ve given them are just that; Affiliate links. You can go as far as to explain to them that you make a small commission on the sale of the item. In most cases, many over your viewers will use those links as a thank you for your honest review.
In future posts, I’ll touch on some ways to start an affiliate marketing business.
Gleaming The Journey Podcast – Episode 001 – Affiliate Marketing
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