When you create an information product, you’ll be selling your knowledge directly. The format is just a way of transmitting that knowledge. The sales page, sales network, shopping cart, and launch publicity are just the technicalities. They’re the methods you use to deliver as many copies as possible to as many people as possible—and earn as much money as possible. Just as it’s the quality of the information you supply in your content that will determine how popular your site becomes, so it’s the quality of expertise in your information product that will influence how many downloads you achieve.
When you sell as an affiliate, the quality of the information is still important. But you don’t get to change it; you only get to choose it. If the product you’re thinking about promoting doesn’t contain knowledge good enough to help your users, then you should give it a pass. The amount you’ll earn as an affiliate won’t depend on the quality of your knowledge but on the quality of the seller’s knowledge.
What you bring to the party is trust.
Your web site will give you an audience. As they’re enjoying your content, you’re going to bother them by letting them know about a product that they didn’t know they needed and have probably never heard of. They may buy it, if you tell them they should.
The product could cost $97, $199, or even more. If your audience saw it in a store, they would probably walk on by. But because you’ve told them that this is a product they need to own, many of them will click the link, press the shopping cart button, and make a purchase, thus putting money in your pocket.
That’s the power of a good web site, packed with reliable, quality content. That’s the power that the trust of your users can bring.
In this chapter, I explain how to make money as an affiliate. I start with a brief description of what being an affiliate means, then discuss how to find merchants and how to sign up for their programs. Finally, I share details of the strategies for success that allow me to enjoy a deafening level of KaChing from the affiliate ads I place on my web sites and deliver to my e-mail subscribers.
So, What Exactly Is an Affiliate?
Publishers call themselves affiliates, Amazon calls them associates, and people more used to selling in the offline world tend to use a simpler term: sales rep.
The offline term is wrong. Amazon’s term is wrong, too, even though the company was one of the first to offer an affiliate program back in 1996. Affiliate systems have developed a lot since then.
An affiliate isn’t quite a sales rep. Sales reps have no say in the products they sell. Their companies give them a suitcase full of samples and tell them they can keep a share of whatever they earn. They are employees... even if their income depends entirely on their sales skills.
Affiliates are really entrepreneurs. They choose which products they sell, they build their own markets, and they decide on the best way to persuade people to buy. They also don’t rely on those sales to make money from the market.
That affiliates are independent business owners in their own right is important. It means that sellers have to treat them with respect—and pay them far more than they might be willing to pay an employee. And it also means that affiliates have to take responsibility. Your earnings as an affiliate will depend to a large extent on the quality of the product you’re selling, but they will also depend on your connection with your market and your ability to lead your readers to buy.
The concept behind affiliate selling is very, very simple. You choose a product, present it to your market, and you take a share of the sales price when one of your users buys. (Although you might find a few affiliate sellers offering payments on a cost-per-action or even cost-per-click basis, around 80 percent of affiliate systems are believed to operate according to cost-per-sale basis, the model whereby you earn a commission.)
Making a lot of money out of affiliate selling requires a little skill. That starts with finding the right merchants to work with.
Choosing Merchants that Match Your Market
Office Depot, Gap, Target, Toys “R” Us, Amazon.com, Zappos.com ... if you can name a big retailer selling online, in the real world, or both, you’ll find that they have an affiliate program that lets anyone help move their inventory.
Why shouldn’t they have an affiliate program? There’s no risk—they only have to pay if someone actually makes a sale—and if they don’t offer an affiliate program, a publisher working in the field will put a competitor’s ads on that site instead. Retailers that don’t have affiliate programs risk losing market share.
That means you’re spoiled with choices. But it also means that many of those choices will be bad. Some products will always sell better to your market than others, and some sellers will suit you and your users better than others.
The first challenge you’ll have as an affiliate seller is trying to predict which items you should be recommending to your audience—and from which sellers.
In theory, that’s not as difficult as it sounds... and yet so many people get it wrong. In a survey of 450 affiliates conducted in 2009 by AffStat.com, part of affiliate guru Shawn Collins’s Affiliate Summit, 23 percent of respondents said that they chose affiliate merchants based on their management systems. A similar number made their decision based on brand awareness, and almost a quarter made it based on
