6 Ideas For Finding Affiliate Marketing Products To Promote
Introduction: Finding Affiliate Marketing Products
Affiliate marketing is all about promoting someone else’s products. In this blog post, I will walk through, step by step, the process of finding affiliate marketing products to promote – especially good if you are a newbie to finding affiliate marketing products .
There are two important parts to finding affiliate marketing products
- Find where the product creators hang out
- Make sure you are promoting quality products and vendors. Affiliate marketing is a long game in which you are trying to build trust with your prospects. It does not work well to burn that trust with inferior product or with a dodgy vendor. When they let your prospect down, you also let your prospect down.
Back to Strategic Framework
Let’s step back then to the strategic framework again.
A quick run through. The strategy is to bring together some combination of skill, knowledge and passion into a focus point. Pick a niche and choose a range of product areas that fit in that niche. The arrow on the right is all about delivering the promise through a set of technical internet things, some marketing stuff and an engine that keeps everything ticking over and scaling up.
Now because we are promoting someone else’s product, we are going to borrow a fair amount of skill, knowledge and passion from the product creator. We will however be applying our own knowledge, skill and passion in the focus point we choose and in the marketing approaches we choose to deploy.
I have chosen to focus the discussion on my current marketing channels -> emailing my lists, using traffic exchanges (a variation of emailing really) and social media posting. Using paid ads brings in a competition dimension which starts to change what products you choose and how you win the competitive bidding = too much for a basic introduction.
Strategic Focus – Pick a Niche
The important thinking step is all about STRATEGIC FOCUS – how to narrow down the field to something that you can get your head around. Now it helps if that focus lines up with your knowledge and skill and passion BUT it is not essential. Step one in strategic focus is to pick a niche – narrow down the field. Now I have kept that pretty broad to start with in the video example MAKE MONEY ONLINE – we could narrow it down further to affiliate marketing or social media marketing or video marketing or the like.
Where might we find products in the make money online niche? This is a wide niche because it includes all the tools that you might use as well as the guides and courses that help you achieve making money online. In the video below I set out 6 areas to find products with examples of each.
In summary then these are the 6 areas I laid out
Finding Affiliate Marketing Products: 6 Ideas
Products you use
Just work through the products you use and you find valuable and check if they have affiliate programs. The beauty of this is it is easy for you to be credible writing or talking about the product. Obvious examples are hosting, domain registrar, autoresponder, click tracking, email service, video editor, etc. These products are central to any affiliate marketing effort, for instance. See my blog past on How to Start Affiliate Marketing FREE
Products from affiliate networks
In the video I cover examples from ClickBank, Warriorplus, JVZoo as they bring together the widest range of products in the make money online niche. There are a host more – you will find a lot of the products in the products you use in places like Commission Junction or Awin or ShareASale. What I found worked well was to link steps 1 and 2. My hosting provider, Hostgator, uses Commission Junction – explore in there to find other leading vendor products in that segment like A2 Hosting.
Products from people you trust
Vendor quality is very important in the long game of affiliate marketing. I use products from a lot of different people – some people just stand out as being better than others. Promote their products even if they are not products you use. For example, my Friend Adam Payne has a great product call Affiliate Oracle – I bought and am happy to promote it. He also has a great Video Marketing Membership. I am happy to support his stuff as I know the products are quality products and as a vendor he stands by his products and keeps them up to date.
Products from leading vendors
Every segment in every market has leaders – following the leading vendors is a strong strategy as you know you can rely on their delivery. The challenge is it is a competitive field. One neat idea is to try to piggy back on their promotion effort – like Aweber launching their FREE product
during July 2020 – ride on their coat tails as they spend the promotion money.
Private label rights products
Private label marketing is all about getting other people to sell their products. Many of them will have freebies you can give away. You do not even have to buy the product. Now there is a lot of rubbish PLR out there – pick the leading vendors.
Product launches
Product launches offer a piggy back opportunity too. They also force you to work to a timetable – launch date and end date tell you exactly when to market. That is good for marketing discipline. They mostly provide good promotion tools to get you going. The disadvantage of launches is there are a lot of people promoting and it is hard to stand out OR worse you have to offer big (and expensive bonuses) to stand out. Paid ad prices will go up too for the keywords you want to bid on
Finding Affiliate Marketing Products: Focus on Quality
I talked a lot in the video about vendor and product quality. A reminder: when a vendor lets your prospect down, you let your prospect down. This is why I lean toward promoting evergreen products and to promoting products from vendors I know and trust. Search out places to find reputation information. Check the affiliate network statistics on things like refund rates. Go to the the discussion forums and ask questions. Buy the products and try them out for yourself – if they do not work the way they are advertised ask for a refund (inside the guarantee period) and do not promote them. For product launches, see if you can get review access – try it out and then decide.
The biggest danger area is the serial product launchers and their cross promoter mates. My friend, Adam Payne calls them the circle jerkers. They use serial product launches to ramp up their numbers. They use circle jerking to give the impression of momentum and gravitas. If they made decent products that stood the test of time and evolved with the market place, they would not have to do this at all – they could progressively raise prices and/or add on solid membership and higher ticket coaching programmes.
Getting Approved and Getting Paid
Finding products to promote is one thing – getting approved to promote takes some work. Many vendors will only allow you to promote if they can see track record or a meaningful email list and/or social media presence. I suggest 3 steps to follow
- Step one is to pick off the low hanging fruit – places where you do not need approval – e.g., leading
autoresponder provders, Aweber and Getresponse do not have an approval process. Many of he ClickBank vendors
do not have an approval step – sign up and apply your ClickBank ID to the promotion links. - Step two is to write up a good profile on the affiliate netowrks you are going to use. Describe your track record and experience in business and marketing. Give them information about your social media profiles and your email list numbers. Put your name and photograph on the profile. How do I know? Been turned down a few times – very irritating on products you have been using for years and years but it happens. For each approval request you send in add in a short note about how you will specifically support this promotion and what you r bonus material would add.
- Step three make sure you can get paid. Many vendors will pay to PayPal – you must have a PayPal account and keep it in good order. Set up a separate personal and business PayPal account in case one gets shut down. Some networks are quite US-centric and will only pay by direct deposit to a US bank account or worse by check. Great if you have one but of no value if you do not. Some vendors will make payments to international banks – be wary of bank charges. Some of the networks will credit an internal wallet – this is fine if you are planning to buy other products on the network or there is a way to make withdrawals. It is never wise to have funds sitting in a wallet if there is a risk your account gets shut or the network falls over
Finding Affiliate Marketing Products: The Untold Secret of Affiliate Marketing
What is the untold secret?
I briefly touched on average price in the video. The challenge in starting affiliate marketing is in generating enough sales at low ticket prices to justify the effort. The strategy has to include two paths
- Scale up the volume so you can generate a standalone income and
- Build to promoting high ticket items.
This opens up the whole topic of the untold secret of affiliate marketing. My mentor, Dean Holland calls it The Iceberg Effect.
What is The Iceberg Effect?
Simple really. As the promoter, you only get to see the tip of the iceberg. The product vendor now has a customer which he paid you for. Most vendors do not give the promoter the benefit of downstream commissions. He holds the customer and he keeps the downstream to himself. Most times they do not even share the customer name let alone their email address
So this opens up the major next strategic phase of finding products – find vendors who do pay downstream commissions and find products that have higher ticket prices, so you can earn bigger commisions. Now many of these programs are paid programs – work your way to participate from sales you have made in phase one. You can read all about the strategy around The Iceberg Effect in a book Dean Holland co-branded with me – it’s FREE just pay a small shipping and handling charge. Place your order here or just click the image below
Resources
Leading autoreponders
Getreponse has 30 day free trial for up to 1,000 subscribers and includes unlimited landing pages. Price then goes to $15 a month for 1,000 subscribers. Start your trial here.
Aweber has 30 day free trial is for only 500 subscribers and includes landing pages. Price then goes to $19 a month. Aweber has now launched Aweber FREE – for 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month. Start your trial here.
Affiliate Networks
ClickBank is a leading global retailer with its own affiliate marketplace – they cover a wide range of niches and products. Join ClickBank here
WarriorPlus thinks of themselves as best-in-class sales automation, affiliate network, and education for digital business owners and online marketers. Join WarriorPlus here
JVZoo aim to instantly connect your business with millions of paying customers and the top performing affiliates. Join JVZoo here
Private Label Rights
Three private label rights providers who lead the market with quality product and a wide range of niche coverage specially in personal development and social media
Publish For Prosperity PLR offers personal development coaches, speakers and publishers with more practical, high-value content with private label rights…that actually helps you grow business. Start with a 30 Days Social Media Freebie
Tools For Motivation focus on self-help & personal development PLR content. Check here for some FREE tools
Niche Starter Packs: Providing content in the Health, Home & Garden, Personal Development and Business Niche STOP Struggling With Content Creation. Check it out here
Product Launch Calendar
Muncheye is the eye for Internet Marketing Product Launches. Check the calendar here
Vendor Quality
The Official Beers with Adam Facebook Group: This is a discussion group – not a place to jam your links. You will get
booted. Ask your questions and be prepared for no bullshit answers. Beers With Adam
