While affiliate marketing is an incredibly simple and effective way to make money online, it is not completely foolproof. That is to say that if you choose the wrong product, or market it in the wrong way, you might not see the immediate kind of success you were hoping for.
A lot of your success then will ride on your ability to choose the right product. Here’s what you need to know.
Most people when choosing a product to sell will load up their affiliate network of choice (ClickBank, JVZoo, WSOPro) and then look for the items that have the most sales and the best commission.
This is a good move because those figures suggest that other people are earning a lot of money and so should you be able to. In fact, you can literally ‘copy and paste’ their business model!
But if that’s all you’re doing then you’re making a mistake. 99% of the products at the top of the listing are going to be on the same precise things: making money online, dating or fitness.
If you start promoting one of those books, you’re now competing with all the other people selling the same book and all the people selling similar books. Most people who have used the internet for more than a day are already sick of being sold ‘make money from home programs’.
What’s more is that these are the most competitive niches on the web. If you don’t already have a massively successful website/mailing list, then getting to the number one spot on Google for ‘Make Money Online eBook’ or ‘Build Muscle’ is going to be nigh impossible. You’re setting yourself up to fail.
Instead then, consider picking something in a smaller niche. Let’s say you find an eBook aimed at a specific industry or job – maybe something telling people how to make money from flower arranging. It seems less exciting and the audience is smaller but your product is now unique.
What’s more is that you can easily reach those flower arrangers by posting on a few flower blogs. And you can probably get your sales page to the top of Google for ‘flower arranging eBook’ much more easily. It has a clear USP as well, which makes it very easy to sell.
Better yet though, is to look at the routes to market you already have. What contacts can you leverage? Where can you reach a lot of people? What are those people interested in?
Think about how you’ll sell the product and where you’ll reach your target demographic before you pick the product. That is how you succeed and it’s a strategy you can repeat over and over again.
If you already have a successful website with a huge audience, then of course it makes sense for you to choose a product that will appeal to that audience.
Multiple Products
Remember as well that you have the option of selling lots of products. This is another one of the big advantages of selling digital products: you can quickly add or remove products from your site without needing to spend days writing and formatting!
There are pros and cons to selling multiple products. Selling multiple products is great if you have a big site and you’re using soft-sale techniques (see the next chapter). This also allows you to offer a range of prices for different types of customer.
That said, focussing on one product at a time will allow you to create more buzz and excitement around that one specific product, and to create a more streamlined website that directs customers all to a single page: the buy page.
Choosing physical products is a slightly different process. Again, the strategy here should be to pick things that are relevant to your content, and to the typical reader of your website.
At the same time, they should also be items that are good quality, and that fulfil a real need.
The good news is that there is no reason to make a big upfront investment and take a risk by buying lots of items in bulk. You aren’t going to be looking at a situation where you have a warehouse full of fidget spinners!
That means that you can follow trends, and generally throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
I do recommend though that you have a range of different products at different price points, in order to cater to every kind of buyer.
BUT also remember that you make commission on anything that is bought after the user visits Amazon. That means that the main priority should be to get the person to click the link and to visit the page – perhaps more so than selling that specific item!
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Get yourself a web host and create your site. Make one new page and place the sales page copy you got on there, along with your affiliate link. You now have everything in place in order to start selling and start making profit! We’ll take a look at this next step in the following chapter.
