Affiliate marketing is one of those rare businesses that you can start from your basement, with zero investments, without a product or service and still make a lot of money.
But still, most people who try affiliate marketing either fail or quit early because making money with it seems like a daunting task.
One of the reasons why affiliate marketing as a career has such low success rates is a lack of education and knowledge. Since all you need to become an affiliate marketer is a laptop and a good internet connection, people get into it with the hopes of making easy money.
In reality, there’s nothing like easy money. Like anything else, affiliate marketing also demands skills and knowledge from an individual to be successful.
In this blog, we’ll try to answer the burning question of how to make money with affiliate marketing. And with the help of an expert, we’ll tell you all the skills and knowledge that you need to have in order to be successful with affiliate marketing.
The expert with us today is Dan McCabe from All In Networker, and today, he’ll tell you how to get started with affiliate marketing and actually make consistent money with it.
So without further ado, let’s begin!
How to do Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically promoting and selling someone else’s product and earning a commission on every sale you make. From big companies like Amazon to smaller ones like Invest Diva, all offer an affiliate program where you can become their affiliate and earn money by promoting their products.
Affiliate marketing is neither as hard as people make it to be nor as easy as some gurus make it look. It is somewhere in between.
The easiest way for you to begin with affiliate marketing is by building a community about anything that you’re passionate about and can build authority in.
As you build the community and create authority within that, you can find programs and products that can better serve and support that community and place those products in front of those people.
It is not necessary to build a community around the product you wanna be an affiliate for. The more important thing is building enough authority within that community that people follow you.
There are people who have built a community around peloton bikes and workouts and then successfully sold a travel-related network marketing program to them.
The reason why Dan would encourage you to build a community around your passion is because it’s hard to show authority in something that you don’t necessarily know much about. When you talk about your passion and something that you’re really interested in, you can easily build that authority without much effort.
When looking for products to promote and sell, there are a ton of opportunities that you’ll find but only a few things that Dan would recommend you.
Which Products to sell?
There are so many different things that you can go for while looking for the right product but finding things that have some kind of continuity, something that can grow and compound on itself is the key.
Because with products with continuity and compound, you can employ network marketing along with affiliate marketing, which allows you to build teams and leverage other people’s hard work to grow significantly faster. (More on the difference between affiliate marketing and network marketing later.)
From a layman’s point of view, your goal with affiliate marketing is to figure out how to get your discretionary income $1 higher than your residual bills. That’s the first level of freedom right there. If you wanna increase that freedom more, you can always do it later.
Affiliate Marketing vs. Network Marketing: What’s The Difference
Affiliate marketing and Network marketing might sound like two interchangeable terms, but they’re not. Though the end result of both is the same, you sell someone else’s product and you collect a commission, the process is different.
With affiliate marketing, you’re able to collect bigger commissions upfront, but you aren’t able to leverage the time, talent, and efforts of other people.
With network marketing, you collect smaller commissions upfront, but you’re able to recruit and start building a sales organization underneath you that can grow by itself. Once that happens, you collect these small amounts from a lot of people that becomes a massive amount.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, “doesn’t network marketing sounds like a pyramid scheme?”
Well, yes, it does sound similar to a pyramid and has a negative connotation around it. So let’s take Dan’s opinion on why a lot of people perceive network marketing in a negative way.
Why a Negative Connotation Around Network Marketing
First of all, while network marketing and a Ponzi pyramid scheme might sound the same, they’re not. There are a lot of legit network marketing companies as well as successful network marketers.
Still, there is a negative connotation around, but Dan believes that the tides are turning on that because a lot of millennials are coming through who are not interested in corporate jobs, and they’re ready to give network marketing a chance and a better reputation.
The network marketing industry really got a negative reputation once because when it started being big back in the 90s, it wasn’t heavily regulated and there were a few bad companies that gave it the image it has today.
These companies, some of which still exist today, have oversold the idea while not giving people the proper opportunity to succeed. That obviously lead to a significant amount of people getting failed, and then those people went out and said all the negative things about network marketing like it doesn’t work.
How to Find Legitimate Companies
If you’re worried if something is a pyramid scheme or a network marketing company, and you’re going to represent their product, just make sure the following things;
First, the company is based in a country that regulates them. For example, in the US, there are heavy regulations for network marketing and multi-level marketing companies.
The other major characteristic that most illegitimate companies have in common is that they don’t separate the business opportunity from the product. The company must have a product that stands by itself, that’ll sell in the market by itself.
You can never make money just by signing up other people to sell a product. You can only make money if they sign up and then actually make a sale. So if something is a pyramid scheme, it’ll probably sound like, “Hey! Do you wanna make money by just signing up three people to this offer.”
How to Make Affiliate Marketing Work
As we discussed, a lot of people who join the affiliate marketing business either fail or very early. Most people just get their link, give it to their friends, and nothing happens. They wonder what to do next or how to bring in the first sale. So, is there a system that anyone can use to make affiliate marketing actually work?
Well, ‘systems’ is the keyword here. Systems make the world go round, especially when you’re doing anything related to affiliate marketing or network marketing. One of Dan’s favorite quotes from his network marketing mentor is- “Systems are just entry to get into the game.”
Getting started with affiliate marketing can be as simple as grabbing your affiliate link from the invest diva website, sharing it with your audiences, making a few bucks, and as you make the first few bucks, figure out a way to reinvest those dollars into growing your audience and scaling your business.
Whether you’re selling online or face-to-face, at some point in your career, you’ll need to learn some basic skills on how to present your offer. This is the single most important thing you need to learn to be successful with affiliate marketing.
If you wanna throw yourself into the fire and wanna learn some of these skills quickly, then network marketing is a great place to start because you can get in cheap and some of the best sales training in the world is there.
Apart from sales skills, you need to learn some basic internet marketing skills because, at some point in time, you might wanna build your community, your sales page, your opt-in page, etc., which will require you these skills.
The great thing about all these skills is that they are easy to learn as well as inexpensive to acquire.
How to Learn Affiliate Marketing
If you’re interested in learning all the skills before you go all-in with affiliate marketing, then be sure to visit allinnetworker.com, they have a ton of free and paid stuff on network and affiliate marketing put together by Dan himself and his business partners.
You can find a lot of free videos on the website, and if you wanna go a little deeper, there’s also a 14-days accelerator program that you can check out.
