Tips On Selling Affiliate Products

One of the most important lessons that you need to learn if you ever want to make money online is that traffic means money. In other words, if you don’t know how to generate traffic, you won’t make money. Ever. Traffic is the lifeblood of your site. It really is that simple.

The good news is that you can generate traffic in many different ways. The most obvious ways people would prefer, of course, is to generate it for free. But you can also buy traffic from people who know what they are doing and can generate traffic. Regardless, the iron rule still stands. If you want to make money online, you have to know how to generate traffic whether it’s free or paid. I needed to preface this article with that Iron rule because that is the basic rule of selling affiliate products. All tips regarding affiliate products must go back to that basic premise. You have to get traffic.

Once you have mastered the traffic factor you can go ahead and sell affiliate products on your site. I also prefer the soft pitch. I don’t want to sell to my readers. I want to show them what I use and if it happens that you want to use it as well and you go through my affiliate link because you like my recommendation – I’m very thankful for that. You should know that being an affiliate for a product is never a disadvantage for the customer. The person who clicks on your affiliate link has no extra costs.

For a long time affiliate marketing has had an unethical touch because it was often misused. You signed up for an email list on a blog you were interested in and you got bombed with affiliate offers. And that person didn’t just send you the offer once – what we might accept – but 100 times (at least that it how it felt). Telling us to sign up to get an awesome free report just to be on another list then where the new marketer sells to us like crazy. Does that sound familiar to you? I bet.

But there are ways to better sell affiliate products, without being unethical.

Here are some tips on how to sell affiliate products:

1. Find the right products. Many people select products based solely on the commission level they would get from the product. Fair enough but the problem is that you have to put in a lot of time, effort and brain power to make sure that you get the traffic for that particular product or else, you are just wasting your time. Sure, a product might pay you $500 a pop, but if you cannot find traffic for it, it is really just a waste of your time. That is the bottom line. So select products based on your ability to either find traffic now or your ability to be able to find traffic in the future. If you can’t get a bead on where that traffic for that particular high-commissioned product is going to come from, it is better to skip it.
2. Select affiliate products based on its landing page. This is one key point that many beginning affiliate marketers miss. They think that just because the product pays a lot of money and that they have the traffic for that product that they’re going to make money off that product. Wrong! The problem is that even if you have tons of traffic, and you drive it to the particular landing page the service provider or the merchant has provided for that product,  if that page doesn’t convert, you’re just wasting your time. There are many high-quality products out there but their affiliate programs are run by people who really don’t know what they are doing. They have these landing pages that just don’t convert. So what you end up doing is that you spend a lot of time and effort in trying to get all this traffic only to send it to a landing page that doesn’t do its job. Do you see what is wrong with this picture? Select products based on how effective their landing pages are. Platforms like Clickbank give you some rough idea on how well their landing pages convert. Beside that, I highly recommend not to promote products you haven’t used. Your audience trusts you, they appreciate your knowledge and the articles you share. You don’t want to disappoint them by choosing products based on the commission and not quality.
3. Before you promote a product, get in touch with the vendor. Even if you have purchased the product yourself you need to assure that, when questions come up, not only you can answer them but also their help desk gets back to the customer. Try them before and after you buy so you can be sure that you recommend a product the customer isn’t alone with after the purchase is made.
4. When you promote a product do not just link to it but show how you use it. The best thing is to take a picture while you read the eBook or when you have the computer you recommend yourself take a picture from your desk. This makes your content more personal. Again, it’s all about trust. People are much more willing to trust you when you are authentic.

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, check out our high quality Academy course here

Filed in: Affiliate Marketing • Blog
Tagged with: affiliate marketing • affiliate products