Affiliate Marketplaces
Your core business might not be affiliate marketing but yoga, or you might run an IT training company. But my personal view is that affiliate marketing should always be a part of your business activities.
Affiliate marketing can be:
your primary source of income,
your secondary source of income next to a day job,
or your secondary source of income for your own business.
Let’s stay with the examples.
If you teach yoga, then your affiliate offers can be yoga clothing, yoga mats, interior decoration, ebooks, and online courses either around yoga, meditation, or similar.
If you run an IT training business, your secondary affiliate marketing income can come from computer sales, IT software sales, desk setup accessories such as monitor stands and desk mats, and much more.
What is affiliate marketing?
If you sell your own products, then of course you do marketing to sell them, and the revenue that you generate is 100% yours.
Affiliate marketing is when you help advertise another company’s products and earn a sales commission for doing so. In that case, a part of the revenue is shared with you as your affiliate commission. But your costs are also lower.
You don’t need to
create more of your own products;
or manage product delivery,
shipping, fulfillment, or refunds.
This is all done by the company that owns the products you help sell through your affiliation.
Affiliate marketplaces are basically online shops where you can pick a product you want to help sell, and on such platforms, under your user account, the marketplace automation creates links for you to use to advertise for those products of your choice. The marketplace software also automates payment so that you receive your commission for each sale made through your specific links.
The product owners also provide marketing material, and often they also demand that you stick to the marketing material they provide.
That is also easy to understand, because imagine you misunderstand some of the product features and write your own text and marketing, and then, based on your own misunderstanding, you promote a product incorrectly. Not a good starting point.
So in short, marketing material or prebuilt landing pages are provided to help you, but also to ensure their products are promoted correctly.
All you need to do is create ads or landing pages for the relevant products that link to their sales pages. If any visitor then makes a purchase, you earn your commission.
Earning a commission every month
Often, affiliate products have recurring revenue; think of monthly subscriptions like a software suite such as Adobe Creative Programs or the e-commerce and marketing community solutions I mentioned earlier.
If you promote such products, you can also earn a monthly recurring commission. With both types of commission combined, you can slowly, or maybe even quickly, build up consistent income streams for your own business.
What amount of income can you create? This mostly depends on your own consistency and your mastery of relevant related skills like SEO (search engine optimization). You will not see ‘income disclaimers’ on my webpage here, as all the programs I know and also advertise for have their own disclaimers in place. As always in life, there are no guarantees. But there are best practices you can learn, like the ‘profit first’ approach I teach, which helps you build a consistent income and grow it over time.
My general advice would be to get used to consistently investing time in those daily or weekly tasks to advertise your own or third-party products and ensure you deliver consistent service so customers and partner companies you affiliate with appreciate you as a reliable business professional.
Once you have built up an income that is, in your perception, sufficient, you can start looking into making things step by step easier for you and creating more free time for yourself in addition to your financial freedom. More automation or outsourcing of tasks can help you with that. Read more under Task Outsourcing.
Affiliate marketplaces I find useful and easy to use are:
