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Looking to get affiliates for your online products?
In this Q&A episode, we talk about this burning question a lot of online entrepreneurs (and aspiring ones too) ask us — the best affiliate programs for digital products.
Listen in on what we have to say, and also make sure to check out the resource links we mentioned in the show that is listed below.
We also have some very important tips you have to know if you’re looking into getting affiliate programs.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey all you’re listening to the Q&A of S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Let’s get started.
JOCELYN: We’re going to answer a question today from Liz Latham and Liz says:
“Where can I find the best affiliate programs for e-books and digital products in general?”
SHANE: An affiliate product is what you sell for someone else. For example, if I have a friend and I sell one of his playbooks then I get 40%, so if he’s selling it for 100 bucks that would be $40. That’s an affiliate product – something that you can sell to other people and you get part of the money. That way you don’t have to create the content.
If you want to offer a new product for your audience and you don’t have time to make it, then you can just go out, find someone online who’s already selling that and you get a commission off what they’re doing.
There’s a lot of marketplaces where people have affiliate products set up. You can go to CommissionJunction.com or ClickBank.com and you’ll find dozens and dozens of products in your niche where people will say “see my e-book I have on my website” and if you sell it on your website I’ll give you 20-25%.
You can go there, sign up and browse through all of their offerings and you can randomly find products that complement your own products and you can expand your offering to your audience and if you’re willing to sell other books and physical products. Amazon.com has a really good affiliate program where you can sell anything on Amazon and get up to 6-7% for every sale so if you’re really looking toad a few things to flesh out your offerings then Amazon is a great place to get started quickly. Marketplaces are good and we use them but not for all our affiliate products.
JOCELYN: There are also a lot of other affiliate programs out there. I know that some states are not allowed to do Amazon affiliates for some reason and if that’s the case in your state then you can go to other companies you buy products from. There are tons of them out there for books, products and just about anything. If there’s a website you like to buy things from, chances are they’ll have an affiliate program or you could ask them if they have one and see if there’s a possibility for you.
How we find affiliates is that we go to live events and meet people who have things sometimes similar and not very similar to us in online business. Some of the people we have met recently and we promote their products. For one, Jessica and Cliff. You can find them on TheSellingFamily.com, and we’ll put a link to their site in our show notes.
They do Amazon where they actually sell physical products on Amazon. So they do things that are different to us, but we like that since we can recommend them to people who want to get started in online business, but maybe digital product creation like what we do is not for them. That’s a great way to meet people and promote their products or services if they think differently than what you do or if it similar to what you do and you just want to explain your product offering without doing a lot more work.
SHANE: So what Cliff and Jessica do is they teach people how to sell on the Amazon affiliate program. Jocelyn and I have no clue how to do that but we’ve had a lot of people ask us how to do that. Instead of making that product for ourselves we met Cliff and Jessica at an event in San Diego and we really liked what they did and we said let us just sell some of that for you and we’ll take a commission off that. So we put links to their website and when they get a sale, we get a commission from it.
JOCELYN: We don’t have more work to do about something we don’t know much about and the people looking for it get what they’re looking for so it works out for everyone. Another couple we met was Jill and Josh Stanton and they’re from Screwtheninetofive.com and they have several products on how to do online business like affiliate sales, which for Liz might be a great place for you to go to and we’ll also put a link to that in today’s Q&A podcast notes.
And finally there’s another person I met recently who talked about something I never really thought about, Shelly Hits, and you can find her site on Trainingauthors.com. She actually trains people to write, sell and market a book on Amazon. Those are some people we’ve personally met and we know and trust them that they’re doing this for the right reasons and we definitely recommend our customers who’re interested in some of those things.
SHANE: I’ve used products from Commission Junction before, but we really have geared most of our marketing through people we’ve met or know because when you recommend an affiliate product to your audience you better be sure who’s on the other end of the digital product. If that person who you recommend leaves a bad taste in your audience’s mouth then they’re going to blame you because you sent them there in the first place.
So while there’s nothing wrong with Commission Junction or ClickBank or any of the other places where you can find these digital products, we would highly recommend that you promote products of people you know or have a relationship with or someone you have personally reached out to and said “I love your product, I know you do a good job, would you mind if I sell that and would you give me an affiliate link where I get a commission for that”.
Make sure you know what you’re recommending. Don’t just grab something randomly on one of these affiliate websites because if you do and if someone has a bad customer experience then you look bad. Hope that answers your question, Liz. That was a really good question and there’s a lot of confusion about affiliate marketing and I hope we steered you in the right direction, so until the next podcast we’ll catch you on the flip side.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Joel says
Thanks for publishing this. The sellingfamily.com site does not work, can you check the link?
Jim says
In your link sellingfamily.com should read thesellingfamily.com
Thanks,
Jim
Thanks for all of this terrific content!