How To Sell Products With Affiliate Marketing (And What Not To Do)

Affiliate marketing is a Great Business Model.

It allows you to make money by selling someone else’s product, without you having to go out there and create, test and optimize your own. You don’t have to have customer support in place, or do any other additional work. But how to sell products with affiliate marketing? What is the process?

Well…all you have to do, is recommend it.

Furthermore, there is no end to the amount of products out there that you can be an affiliate for, which is a huge plus!

From physical to digital, there is probably some sort of “partnership” program, for a huge majority of the products that you might be thinking of promoting, and plus, companies are always on the lookout for people who can drive more sales and customers to them.

It’s been this way for like…forever. ?

When you’re starting out as a brand new affiliate online, and you don’t have any experience or track record, you might be directed to sites like clickbank.com by other, more experienced affiliates and marketers.

It’s one of the most well-known and most trusted online marketplaces that allow people from most countries all around the globe, to both sell online and make money as an affiliate for different products, most of the time without asking for any requirements whatsoever.

And since that’s where most affiliate marketers start, it’s what most affiliate marketers learned how to use, right from the getgo.

Heck it’s where I personally started too! Although I was a bit more successful elsewhere.

But, a lot of the information out there on affiliate marketing, is kinda overhyped. Let’s be real. 

You have people promoting and recommending ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, scams and a whole lot of other things. Just like anything else, it has its pros and cons. 

The society that we live in, is an “instant gratification” one. In where you get everything, at a click of a button. But as the saying goes “the good things in life, take time”.

And because of this, the business model, and affiliate marketers in general…are given a bad rap. For this reason, when you’re dealing with the question “how to sell products with affiliate marketing”, there are a few things you should probably not want to do.

Here are just 2 examples (there are many many more).

How Not To Sell Products As An Affiliate

Being Biased

You should always be truthful when it comes to recommending products, for both yourself as for the potential customers you’re recommending the product to. If you’re selling something you don’t believe in, you won’t (or at least shouldn’t) last too long.

Another thing you should not do, is promote something “for the sake of it”.

For example, if you’ve never smoked, you wouldn’t write something like “here is something that’ll help you quit smoking, it helped me!” and then pitch your offer. I’ve seen this happen (there is a youtube video, available to back this up) and it’s just not right.

It might work for a minute or two…but it’ll not last too long. The way you win, is by being authentic.

 

Don’t Spam

Even if you can do affiliate marketing offline, I think that a BIG majority of the affiliate marketers are doing their marketing online. 

Thus, you’ll have to be up to date with the different marketing tactics and techniques that allow you to generate as much targeted traffic as possible…

One of the ways NOT to do that, is spamming.

Spamming your affiliate links over the internet, will not only make you look bad, it also doesn’t work at all, because it’s the absolute easiest “hands off” way to do it, and so everyone who doesn’t really want to do any work…is doing it!

You might get banned from sites and ad networks or blocked from forums and channels…it’s just not worth it.

We’ve all done it in the beginning, it doesn’t work, let’s move on ?

The “Right” Way To Sell Products As An Affiliate

So, we’ve come to the conclusion that there are a few incorrect ways of doing affiliate marketing… But, it’s important that you realize:

It’ll cost you more down the line, to NOT do thing correctly, then if you just did them correctly straight away.

This is SO true. It’s crazy.

If you do things correctly the first time around, you’ll not have wasted time doing it incorrectly.

If you realized that you’ve been doing things incorrectly (and by things I mean selling products as an affiliate by spamming and whatnot) and you have to take a step back and do everything all over again…but correctly…it can make you waste HUGE amounts of time.

So, how do you go about promoting affiliate products the RIGHT way?

Apart from doing the opposite of what is mentioned above…You will generally want to:

• Create valuable content around the product of service you sell. Something Like A Blog or youtube videos are amazing, because they’re like virtual real estate. The more you own, the better.
  
  
• Actually CARE for the customer. If the product isn’t for them, don’t recommend it to them. Always try to put yourself in their shoes. What is the BEST product for x,y,z situation?
  
  
• Create an audience. This can be something as simple as a facebook, instagram, tik tok or Youtube following. Basically, build something that you can put your name or brand behind and that will allow you to, later on “switch over” to different platforms, if need be. ?
  
  
• Build an email list. It’s super important. No matter what happens to the social media platforms, you always control the email (you can download it as a text file). Not only that, it’s the closest thing to “push button” free traffic there is.

Those are some of the ways I would recommend doing, and NOT doing affiliate marketing.

Once again, it’s better to do things correctly from the get go, otherwise you might fall short, further down the line.

Cheers.