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We will cover how to effectively monetize your podcasts with affiliate Marketing.
Steps for Skill Mastery:
The process for how being an affiliate works generally looks like this:
The first step in being an affiliate is finding the right offers to promote to your audience. Typically, either you’ve tried a product or service, or several people who you trust have tried a product or service, and they’ve raved to you about it. Because you value the product or service AND you believe it can help your audience, you decide to reach out to the creator and ask if they have an affiliate program.
What is important to note here is that you:
If these things are not true, then you should not become an affiliate partner and promote that product to your audience. Below are some questions to help you start identifying what to find affiliate programs for.
Remember to think of things like courses, books, physical products, software, or coaching services that will help solve problems your audience has.
Answer the following questions to get started:
Here is a video to help you reflect on these questions.
Once you have identified the products, services, or companies that would help your audience with their problems, it’s time to find their affiliate programs. You can do this by going to Google and typing in the product or company’s name + the word “affiliate”, or typing in your niche + the word “affiliate” to find many programs related to you niche.
Alternatively, you can also go directly to the company’s website and look for their affiliate program. You can typically find out through someone’s website whether or not they have an affiliate program for their products or services. If there is ever a question, don’t hesitate to reach out to them and just ask. Below is an example of Bluehost, where they list their affiliate program at the bottom of their website.
Even if they don’t have a full-blown affiliate program set up through an automated system, they might be willing to set something up with you so that when you refer people their way, you can do some type of value exchange.
For general physical products that are specific to any one company, such as a podcast microphone for podcasters, you can use Amazon’s affiliate program called Amazon Associates.
Remember, before fully commiting to promoting any product or service, always do a check with yourself and ask:
If the answer is yes to those questions, then you have a product that your audience will respect you for promoting and will actually make you money.
Create a spreadsheet like the one below to start listing out the possible programs you could sign up as an affiliate for.
You have discovered which products and services you are going to promote as an affiliate and found which affiliate programs to sign up for.
Before you start creating ads or promoting the product or service you need to get to know it yourself, inside and out.
Affiliate marketing works best when you treat the products you’re promoting as your own. You need to know firsthand the experience your audience will have using this product.
So pick a product or service from your list yesterday and get some first-hand experience with it. Then write down some notes and review the product, focusing on how this helped you solve your problems.
Answer the questions and prompts below:
Now that you have spent some time with the product or service, let’s get to promoting it!
First thing you will need to do will be to sign up for the affiliate program on their website and get your affiliate link. Below is an example of ClickFunnels affiliate sign up.
An affiliate link is a link to a product, service, or website, appended with a tracking code, so that each click or conversion can be tracked back to your referral. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given a unique URL link that you will have people click on that is tracked specifically to you.
Each company has it’s own affiliate tracking dashboard that has many resources for you to help promote their product or service. Below is an example of ClickFunnels dashboard.
Go to the websites of the products or services you wish to promote and sign up for their affiliate programs. Once accepted you should located your unique affiliate link.
Once you have your affiliate links, it’s time to create your ad reads.
For creating your ad reads, the process is very similar to creating them for sponsored ads. You want to craft them with:
Now it’s time to craft your read for your first affiliate offer.
When creating a ad read script, answer the following questions:
Then craft a script for you ad read based on those questions.
Now let's get this ad read into your episodes.
Once you have your approved unique read, it’s time to insert it into the episode you’ve sold. Decide where to break and put the ads in your shows, record, and edit them into your episodes.
Record your ad read and ad it your podcast episodes in the appropriate location within the episode.
Be sure to listen back once you’ve inserted your reads to make sure everything flows the way you want it to. And of course, if you’ll be doing ‘live reads’, which some hosts do, then make sure you have your notes or unique read by you when it comes time to hit that record button.
After you have everything you need and the affiliate ad is ready to run, you need to make sure you have a way to direct listeners to you offer. You can do this in a few of the following ways.
The first thing you need to do is have any of the affiliate offers applicable to the podcast episode linked in your episode show notes. This allows the listener to simply open up their podcast app and click the link there.
The second thing you can do is actively point people to your show notes during the podcast episode. For example, if someone references a piece of software that you are an affiliate for, direct the listeners that they can check out that software by finding the link in the show notes.
The third thing you can do is give them the exact URL. But what is my URL is long and ugly? No worries, you can create a redirect in your website. This will allow you to create a short, easy to remember URL that you can simply read out in your episode. For example, your original link might be www.fakewebsite.com/how-to-start-a-podcast-101 . You could create a new link www.fakewebsite.com/podcast101. Using a process like shown in the link above, you can have someone type in www.fakewebsite.com/podcast101 and be redirected automatically to www.fakewebsite.com/how-to-start-a-podcast-101 without them ever realizing it. I would definitely recommend creating these redirect links if you are going to give out links in your episode.
Complete the following items to direct listeners to your offer:
Now you are successfully running affiliate ads!
Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.
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