Make passive income online- affiliate method
Affiliate marketing means that you are selling other people's products but you're getting a percentage of the sales from those products. Now, apparently 48% of affiliate marketers globally earn $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month. Which is actually not bad at all. Like people are doing very well with affiliate marketing overall. So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing? Well, I'm going to give this a two out of five stars. Basically, you can just sign up to an affiliate program like Amazon Associates. So Amazon have their own affiliate program which I think is probably the biggest in the world. And then once you have your little special links you can post those on your website or on Twitter or on social media or whatever. And if people buy the product through your link or in fact buy any product on Amazon through your link you'll get like some tiny percentage of the sales. So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing, but how hard is it to make $100 a month? Well, this is actually kinda hard. So let's say you had a product that was $50 that you were trying to sell and you were getting 5% commission on it. That'd be pretty good. Amazon doesn't offer nearly as much as 5% it offers like two or 3%, something like that. And let's say your average conversion rate i.e. people visiting the thing versus people actually buying the product after visiting the thing, let's say that's 1% which is pretty reasonable for conversion rate. You would need 8,000 visits to your website or whatever to make $100 a month. It's actually quite hard to get 8,000 visits per month to your website, to a specific product page. And generally doing well in affiliate marketing requires lots of upfront effort in terms of either building an audience or building such domain authority in whatever space you're in, that you're sort of organically getting traffic. Now, other than Amazon there are a few other affiliate programs that I'm part of. One of them is Skillshare who are kindly sponsoring this post. I'll tell you about the sponsor segment later but Skillshare has an interesting affiliate program where if you refer someone to sign up to a free trial of Skillshare, you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing. So if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates, you would need 15 people every month to sign up for Skillshare with your affiliate link thing. How hard is it to get 15 people a month to sign up with your affiliate link? Well, it's not that hard if you have an audience and it's not that hard if you have your own classes on Skillshare, like I do, I have like nine of them. And so if I wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates, I can just tell people, "Hey guys," like I can tell you that, "Guys I've just released my latest Skillshare class Productivity for Creators, how to start a successful side hustle, so there'll be a link in the post description if you wanna check that out." Like that would be hopefully some of you will see that, will click on that link in the description, and then that will be me getting some affiliate income from Skillshare for this post. So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix how hard is it to make $100 a month? I'm going to give this a 3.5-star rating, because again you need an audience. And as we always talk about on this channel the way you build an audience is by creating useful content, putting it for free on the internet once a week and doing this for at least two years. If you just follow those three steps I guarantee you'll have an audience and you'll be able to make some kind of money through this passive income stuff. But that's quite hard to do no one sticks to it for at least two years. So we'll give that a 3.5-star rating. But the good news is once you've created it. And once you started making money from affiliates it's actually quite easy to maintain because especially if you have evergreen content, the sort that isn't relying on, like current affairs or the latest news, the sought that people might search for over a long period of time, this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income. Now, if we look at me and my business, these days from Skillshare we make a roundabout $11,000 per month in affiliate income which approximates to around $2,750 per week. And from Amazon on average, like it's around about $450 a month from the Amazon UK store and a little bit more from the US and Canada. All right, method number five of making passive income is by selling digital products. Now these are products that you create once, like an ebook or a download or an app or something like that. So you create it once and then you can sell it multiple times because selling digital products doesn't usually have any costs associated with it. One really good example is this guy called Traf, who I follow on Twitter, who made an iOS 14 icon set and sold it for like $30 a pop, a few months ago and ended up making, I think like $300,000 in the course of like a few weeks, just because loads of people around the world wanted to buy his icon pack. So he put the work into creating the pack and now he's selling it for lots of money. Another example is my YouTuber friend Oliur, who has made, as he says $700,000 from selling his website Tumblr themes since 2014. So he made the website themes for Tumblr, he sells them and he makes $700,000 on average. Well, overall, since 2014, that's pretty cool. So how hard is it to get started making digital products? I mean, anyone can write an ebook an ebook counts as a digital product. So I'm going to give this a two-star rating, two out of five stars, but obviously like again money is an exchange of value. So the thing that you're selling you have to be providing enough value to compensate, to make up for the price that you're selling it for. And that's often quite hard, especially if you don't have any experience in this sort of field and how hard is it to make $100 a month? Well, you know, it's very easy to create an ebook but it's a whole different ballgame trying to get people to actually buy your ebook or buy your icon set or buy your app or buy your website themes. And because the market around this stuff is so competitive like you have to be genuinely really good to get people to buy your stuff. And the way you get people to pay you money for something is that you identify a problem that they have, you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it. And if you can do those three things, then it's, you know I wouldn't say it's easy to make $100 a month but it's very doable to make $100 a month. You just genuinely have to have something that solves a pain point that other people are willing to pay for. So we're going to give this a three out of five stars to make $100 a month from selling digital products. And finally, in terms of maintenance, we're going to give this a two out of five stars, because usually, you do have to maintain your product a little bit but it's often easier to do like it's much easier to maintain a product then creating a product in the first place.