- Affiliate marketing is an incredibly powerful
and easy way to both add new income streams to any business
and add a ton of extra value
to your subscribers at the same time.
In this video, we're gonna step through
how to start affiliate marketing,
but not just for beginners,
we'll also cover off on some pro tips that we use
to generate over six figures per year in affiliate revenue.
(upbeat music)
Hey, it's Justin Brown, here from Primal Video
where we help you amplify your business
and brand with video.
If you're new here,
make sure you click that subscribe button
and all the links to everything we mention in this video.
You can find linked in the description box below.
So, let's jump into it.
So, affiliate marketing is, at it's core,
getting paid a small commission
or a reward for referring new customers
to a product or to a service.
In some markets,
affiliate marketing does have a bad name,
due to spammy or unethical marketers,
but aside from all those bad outliers,
the system itself is actually an incredible way
to add big value to everyone involved.
We actually now generate over six figures
just from affiliate marketing
because do it in a way that it adds value to,
not just the companies that we trust and support,
but primarily because we focus so heavily
on adding value to our subscribers.
Now, if you're wondering how
affiliate marketing actually works,
I'm gonna give you a quick overview
and run through an example that we use,
and then we'll jump into how you can start
implementing this yourself.
So an example of a product or a service
that we use all the time, and we recommend,
strongly recommend, a lot of people use,
especially in relation to video.
It's called Rev.com,
and it's a transcribing service or a captioning service,
so if you're looking for subtitles and captions
or to transcribe your videos into other languages,
that is the service that we recommend.
Now, whenever anyone clicks one of our links
when we're recommending Rev.com
either from a video or some other resource
and they make a purchase,
then we receive a commission
for sending that sale their way,
or that customer their way.
Now, we normally put these links
in the descriptions of our videos.
They could be in e-mails, websites, blog posts,
wherever it is a fit for us to mention
that to offer value to our audience.
Now, different affiliate programs
will have different commission structures as well.
So some of them work off a,
percentage basis,
or a fixed dollar amount
or some of them will have a recurring monthly payment
that comes to you for referring that sale.
Now, Amazon, for example, will actually
pay you a percentage from what's actually
in the cart at the time of checkout.
So, we've had instances where,
someone has clicked our link for a 20 dollar microphone,
and the customer has gone on then
and purchased a heap of other stuff from Amazon at that time
and when they've checkout out from clicking our link
then we've actually received commissions from everything
that was in their cart in that purchase.
Also, a lot of software platforms out there,
especially the subscription-based ones can offer
up to 30% recurring commission month on month.
Now, just before we get into the steps
to get you started with affiliate marketing
and then on in to some big tips
to help you maximize your results,
I do want to cover off a couple
of really important things that you should remember.
Only ever recommend products or services
that you've tried, that you've tested,
or things that you actually use yourself,
or things that you would recommend to your best friends.
Focus on delivering value to your subscribers first.
You don't wanna be the person that's recommending stuff
that's actually not going to help people,
or that it's a bad product or it's buggy,
or it's going to create more hassles and a bad experience.
That's gonna be a reflection on you for sending them there,
and that's really where a lot of people go wrong
with affiliate marketing.
Is that they start by looking for,
the products and services
that have the highest commissions
and pay up the highest amounts,
and they work backwards from there,
and that's really unethical,
and is not gonna be sustainable for you long term.
You'll also always wanna be disclosing
that your links are affiliate links
and that you are being paid a commission
if they do sign up using your link.
You also, really need to get clear on
the program terms and conditions
for each of the affiliate programs that you're a part of.
They are not all the same,
and some of them have strict rules
or regulations around what you can and can't do,
and where you can and can't put the links, as well.
Okay, so now that we've got that covered,
this is how you can get started with affiliate marketing.
The first step is to write a list
of everything that you use or recommend.
This could be software, it could be tools,
it could be books, it could be courses,
programs, whatever it is,
look at the things that you're actually using
on a daily or monthly basis,
or the things that you use to create your videos,
or the things that you use to run your business
or to help people.
What are the things that you recommend,
and start writing out a big list.
Step number two is to identify from all
of those on your list which ones are going
to most help your subscribers,
your customers or your audience.
So for us we get a lot of questions
about the gear that we recommend,
and the systems and tools and things
that we use inside of Primal Video.
People wanna know this because they trust us
and using what we've tried and tested
and the things that we recommend saves them time,
researching online, buying, trying
and testing things themselves.
So, that's one niche,
but you can do this in almost any niche.
So take dog training, for example,
if you're a dog trainer,
you could just look at things like,
dog food, dog toys, any training implements that you need,
or it could also be things like pet insurance.
That's something that people typically
would spend a bit of time researching
and reading reviews and comparing all the different pricing
and what's covered and what's not.
So, this is something that you can actually
help your audience with
by saving them a lot of that research.
So, that's one example,
but to give you another quick one,
if you're in the fitness space,
you could look at things like the gym clothes
or the training clothes or workout clothes
that you recommend.
It could be the proteins or the shakes
or the products, the nutritional products
that you take and that you recommend.
Or it could even be things
right down to a gym membership.
A lot of the major gym chains
have affiliate programs as well.
And that leads us on to step number three,
where you wanna make a short list
and then go and check to see if they actually
have an affiliate program already set up.
Now, this is really as simple
as doing a Google search for the product
or service, along with the words
affiliate or referral program.
And if they've got one,
then it should show up there in the search results.
And if they don't have one,
then definitely reach out and ask them,
and let them know that you're interested
in promoting their product,
and you will be surprised by how many companies
will go out of their way and set something up
that's unique for you.
Step number four is to get familiar
with each of the programs' terms and conditions.
I know I mentioned this earlier
but I really can't stress this enough
because you need to know what you can and can't do.
And a really quick example on that,
I know that we mentioned earlier
that we put some affiliate links
into emails and those sorts of things.
Amazon, in particular, doesn't let that happen.
You're not allowed to put your Amazon
affiliate links in emails.
So, that's just one example,
so it's really important that you get familiar
with what you can and can't do
with each of the different programs.
Step number five is to share your links out,
but I really stress here that you wanna
be doing it in a way where you are adding value.
So, it could be things like reviews
or how-to videos or a comparison video.
What are the different competitors
to that product that you're wanting to promote?
And how does this compare?
Again, coming from that authentic place
of adding value but what are the things
that your audience would need to know
when they're deciding which one to purchase?
It could also be things like,
advanced training or courses or content that you create,
to help people get specific results that you get yourself.
Remember here is not about just
spamming your links out there.
Make sure that you're adding value to your audience,
and also make sure that the products and services
that you're recommending are good.
Now, we actually had to recently pull down
a full video training series
that we had inside a Primal Video accelerator,
where we could no longer recommend the product
that we were talking about in that video training series.
That was a big part of that video training series.
So, we had to pull the whole thing down and reshoot it,
when we had something better to replace it with
as a new recommended product.
Because once that product wasn't a fit for us.
we had a bad experience with them.
We couldn't recommend them anymore,
cause we didn't want anyone else
having that same experience.
Now, I've got a pro tip here that's gonna save you
an absolute ton of time with your affiliate marketing,
and that's to use redirect links.
So, when you sign up for an affiliate program,
they'll assign you you're own unique link.
And that's their link that ties that sale
or that customer to you.
Now, what most people do, at this point,
is that is the link that they put in their descriptions,
in their emails, on their websites, on their blogs,
and all of their videos and things.
But if that link changed,
if that affiliate provider changed that link,
which does happen quite a lot,
and more than you would think,
then you've actually got to go back
to all of those different videos
and blogs and places to update that link with a new one.
So, you can actually add a redirect link that you own.
So for us, we use primalvideo.com forward slash, go,
forward slash, whatever the product is,
Rev, was our example from earlier.
So, if someone goes to our link it's going to redirect over
to wherever we want it to go,
which is our Rev affiliate link.
So the beauty of this is, is if those links change
you can simple change
where that link is going to be redirected to.
So you don't have to go and update everywhere,
you can update in one place,
and all of your links everywhere are now updated.
So there's a really awesome WordPress plug-in
that we use to manage all of ours,
and that's called Thirsty Affiliates.
Again, links are in the description below,
but you can also use a redirect service,
like bit.ly,
and there's others out there as well.
But owning your own links and using redirect links,
especially for affiliate marketing
is gonna save you a heap of time
and a heap of headaches down the track.
So by having a focus around adding value to your audience,
one of the most powerful ways that we've found,
to not only 10 x that value for our audience
that are looking to deep dive into a certain topic,
but also to increase our affiliate revenue
is to use email automations.
Now, once someone joins our email list,
we can provide additional options for free training
and they're gonna help those
looking to go deeper on certain topics
or to achieve certain results.
Things like, creating better videos
with a smartphone or growing an email list using YouTube,
we offer both of those trainings completely via email
because it can be delivered automatically.
And inside those trainings,
we can give them exactly how we use gear,
products or services in our own business,
and show them how they can get the same results.
And then for anyone that hasn't started yet,
we also include our affiliate links in there
to help them get started.
So here's a live example for you,
if you're looking to try this strategy for yourself
then linked onscreen, is one of these advanced trainings
that's completely free.
And it shows you how to grow your email list,
completely organically using YouTube.
So that you can start using email automations
to scale your existing business,
and your affiliate revenues all on autopilot.
And I'll see you soon.