Wondering how to sell other people’s products online? A clever business model known as affiliate marketing allows anyone to join a program and promote products through your unique affiliate link. When someone makes a purchase through your link, you earn a commission based on the sale. The product/platform owner pays you a commission.
Amazon, for example has a affiliate (or partner) program which anyone can join. Once you join you’ll get access to the affiliate “portal” and you can get your links. Link to any product on Amazon and they’ll pay you for sales generated through your links.
Amazon isn’t known for its generosity to affiliates however and they offer some of the lower commission rates available. So despite Amazon’s popularity and the fact that most people trust the site to buy from, it’s not the best solution for affiliates. So what is the best solution if you want to earn through selling other people’s products?
How To Sell Other People’s Products Online – Digital Products
Physical products like you will find on Amazon typically pay the least amount in commission. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% for most products you’ll find on the site. But digital products will pay much more. Clickbank.com and JVZoo.com for example are online marketplaces for digital products. They typically pay much more per sale than physical products and usually from 30%-40% commission.
Digital products don’t have the many costs associated with the delivery of physical products. You can download a digital products from anywhere in the world totally for free! So these savings can be passed to the people who promote them – affiliates!
Digital products can also offer ongoing value. Digital software products and online education products can carry ongoing membership fees and some of them pass these on to the affiliates too. This means if you choose to promote subscription affiliate programs you can earn recurring commissions from each sale, potentially for years with the right products and customers.
There are also high ticket affiliate marketing products which pay much larger commissions than average. These are definitely a good idea and allow you to use a larger marketing budget. When you’re getting started in affiliate marketing they can give you more opportunity to find your feet. When a large ticket commission comes in it can be re-used in your marketing budget and you can grow your business more quickly.
Some of the most profitable digital products to sell online offer high ticket recurring income products within a product range.
How To Sell Other People’s Products Online – How To Do The Selling
There’s many ways to sell affiliate products online and not every affiliate uses the same approach. Some will create written or video content, such as this article. Others will build an email list of subscribers and email their list and promote products with links in their messages.
The fastest way to build an email list is through using paid marketing techniques. There’s a few marketing platforms you can use if you go down this path:
- Google Adwords
- YouTube
- Bing
- Etc.
Some of these strategies are better than others but your choice of promotion method will depend on your own preferences and your marketing budget (if you have one). If you don’t have a large marketing budget to build an email list or send thousands of visitors to an offer, you can choose a cheaper promotion strategy.
Cheap strategies tend to involve building content: blogging and video blogging for example. This can take some time and your success with any given strategy will depend on how committed you are, your choice of products and your ability to keep going and overcome any difficulties you encounter.
Selling Through Blogging
Bloggers build a lot of content and over time their content gets shown on the search engine results pages (SERPS) of Google and other search engines. It can take several months or even years before a blogger makes their blog a full time income source.
The time it takes will vary from one person to another and depending on how competitive the topic is which they choose to blog about. This applies also to building a YouTube channel too or using content to drive online affiliate sales.
Paid Marketing
Marketers who use paid platforms to drive traffic can build an affiliate business much more quickly, given a large enough marketing budget and the patience to learn this skill. Affiliates who use this strategy will send targeted website traffic to a landing page where they collect subscribers who join their email list. With an email list you can send automated messages to your subscribers on a regular basis and promote affiliate products through your links.
You can also send paid traffic directly to your affiliate offers. However this can be frowned upon by some marketing platforms and there can be a lot more wastage with ad budget by doing this. Collecting email subscribers gives you a longer time period to engage your audience. Whereas if you send them directly to a sales page or an affiliate offer, they can simply leave never to return.
Once you get people to subscribe to an email list which you own, you can continue to deliver messages to them over weeks, months and even years. I’ve had subscribers purchase products even years after they signed up to join my email newsletter.
Social Media Platforms
There’s other methods of selling affiliate products too and many affiliates will use their social media presence to build a following. By setting up your profile to showcase your offer, you can lead people towards your landing page or website to build a traffic source. You can choose both paid methods and unpaid social media marketing strategies.
Unpaid methods will typically take longer but are more suitable for anyone without a marketing budget. If you use paid marketing methods, be prepared for some of your budget being used up in the learning of the skill. Paid marketing is faster and more scalable, but not every paid ad you run will work!
