Jun 10
17
Small Business Ideas 102: Selling Affiliate Products
In the previous article on selling custom products, I already talked about how the Internet had enabled new forms of business and commerce. This article will discuss another form of business we can set up using the Internet as the medium.
Selling affiliate products, which is commonly referred to as affiliate marketing, is a business where you sell others’ products or services and gain commission when a sale occurs as a result of your marketing effort.
How to start affiliate marketing on the Internet?
First you should have a blog with a decent number of visitors. A well visited blog is your starting point for selling affiliate products.
To attract visitors, your blog must have high quality contents. It means, your blog posts should be unique, useful and entertaining. If your blog posts are interesting enough, your audiences would like to link to them and share them with their friends. That, in turn, will generate more traffic to your blog.
Don’t forget to build a relationship with your visitors by responding to comments, being friendly and trustworthy. This will turn your regular visitors into loyal readers that will keep coming back whenever they see any updates in their RSS readers.
Is having many loyal readers enough to guarantee success in affiliate marketing? Not exactly.
Having many dedicated readers is good, but it means nothing in terms of business, if they do not buy anything from you or your partners.
So, the next challenging task is to convert your readers into potential buyers. This is where you would spend most of your time by learning and applying conversion rate optimization techniques such as persuasive copywriting and landing page optimization.
The final task, and maybe the easiest, is to sign up for an affiliate program.
It is not difficult to find companies or persons doing online business that offer some kind of affiliate program for publishers or bloggers.
Amazon.com offers affiliate programs named Amazon Associates that gives bloggers a chance to earn up to 15% of the total sale whenever a visitor purchases some products from Amazon after clicking an affiliate link in the blog.
You can also sign up as a publisher in affiliate networks such as Commision Junction, Clickbooth, Click2Sell, etc. These affiliate networks basically provide a way for advertisers and publishers (affiliates) to become partners in a specific affiliate program.
It takes serious effort to succeed in selling affiliate products. It goes beyond just putting some affiliate links or banners and hoping visitors will click and buy something. Once you have mastered the basics, you should continue to learn and apply some advance techniques to capitalize on the relationship with your readers.