Affiliate income is commission on sales that you make for someone else's product.
1. Recommend products and services you use personally and believe are useful to an audience you have already attracted. You can share the information through blog posts, articles, videos and podcasts with affiliate links to the products
2. Find products for a niche target audience and then buy traffic to send to the product sales page. This doesn't require building up an audience in advance, but it does require extensive knowledge of paid advertising.
The former is a more of a long-term strategy and the one I use personally. I only recommend things that I really think will be useful. However, the paid traffic mechanism can be done in a perfectly ethical way, especially if the product is good quality and useful to the target audience.
How do you become an affiliate?
For many sites and products, you can just set yourself up and you're automatically approved. For example,
- Amazon Associates – for pretty much anything sold on Amazon. If you have links to your books on your website (and you should do!), this is a good way to start with affiliate marketing and you will receive a little bit extra if people shop through your link, as well as a percentage of other products that people buy within a 24 hour period. You can use your existing Amazon account and then find your books, copy the special link and then use that on your site. You can also use a site like Booklinker.net or Books2Read.com to create one link that works for all stores and contains affiliate links.
- Apple affiliates – for apps, books, music, etc. sold on iTunes, iBooks and app stores. Again, if you're linking to your books on iBooks, you may as well use an affiliate link.
Many products are invitation-only, based on relationships in the niche that you serve. You are more likely to be approached if you have measurable traffic on a blog, an established podcast, a niche audience that people want to access and/or a substantial email list.
Tips for affiliate sales
- Write a blog post or do a podcast or video that outlines the most useful things about the product or service you recommend.
For example, I did an interview with Jim Kukral about Author Marketing Club which has a tool that helps authors get book reviews in a more streamlined manner, saving time and energy. It's a useful interview that you can find at www.TheCreativePenn.com/jim
- Do a free webinar with the product creator
Webinars include video, while teleseminars are audio only. Both options are very popular and generally result in good sales spikes. You can check out a replay of my webinar with Nick Stephenson, where we go into how to automate your author marketing at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/nickjo
- Include your affiliate links in your email auto-responder
Your autoresponder is the series of emails that go out to people who subscribe to your website in exchange for something they want. For example, if you sign up to my Author Blueprint at www.TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint you’ll get useful emails, articles and videos, some of which contain affiliate links, all for products that I have personally found useful.
- Create a video tutorial
Demonstrate how people can use the product you're recommending. One example is my own free video tutorial on how to build your own author website in under 30 minutes which you can find at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/authorwebsite
- Create a Tools or Resources page
Include links to everything you use so they can be found in one place. Here's my own tools page as an example: www.TheCreativePenn.com/tools
My overarching tip is to be ethical.
There are plenty of affiliate marketers who don't care about reputation, but for me, trust and reputation is far more important than easy cash.
People want to buy things that will help them, or be useful, or entertain them. If we can be trusted advisors who curate a sea of possibilities, then recommending affiliate products is a useful thing to do as well as a great income stream.