Make Extra Money From Home with Affiliate Marketing
Last few days, we’ve discussed about how to make extra money from home by selling your own products. In that post, you’ve already been introduced what products you cans sell to make money, how to create them and where to start?
Visit this link to check the full list of 12 most popular online jobs for college students.
Today, I will move to an interesting topic: Earn money by selling other people’s products. This method is also called affiliate marketing, and it is a very famous and powerful way to make money online, not only for college students, but also for everyone else. So why done everyone talk about it ? We will find the answer for this question right now. Lets’ go!
What is Affiliate Marketing and How this Work?
Actually, the nature of affiliate marketing is not new. Its rule is that you will play the role of an intermediary between the sellers (individuals or companies) who want to sell their products and customers who are finding the solutions to their problems.
As you may know, this role has existed for long time in traditional businesses. However, along with the rapidly growth of the Internet and eCommerce, more and more sellers realize about the effect of affiliate marketing. Thus, they increasingly call for the help of affiliates (people who promote others products) by sharing higher commission, creating useful tools such as banners, copy writing scripts, etc to help affiliates more easily in promoting their products.
Technically, the typical process of affiliate marketing will be like that:
- Step #1: You sign up for the affiliate network that you intend to promote products. There are so many affiliate networks for you to choose, and I will list some of popular ones in the below section. The sign up is usually free, but some are immediately approved, while others need some reviews before approving your application.
- Step #2: After becoming a member, you can choose a product or service that you want to promote, and get the affiliate link. This is a special type of link, which has the effect of tracking the clicks. That means if customers click on your link and do purchase the products, then affiliate network will know and count on the commission for you.
- Step #3: From now on, this is the process of keep promoting and selling products. You will have to try any legal methods to get the traffic to your affiliate links. Some popular ways: building a website to review about the products; or creating a video about the product, then upload to YouTube; or promoting via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. You are totally free to choose the promoting method, as long as it isn’t against the affiliate network’s policies and it brings you money (of course 😀 )
- Step #4: Counting the money! If you are hard working, and follow the suitable method, there’s no reason you can’t earn money from affiliate marketing. However, before reaching to the success, you will have to keep trying a lot because the competitiveness is very high, while the customers become more and more wisely and vigilantly.
Why affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing has many advantages in comparison to other online jobs. They are:
- The affiliates don’t need to own their own products, so the initial investment is not so high. This is quite important, especially for college students, who are usually not in rich scheme. Besides, when you don’t own products, you don’t have to worry about stuff like inventory, payment method, warranty, refund and many other complicated things.
- The commission rate is quite high, especially the digital products. For example, if you promote products at Clickbank, you can receive the commission rate up to 75% of sale price, and even more if the products are recurring type (that means the products require customers to pay monthly).
- Huge potential. With the development of eCommerce, affiliate marketing can’t be dead, otherwise it will grow bigger in the future. Therefore, if you can earn well with affiliate marketing when you are a college student, you can continue with this job as part-time job or even full-time after leaving your college.
Some quick tips to succeed in affiliate marketing:
- Be patient. Affiliate marketing has big potential, that’s right. But it is also a long-term business, that means you can’t hope to be a millionaire just after a night. You have to eat and sleep with it; try and try more; until you find yourself the successful formula.
- Follow your passions. This job requires you to test a lof of methods; thus, you can’t work with it in long term if you choose to promote that product just because it provides the good commission rate.
- Choose products to promote carefully. You are the affiliates, and products are your face. If you choose a low quality product, your reputation will decrease rapidly and customers will never buy via your recommendation again.
- Promoting products honestly. Again, this rule affects your reputation. If the product has only 5 features, but you say it has 10, so next time customers will don’t trust you any more.
Where to start with Affiliate Marketing?
- Clickbank: This network mainly focus on digital products (eBook, courses, software, etc.)
- Amazon Associates: I bet you’ve heard about this giant before, and many of you have purchased from it. But now, we won’t buy from it, but sell to others.
- eBay Partner Network. Become affiliates for eBay
- JVZoo: Mainly digital products, especially online marketing
- Warrior Plus: same as JVZoo
- Commission Junction
- ShareASale
Besides, there are so many other networks to choose. And depending on your niche or products you want to promote, you can go to Google to search for the corresponding affiliate programs. For example, you can enter the keyword: “your niche/product” + “affiliate program”.
Above I’ve just talked about another way to make extra money from home with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money for teens, college students and stay at home moms and has huge potentials. Hope that it’s useful for you guys!
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