Have you ever struggled to find hot selling products from legit, no-fee dropship suppliers in the USA ? Or maybe you have applied to a number of dropship suppliers only to find they denied your application because you’re too new to dropshipping?
Well, what if I were to tell you there is a way to literally access almost any product you have wished to sell without having to worry about being denied?
The 5th type of dropship supplier I will teach you about in this 8-part DropshipXL supplier series is what I call an affiliate dropship supplier.
Affiliate dropship suppliers are completely different than the previous 4 suppliers I have taught you about (1- open door, 2- MAP, 3- private label and 4- exclusive).
Many people have heard of affiliate marketing. However, not many dropship business owners are aware of affiliate marketing, how to access affiliate programs and how and when to implement this marketing strategy.
In today’s training I’ll teach you the pros and cons of leveraging the power of this 5th dropship supplier type so you can maximize your profits by have more flexible options to help your customers.
The 2 pros of using affiliate marketing programs for dropshipping
The first obvious benefit of affiliate marketing is you are able to literally access millions of products in less than 30 minutes!
As of 2020, there are over 353 million products on the Amazon platform. Let that sink in for a moment….353 million products! Accessing products to sell should now be a think of the past. Any or all of those products can be added to your website or store to make available for the public to purchase. All you gotta do is sign up for Amazon’s associate program here.
How to become an Amazon affiliate
Not familiar with how affiliate marketing works to make you money? Here’s how it works…When someone visits your store and clicks on a product for consideration to purchase they are redirected off of your site after they click on the add to cart/buy button. If/when that visitor buys that product as a result of becoming aware of it and clicking on it from your website, you’ll earn up to a 10% commission of the product ticket price. Amazon knows that purchase came from you because the buyer clicked on the unique affiliate link from your website. Your affiliate link is kind of like your fingerprint. It’s one-of-a-kind, unique to you only.
The second benefit of utilizing affiliate marketing for your dropship business is you can use affiliate products to put on your store/website without being approved with dropship suppliers. That’s right. Some dropship suppliers are actually not even aware of this. Just this year a number of students I have mentored have told me that after they were temporarily denied as a retailer they went to Amazon’s affiliate program to access that supplier’s products anyway!
The 2 disadvantages (cons) of affiliate marketing
The first common complaint many inexperienced online business owners have with affiliate products is the profit margin is much lower compared to getting approved as a dropship retailer from the supplier. This is true primarily for tangible product affiliate programs. The profit margins on digital products and services however is extremely high. But that’s a discussion for another time.
The commission rate on average for affiliate programs that give you access to promoting physical products is between 2 to 10% of each sale. So on a $100 retail product you’d earn around $2 to $10 profit on each sale assuming you didn’t have to pay for your traffic to generate your sales.
Getting approved with dropship suppliers for the same $100 product would usually result in a 12 to 20% discount on the product. From there you could retail the product for whatever you wish and/or what the market/competition bears at that time of selling it.
The second con or disadvantage of promoting affiliate products is the difficulty of getting customers to come back to you to buy more from you (aka repeat sales). It’s not impossible though. In fact your chances of getting repeat sales from affiliate buyers is to make sure you are collecting their name/email upfront before they leave your site. Read more about this below.
Top 3 ways of making money promoting affiliate products in your dropshipping business
So the million dollar question I’m sure you’re asking yourself at this point is, how in the heck do I really make money selling products from affiliate suppliers?
The #1 best method of profiting from affiliate products that I’ve discovered over the past 15 years is to promote them through your trusted recommendations via email marketing.
Like anything else in life you have to do this right. And the right way of promoting affiliate products/offers via email marketing is to first make sure you acquired the email properly (learn how here).
From there build up a relationship of trust with them by sending emails to them about 1 to 4 times each week to educate them about the benefits to them about your brand. Next send them emails about the benefits of the products/offers/services that solve their problems. There are many strategies to consider here with email marketing, but those are the basic fundamentals.
As long as you’re transparent about your recommendations and that you’re making their life easier by suggesting products/services they should buy because you have vetted them yourself etc, you can make a lot of money. Why? because money follows you automatically when real value is created for someone. That’s really the only way affiliate marketing will ever be consistently profitable for anyone.
The second best approach to making affiliate offers profitable is to hyperlink words and call-to-action statements/buttons in blog articles. This is what we call “native advertising” in the online marketing world. The key to success here is to make sure you write a very helpful and targeted article that solves a specific problem your target audience has.
The third best strategy to make money promoting affiliate products in your dropship business is to present them directly on your store or website on any page/post. This can be done on any website platform such as WordPress and Shopify. I personally use WordPress for all my sites and stores because of these reasons here. The reason why this method is 3rd is because for affiliate products to turn into profit for you there needs to be a preliminary value creation process first that promotes that affiliate offer. That’s why email marketing and blogging continue to be the top 2 drivers of traffic to affiliate products and services.
Selling affiliate products on Shopify and WordPress
To sell affiliate products on Shopify or WordPress the process is almost the same as adding any other product to your store. For WordPress I use this WordPress plugin to automatically import products to a store/site with a few clicks. For Shopify users you can check out any of these affiliate marketing apps for Shopify stores.
Where & how to find other drop ship affiliate programs
While Amazon gives you access to millions of products they still might not have everything you need or want to have access to. In this case you can visit any website and immediately look at their footer section of their website down at the bottom of their site.
Look for a link that says “affiliates”, “partner program”, or similar. From there you can apply directly to that company’s affiliate program to access their products to promote! You can also check out this free list of top affiliate marketing companies and networks I compiled to speed up the process for you.
Summary
Promoting products from affiliate sources such as Amazon is extremely fast and easy to leverage. Just be clear about how you’re going to promote your affiliate products to avoid wasting time. Overall, affiliate marketing can become a powerful source of profit and even a stream of consistent passive income for you when done right. Make it a priority blog and tap into the power of email marketing automation. Create trust with your audience by promoting solid, vetted products and services and you’ll be on your way to making affiliate marketing be super profitable for you.
Want help implementing affiliate marketing in your dropship business? Sign up for DropshipXL Academy here and join us! The support group and I (Trent, the founder) will help you every step of the way. You’ll have the training, support, accountability all built in to empower you to be a great success with your dropshipping business. See you on the inside.
Good morning, my name is Francisco and I work with grain exports from Brazil to the world, but I face problems to have good customers around the world. Can you help me? I need to increase my sales a lot.
Hi Francisco. Good day. Thanks for reaching out. Yes I can help you. Please schedule a call by applying and booking a call with me here:
https://dropshipxl.com/coaching-application/
Talk soon
Trent