affiliate marketing for digital products

Affiliate Marketing for Digital Products

Discover how affiliate marketing for digital products can be an awesome way to make money online in commissions without the hassle of shipping physical items to customers.

In this article, I'll show you how learning to become a successful affiliate marketer of digital products can be relatively easy, as is putting it into action in the real world without requiring a substantial capital investment.

In other words, digital product affiliate marketing can be undertaken very cheaply or even completely without any initial startup cost.

Let's look at how this is accomplished:

Getting Started as an Affiliate Marketer of Digital Products

You'll need to set up some things in advance before you get started, such as:

  1. A laptop or home computer to do the work on
  2. A way to get paid
  3. A contact email account just for your online business

Notes:

affiliate marketing1. Tablets or phones may seem more convenient, but their small screens can be fiddly, especially for typing large amounts of text. Also, multi-tasking is common and you'll need the capability to have several windows open at once, which is more within the realm of a larger computing device.

2. Commissions are generally paid into a checking bank account via wire transfers or checks or a payment processor such as Paypal.

3. An email address for communicating with affiliate companies is important. A gmail address is OK, however, a branded website email address is more professional looking (ie. your own .com).

Next, you'll need to set up some online accounts, with affiliate companies, web hosting solutions and social media, preferably separate from your personal social accounts. You can start by using free website builders and blogging platforms, but owning your own branded website on a self-hosted .com is optimal.

More about that later.

Finding Digital Products to Promote

There are a number of trustworthy places to find digital affiliate products to promote and I'll share some of the places I use personally:

There are many other networks and stand-alone affiliate programs around, but if you're just getting started, the three mentioned above are more than enough to get you going.

My personal recommendation is to start with Clickbank. This is an easy-to use affiliate network that houses thousands of digital products that each has its own affiliate criteria, most with very good commission structures that provide good payouts to successful marketers.

One of the biggest attractions of Clickbank, in my opinion, is the ability to promote and make money from most of the products without needing to be individually approved, which means you can get up and running very quickly.

Affiliate networks generally provide you with special affiliate links to products you wish to promote, so that you can publish these on your web pages to track buyers that click through to the product sales page and go on to buy.

Once you have found a product that you feel is worth your while promoting, it's time to swing the machine into action!

How to Promote Digital Affiliate Products

For many newcomers to this business, the initial promotion method tends to be creating content in the form of a product review and publishing it on a web property of some description.

If you're starting with zero capital, a free web platform is perfectly good to start with. Of these, my personal preferences that provide you with an easy way to publish without any technical know-how are Google sites and Blogger, both coming as part of a Google account.

Some other free alternatives that you can publish to with no coding knowledge are Tumblr, Quora and Weebly (I use them all).

When your knowledge and experience grow, you'll see the massive benefit of learning how to write your own HTML code to produce web pages without the need for a WYSIWYG editor. This is what I have done for many years and it opens up a whole new world of free web hosting platforms that is mostly out of reach of those without this knowledge.

This site is itself built on one of those platforms (Amazon AWS). I will talk more about these in separate articles on this site.

Writing a Product Review

In order to sell something, you must first grab the attention of a potential customer and then convince them that they should make their purchase vis one of the special affiliate links that you have posted on your page.

To do that, you need to know what kind of content to produce that will not only grab their attention but will also create enough interest and desire to want to click your Call to Action (CTA) link. This can be a promo image or a plain text link, depending on what the product vendor has supplied you with.

This skill is called copywriting and it is something that can be learned, practised and perfected over time. It's no secret that good copywriters can earn thousands of dollars, because they know how to get people to buy things!

You can learn how to do this too and there are a number of worthwhile copywriting courses out there that you should certainly invest in if you are serious about selling digital products for commission.

Summary

Getting started as an affiliate of digital product creators is relatively straight forward and can be exceptionally lucrative over time.

As long as you have a passion for the kinds of products you intend promoting and you have the enthusiasm to create content in the right areas, there is little to prevent you from earning commissions from this way of working.

Posted on: Dec 21, 2023


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