If you’re the type of person who loves interacting with an online audience, then digital affiliate marketing might be right for you. It’s not as hands off as tangible promotions are.
With digital products, there’s more of an emphasis on it being a solution to a problem, rather than the specifications of what the product includes. Of course, readers do want to know what’s included, but more importantly, they want to know if this digital download will be the answer they were searching for.
The types of people who buy digital downloads want instant gratification in terms of getting the information. They don’t want to wait and drive to a bookstore or order something via Prime on Amazon.
They’re seeking information on a whole host of topics – everything from health and weight loss to success and mindset – even dating and gardening can be on the digital promotion frontier.
They want the info now, and they’re willing to pay a little more to get it. That’s an attractive reason to promote digital products as an affiliate – because instead of a few pennies on a tangible book on Amazon you might get $20-100 or more on a digital course that your audience loves.
As an affiliate, one of the great things about promoting tangibles is that it’s often more interactive and supportive than a tangible item is. If you promoted a Tony Robbins book, there’s no guarantee your buyer would ever get to actually ask him a question.
But often, with digital downloads, the support is just an email away, and many product creators have blogs, webinars, and fan pages where they’re constantly rubbing elbows with their customers.
A digital download promotion can come in many forms. It can include:
- A simple eBook
- A membership site
- A software program
- An audio product
- A video product
There can also be a mixture of the above items. And don’t forget coaching programs, too! You might be able to promote a coaching service and earn a commission off of that live interaction.
Digital promotions are typically year round, evergreen niches, but there’s one exception. There are some niches where timing does matter, such as gardening by the season, dieting for New Years’ resolutions or Spring Break, or the Survival niche whenever something happens on a financial or health scale that threatens to wreak havoc on citizens.
But as you’ll notice, all three of those digital niches are also evergreen – they just have certain times of the year when sales might spike. A topic like “nail fungus,” however, wouldn’t have a spike – it would just be year round.
When you promote a digital product, you’re not just promoting the information itself. You’re promoting the person selling it. So you have to be very careful to align yourself as an affiliate with trustworthy sources.
As a digital affiliate marketer, you want to familiarize yourself with the launch of products in your niche. This means getting on notification lists for JV (joint venture) opportunities. You can check launch calendars and sign up on the list of the product creator to find out more details and get access to tools that other affiliates might not have.
You can also check affiliate platforms like ClickBank, JVZoo, Warrior Plus and other places to see what’s recently launched so that you can get in early on a launch, if you didn’t know about it beforehand.
There are different schools of thought about when you should promote digital products. Some people think you shouldn’t promote often, while others say every email should have a promo in it.
That’s up to you – only you will know the preferences of your list. While the tangible niche doesn’t always open itself up to subscribing, the digital one typically does – especially if your free opt in gift is enticing enough, and your newsletter is valuable enough to keep them.
A good rule of thumb is to keep the value at the forefront and that way no one will be disappointed to where they feel like you’re spamming them or using them as a cash cow to milk whenever they feel like it.
Your digital promotions will be done in three places. The first is your blog. You’ll be able to conduct thorough product reviews of the digital products and explain the pros and cons of each one.
You can have banner ads, text links, and more on your blog. This is a great place to participate in what’s known as a launch jack. When you jack a launch, you’re positioning yourself to take a large portion of the traffic for that product.
So for instance, a few weeks before a launch of a product, you can begin blogging about it and using the title in your blog posts. The day of the launch, since people will be looking for information online about it, they’ll come to your review, and then head to the sales letter.
You can also promote directly inside your emails to the subscribers who join your list. You never have to send them to your blog from that point, just directly to the product’s sales page.
And of course, social media also offers a place for promotions. Twitter and Facebook would be the two most-used social media sites for text-based promotions, but you can also try Pinterest for images, and YouTube for videos.
Digital affiliate marketing is a great business branch to combine with tangibles. Not only does it provide you with increased income, but it also helps your target audience get more out of their search for solutions to their problems.
You might be in the stress niche, and find that you can promote stress relieving tangibles on Amazon, with meditation or EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) products in digital format. The two go hand-in-hand nicely.
As a digital affiliate marketer, you want to have a strategy that makes you a leader in the niche, even if you don’t have a product of your own. That means you need to gain respect for the products you promote (as well as the people).
Ask for review copies, or purchase the product yourself so that you can review, instead of simply promote it to your audience, sight-unseen. Giving a thorough review builds trust with your audience, but only if you’re honest about the product’s potential shortcomings.
As a digital affiliate marketer, you might be able to include a bonus, depending on the platform. That way, if the customer buys through your link, they get an additional freebie.
This works well on JVZoo, where the bonus can simply be uploaded by you and downloaded by the customer inside their purchase area. Make sure your bonus is relevant and pairs well with the product being sold.