It’s quite possible you’ve never heard of Affiliate Marketing. It is not new but has really taken off as a Side Income generator with the explosion and continued growth of the internet.
Affiliate Marketing is the act of marketing another person’s or company’s products and benefiting from the commission they give you for the product sales.
What is the earnings potential?
Choosing to sell other people’s products door to door is massively time consuming and unlikely to deliver you anything like the income you are looking for.
On this site we assume that you will be conducting your marketing through some internet based platform in which case the potential is massive.
Some people have become millionaires through affiliate marketing. The earnings potential is massive but is directly proportional to the products you choose to market and the effort you want to put into that.
Is it legal?
Absolutely. As long as what you are selling can be legally sold then you can market it.
How easy is it to do?
It will be much easier if you can put together a website and know how to drive traffic to it.
If you don’t know any of that it is not impossible, you could get somebody to set it up for you or you could learn in a couple of days how to do it.
It will require a surge of effort at the start to set up your sales platform, probably a website. That may take a week or two, but for those who know what they are doing could be measured in hours rather than days.
After that, you will need to maintain your site but the majority of your transactions will be automated allowing you to sit back and do something else.
Reading or talking to many people about Affiliate Marketing can leave you confused. They will get into technical web based language. Don’t let that put you off. You will pick it up quickly and right now if you’re thinking of it you should focus on:
- What can I sell?
- Will people buy it?
- How do I market it?
Give us another couple of minutes and we can help you answer all of these.
Do I need to invest anything upfront?
If you know how to set up a website the costs of setting it up are minimal:
- Register a domain £10 per year.
- Host the site up to £10 a month.
How does it work?
Affiliate Marketing works by you advertising somebody else’s product on the internet for them.
When anybody clicks on your advert to buy the product an embedded, and hidden, code tells the product owner that you have pointed the buyer to them and you receive an agreed % of the sale which can be up to 50%.
Many online sales platforms have affiliate links for you to follow somewhere on their own page.
Where can I learn how to do it?
There are a number of books which explain to you what to do. These break down into different aspects, the thinking behind Affiliate Marketing and how to put the website together.
Books we have found useful include:
You can probably learn how to put together a website from YouTube and most certainly you can if you are prepared to put some time into the website domain and builder sites such as 1&1 IONOS, Fasthosts and Wix.You could also attend a course to learn how to do all of this, and more. The Internet Business School offers a wide variety of courses from online or one day through to three day diploma courses and mentoring. That is incidentally where our website builder learned how to do this site.
What can I sell?
If you don’t immediately have anything to sell then there are websites which actually provide links to products others are selling. You could go for some of these products which already exist and want you to market for them.
Have a look at:
Will people buy it?
The million $ question. You’ll need to do some research.
Have a look on Google Ads. If you go to the Keyword planner and type in your product name you can very easily, and at no cost, see how many searches occur for it. A low number is bad unless of course you will be getting a 25% commission on a Multi million£ yacht.
How do I market it?
That’s where your website comes in.
If you can’t or don’t want to build it yourself then you can probably get one built from £250 depending upon what you want.
Home.
All photos are courtesy of Unsplash
