Affiliate Marketing to Make Money Online
One of the most lucrative ways to generate an income as a global nomad is to do affiliate marketing to make money online by promoting products for commissions.
There are all kinds of products, both physical and digital that can be promotes and sold online that have affiliate programs associated with them.
By becoming an affiliate of several different product producers, it is possible to create a diversified income model that once set up, requires only minimal maintenance to keep it viable.
Let's talk about what's involved in being an affiliate marketer, since it is what I do as a full time income source.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Many product vendors rely on attracting customers to their sales pages online to sell their wares and make money for themselves.
One method of achieving this is to enlist the services of affiliates who perform the function of attracting potential customers through product reviews and advertising. Affiliates are rewarded for their work by being paid commission on each sale that originates from their efforts.
Affiliate marketing is then the process of promoting and pre-selling products for vendors through various avenues with the goal of sending potential customers to a vendor's website sales page where they can purchase said product. The mechanics of this process is outlined below.
Generating Sales
An affiliate like me would begin by finding products within affiliate programs to promote that carry a worthwhile commission structure and are viable with sufficient interest to buyers.
I would chose products that are of interest to me, that I have some knowledge of and that I can write about with some expertise. That's important since I need to be motivated to write product reviews after doing some research into the product and interest is a good motivator!
Traffic to my affiliate sites' pages comes from a mix of organic search (the best), social and some paid ads. To be transparent, I have a number of different websites carrying affiliate product reviews in various different niches, to spread thongs around.
Affiliate Networks
I use several different affiliate networks, for promoting a variety of products, bith physical and digital.
I use CJ (Commission Junction), Linkshare (Rakuten), Impact, Shareasale and Amazon Associates for physical products and Clickbank, Digistore24, JVZoo and Warrior+ for digital products. I also do some CPA marketing using Maxbounty and MarketHealth as my source of offers.
These affiliate networks are all relatively easy to sign up for and start promoting offers, with all the above physical product networks being about the easiest. Clickbank and Digistore24 are arguably the easiest for digital products, since most offers do not require individual approval by the vendor to run, as is the case with JVZoo and Warrior+.
More about this form of mainly passive income generation in a more in-depth article on those networks.
Getting Paid
Of course, the icing on the cake when doing affiliate marketing is getting paid those lovely commissions.
How that happens depends on your personal preference. For me, I like using a mixture of payment processors such as Paypal and Payoneer for simplicity.
That's because I do not live in the USA and need to be able to receive my commissions, most of which are paid in US dollars, in the local currency. Your own circumstances will dictate which is best for you.
Summary
Without wanting to make this article too long, I have covered the main points about affiliate marketing when living as a digital nomad, working online and being able to travel or move from country to country without being restricted by the need to get a local job.
There are more details about how to make money online from affiliate sales that need explaining and I'll do that in separate articles to keep things concise and readable without sending anyone off to sleep!
I'll link to them below as I write and publish them here.
Posted: February 4, 2024
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