Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

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Today, we are diving into a powerful strategy that can help you make hundreds and thousands of dollars in passive income every month, and that is affiliate marketing.

For the past few years, I’ve been bringing in a few hundred dollars every single month purely with affiliate marketing, and in the few months, I’ve been bringing in at least a thousand dollars every month!

Whether you are a content creator, a blogger, or an online business owner, affiliate marketing is just such an incredible way to monetize your traffic and your influence and create a consistent revenue stream.

I’m going to walk you through the basics share my personal experience and give you some strategies that will help you to be successful and take your affiliate marketing game to the next level.

Disclaimer

I do want to preface this episode by saying that if you are just starting your business, I would not recommend relying on affiliate income as your only source of income.

It is a long term strategy. It does take time to grow your audience and to get the numbers where you are profitable with affiliate sales.

So just keep in mind that although it’s never too early to start, it’s going to take a while for you to see that revenue coming in. 

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a business model where you as a content creator or as a publisher, earn a commission for every sale you generate for your business, for a retailer or a merchant.

Think of it like getting paid for recommending products or services that you use and that you love.

Many products that you use on a day to day basis, many apps, many softwares, they will have affiliate programs that you can join and you can start earning affiliate commission if you make them sales.

One of the biggest affiliate programs out there is Amazon Associates, where you can promote products from Amazon and get a percentage of every sale that comes through your unique link.

The key here is to find products that align with your brand, your business, your audience, and ideally things you already use and trust so you can provide genuine reviews and recommendations.

With any affiliate program, you usually do have to apply or at least create an account.

Some of them you will be automatically approved for, others you might need like a certain number of viewers or readers, or you have to reach a certain number per month.

From my experience, I am part of many affiliate programs myself. It is never too early to just apply and see whether or not you get accepted.

Create a google doc, create a list of affiliate programs you want to join. If they don’t accept you the first time around, try again, try, try again until you get accepted.

The sooner you can get your unique links, the sooner you can start monetizing, the sooner you can start inserting them in your content.

Not All Affiliate Programs Are Created Equal

Some programs are better than others. I will say I’ve applied to the Amazon one multiple times, I think like three times in the course of three years, and I got rejected the first few times.

Now the payouts from Amazon are like so incredibly low. The commissions range from like 2% to 10%, and if you are recommending low ticket or lower priced items, and you make 2% off of that, it’s really not a lot and you do need a lot of traffic.

Better affiliate programs will offer 30-40% commission.

I am a part of several affiliate programs myself, and I also run my own affiliate program.

From my side, I offer all of my affiliates 50 percent because in my mind, those are sales that I wouldn’t have gotten myself, so I want to give credit where credit is due.

If you are a member of any of my programs, if you’re in the Business Academy, if you have been a private client before, you have the opportunity to create your own account and recommend my services and my courses to your friends and family and to your audience and make up to 50% commission from there.

Personally, I will always encourage my clients to have their own affiliate programs because as you can see, you do make a lot of money.

You can keep 50 to up to 80% or more versus if you are recommending someone else’s product, you’re getting sometimes 2%, 5%, 10%, 20%.

It really depends on what the original retail price is because if you’re recommending something that is five dollars, you’re not going to be making that much money. So it is very powerful to have your own affiliate program.

Pros Of Affiliate Marketing

The main thing that I absolutely love about being an affiliate is how passive it is. It is a great way to generate passive income.

I will log in to many of my affiliate dashboards: this is where I can track my sales, track how many people signed up through my link and what my commissions are.

I will log in and people will have signed up using my link or people will have used my discount code.

And I just see all of this passive income coming in and I get paid out every month or after every sale, depending on the program. So it’s an amazing way to set up that additional revenue stream for your business.

Check out this post if you want to know all the additional income streams that I have in The Wanderlover.

How To Drive Traffic & Make Sales

Now let’s dive into the bread and butter of affiliate marketing, which is where do you share your links and how do you drive traffic to make sales?

I’m just going to share a few platforms. There’s probably so many more that you can think of that you’re active on, or that you can create an account on where you can promote your links. 

Blogs

The first is on a blog. This is one of my favorite ways to promote affiliate products, because you can literally write a whole blog post about an affiliate product and include your link or include a discount code.

Some programs will give you your own unique code that people can enter in at checkout for a discount, and you can create product reviews, guides, or listicles featuring your favorite affiliate products.

If you are in fashion, you can create a list of your favorite fashion brands and your favorite items for autumn and include all of the links there.

These blog posts work for you 24/7, especially if they are SEO, people are searching for them on Google, or if you have them distributed on Pinterest.

This is how I get a majority of my affiliate sales, just writing really detailed blog post reviews.

When people want to buy something or want to sign up, they go on Google and look for reviews, right?

So if you can come up with a great review and include your link in the blog that people click on, then you can make money every month.

Freebies

The next place that you can share your links are freebies that you create.

If you offer free downloads or resources for your audience, maybe you run ads to them, maybe it’s in your link in bio. After they download your freebie or your guide, you can include affiliate links within those PDFs.

It’s a very low key way to add value and promote products you love without being too salesy because it’s in a freebie, they are resources that you have used that’s valuable to you, and you can include the link very naturally.

Social Media

The next place to include your links, and this is by far one of the most powerful ways, is on social media.

So either in your link in bio, in your Instagram stories, you can create reels, you can DM people the link, Instagram or TikTok or social media, LinkedIn, YouTube, they are all powerhouses for affiliate marketing.

You can drop links in your bio, include them in stories with a tap to purchase or check out your affiliate link.

Reels are also a great way to introduce products like outfits, and what you can do is have people comment a certain word and you know that they’re interested and you can send them your affiliate link to sign up.

A lot of creators I know in the fashion industry or even like momfluencers, will be Amazon affiliates.

After you comment something, they will send you their own list with their affiliate links so that you can purchase using their link. Sometimes they also give you discount codes.

So now we’re thinking, okay, how do we do that? Right? You want to be on the other side of offering the links and offering the discount codes in exchange for commission. 

Newsletters

And then lastly, another great place to insert your links are through your newsletters via your email list (check out the blog on how to set one up here).

Your email list is gold. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you can send out product recommendations, exclusive deals, updates about your favorite affiliate partners, or you can even share blog posts that you’ve written about the affiliate partner, right?

There are so many ways that you can navigate this. The point is you are trying to get your link in front of as many people as you possibly can using your business, using your existing audience and finding a way that works for you. I will encourage you to think about more.

Evergreen and more sustainable strategies like blogging where you get the traffic through SEO instead of maybe on Instagram where you constantly have to be promoting new content or else it just gets lost and people don’t see it anymore.

Think about how you want to incorporate your links and what is the easiest way for you right now using your existing channels.

Creating Your Own Affiliate Program

One last note, I know I touched on this before, but a really advanced strategy for business owners, and this is by far the best thing you can do for your business, is also create your own affiliate program instead of relying on others.

If you already have products or services, digital products, courses, or even physical goods, by offering a commission and oftentimes a generous commission to your affiliates, you can tap into their audiences and exponentially grow your sales without really much effort on your end.

You kind of just provide them with a link and they go off and do the work for you. It’s scalable, it’s effective, it creates a community of ambassadors who genuinely love your products, and you are essentially in the driver’s seat instead of the passenger seat.

You get to control the affiliate commissions. You don’t have to worry about a program completely getting rid of their affiliate program because it is your program.

It’s definitely something to consider if you want to incorporate some form of affiliate marketing into your business.

Conclusion

In conclusion, affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible ways to create passive income in your business, and the possibilities are truly endless.

Whether you’re just getting started or whether you’re ready to scale, there is a strategy that will work for you.

The key to success is authenticity here. We’re not trying to scam your audience into buying something that you’ve never tried before. Promote products you believe in and your audience will trust your recommendations.

Thank you all for tuning in. If you would like to check out some examples of affiliate blog posts I’ve done, I will include them in the show notes and I will see you guys in the next episode. Have an amazing week!

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread The Wanderlover mission to those who need a dose of inspiration today.

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