Affiliate Marketing can be a great way to earn passive income. Affiliate Marketing is when you promote a product or service from another business, and earn a commission when you refer sales to that business.
Many businesses offer affiliate programs. When you sign up, you get a special link that is customized to you, and then you can start promoting that link to your readers, social media followers, etc. That special link will enable the other business to know if anyone that you referred to them purchased one of their products or services. As a “thank you,” they give you a commission of that sale.
I think everyone can appreciate tools that save time and make tasks easier.
Here are some of the things I use regularly to help with my Affiliate Marketing:
Excel / Google Sheets – As you start joining affiliate programs, I recommend keeping a list of the programs you’ve joined, the login link to that program’ affiliate area, as well as your username and password to login to that program. You can use anything you like to keep track of this – but I personally like a spreadsheet.
Pretty Links – You will notice that your affiliate links are all very long. They are definitely not the most attractive, or easiest to remember. If you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Pretty Links plugin. This will help you shorten your links into something more attractive and easy to remember.
ConvertKit – I recommend ConvertKit to all business owners. It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or a brick and mortar business. ConvertKit is an email service provider. As a business owner, you need a mailing list, and ConvertKit is my tool of choice for sending emails and staying in touch with your email list.
The reason I chose to include it on this list, is that ConvertKit offers a lot of features that make affiliate marketing easier. For example – ConvertKit has some awesome tagging and segmenting functions.that will help you send messages to the readers that are most interested in the affiliate program you’re promoting.
For example – let’s say you are a health coach. Your ideal customer is a mom who wants to get healthy after having a baby. Some of these women work outside the home and some stay home with their children. Some of them love to cook and some of them prefer healthy food that doesn’t take much effort to prepare. By using ConvertKit’s tagging and segmenting features you can send specific messages (that include affiliate links) to all of your different types of clients.
Camtasia – Camtasia is the screen recording and video editing software that I use and recommend. You can use Camtasia for a variety of reasons, not just affiliate marketing. It really does come in handy for demos and how-to videos, though!
Let’s say you’re an affiliate for a software product, a WordPress theme or plugin – you can record a screen share video of show people how to use the software or WordPress theme or plugin. OR – if you are an affiliate for a digital course, you can give people a “tour” of the product, by recording your screen with Camtasia (or another screen recording software).
Social Media Tools – There are sooo many social media tools to choose from, including free tools like HootSuite and Buffer to paid options like Meet Edgar and eClincher. These tools help you with your affiliate marketing by getting your links in front of more people.
Whether it’s a blog post that includes an affiliate link, or it’s an opt-in page to a freebie that has affiliate links inside of it, these social media tools make writing and posting social media updates easier. That means that you’re able to create more social media posts, and more people will be seeing those posts that lead to your blog posts or freebies.