Affiliate Marketing Programs are a great way to make passive, residual income with zero product development or staffing costs.
In the image above are just some of the companies that have paid me affiliate commissions recently.
While some will discuss "unattached affiliate marketing," "related affiliate marketing," and "involved affiliate marketing," at the end of the day, affiliate marketing programs are simply a way for you, the blogger/entrepreneur/business owner/salesperson to get paid for driving traffic to another business and having that business pay you either for driving traffic to them and/or when someone actually buys on their site after learning about them on your website, email, social media post or even a direct mail piece or other form of advertising.
There are some out there that make money by simply being savvy advertisers and prolific landing page builders who make sites for the sole purpose of driving traffic to other sites that pay great affiliate commissions.
You can find companies to represent by signing up for free with affiliate marketing programs aggregators like Commission Junction and ClickBank.
Once approved, you can do a search for vendors with products to sell, see the commissions they offer, grab their text, HTML, and/or banner ads, copy them, add them to your sites and emails, and start making money (if you know what you're doing.)
In today's trust-based, transparent, socially-conscious economy, I prefer to promote the things I know and use and feel good about and can discuss with some degree of knowledge and credibility.
Years ago, I started reselling a sales book on Amazon before I had my own books, before I had my own website, before I had my own merchant account, before I had my own CRM / Email Marketing platform, and before I really even had a business.
As I expanded my business and my knowledge of selling online and of owning, running and building my own business, I got ankle-deep (head first) into Keap (Infusionsoft) then I shifted to HubSpot to automate my sales and marketing.
I then learned Wordpress and hosting so I could build my own website, which enabled me to start recommending HostGator and BlueHost for beginners and MediaTemple for more advanced web hosting needs.
Over the years (going back to at least early 2009), I've been sharing my sales and marketing automation tips and tricks here with a big emphasis on HubSpot, which has been the core/hub of my growth.
The affiliate income I have earned from them, along with the direct income from selling the software on my own coupled with the spin-off income I've derived from Keap CRM clients that needed additional work such as web design, hosting, copywriting, strategic consulting, and programming enabled me to leave behind a Corporate America job that paid $180,000 and put a roof over the heads of my wife of 18+ years, our seven children and Decker the Diabolical American lab.
So embrace affiliate marketing programs and proudly and boldly recommend and share the products you believe in and feel good about earning a nice commission for doing so. As long as you are honest and transparent, everyone wins.
If you still have questions on which affiliate marketing programs are right for you, please leave a comment below, and I'll do my best to answer it here and/or on The Sales Podcast, which you are subscribed to, right? :-)