The two types of affiliate marketing are digital affiliate marketing and physical affiliate marketing. With physical products, affiliates typically earn much less than with digital products. Amazon, for example pays affiliates 1-11% commission on their physical products through the Amazon partner program. Digital affiliate marketing however usually pays much more – from 30-100% in some cases and typically around 40% of the sale value.
Physical products carry more costs such as manufacturing, postage and handling costs. Digital products on the other hand have far fewer costs associated with their sales.
Therefore digital affiliate marketing is better, right? In some ways yes and in some ways no. Physical products can be easier to sell than digital products because customers usually know exactly what they’re getting. With certain digital products, the value of the product is less obvious, so affiliates might need to become better marketers to sell them.
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Selling
Take for example a camera. As a physical product, most people know exactly what they’re getting. Compare this to a course on dating advice, for example. The course is far less tangible than the physical camera. So the affiliate might have to work harder at making the sale.
With a digital product, affiliates usually have access to sales pages, testimonials and a number of other marketing materials to help them make the sale. But a product such as dating advice can also be harder to sell because the information may be freely available elsewhere. How would the customer know it’s worth the money?
For this reason and many others, digital affiliate marketing is often done through the use of an email marketing list. A camera sale can be made more easily straight from a review website, for example. But a digital product might take some more work to show the customer the value in the product.
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Types Of Digital Products
There’s a lot of digital products you can sell as an affiliate marketer too. Some products offer more value than others. Many affiliates start out on Clickbank which has thousands of digital products for sale. With most of these products, you’ll earn around 40% of the sale value when you make a sale. However, it’s worth focusing your efforts on products which pay out recurring commissions.
Recurring commission affiliate programs offer ongoing value for their customers.
This could be in the form of a membership or some kind of software which is used for business. For example, an auto-responder is one of the best software products to promote as an affiliate. With an email marketing service (autoresponder), you can earn ongoing commissions for the lifetime of your referral.
Other digital products can offer multiple products from which you can earn commissions too. Most affiliate products including digital affiliate products only pay you once though. So it’s worth using a sales funnel with a range of digital products in it which you can earn from. See SFM digital business system for more on this.
High Ticket Digital Products
High ticket digital products offer more value to the customer and of course give affiliates larger commissions. A high ticket product might be a seminar or training course which helps business owners earn more income, for example. High ticket products are a good idea for affiliates for a few reasons:
- Selling a single high value product is easier than selling hundreds of small value items
- A high value product gives you a large commission
- You can offset advertising expenses more easily – allowing you to access the more expensive marketing platforms
- Scaling up into six and seven figure businesses is more easily done with large value items in your sales funnel
Digital Affiliate Marketing – Platforms
Marketing platforms for digital affiliate marketing include Adwords (Google), Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Instagram and a whole host of others. Ideally choose a marketing platform which suits your marketing budget, business model and interests. For a long time I focused on blogging.
Blogging is a long term marketing strategy but it can work if you stick at it. Paid marketing of course is much faster and more reliable. If you’re promoting low value digital products, it’s going to be much more difficult to use paid marketing and return a profit. So it’s worth using a large value product within your digital product offering.
With digital products, it can be helpful to focus on video since you’ll be able to let your customers know more about you and your product from a video than from a single text advert. In a text advert, there’s much less information available to the customer to help them come to a buying decision. With video, you can explain a lot more about your offering. Here’s a video I’ve used on YouTube to generate leads and sales to my online business.
A digital affiliate marketing business can be life transforming as it can give you complete time and geographical freedom. Learn more about digital business mentorship.