Affiliate Marketing

Passive income.

That’s the dream, right?

Make money while you sleep.

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

The idea behind it is that you promote other people’s products, often through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people actually end up buying thanks to your marketing.

It’s based on revenue sharing. If you have a product and want to sell more, you can offer promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. If you have no product and want to make money, then you can promote a product that you feel has value and earn an income from it as an affiliate marketer.

I’ve talked a little about it before, but today I want to dive deeper into what affiliate marketing actually is, what sides there are to it, and how to get started.  So, let’s dive into my affiliate marketing guide.  Ready?

Definitions

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

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

Therefore, affiliate marketing can be seen as the process of spreading product creation and product marketing across different parties, where each party receives a share of the revenue according to their contribution.

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

You can be both the creator and the marketer and still profit from the underlying idea of sharing revenue.

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

The Merchant: Sometimes also known as the creator, the seller, the brand, the retailer, or the vendor. This is the party that creates the product. It can be a big company, like Dyson, who produces vacuum cleaners.

Or, it can be a single individual like Mariah Coz, who sells online courses to female entrepreneurs.

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

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

It’s where the marketing happens. An affiliate promotes one or multiple affiliate products and tries to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the merchant’s product so that they actually end up buying it.

The Consumer: The customer or consumer makes the affiliate system go ’round. Without sales, there aren’t any commissions to hand out and no revenue to be shared.

The affiliate will try to market to the consumer on whatever channel they see fit, whether that’s a social network, digital billboards or through a search engine using content marketing on a blog.

Whether the consumer knows that they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not is mostly up to the affiliate.

Some choose to let their consumers know and more and more affiliates tend to be transparent about their marketing being incentivized financially, but others don’t.

They let the tracking system work in the background, where the customer can follow the purchase process just as usual and the affiliate still ends up being paid a commission.

The consumer will not typically pay a higher price to the affiliate marketer, as the cost of the affiliate network is already included in the retail price.

The Network: Only some consider the network part of the affiliate marketing equation.  But, I believe that an affiliate marketing guide needs to include networks, because, in many cases, a network works as an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.

While you could technically promote an online course someone has created and just arrange a direct revenue share with them, letting a network such as ClickBank or Commission Junction handle the payment and product delivery puts a more serious note on your affiliate marketing.

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

The affiliate network then also serves as a database of lots of products, out of which the affiliate marketer can choose which to promote.

Fiverr Business

Earning five bucks at a time may not sound like much, but those little sales can add up to thousands of dollars.

That’s the idea behind Fiverr, an online platform where users sell their products and services for $5 each. Fiverr says users create 4,000 new listings, or gigs, every day.

What Can You Sell on Fiverr?

Gigs range from the standard data entry and research tasks to the truly out-there. For example, as I write this, sellers in the “Fun & Lifestyle” section are offering:

• A unique gift idea
• To paint your message on their body and doing funny dances
• To create a video of Donald Trump signing your business’ logo
• To send you a telepathic message
• To write your message on their chest while playing a kazoo
• To prank call anyone
• Balloon popping

If you don't want to write advertising slogans on your belly or scare someone's friend, offer one of the thousands of more ordinary products and services, like:

• Draw the customer as a cartoon character
• Make a photo into an avatar
• Promote a business on Facebook
• Write a short blog post
• Translate English into Chinese (300 word maximum)
• Create a video testimonial about a product
• Teach people how to play blues guitar

How Much Can You Really Make on $5 Gigs?

The stories told in the Fiverr forum and elsewhere suggest a wide variety of experiences ranging from members who haven't sold a thing after months of trying, to others who claim to have made $1 million from Fiverr.

An article about Fiverr on the U.S. News website features Mark Mason, a semi-retired man from Chicago who offers business services like writing marketing materials and makes $150 to $300 per day for a few hours of work on his gigs. The same article explains how college student Morissa Schwartz has made $7,500 in the last year by offering copyediting services.

If you think some gigs are too much work for the money, you're right. In fact, you don't even make the full $5 for a sale. After Fiverr takes its 20% and you pay 2% to have your money transferred to PayPal, you're really only making $3.92 per $5 sale.

To be successful, you need to find a product or service that costs almost nothing to provide and takes only a few minutes of your time to create and deliver. We'll look at some examples in a moment, but first let's look at another way to make gigs worth your time.

Take It to the Next Level

After you've made some sales, work to become a Level One, Pro League and  Rockstar seller. At each new level you get extra selling tools, like the ability to offer additional options and add-on services. For example, if your $5 gig is a video about the town where you live, aimed at people moving there, for an extra $40, you could spend two hours driving around and videotaping anything the customer wants to know more about.

At the moment, the maximum additional charge for an extra is $100, but depending on your gig, you might also be able to get customers to buy from you again. For example, I've bought covers for my ebooks on Fiverr for $15 and returned several times to the same graphic artist.

To climb the Levels, you’ll need to get positive reviews, deliver on time, respond quickly and politely to customer questions, and follow the rules. Some members have achieved Level One status after only one month and 10 sales.

How to Make Money on Fiverr Without Climbing Levels

While selling gig extras is one of the best ways to increase your earnings on Fiverr, some products and services make sense even for $3.92 — what you net from a $5 gig.

For example, in two months Martin Buckley made $900 selling an ebook on Fiverr. It makes sense to sell something that has zero production cost and only takes a minute to deliver, but in addition to making $900 from that one book, Buckley had another technique: He promoted other books he was selling on Fiverr within this ebook! It pays to use every trick you can to maximize your per-customer income.

Here are some other online side jobs to consider:

• Logo design (using software that does most of the work)
• Video lessons (for anything you know how to do)
• Crafts (if you can make them fast and cheap and use one stamp to send them)
• Photo-into-painting service (using software to convert the photo to look like a painting)
• Facebook promotion of customers’ products (if you have many friends)
• Writing (minimal for $5 — charge more for longer work)
• Business card design (with software doing the heavy work)
• Conversational language instruction (just a few minutes for $5, extra for longer sessions)
• Online research for writers (have a template and a system for speed)
• Ebooks (your own or ones you buy the rights to)

Use your imagination to come up with something of real value. For example, one offer says, “I will answer 10 questions about Italy.” Most of us know enough about the place we live to offer a service like that — though I would give the customer an audio file rather than a typed response to make answering quicker.

If you have an unusual career, you could target those who might want to learn more about it by offering a video or PDF file that explains your work and how to get a similar job. Gigs where you sell the same thing over and over — and continue earning with little additional work — are some of the best.

A Few More Tips

Once you have a plan in mind, promote your service or product wherever you can, including telling your friends, family and contacts, to make enough sales to become a Level One seller — that's when you can sell gigs in multiples or sell gig extras.

How you market yourself has a huge impact on your potential earnings. Fiverr seller Mary Ingrassia told Business Insider her business really took off when she used her cell phone to make promotional videos with Pickle, her pet bird, and put them on YouTube. She sells graphic designs and says, “Over the past year, it's grown to five to fifteen orders per day, with people spending different amounts (between $10 and $20). To date, I've made $10,000 and the money just keeps growing.”

When you find something that works, try other markets. There are now many websites copying the Fiverr format, with some slight differences. Here are two:

• http://gigbucks.com ($5 to $50)

• http://www.zeerk.com ($2 to $100 — no fees)

Open a PayPal account to access your earnings. While the debit card Fiverr offers can be cheaper, you’d need to watch out for several fees, including an activation fee, a charge every time you transfer money to it and a $1-$3 fee for each withdrawal.

Just listing your service for sale isn’t enough to make it successful. You need to put it in the right category, post photos and maybe a video, and do some marketing. In the Fiverr forums, members share what has worked or not worked for them. Use this valuable information to help you make the most of your time on Fiverr.

Passive Income

Wondering how to make money online? Or perhaps you’ve already tried, but haven’t had any success?

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

To my knowledge, this is the world’s most complete list of ways to make money online. It’s also one of the most regularly-updated, as I only want to share current methods that work in 2018.

Including all the research, writing, formatting, etc., I’ve easily spent hundreds of hours putting this list together.

Since I’ve tried to include every legitimate online earning method, there’s a huge range in income potential – some methods can make you a millionaire (if you put in the work), while others are only good for pocket change.

Whether you’re looking to make a full-time income working from home or simply want to find a good side hustle, I’m sure you’ll have tons of ideas by the end.

As you’ll see, I’ve included the income potential for most of the items on this list, which is on a scale of 1-5 [1 being the lowest income potential, 5 being the highest (millions +)]. In many cases the income potential is virtually impossible to give (such as in the case of online investing), so don’t take these potentials too seriously. They only serve as a general guideline.

As a disclosure, this article contains affiliate links. This doesn’t affect you in any way, it just means I may earn a commission if you click one of the links and purchase something.

You probably came here to get some make money online ideas like any alphawould.

When you search make money online, you mostly get scuzzy ideas like filling out surveys or becoming a mystery shopper. Lol. Thats why I hired a researcher and spent 40+ hours putting together this post. It only serves up money-making ideas that can make you good money.