When the time comes to monetize your blog, you can choose to sell other people’s products and services as an affiliate, or you can sell your own books, webinars and teleseminars, courses, memberships sites, and services. Selling your products and services can prove much more profitable and rewarding. However, you can still take advantage of affiliate marketing.
If you want to build a business around your blog or around your book, creating your own products and services will provide the best monetization strategy long term. You will make more money from the things you create and sell than those others create and sell. After all, as an affiliate, you only make a percentage of each sale. (Read this post for more information on affiliate marketing.) When you sell something of your own, you make all the profit from each sale.
What Can You Sell?
Determining what to sell depends a lot on what type of business you want to create as well as what type of book or blog you have. You will want to create products and services that help you promote your book and blog and that provide your readers with highly valuable content that targets their interests and needs.
- The products and services you might consider creating include:
- Teleseminars
- Webinars
- Home-study courses
- Live courses
- Live events
- Coaching services
- Done-for-your services
- Done-with-you services
- Consulting services
Leveraging Your Offerings
To get the most bang out of each one of your launches, though, you want to employ affiliates. That means you want to implement an affiliate program so you can leverage yourself.
Your affiliate partners market your products and services to their lists. Although you technically “lose” money on each sale because you have to pay each affiliate a commission per sale, you stand the chance of making much more money with each launch than you would on your own. Why? Because you aren’t selling the product alone. For example, if you are the only marketing your product and you sell to your 3,000 subscribers and 1,500 Facebook and Twitter followers, that is your only pool of potential buyers. However, if you have even five affiliate partners and each one of them has a platform of the same size, your product gets promoted to 18,000 subscribers and 9,000 people no Facebook and Twitter. Many of these people may never have heard of you before and may opt onto your subscriber list or choose to follow you—even if they don’t purchase anything. That builds your potential buyer list for the next launch—even without affiliates.
If you manage to achieve two percent return on that list of 18,000 subscribers, that’s 360 sales. If your product was priced at $19.99, you’d earn $7, 196.40. Subtract out the 40 percent commission you would need to pay your affiliates (assuming that’s the percentage you offered), and you end up with $4,317.84. Without the affiliates, you would have sold 60 items, or an equivalent of $1,199.40.
You can see how having affiliates can pay off quickly.
Creating Your Own Affiliate Program
There are many ways to create an affiliate program. If you offer digital products that can be downloaded, the easiest ways to get started are with sites like E-junkie and ClickBank.
If you have WordPress blog and want to conduct courses, these can be sold through your affiliate program. Look into using programs like iDevAffiliate, which is what I currently use for my affiliate program.
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