Why Affiliate Marketing ?

What exactly is affiliate marketing ?

Well, Lets break the words down,

Affiliate:- A person or organisation officially attached or connected to an organisation.

Marketing:- The action of business promoting and selling products and services.

Have you ever being talking to friends or family about a great new product you have just bought off say Amazon....your so pleased with it your telling everyone who will listen about how fantastic it is and how it has changed your life....people who know you and trust you will think, hey, I think I will get one too. They go to the amazon website and purchase the very same product.

Lot’s of people and business owners have now realised that to sell more of their products or services online a great addition to their marketing is to add an affiliate program so other people can also recommend their product/service and if people buy they pay that person a percentage of the sale.

How on earth can you get paid ? What happens is the company who’s selling gives you an affiliate link, so if someone clicks on it and buys, the sale is associated to you, the company selling does everything else, and i mean everything. Your involvement stops right there (sort of), the company send the product out, they deal with any queries, returns, what ever. You get paid a percentage ranging from 10% to 80% of the product cost. (the higher % payouts are more likely to be for digital products/downloads etc)
A good example of this is with one of the worlds biggest, AMAZON. Most of the products they sell you may not realise it are by affiliates,its called the 'Amazon Associates Programme'

Your involvement stops there, when i said sort of, what i mean by that is the savvy marketer will at some point try to get the customers details to build his data base / list. The idea here is over time he feeds them relevant good information, building their trust, they then will make another recommendation knowing that a good percentage of those people on his list will end up buying and once again, he/she gets a cut of the money made.

I’ve heard many good marketers say “The monies in the list”

Sound easy right ? Wrong!!

I have sold many thousands pounds worth of other people’s products over the years without really knowing what I’m doing. The main thing that has helped me in those sales was I was an avid fan and user of those particular products and services. I think you have to be very genuine when it comes to affiliate marketing because people are not stupid and they will soon sniff you out if your coming across as needy, you have to come across as really wanting to help people.

I’m currently doing a ‘proper’ in depth course so I can go deep into the weeds(so to speak) to see if I can replace my current salary in 12 months. I’m under no illusion that it’s going to be easy, however I don’t think there’s a better time than now (especially with the lock down) I will be doing regular posts of hopefully interesting and helpful information of my findings