When it comes to running a business, whether it’s online, offline, or on Mars, typical small business owners have many roles.
They do the marketing, they do the customer service, they answer the phones, they ship the product, they fulfill the service, they follow up on the leads, they pay the bills and they clean the bathrooms.
When you look at it from that perspective, it’s easy to see why so many business owners work more than 80 hours a week.
However, when it comes to running an online business, there are many leverage points that you can use to automate your business and make it run more efficiently and even make you money while you sleep. (And there’s a lot less toilet to clean on the internet.)
One of the most leveraged online businesses is affiliate marketing.
In fact, there are several advantages of affiliate marketing over running a traditional business (even an online one).
As you see with affiliate marketing, you make money when you refer a sale to someone else. You get a part of the money raised in that sale, between 4% and 100%.
Then you’re done, you don’t have to deal with customer service or product fulfillment. You can focus your efforts only on finding and recommending quality products and creating content around those products.
It is one of the least stressful and most flexible businesses you can run online. For example, I can go on vacation and not once do I need to check my email for the affiliate side of my business because I don’t have to worry about submitting orders, answering questions, or providing customer support.
List building
One of the most valuable assets any business can have is a list. You have probably noticed that as an affiliate, you don’t create your own customer list. However, you can certainly build an email subscriber list without having to sell a single product of your own.
And many people who start out as affiliate marketers enter the market with a product of their own. It’s actually a great idea because if you start out as an affiliate, you can find out which products convert well without going through all your product development work up front, which means you can earn money while learning the business.
Once you believe that you can build a better mousetrap, you can enter the market, get your own affiliates to promote you, and still promote products on the backend as an affiliate to earn extra income from your customers.
