Have you ever read stories or watched kids’ movies where a caravan is all set to search for treasures of gold? People dig and dig into the earth only to find dilapidated skulls and unnamed insects.
The gold, or the treasure so to speak, remains hidden from the world and the caravan’s dreams of getting rich instantly burst into million pieces.
What if we tell you that there is a way you can earn a substantial amount of money without setting out on an excursion? In this fast-paced world, you need to get your hands on as many money-making techniques as you can to get some moolah in your bank.
The problem is that there are only 24 hours in a day and you can’t possibly have more than one eight-hour job to get your bank account rolling.
So, how are we going to grant your wish? Passive income. Here, you earn money by working indirectly for a brand. For a majority of people, there is no better way than affiliate marketing to have a substantial side income.
What is Affiliate Marketing
The term can be formally defined as follows: “the process through which a promoter can earn money by promoting other people’s products is affiliate marketing.”
Built on the revenue sharing model, affiliate marketing is simple to master. You have to market other people’s products through an affiliate network. You are entitled to a commission if your marketing actually gets people to buy the product you have been promoting.
Affiliate marketing goes both ways. This means that you can be on either side of the table. For example, if you have a product or if you offer services that you want to promote, you can offer some financial incentives to promoters and get them to promote your product or service.
In the same manner, if you have no product, but you are the master of marketing, you can enter into an affiliate program with a brand and market their products or services.
How to Become an Online Affiliate Marketer
Here are some easy-to-follow tips that will help you understand how you can up your game of being an affiliate marketer.
Review Products in Your Niche
If you have a blog, an Instagram page, a YouTube channel, or a Twitter account and you have a huge following, the chances are that many people are reading the stuff you post because they can relate to them. So, if you’re a writer who loves writing small Insta-poems, there are high chances that your social media followers are also voracious readers.
If one morning you decide on becoming an affiliate marketer and start promoting sportswear, for example, your followers will not immediately follow the link and buy the product you’ve been intending to sell. This is because you don’t have the right audience.
Just like marketing your own products, promoting other people’s products also requires you to understand your audience and have an idea about what kind of products they are interested in buying. Once you have the information, collaborate with the company (or the merchant) which sells products that are liked by your followers.
To help you understand this concept, let’s go back to our original example. If you are a writer and you love sharing small poems with your audience, make a partnership with bookstores or publishing houses. Write short reviews of books or summarize a few poems and get your followers to buy the book you have just reviewed.
Promote Products of Different Merchants
You don’t have to work with one merchant as an affiliate marketer. You can work with different merchants in the same niche. This will give you a large number of people and subsequently a greater amount of commission.
Keep Sharing Content
Never forget that the main reason why your followers come to your page is the original content that you upload regularly. If you compromise on the quality or the frequency of the content, you will end up losing your followers. Obviously, you don’t want to sound like an advertising company for different brands (we already have hundreds of that).
Things to Avoid with Affiliate Marketing
As easy as it may sound, affiliate marketing does require a considerable amount of care and caution. Here are some of the things that you should be mindful of if you want to keep your affiliate marketing steady.
Picking the Wrong Product to Promote
This is basically an extension of what we explained above. If your original content is not at all remotely connected to the product you are endorsing, you will raise red flags. So be careful what you’re promoting.
Picking Too Many Products
Your channel, page, or account was not originally set up to promote products. Don’t enter into the affiliate program with too many brands.
Not Uploading the Content
If you stop uploading the content that led you to have a huge following, you will slowly start losing your loyal followers. No one wants to see marketing posts round the clock. It’s true that through affiliate marketing, you will earn a lot of money, but you have to try to retain the followers and upload original content. Only the followers who trust you will show interest in buying the product that you have reviewed.
Not Trying New Things
The digital age is standing on the foundations of the latest trends. If you are unaware of the trend, you are most likely to lose your followers. You need to be ‘relevant’ and come up with content that is relatable. Keep trying new things and try to go with the flow.
How to Become an Affiliate Marketer for ClickFunnels
There are so many affiliate programs that you can sign up for, but the ClickFunnels affiliate program is among the best. ClickFunnels provides a commission rate that has helped promoters make a six-figure commission in one week.
Signing up with ClickFunnels is not an uphill task. The minute you create an account on the site, you become a ClickFunnels affiliate. Your dashboard will have all the relevant links that lead you to ClickFunnels products that you can promote. You can also be a ClickFunnels affiliate without an account.
ClickFunnels also has a sticky cookie which provides better chances for a promoter to make more money.
Making money as an affiliate marketer is stress-free. You don’t have deadlines to follow and you can take time off whenever you feel like. Affiliate marketing, however, is a good way to have a steady supplemental income.
Why Promote ClickFunnels
Why are we mentioning the ClickFunnels affiliate program? The reason is that it has one of the most lucrative commission rates. ClickFunnels offers promoters 40% recurring commissions on ClickFunnels’ monthly accounts.
If this wasn’t enough to be classified as the best affiliate marketing program for advertisers, ClickFunnels also provides a 5% commission for every monthly account sold by a promoter who signed up under you.
In addition to this, ClickFunnels has to-die-for bonus prizes including leasing your dream car through its Dream Car program.
How Do Share Funnels Work?
Share Funnels is another cool feature in ClickFunnels that lets you share your funnel with other people. Every funnel that you have created via your account has a unique share funnel URL. You can easily share this URL with others.
When a user clicks on the share funnel link and they don’t have an account, they can start their free 14-day trial of ClickFunnels. What’s cool about this is that the client actually gets tracked back to you, and you will receive an affiliate commission for bringing in a new ClickFunnels member. When they sign up, the entire sales funnel will show up in their account, and they will be able to edit it in any way that they wish. You can make a lot of money while using the Share Funnels feature.
How to Become a Merchant (And Have Affiliates Sell Your Product)
If you want to be on the other side of the table, meaning that you want to be part of the affiliate marketing program where you are the merchant, you can do so as easily as you were carrying out your business of promoting other people’s products.
Here is what you can do:
- For becoming a merchant, the first thing that you need to do is to come up with a product idea. You have to decide on a product that is already popular among people so that you can reach a good sales figure.
- The next step relates to the validation of your idea. There is literally no point in creating a product that has zero likeability among people. You have to survey and find out whether your product is what people want.
- Once you have completed the first two steps, it’s time for you to actually create the product.
- The last step is to find an affiliate who would promote and market your product. For this, you can create an affiliate marketing program.
About ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a great sales funnel tool to use for your business. We make it simple for any entrepreneur to build their own sales funnels in just minutes, all without needing to rely on a team of techies.
With Clickfunnels, you’ll build high converting and clean sales funnels.
Everything you need to build and launch your funnel is pre-developed and automatically pieced together for your company, so you have a seamless and fast set up.
I've been looking for a good MLM. Do you know of any? THX, KO