Affiliate Products – Selling What You Are Passionate About

Affiliate products are products that belong to other people (products that they have created) which they allow you to promote.  Promotions of the product leading to sales by the product owner earns you commission, usually 50% - 75%.

Affiliate products on the internet gives website owners and bloggers the opportunity to integrate useful products into their content that their visitors will want to buy.  All the webmaster does is include a link to the sales page of the product owner.  All the selling is then handled by them on their own site.  If a visitor which you have referred decides to buy the product, you get the commission.  That means minimum effort and maximum earnings for the referring webmaster!  The transactions are usually handled by an independent affiliate company, so if you work through a reputable company to find affiliate products to promote you can be absolutely certain of receiving your checks of the products “you have sold” in the mail like clockwork.  Because of this system there is almost no way for the product owners to con you out of commissions that rightfully belong to you because or customers you have referred.

This all sounds so amazing – like a webmasters Utopia if you will.  You just include links and get paid.  This is a bit over simplified.  Like anything in life the more smart effort you put into promoting the product, the better you will do.  A great review by a trusted webmaster means more than just a pretty banner on your website.  To give great reviews of products other people sell you need to research their product a bit and write your own short sales page.  To do this effectively you need to be passionate about the products and particular niche in which you are promoting products.

If you are passionate about the products you are promoting, you are likely to write more energetic reviews about the particular product.  If you are excited about the product you are promoting, chances are also that you are going to excite your visitors to a point where they feel they have to visit the product owner to see exactly what is getting you so excited.  If you accomplish this then your work is done.  You have referred a customer and now it will be up to the product seller to clinch the deal so you can get paid.  It is very difficult to get other people excited about something that doesn’t excite you and inspire your passion at all.

Passion for a certain product is very easy to pick up from someone promoting the product.  If passion to sell the product is lacking it will be like trying to sell ice to an Eskimo.  If passion for the product shows then promoting a product will feel like it is no effort at all.

But what if you do not want to write reviews for other peoples products?  Well, then you don’t have to.  You started your online business to break free from any constraints, to do what you want to do when you want to do it so don’t give up on your dream.  If you are just going to include a link or banner to the website selling the product, be sure to place it in an eye catching place.  It should make your visitors wonder what that link offers a doorway to.  You want to pique their interest so they go visit the product seller and buy that product so you can get a bigger paycheck at the end of the month.

Even though you do not have to “pre-sell” the product on your website, doing so will greatly increase your success rate.  This is especially true if you have a lot of visitors that trust the content you deliver.  What you are doing is endorsing the product of someone else.  You are warming up the customer to the product that you are promoting.  Most affiliate product owners are very professional and write amazing sales letters, but it is sometimes a short endorsement or review by the referrer that seals the deal and makes the seller and promoter a lot of money.

There is a psychological aspect to back up pre-selling.  By pre-selling a product and then referring the customer you are creating a subconscious message in their brain that this particular product is so great that you are willing to refer a customer away from your own site.  This is of course not true, you are simply referring the customer to one of your “sales branches”.  But it is the perception that you are creating that is important and that will make sure you realize your dreams of wealth on the world wide web.

If you are a blogger, writing passionate reviews for affiliate products can be particularly useful.  Why?  Because we all know on the internet content is king and we all from time to time hit a creative barrier where we don’t have a clue what to write about on our blogs.  An easy way to break past this barrier is by reading the sales pages of affiliate products.  You broaden your own scope of reference as these sales pages usually contain some very interesting information, learn some real great sales techniques and will have tons to write when you are done reading – You thus get free sources to create content for your blog and you even get to make tons of money doing this.  Talk about a great deal!