For many businesses, the market in which they operate is becoming increasingly dynamic and faces increasing challenges. Demanding customers, shorter lead times, and a large increase in technological developments, among other things, have ensured that the attention for Performance Management has expanded enormously in recent years. However, performance management is a broad subject. You often see that businesses think too lightly about it. Please provide a list of KPIs, communicate this to management, make their bonus dependent on it, and people will manage. 

Nothing could be further from the truth, and you often see disappointing results. Setting up good performance management is, therefore, not easy.

Performance management can only succeed if the correct preconditions have been met.

• There must be a clear link between formulated KPIs and the organizational objectives. Often this link is missing, with the risk that people are not steering in the right direction.
• A good decomposition of processes is important in order to be able to do a good translation from strategic goals to operational objectives.
• Make sure you don’t have too many KPIs that make businesses micro-manage. This indicates a lack of focus.
• The introduction of Performance management requires a different way of leadership. Managers must be willing and able to steer based on the insights obtained. It requires a change in managers’ behavior in which addressing people about their responsibilities is of great importance.
• Ensure that the preconditions (rewards, responsibilities, etc.) are properly fulfilled for managers so that they can fulfill their role properly.
• Good and sufficient communication about the implementation of Performance management is necessary. The organization’s employees must be sufficiently informed because otherwise, resistance may be perceived as threatening as a possible consequence.
• The setup Performance management system must be sufficiently flexible. Inevitable organizational changes and adjustments in organizational goals must be easy to process if people want to continue to manage in the long term.

Performance management is, therefore, more than just managing based on a few numbers. Performance management is acting on business questions that play a role within the organization. Good Performance management must ensure that an organization:

• Can respond quickly to questions from the market

• Ensures the required transparency

• Manages the realization of the strategy

Performance management is, therefore more than drawing up a few KPIs. If businesses actually want to implement performance management and control performance, the preconditions are also very important!

Seriously, how to make the most money with affiliate marketing?

Earning money with affiliate marketing, if you read about it online, it almost seems like you can get rich while sleeping.

Although that sounds too good to be true, I regularly receive an email when I get up with the message that I have made money again with affiliate marketing! Earning money while sleeping is, therefore, possible.

I’m not very rich yet, but I don’t have to. With more than a thousand euros of passive income per month, you can already live quite well in Thailand. I write this blog from my apartment on the beach :).

So I’m sure: affiliate marketing is the way to build an extra income on the side. In this article, I will tell you everything about making money online with affiliate marketing and how you set it up yourself. I will also discuss what affiliate marketing is, which affiliate programs generate money, and how you can get started with it yourself. On to a passive income!

Build a passive income with affiliate marketing with affiliate marketing you can make money while you sleep; nothing more beautiful than that, of course. Don’t confuse this with making money without doing something for it.

The work to get such a passive income has to be done before you make money. That process can take a long time, depending on the skills you currently have. I myself had my first income from affiliate marketing in the first month that I started it, but that only amounted to about 17 euros per month. Before this was a few hundred euros, I was already six months further. I am now well over a thousand, and that still increases every month because I am working on it.

The great thing is that the income now also comes in when I sit still for a while and therefore am not working. I will explain below what affiliate marketing is practical to understand so that you can understand that concept.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing means that you promote a product or service of a company in exchange for money. This could be because you have a website, blog, Instagram account, or YouTube channel that is viewed a lot. However, because you do not have a product or service yourself, you do not earn any money with this. In this case, you can use affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing, you become a partner of a company that offers products or services that match your followers or visitors. You then recommend those products or services to your target group. In that case, you use your channel as a place for the company to promote. Then the company will pay you according to your bet.

Are you planning to set up a WordPress blog to monetize affiliate marketing? It is advisable to choose a hosting party that can handle WordPress well, which makes it all a lot easier. 

With affiliate marketing, you place links of specific products or services in your Youtube video description, between the articles of your website or with the description of your photo on Instagram. It may even be that you have a nice mailing list to which you send an email with the affiliate link.

When people then click on your affiliate link because they are interested in the product or service, they are traced on the company’s website. The company will then see that you have referred them. If that visitor buys something from the company, you will receive a commission from the company. See the simplified model of affiliate marketing below.

Make Money With Affiliate Marketing, The Way!

By far, the most common way of making money with affiliate marketing is through sales. In marketing, they would say based on the Cost Per Sale (CPS) principle. The company pays you based on a product or service that has already been sold. This way, the company does not risk spending a lot of money on an ad that turns out not to work. So it is a very fair form of marketing. The better you can convince your followers or visitors to purchase the services and products, the more money you earn.

“Affiliate marketing is relatively new when we consider other forms of marketing. The reason for this is that this only became possible with the rise of the internet. Through the internet, we can easily trace where a sale comes from certain pieces of code.

When someone now clicks on one of your affiliate links, this will be stored in someone’s cookies. In the past, we just had to take people’s word for it when it came to who recommended the product or service. Now the internet helps us with that.”

In the past, you should also have had sufficient confidence in the company you work with. After all, they have to tell you when something led to a sale. To have this confidence in affiliate marketing, there are intermediaries. These are affiliate programs that act as an intermediary to keep track of which click led to which sale. So you don’t have to worry that you will be secretly stripped of your income.

For many affiliate programs, anyone can sign up, but before we go to affiliate programs, we first look at what kind of commissions are given so that you know how much you can earn with affiliate marketing.

Merits of Affiliate Marketing

A lot of money can be made with affiliate marketing. But even more interesting is that this income is often recurring. 

“How much money you earn with affiliate marketing depends very much on the type of products and services you promote. For example, if you are an affiliate for online training, you have very high commissions of up to 50% of the sales price. While for tangible products (such as books), you often only have a commission of up to 8%.”

The target audience that you attract to your channel, website or page is essential to how much you can start earning with affiliate marketing because it is that target audience that you will need to tailor the products and services you recommend to.

To give an example, someone who comes to a website with information about raising children will not purchase expensive online training. More logical for that visitor are affiliate links to children’s clothing, and there is a small margin on that. You, as a promoter, therefore, earn less money.

If you are still developing a YouTube channel, Instagram, or website, it can be good to dwell on the topic. Is there anything valuable to sell to that target group?

In terms of earnings, I will give you an indication. I myself earn an average of more than 1000 euros per month passively with affiliate marketing. I do this through my website, where I have about 30,000 visitors per month. This number is growing day by day, and so there is good hope that this amount will increase further, and don’t forget; it is passive. I don’t have to do anything anymore! 

I’ve learned from my work with affiliate marketing that it’s especially important to look at the average earnings per click. Often the affiliate programs keep track of the number of clicks themselves, and you can see this. When you see how many clicks you have and how much total income over the same period, you divide them. This way, you can make choices in which affiliate programs to continue and which to quit.

A lot of people don’t make much money with affiliate marketing, and this revenue per click is one reason for this. They choose too bad affiliate programs. In the section below, I will discuss my earnings per click with three different programs.

Top 3 Affiliate Programs To Make Money

There are numerous affiliate networks that you can join to earn money. Relevance is important here. Products and services that fit your channel are sold much better and are easier to promote.

Just think, if I suddenly start promoting a refrigerator in this article, the chance that you will buy it is very small.

The more relevant, the more you earn. Don’t just focus on the commissions; mass is the cash register too! Rather a low commission with a lot of sales than selling nothing at all with some super vague product. Let’s look at the three programs: bol.com, Paypro, and Tradetracker.

Paypro

Paypro is an affiliate program for mainly online products. Think of online training courses and e-books. The advantage of this is that the commissions are high. Each product also has its own landing page, which means that there are high conversions. With this affiliate program, I earn the most money myself, but registration costs you 50, – euro.

My average affiliate earnings per click at Paypro is 75 cents. This makes it an insanely strong affiliate program with a high income.

Trade tracker

A trade tracker is a collective platform for all kinds of affiliate partners. It is the largest gathering place in the Netherlands. Here you will find numerous Dutch companies that offer their products with commissions. So you will always find something that suits you.

My average affiliate earnings per click at Tradetracker is 27 cents. This makes it a great program. But beware. It can make a big difference here which product from which company you are going to promote :).

There are a huge number of affiliate programs that you can make money with

When you really start looking, you will no longer see the forest for the trees. There are so many affiliate programs to join. Therefore, my biggest recommendation is to work mainly with companies of which you are a customer yourself. Then you know for sure that you recommend something meaningful and you can probably also sell it better to others, after all, you know yourself what the product or service is like. Large companies often have an affiliate program that you can sign up with—so good Googling.

I also sometimes choose to approach companies myself if I am satisfied with their product or service and feel that I can also sell this to my target group. Sometimes they have a hidden affiliate program or think it is a good plan to start it up so that they can market their products or services via more platforms. The large companies almost always have an affiliate program, so it is just a search :).

Tips for Making More Money With Affiliate Marketing

When you have found a suitable program and joined it, it is time to post or promote the affiliate links on your website via your Instagram, Youtube, or other channels. Don’t expect to make money just by posting links. Make sure you really recommend and promote the product or service and be realistic. There’s nothing more annoying than someone just coming off as a spammer. Make sure that you actively get started with content creation in order to get more and more visitors or followers to whom you can present the affiliate links.

Nice is that once you know how many people click through on links and how high the conversion is, you can also calculate how much you would earn if you had more visitors or viewers. You can then set goals based on that, and it is enormously motivating.

For example, if I look at the statistics of my own website for a random month in 2020, I see that there were 30,232 visitors in one month who clicked 3412 times on affiliate links from the bol.com partner program. Of the clicks, 152 people placed an order with a total commission of 317.24 euros. Based on that metric, I then look at the top-performing pages on my website and add or adjust links as needed.

Statistics are a good help to grow and should therefore never be underestimated :). And that’s how I actually do it with all affiliate programs I refer to. So learn to interpret and use statistics.

Keep growing in your passive income.

Just by starting with affiliate marketing, you will learn time by time how to sell more and earn more. There are many pitfalls that everyone enters again and again, and that is such a waste of the time that they put into it. You see many people referring to products that are not relevant to the target group, simply because they have a high commission. Ultimately, you will still not earn anything from it. 

Refer to products and services that you believe in yourself, then your target audience also believes in them.

There are also many tricks to apply to make affiliate marketing such a success that you can live from it to the full. For example, you can take the first big steps by following good affiliate marketing training. You definitely recommended if you want to avoid working on something for months, that doesn’t yield anything;).

If you apply affiliate marketing in the right way, everyone can get a full-time income from this. That should be possible for everyone to do within a year if you fully devote your time and attention to it. Although you can, of course, also choose to build it on the side, as I do myself. It all takes a little longer, but then you can work a little less and less because of the passive income!

Become an affiliate yourself instead of a publisher

Do you have your own product or service? Then see if you could use affiliate marketing the other way around that you yourself become a provider of a product that others can promote and sell. I do this myself, for example, with my own book. I have placed that book on an affiliate platform so that bloggers, vloggers, and influencers can now promote my product with a link. In this way, I increase my sales channel without running any risk. I only pay the promoter when something has been sold.

How can you generate passive income? It may surprise you, but there are plenty of ways to do that! Even if you don’t already have a few million in the bank, you can generate passive income. After all, this is not only about investing money but often also about investing time or having a good idea.

In this article, you will find ways to generate a passive income that works along with my own experiences.

What is Passive Income?

A passive income is an income for which you do not have to do anything at that moment. So you don’t have to work for one hour to get paid for one hour. When you immediately receive money for work that you do, it concerns an active income. That is the income for which the majority of the Dutch work.

For a passive income, you make no effort at the time of earning. So it may well be that you earn money while you sleep.

“I have been living as a digital nomad for three years now. That means that I combine work and travel. I spend about 8 months a year abroad. At the moment, 20% of my income is active and 80% passive. That passive income grows a little every month so that I have to work less and less (actively).”

The biggest fallacy with passive income

You can earn money while sleeping does not mean that you do not have to do anything for it. Indeed, you do not do anything for it at that time, but before you have generated a passive income, you are already quite a few working hours further.

Depending on the way of generating passive income that you use, it can take years before it is enough to live on. But then again, you are, of course, in the situation that you might enjoy it for a lifetime!

Therefore, a passive income is not for lazy people, but for people who now want to roll up their sleeves to reap the benefits in the long term. But this principle is the reason why so many people fail to generate passive income simply because it takes them too long to achieve results.

Ways to Generate Passive Income

Below I describe the different ways in which people generate passive income. I have experienced most of the ways myself. I will describe in those ways how this went to me and how you can make it a success.

Your own online product

Your own online product is an ideal way to generate passive income. When you sell an online product, you often do not have to worry about sales and handling, as you can automate all of this.

Think of online video training or your own e-book. With such a product, you have an automated distribution process, and you can, therefore, earn money without having to worry about it. You obviously need some skills for such an online knowledge product. After all, there is already enough rubbish sold on the internet.

So do not be the umpteenth to start with online training on ‘get rich quick’ if you are not rich yourself. That isn’t very pleasant and does not do your name good.

But if you do understand something, feel free to create an online knowledge product and ensure a good sales channel such as a website or social media. You got this!

“I sell training courses on my website myself. Sometimes these have already been taken up and are therefore passive income. The idea is that I have a lot of knowledge that is valuable to someone else. Training, online or offline, is just a lot of fun to do.”

I also know people who have their own video courses on how to trade successfully in cryptocurrency. They have been trading cryptocurrencies for about six years and therefore enjoyed supporting others in this.

A very lucrative earnings model when you consider that such a course quickly yields 197 euros per participant. 

However, since this is a video training, that process is also automated, making it a legitimate way to generate passive income. What is interesting about their story is how they promote online training. They do this not only through their own channel but also through affiliate marketing. But you can read more about that under the next heading.

Affiliate marketing as a publisher

For people who generate passive income without having millions in the bank upfront, affiliate marketing is probably the one they started with. Why? Because affiliate marketing is very easy to set up without even needing a product or service.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is the promotion of other people’s products based on a pre-agreed commission. As a publisher, you put links to products between your posts, on your Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, e-mail, or another channel. When someone clicks on one of those links and buys the product, you will receive a commission on it. It looks like this:

An example of such an affiliate link is if I would recommend that you use Wix to create your website (great system by the way;). If you now click on the link above and think that Wix, I like that. Then I receive a small commission from Wix with your purchase as a thank you for the referral. A top system, because you, as a buyer, do not pay anything extra for this. After all, it’s just part of Wix’s marketing budget, that commission.

Many products will not have such a high commission. 

But when you find an affiliate program with digital products, those commissions can quickly go up to 50%, and that’s when things get interesting. For example, if you recommend an online training of 100 euros, you will already receive 50 euros when someone buys it via your link. And that is without having to make a product yourself. You just need a channel where you can place the link and where a lot of people come along.

“I now earn a full-time income with affiliate marketing as a publisher. This is therefore fine for generating passive income. Especially because I don’t have to worry about it. Recommend a product but do not have to do customer service or fulfillment. I simply receive commissions simply because I link to someone.”

If you want to get started as a publisher with affiliate marketing, you will do well to read up. Placing links haphazardly will not have a major effect. It is, therefore, important to only refer to relevant products towards a relevant target group. Only in this way can you successfully earn money as a publisher with affiliate marketing.

Before I started earning my monthly 1200, – euro I was one year further. This was because I just did something at the beginning. I posted links to low-value products with a bad sales funnel. So I could send people what I wanted, but it didn’t generate any sales. If you know which programs you should and should not use and how to recognize opportunities, it will all be a lot easier.

Affiliate marketing as a seller

Generating passive income can also be done in another way. Continuing in a previous way, you can also use affiliate marketing the other way around. For example, suppose you have made a product yourself, such as video training or e-book. Then you can also choose to sell it yourself through an affiliate network. You then offer your product so that others can promote it for you in exchange for a commission.

You can imagine that if you do this right and hundreds of websites sell your products, it will go fast. You then have an enormous potential to sell your product, and selling it in massive numbers is not unique.

This is what I do myself. I also sell my training through an affiliate network and dozens of other websites. They will receive a commission per sale :). In this way, the publishers and I, as an affiliate, generate a passive income.

Start your own webshop.

Instead of inventing and designing a product yourself, you can, of course, also sell products of others through a webshop. Unfortunately, you are just not there yet. Because in this way, it is not entirely a passive income. You can imagine that you still have to store the products yourself in a warehouse and send them to the customers. It may be that someone wants to return something or has a complaint. Then you are customer service.

And an interesting trend comes along there; dropshipping. With drop shipping, you do not have the products in stock, and you do not have to ship them yourself. They are shipped directly from the wholesaler to the customer. So you are just the marketing tool to make the sale. Now you only have to hire someone for your customer service, and you don’t have to worry about your dropshipping business anymore. This way of generating passive income requires a lot of experience. Setting up a successful webshop just like that is not a breeze in a saturated market, but it is certainly possible.

Generate passive income as an author or musician

Besides an e-book on a specific subject, you can also become a writer of a real book. You can imagine that this was not done just like that. The average novel has 55,000 words, and that is quite a job I can tell you (I am still writing a hardcover book myself). But no matter how much time this takes, when it is published, it is a form of passive income when you sell it.

If music is more your thing, it can also be a form of passive income. You earn money when you put music online through many different channels. The most famous channel is the sale of your music. But that is certainly not the only one. You can also earn with your streams on Spotify. And you can even earn money from the rights to your music… 

And now I hear you think, I am not a well-known musician at all, so that will not work. Then, when you’re on the producer / DJ side, you could even start ghost producing for bigger DJs. You always earn money on the rights of that music when it is played. But yes, that for the musicians among us, when it comes to generating passive income, this may be a bit far fetched.

Earning money with blogging, vlogging or as an influencer

If you want to earn money with blogging, vlogging, or as an influencer, this can, in many cases, be passive. Although you must stay up to date with your followers, so every now and then, some work will have to be done to remain interesting.

So it is in any case possible to generate passive income in this way. You do this by, for example, allowing sponsoring. Companies then pay you monthly to promote them. Other examples of passive income in this area are selling merchandise, running Google Adsense or YouTube ads on your content, and allowing advertorials for a fee.

In addition, if you reach a lot of people through your medium, whether this is Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or a blog, this is interesting for many revenue models. You can imagine that if you have a lot of followers, they are worth money in any way. Suddenly you are able to launch your own products and sell them. Do you understand him? Plenty of options!

Generate passive income with investing and investing

Money makes money. So if you already have a piggy bank, generating passive income is actually quite easy. Consider, for example, investing in real estate. A good return can be earned with this. But of course, you can also choose to trade in cryptocurrencies or stocks.

An average return on investment quickly comes to 6% to 8% per year. It is therefore always better to let money move than to leave it cold in your bank where the interest is nil or minimal.

In addition to these forms of investing, you can also use your money to support start-ups in exchange for shares or buying up websites that yield a profit over the years.

Generating passive income conclusion

Everyone can generate passive income. Even if you don’t have a cent to invest yet, you can already start with the above (except for the last) ways.

My own experience has taught me that generating passive income takes time, a lot of time. And that makes sense. You invest time before your work yields anything. But in retrospect, I dare say out loud that the investment is worth it anyway. Therefore, it is a good idea to start building your own passive income as early as possible. In the best possible situation, you do this in addition to a stable income that you already have.

When building a passive income, many people drop out after a few weeks or months. They don’t see immediate results and lose motivation. In fact, anyone could generate passive income, but it is good to check yourself if you have that entrepreneurial instinct. Otherwise, it is simply a waste of your time. 

Anyway. Good luck!

Passive income.

That’s the goal, right?

You are making money while you sleep.

For 99% of people, affiliate marketing is how they get started.

The idea is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, earn a commission when people end up buying thanks to your marketing.

It is based on the sharing of revenues. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you don’t have a product and want to make money, you can promote a product that you think has value and earn an income as an affiliate marketer.

I’ve talked a little bit about it before, but today I’d like to dive into what affiliate marketing is, what sides there are, and how to get started, so let’s dive into my affiliate marketing guide.

Definitions

The best definition of what affiliate marketing is can be read on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income :

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other (or companies’) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a share of the profit for every sale you make.

However, Wikipedia talks about four different parties involved: the merchant, the network, the publisher, and the customer.

Other definitions talk about three parties instead of 4.

I’ll explain all four parties in a second. But when it comes to the actual marketing, there are two sides of an affiliate equation: the product creator and the seller and the affiliate marketer.

So, affiliate marketing can be seen as the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across various parties, with each party receiving a share of the revenue based on their contribution.

It’s not just the promotion or just the product development that defines who you are as an affiliate marketer.

You can be both the creator and marketer and still take advantage of revenue sharing’s underlying idea.

Now let’s take a look at all parts of a successful affiliate marketing system.

The Trader: Sometimes, also known as the maker, seller, brand, seller, or seller. This is the party that makes the product. It could be a big company, like Dyson, that produces vacuum cleaners.

Or it could be an individual like Mariah Coz who sells online courses to female entrepreneurs.

From solo entrepreneurs to startups to large Fortune 500 companies, anyone could be the merchant tied to an affiliate marketing program. They don’t even have to be actively involved. They just need to have a product to sell.

The Affiliate: This person is sometimes also known as the publisher. Affiliates can also range from individuals to entire companies. An affiliate marketing company can produce a few hundred dollars in commissions or tens of millions of dollars every month.

It’s where marketing happens. A partner promotes one or more affiliate products and tries to convince potential customers of the value of the product from the seller so that they actually buy it.

This can be accomplished by running a review blog of the seller’s products. 

It could also be an entire site that focuses on finding cool products related to a particular topic and promoting those affiliate products.

( This is why I Broke is one of the most popular affiliate networking sites)

The consumer: the customer or consumer completes the connected system. Without a sale, there are no commissions to hand out and no income to share.

The affiliate will attempt to promote the market on any channel they see fit, be it a social network, digital billboards, or through a search engine that uses content marketing on a blog.

Whether the consumer knows they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not depends mainly on the affiliate company.

Some choose to let their consumers know, and more and more affiliate companies tend to be transparent about their marketing being financially incentivized, but others are not.

They let the tracking system work in the background, where the customer can simply follow the buying process, and the affiliate will eventually receive a commission.

The consumer usually does not pay a higher price to the affiliate marketer because the affiliate network’s costs are already included in the sales price.

The Network: Few consider the network portion of the affiliate marketing equation. However, I believe that an affiliate marketing guide should be about networking, as in many cases, a network acts as an intermediary between the affiliate and the seller.

While you could technically promote an online course and someone created a direct revenue share with them, a network like ClickBank or Commission Junction can handle payment and product delivery and make a more severe note about your affiliate marketing.

Sometimes, affiliates have to go through an affiliate network even to be able to promote the product. This happens, for example, if the merchant only manages his affiliate program on that network.

Therefore, the affiliate network serves as a database of many products, from which the affiliate marketer can choose which ones to promote.

( Clickbank is an example of a network)

In the case of promoting consumer products, such as tools, books, toys, and household goods, by far, the largest partner network is Amazon. Their Amazon Associates affiliate program lets you promote any item sold on their platform.

Anyone can sign up and then generate a custom affiliate link to Amazon products. If someone makes purchases through your link, you will earn a small commission.

Once the basic terms have been clarified, let’s get an overview of how best to start setting up your affiliate marketing business.

Overview

As I mentioned, there are actually two sides of the affiliate marketing equation that you can choose from, assuming you’re not going to build an affiliate network like Commission Junction.

You can become a merchant and let others promote your product to give a commission from the sales they make.

Or you can become an affiliate marketer for one or more products that you want to promote and sell to consumers to make money.

While most people start taking the affiliate route, and it’s definitely the easier path to take, building enough traffic to earn meaningful income only from affiliate sales isn’t quick or easy.

That’s why I’ll walk you through the four necessary steps you can take to get started on both sides of the affiliate marketing industry.

Become a trader in 4 steps

If you want to become a merchant in an affiliate program and then make money by letting affiliates sell your product, there are four easy, but not easy, steps you can take.

First, you must have a product idea. I’ll show you a few ways you can generate those ideas based on what’s already popular in the next section.

Second, you have to validate your idea. You can just go ahead and build your vision. But what if people don’t even want to? An idea is only useful if people really want it to come to life.

Third, you have actually to make the product. Since making a physical product usually involves vast investments and risks, I’ll just show you ways to create digital products. These are the best places to get started as they usually only require your time and little or no money.

Even once your product has been created and released, you still need to find partners to promote your work, and this is where affiliate networks can help.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Come up with a great product idea

People always say it’s hard to come up with an idea. But… Ideas are simple.

But when you think your idea has to be super original and born of your brain’s sheer genius, that’s tough.

If you want to make money with an affiliate marketing company, you cannot be romantically attached to your idea.

Instead, just look at what products and services are already out there and consider how you can improve them by delivering something that solves those products’ problems.

You can, of course, always choose a topic you are interested in or involved in.

Imagine that for a second. You are a housewife or a father with whom you are at home.

You may want to make a product that makes household chores easier. For example, you can find a vacuum source to get ideas.

This is the first Google result, a robot vacuum cleaner review site :

Perfect!

Just by looking at the individual reviews, you can immediately see what’s terrible about these robots and what you can potentially improve.

No virtual walls telling the robot where to go and where not to go is a common problem, listed in 6 out of 10 reviews of the top products!

The lack of remote control was also a common ‘deception’.

However, the virtual wall came again and again and again.

Therefore, a great idea could be to develop a virtual wall that works for all vacuum robots.

I imagine you could sell anyone who owns a vacuum source, a system that acts as a virtual wall, so their robot only cleans a predefined space.

That is a valid idea!

This works for everything. Let me show you.

Another way you can research is to use a tool called Buzzsumo, which shows you what’s popular, based on social stocks.

Even if you’re building sandcastles, you can immediately see what content has been popular recently.

If you go on YouTube and search for ‘build a sandcastle,’ you will find thousands of results.

People really want to know how to build cool sandcastles. What could you do?

Record a series of videos showing people step by step how to build five very specific, epic sandcastles.

Or, you can list all the tools you need to build epic sandcastles.

You might even some forms or stencils can imagine that people can use to build sandcastles epic easier.

The question is… will people pay for it?

Step 2: Validate your idea

In order not to make a great set of sandcastle videos that no one wants to buy, you have to validate your idea first.

How do you do that?

Simple: you ask others to pay you for it.

How do you find these people? Easy.

Take the URL of one of the sandcastle posts on Buzzsumo and plug it into a tool called Topsy.

Topsy will then show you a list of all the people who tweeted the link.

You can then tell them directly about your idea by pressing the answer button …

Make sure you ask them if they would buy your idea – not until they like it.

Everyone will say they like something just to be nice.

If they respond with a yes, you have to answer a question right away to buy.

Saying they spend money is not the same as spending the money.

When people are interested in your product, give them a chance to buy. You can just use PayPal and say you’re going to build it when you get a certain number of orders.

Once you cross your threshold and make people really want it, you can start making the product.

Step 3: Making the product

There are a ton of steps to making a product, and this is not an entrepreneurial guide, but I want to point out some good starters.

I will only give you resources for starting digital products as I don’t want you to waste valuable time and money creating a physical product on your first try. ?

Online courses:

• How to Start an Online Course and Earn $ 220,750 in 10 Days
• How to Properly Create and Sell Your Online Course
• SPI 136: Creating an Online Course That Sells with David Siteman Garland

ebooks:

• The ultimate guide to publishing your ebook on Amazon’s Kindle platform
• How to (Really) Make $ 1,000,000 Selling Ebooks – Real-World Case Studies
• How to start writing an ebook and actually finish it in 30 days

Podcast / Audio:

• Podcasting for Beginners: The Complete Guide to Getting Started with Podcasts
• How to Start a Podcast – Pat’s Complete Step-by-Step Podcasting Tutorial
• How To Podcast: The Ultimate Guide To Podcasting

These are good starting points. Creating digital products is a lot easier because it just takes time and sometimes a bit of financial investment, but usually nothing more than a service charge or a one-time price for the software.

Once you have created the product and delivered it to your first buyers, it is time to open the affiliate network.

Step 4: Find partner partners.

The technical part is the easy thing here.

Tools like Gumroad or Digital Product Delivery make it easy to set up affiliate program partners and collect commissions.

The hard part is finding partners who actually have an audience interested in what you have for sale.

Let’s stick with the sandcastle guide example.

Do you think there is anyone selling something that is remotely related?

Actually, it is.

When you enter ‘learn to build sandcastles’ in a search engine, several sites will appear that sell educational materials about it.

Like Sand Sculpt USA, which offers lessons in sandcastle building …

or SandCastle classe

s, which offer a course on the same topic.

Contacting them and getting them involved in a joint sale would be an easy pitch as it is a perfect fit.

The more niches your product is, the easier it will be to pitch to fellow merchants.

You can simply email them, introduce yourself and your product, and ask them to collaborate on a sale, sharing the proceeds.

Pro tip: Affiliate conversions of 50% or higher are very common with digital products because you have no replication costs. Don’t be greedy here. Split the pot evenly, and everyone wins.

Googling the ‘toy review blog’ also yields a lot of results, where people write toy reviews.

In addition, many YouTube channels view specific categories of toys. If you find one that rates toys for children, they are likely suitable for your affiliate product.

Just try to find a person to work with and start your first affiliate promotion. You can adjust commissions and details later. The important thing is to get started.

However, you can also embark on the journey on the other side of the fence and become an affiliate yourself.

4 Steps to Becoming an Online Affiliate Marketer

As well as becoming a salesperson, you can also take four steps to start your journey as an affiliate marketer.

First, you need to start reviewing products in your niche. You can do this on a YouTube channel, on a blog, or even with live streams on Periscope.

Second, you need to collect emails so that you can connect with your audience at any time and not have to hope that they see your content.

Third, you can use joint venture webinars to make a lot of sales in a short amount of time, while simultaneously increasing your email list and creating new content.

Finally, once your affiliate marketing business starts to make money, you can scale your growth with pay per click advertising.

Step 1: Assess products in your niche

It’s easier to get started as a partner because you skip the ideas ‘Have an idea’ and ‘Create ideas’ to become a salesperson.

You already use and love many products, so all you need to do to get started is talk about them publicly.

Start by checking out the partners in step 4 to become a salesperson because that’s what you are trying to get started in this step.

Every product works.

Really.

Take a look at this guy watching Hot Wheels tracks and cars :

More than 300,000 Hot Wheels subscribers? I’m sure whatever your niche is less specific.

If you like to read, check out the books :

Note: A special kind of assessment that usually works very well is the comparison with a direct competitor.

You will soon find enough people who are already doing this. Just search for “best hair straightener,” and have a look:

This blog reviews flat irons for hair straightening (for women). How specific is a blog that?

She can relate to the product as she has to straighten her own hair. And when she does her research well, the blog does not only score high in search engines but also helps women find the best tool for the job.

Whatever you judge, make sure you do the same.

If your reviews aren’t really helpful, people will immediately notice that you just want to make a quick buck.

As Pat Flynn points out in his affiliate marketing guide, affiliate marketing involved is by far the most profitable because you can actually relate to the product, rather than just promoting something that could make you a lot of money.

If you don’t even know the product, how can you credibly promote it?

Note: This is a bit different for consumer products than for online courses or books created by individuals. If you’ve known a person for a long time and trust them and know that their job is great, that’s another thing.

When you write reviews on your blog, you can use an affiliate link to link to your promoting products.

You can recognize them on other blogs by the long “/ ref …” tail at the end of the regular link.

This is usually the first step to create commissions.

Sign up with Amazon Associates, and you can then proceed with your own affiliate link for any product on Amazon.

Simply go to the product page and click on “Short link to this page.” You get a link that gives you a commission when people buy through it.

However, if you only rely on people using the affiliate links in your reviews, it means you need a lot of traffic actually to make serious money.

But if you find a way to directly contact your target audience, you can market them whenever you want, not just when they come to your website.

This is where step 2 comes in.

Step 2: Build an email list with your prospects on it.

Email is still one of the best marketing channels today, so don’t miss out.

I’ll show you three super easy ways to collect email addresses from your website visitors.

Number 1: Hello Bar

Hello, the bar makes a call to action on top of your website. When someone visits your website, they see this bar at the top.

You can offer them an ebook (perhaps bundle the top three product reviews) or a dedicated evaluation video.

Once they click on your Hello Bar, you can redirect people to the page to enter their email in exchange for the content.

Number 2: Exit Gate

You can also use the Hello Bar to create an exit port. This pop-up will be placed across the screen when visitors are about to leave your website.

It is triggered by their mouse moving to the top part of the browser.

I use it to get more Facebook likes on Quick Sprout:

But you can also redirect people to your main magnet and get their email address this way.

Number 3: Sidebar Widget

Many blogs make their sidebar completely cluttered.

(too many things here to do)

Do not do it.

If you give your visitors 20 things to do, they are unlikely to do anything at all.

Just one call to action in your sidebar. Again, it should offer people something in exchange for their email address.

We are giving away the ‘Double Your Traffic’ course on Quick Sprout, and it has worked well.

Since you are compiling email addresses around a particular topic like how to find the best hair straightener, juice maker, mini-oven, etc., you don’t need many of them to make the email list worth your time.

Even with less than 500 people on your list, you can create significant sales.

Make sure to keep your audience engaged by sending them regular updates, ideally once a week.

Don’t make it all sales. Let them know if you have a new review.

For example, I email every post we post on Quick Sprout with a straightforward description of what it’s about:

Send them a specific call to action every now and then to buy a product. Maybe you just found a new favorite in the last review and really love it.

You can update your audience on your mood, the reasons for it, and recommend that they switch to that product as well.

But there’s more. Once you have a few contacts on your email list, you can do this.

Step 3: Educate your audience with live webinars

Webinars are great.

Imagine you want to buy a new refrigerator.

Why do you want to buy a refrigerator more:

1. Read a review on a blog
2. See a live presentation of a fridge in action

Number 2, of course!

Using a tool, such as LeadPages, you can create a simple landing page for people to sign up for your webinar.

(I also use LeadPages for my webinars)

Promote your webinar on social media a week in advance and get people to sign up.

Then you can very easily host a Google hangout, which is entirely free to live stream your webinar to your audience.

Webinars are great for connecting with your audience one by one, showing them the product you are promoting life, and answering any questions you may have.

You can:

• present the features of the product
• show different use cases of the product
• talk about its pros and cons
• tell people your personal history with the product
• help your audience get the most out of it

And much more.

Tip: Learning how to work with a webinar with a Google Hangout takes less than 10 minutes. Evidence? This video explains it well.

Imagine how fired your audience will get when they see all the cool things your product will make them do.

Referring to your affiliate link and sharing at the end of the webinar is a soft sell and comes naturally because you’ve just spent an hour talking about the product.

It won’t feel compelled, and your consumers can still take their time deciding whether actually to buy it.

Pro tip: Can you get your salesperson to give you a special deal for your audience? If you promise to get their product in front of a few hundred people, they are often happy to give you a discount or special bundle to incentivize people further to buy.

Step 4: Grow your business with PPC advertising.

Once your affiliate marketing business starts to take off, you can start thinking about paid advertising.

I’m not going to show you how to do it here, since I recently published a guide on both Facebook Ads and Google Ads, but remember: only do this if you have a way to make money back.

Conversions are all that matters here.

You can use PPC advertising to:

• let people sign up for your webinar
• grow your email list
• more sales

For example, if you teach Google “leadpages,” you can see that LeadPages themselves are promoting this keyword, showing Google ads, and promoting their weekly live webinar.

So, keywords related to learning about your product or topic would be a good start.

You can also target your competition. For example, there is an Unbounce ad just below the LeadPages ad.

These guys also offer a landing page creation software, so it’s easy to get in front of someone else’s audience.

Now you can try to target people who are just trying to find a review of your product, but it is probably better to improve your SEO.

The percentage of people who buy directly from your link right after reading a review is naturally low, so imagine paying these amounts. Depending on the product price, you will only get a few dollars or even cents per sale, so the margin you can spend on advertising isn’t considerable.

In most cases, you will be promoting your login attempts to your email list.

By the way, it’s the best way to get people to sign up for a webinar with ads.

(what a webinar Facebook ad might look like )

You win in 3 ways:

1. They are in your email list, and you can contact them again at any time
2. There is a chance that they will attend your live webinar and purchase the product
3. You can put them on an autoresponder email thread encouraging them to buy

For example, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire often conducts webinars and posts them directly to his homepage.

Once you sign up for the webinar, he’ll also send you a series of automated emails.

In those emails, he offers you other courses and free tools, such as a webinar course, in which you learn how to do webinars to make sales.

If you sign up for this, you will receive ten email lessons for a few days, and at the end, will invite you to purchase a more comprehensive webinar course.

After you have already learned a lot about webinars, you will be introduced to its more thorough and detailed course that will teach you even more.

He even shows you a behind-the-scenes look at the track so you can get a sneak peek.

Once he knows how many people will eventually buy the full course of the auto-responder series, he can easily calculate how much he can spend on ads to get people to sign up for the webinar or webinar course.

So with this strategy, you have several opportunities to get your consumers to buy your product.

They have a chance to buy after the autoresponder series, on the webinar, and from future emails.

When your sales start from those many sources and start to grow, you can really blow up your business with paid advertising just by driving traffic to the sales mechanisms that are already working.

Conclusion

Time to recap. So there are two ways to get started with affiliate marketing.

You can become a merchant or an affiliate.

The four steps to becoming a seller are:

1. Come up with a good product idea.
2. Validate that idea by getting people to prepay you for the product.
3. Making that product.
4. Finding partners, probably through an affiliate network, to work with who will promote your product.

The more common and slightly easier route is becoming an affiliate. There are also four steps you can follow:

1. Start reviewing products in your niche
2. Create an email list
3. Using live webinars to inform and sell your audience
4. Expand your affiliate business with PPC advertising

Affiliate marketing is a great way to get started with online marketing.

The only question is which side are you going to take?