What’s better than one source of income? Multiple sources of income!
With the help of our latest feature, we’re making it simple to diversify your income while providing an even better shopping experience for your audience. Read on to learn more!
As a digital creator, there are three primary sources of income you can cultivate to fund your creative endeavors.
- Advertising. Whether you’re publishing videos on YouTube, recording podcasts or throwing up words on your own blog – monetizing with ads (and sponsorships) is an important revenue model to introduce. Unfortunately, unless your audience is fairly substantial it can be difficult to start generating meaningful income here until you start selling custom sponsorship packages yourself. Oh, and then there’s the inconvenient truth that people tend to get annoyed with ads fairly quickly – so be mindful of that.
2. Memberships. Thanks to the advent of platforms like Patreon, it’s pretty darn easy to establish and manage a membership community around the work you produce. We absolutely love this approach and believe it can play a nourishing role in most creators’ revenue playbook. However, designing patron-only perks does take time away from producing your primary content and building your general audience, so once again it’s a balancing act.
3. Sales. You can sell your own product/service or you can promote other people’s products and services. While the former takes a great deal of work, the latter can be much simpler to execute. Perhaps you’re familiar with that concept – it’s what we call affiliate marketing. Now, affiliate marketing makes the most sense when you’re actually talking about products in your content. We work with many clients who are simply linking to the gear they use to produce their content and that’s great! But affiliate marketing is an absolute no-brainer when your primary content is focused on presenting and reviewing products.
In this post, we’re going to detail this third revenue stream – product sales or, more specifically, affiliate marketing.
To lots of people, including myself, the Amazon Associates program serves as a great introduction into earning your first affiliate marketing commission dollars. Over the years, many of our clients have earned tens of thousands of dollars through the Amazon Associates program – even more, when leveraging our software to maximize their international commissions. We love Amazon and have been able to build a great business by supplementing their technology.
But…
(And this is a big but.)
It’s not wise to rely solely on one individual affiliate program, even if it is Amazon! You’re partnering with a massive company and at the end of the day, it’s always going to make the decisions that are best for itself, its customers and its shareholders.
We work with many clients who saw their income halved overnight when Amazon decided to adjust the commission rates for different categories. When you’re counting on that income to pay your rent each month, that’s just dangerous and, quite frankly, not fair.
For our own part, we have been a bit complacent in this regard as well – we’ve been fixated on supporting our clients who earn all of their affiliate income from Amazon. And we will, of course, continue to support them.
But, the world has changed! Relying solely on one affiliate program is not where you want to be as a marketer. And frankly, these days there’s a wealth of affiliate programs to choose from which hasn’t always been the case. For example:
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- Walmart
- BestBuy
- B&H Photo Video
- Target
And affiliate monetization platforms such as Skimlinks and VigLink.
Over the past year, we’ve been building towards a future where we can provide the tools to help you diversify those partnerships. We know Amazon Associates program will always play a major role in your affiliate marketing strategy. But we also want to make it as easy as possible for you to make that first step into a broader realm of affiliate marketing.
Choice pages were our first major feature development in that direction. They let your shoppers choose where to buy the products you recommend. Turns out, people love being able to buy from their preferred stores.
Once we saw that shoppers appreciated having that choice, we knew we had to double down and encourage our clients to better monetize those links through diversification.
Ultimately, we want to build a solution where you can give your audience the freedom to choose while still being able to earn commissions no matter where they purchase from.
We call this Universal Affiliation.
And today we’re rolling out the first phase of Universal Affiliation: the ability to monetize your links for tens of thousands of brands and stores via VigLink and Skimlinks.
An over-dependence on any single source of revenue is risky, even more so when you’re tied to the decisions made by a global conglomerate.
We encourage you to be an independent marketer, empowered to offer the best shopping experience possible while being rewarded for doing so. We’re here to help you squeeze more revenue out of every link you share.
Moving forward, what e-commerce platforms would you like to see us to roll-out direct affiliate support for? Let us know what you think!