Are you interested in starting an affiliate marketing business? Then you’ve come to the right place! In this article, we’ll explore what affiliate marketing is and whether it’s the right business model for your new enterprise. We’ll also show you how to use webinars to supercharge your affiliate marketing efforts.
In our Webinar Glossary series, we take a look at important terms and phrases that you need to know about. This month, our phrase is “affiliate marketing.”
Ready to get started?
Table of Contents
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice to reward affiliates for each visitor. It makes companies and independent marketers partnering together to generate more revenue. Independent marketers promote a company’s products and drive traffic to its website. In exchange, they receive a percentage of any sales they help to generate.
For example, let’s suppose that you run a popular blog that teaches readers about fashion and how to dress stylishly for every occasion. Let’s also say that you’re looking for new ways to boost revenue for your blog. So, you decide to try your hand at affiliate marketing.
Then, research different fashion companies offering affiliate marketing programs. Enter into a partnership with a few of them. Now, when you promote those companies on your blog and drive traffic to their websites, you’ll get a percentage of every sale. Percentages vary by industry and company, but generally, they fall in the 10 – 30% range.
And the best news? Affiliate marketing is really easy to get into! The experts even expect this strategy to generate 7 billion dollars a year by 2020. That’s a lot of money up for grabs! All you have to do is sign up and start selling, and a part of it could be yours.
Is Affiliate Marketing Right for Your Business?
Only you can answer that question but there are many benefits to affiliate marketing. For instance, not having to create your own products, the option to work when and where you want, and the ability to make passive income. Let’s take a look at each one of them.
Never Create Products
Affiliate marketing is the easiest business to start as you don’t have to create or store your own products. Forget about prototyping and inventory. Here, you let other people take care of those details while you get to focus on the fun stuff like marketing and sales.
That’s not to say that affiliate marketing is easy. But it will allow you to start a business much easier and with much less financial risk.
Set Your Own Schedule
When you own your own business, you set your own schedule. Do you work best at two in the morning? Then work at two in the morning. Are you a morning person? Get up with the sun and finish working by noon every day — it’s up to you.
Where you work is your call as well. Some folks like to work from home while others prefer the coffee shop down the street from their house. There’s also the digital nomad phenomenon to consider. A growing number of professionals enjoy traveling the world while they work remotely. Affiliate marketing is the perfect business model for this lifestyle! As long as you can generate sales, you can work when and where you want.
Generate Passive Income
Lastly, affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn passive income — the best kind of income! According to financial expert Dave Ramsey, it is “money you earn in a way that requires little to no daily effort to maintain”.
Passive income is the money you make while sleeping, working out at the gym, or sipping mai tais in the Caribbean. Once you set up an effective affiliate marketing system, you’ll be able to earn income even when you aren’t working.
Using Webinars to Supercharge Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts
Affiliate marketing sounds pretty great, right? But how can you begin using this strategy to make money? As it turns out, webinars are one of the absolute best tools for affiliate marketers. Here are six tips to help you use webinars effectively.
1. Build an Audience
Generally, affiliate marketing businesses succeed more often when they build their own followings rather than rely on paid traffic alone. There are plenty of ways to build an audience. You could start a blog, run a Facebook group, use Instagram stories — the list goes on. But no matter which channel you use, keep these two things in mind:
Know Your Audience
Whom does your affiliate marketing business cater to? Attempting to sell everything under the sun probably won’t get you very far. Instead, choose a niche that you’re passionate about and build an audience that will trust in what you say.
There’s no shortage of niches out there. You could operate in fitness, cars, or marketing industries — whatever you like. Just choose your category and then start attracting the right audience to your business.
Always Add Value
Our second tip on building an audience for your affiliate marketing business is to always add value. Why should a person continually visit your website and follow your social media channels? Because you make it worth their time.
Value comes in all shapes and sizes. It could be an informative blog post or an entertaining video. It’s anything that your audience wants to consume. So, start creating great, valuable content, and build a follower base that you can monetize via affiliate offers.
Once you have an audience, you can then promote your webinars directly to them. This makes the webinar marketing phase MUCH easier.
2. Market Your Event
You can’t have a great event if you don’t market it first. Luckily, there are plenty of avenues affiliate marketers can use to drive traffic to their webinars. Here are our three favorites.
Social Media
Social media is a fantastic tool and gives us access to (literally) billions of other people all around the world. When promoting your upcoming webinar, make sure you take advantage of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any other network your affiliate business happens to be on.
Just remember the golden rule of social media marketing – be social! If you successfully want to use a social platform to increase webinar registrations, you have to engage your followers. Ask them questions, respond to comments. Don’t simply use these channels as one-way announcement boards.
Email Marketing
If you’ve been in the affiliate marketing game for a while, you should have an email list. While email may seem old fashioned — especially when compared to social media — the numbers don’t lie. Email marketing produces an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent, much more than any other marketing channel.
Send an email to your subscribers and let them know about your upcoming webinar. And once folks start registering, periodically send them reminder messages so that they actually show up to your live event.
Paid Advertisements
Don’t forget about paid advertising. Facebook ads and Google AdWords work particularly well for driving webinar traffic, though there are other channels to explore too. Just be sure to track your advertising efforts, adjust when necessary, and only invest in winning strategies.
3. Nail Your Content
The best affiliate marketing webinars always consist of outstanding content. The key is choosing an ideal topic hat will be of interest to your unique audience. But no matter which industry you’re in, these content strategies will do well:
Rankings
Internet users LOVE lists. Which lawnmower is best? What are the top 25 Disney movies of all time? What are the best webinar platforms on the market? If you create webinar content that includes the ranking of something your audience cares about, you’ll likely see a much larger attendance at each of your webinar.
Reviews
Taking the “rankings” tip one step further, don’t just list products for your next webinar, give detailed reviews about them. Think about it! If you read a list about the “best productivity software in 2019,” and discover a tool that interests you, what’s going to be your next step? You’ll probably look for reviews on the specific piece of software in question, right?
Your webinar audience thinks the same way. According to PYMNTS, 88% of consumers research products before purchasing them online. If you want to sell more affiliate offers during your webinars, review products during your events and give your audience the information they need to make an informed buying decision.
Great Visuals
When hosting webinars, you can never go wrong with great visuals. Did you know that the human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than plain text? Use this information to your advantage and include engaging slides, videos, and GIFs in your webinar presentations. When the goal of your event is to engage your audience and boost sales, use great visuals.
Guest Speakers
Guest speakers are another great content idea. Not only will this give your audience the opportunity to hear from a third party about your affiliate offers, but it also gives you a strong marketing angle. You can use the guest speaker’s prestige as a way to increase registrations for your event. You can also ask the guest speakers to promote your webinar to their own followers to expand your reach.
Partner with well-known and respected people in your niche and inviting them to speak during your webinar.
4. Promote Your Affiliate Offers
It may seem obvious, but we still need to mention it. When hosting affiliate marketing webinars, make sure you promote the products you sell! It doesn’t need to be clear that you’re trying to make sales, though you do need to inform people that you will earn a commission on products sold.
Instead, marry this tip with some of the ones we already mentioned. For example, when you create rankings for your webinar content, make sure to include the products you sell in your lists. And if you decide to review products during your webinars, review ones that you can make a commission on.
See how that works? Affiliate marketing webinars won’t do you nearly much good if you don’t sell your affiliate offers.
5. Increase Sales
To make sales during your webinars, you have to promote your affiliate offers. But aside from simply making your offers available, is there anything else you can do to increase sales? As a matter of fact, there is! Here are three tips to help you sell more.
Capitalize on the Goodwill of Your Audience
If you’ve been working hard to build a loyal followers base for your affiliate marketing business, then you may be able to capitalize on the goodwill of your audience. What do we mean by this? You can make it known to your webinar attendees that if they buy from your affiliate links, you’ll receive a commission. This will, in turn, allow you to keep creating great content for them to consume.
If you’ve developed a strong relationship with your followers, they will want to support you and your affiliate marketing business — especially if they can do it by purchasing products they already want and/or need.
Consider Offering Discounts
You may also want to offer a limited-time discount to increase sales during your webinar. A discount is a special offer that allows a customer to receive a partial refund for their purchase. This refund would likely have to come out of your affiliate marketing commission. It may enable you to sell more products.
You’ll need to do the math and decide whether a rebate offer makes sense for your affiliate marketing business. If you find out that it does, you’ll probably see a lot more people buying products during your webinars.
Ensure Your Webinar is Mobile Friendly
It’s also very crucial that your webinars are optimized for smartphones. Not only will this ensure a much better attendee experience, but it will also help you make more sales. According to BigCommerce, mobile e-commerce sales accounted for 34.5% of all online purchases in 2017. That number is expected to rise to 54% by 2021.
What does this mean to your affiliate marketing business? It means that people love to buy things from their phones! If your goal is to use webinars to increase sales, then it only makes sense to ensure your webinars are optimized for phones.
6. Create On-Demand Webinars
And finally, we recommend that you record your live webinars and turn them into on-demand, selling machines! Remember when we earlier talked about passive income? On-Demand Webinars are a great way to get it. Once your live event has concluded, you can promote the recording to anyone and everyone who didn’t attend.
Imagine emailing a webinar link to your subscribers or promoting the recorded event via Facebook Ads and then watching sales continually trickle in, your bank account rise and your business grow without you having to do any more work. That’s the power of On-Demand Webinars.
Fortunately, webinar platforms like ClickMeeting make it really easy to record and distribute your past events.
Own the Affiliate Marketing Landscape with Webinars
Affiliate marketing is a wonderful business model that will allow you to set your own schedule and generate passive income. This all can be done without you ever having to create your own products. Like any business, it does take work to set up and run properly. Fortunately, webinars can act as a bit of a shortcut and help you sell more products faster! Just remember to:
- Build an Audience;
- Market Your Event;
- Nail Your Content;
- Promote Your Affiliate Offers;
- Use our Sales Increasing Techniques, and;
- Create On-Demand Webinars.
If you’re just getting started and looking for the perfect affiliate offer to promote, why not sell ClickMeeting? Our platform offers everything a webinar creator could want. This includes waiting rooms, Facebook and YouTube integrations, Screen sharing, Call-To-Action, detailed analytics and more.
Become an affiliate today, and you’ll enjoy an industry leading 30% commission rate. That’s equal to a $515 payday depending on the product you’re able to sell! You’ll also have access to a dedicated affiliate manager to help you and share advice.
Sounds good? Then partner with us today!
Loading...
