AP 0493: Should I Bother with Low Value Affiliates?

AskPat 493 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 493 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business related questions five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Brittany.

Brittany: Hey Pat, Brittany here from BHookedCrochet.com. My question for you is in regards to affiliate marketing for a lower dollar items.

My website is devoted to teaching, sharing, and inspiring the art of crochet, and I do so by designing patterns, creating video tutorials, product reviews, demonstrating techniques, and more. My early monetization strategy consisted of Adsense. However, I'd like to pivot and shift my focus towards affiliate marketing. I love the affiliate marketing model for my business because I'm able to put links directly to the supplies needed to complete my projects. It's a win-win for me and my audience. I've added my links to my most popular projects, and my audience has been purchasing through these links. The supplies cost an average between three and ten dollars each. Although I have referred about 100 sales since focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing, this only translates to about $70 in commission. So my question for you is, is it worth the time investment to research and add the links to my pages, the trouble dealing with the small income on my taxes? I'm wondering your thoughts on scalability when promoting low-dollar items.

Thank you so much for all you do. Your wisdom has helped me tremendously, and I contribute much of my success directly to you and your efforts.

Pat Flynn: Hey Brittany, what's up? Thank you so much for the question, I appreciate the kind words at the end there and so let's get right into your answer. Do I think it is a waste of time? Do I think it is something that you shouldn't be doing? Absolutely not. You should definitely be doing it in the way you're doing it. The thing is, for one, the products that you recommend are going to be products that are going to be helpful for your audience. You should be recommending them anyway. I feel that you can make a commission by doing that, then you might as well do that.

The thing is, with blog posts, with videos, podcast episodes—however you're promoting these things—these are going to last you a long time. As you build more content, you're going to have more links and over time you're going to start to create this amazing bank, this library, of links that are out there. Your commission might be $70 now, but even without doing any more work, you can see that increase over time as those articles get ranked higher in Google, as more people share them, and all those sorts of things. I would continue to do that. You've just started and it's only going to grow from now, which I think is really encouraging if you were to think of it that way.

Another thing is, if you're doing Amazon promotions, for example, you have to understand that even though your products may be three to ten dollars that you're promoting as an affiliate, through Amazon specifically you're getting five to ten percent, depending on volume on that. You also get commission on anything else that people are buying through that link too. Anything they buy within 24 hours after going through your link on Amazon you will get credit and a commission for that. I've had some weird things that people have purchased. They go through my links for books and equipment and electronic-related things and then they end up buying an indoor pool, or something. Literally, that's what they bought. Or a gold watch. Or pet-related things that are really expensive. A treadmill once, somebody purchased. I've gotten $100 commission off a few of those items. If you're promoting through Amazon specifically, that's another way that you can generate more commission than just the crochet supplies that you are promoting.

Again, the big thing here is that, yes, it's totally worth the time because you are serving your audience and this is a way for them to serve you back. They feel good about knowing that you're getting paid for this and because you share that, hopefully you do. Hopefully you show that these are affiliate links and that this is how people can pay you back for that information that you are sharing with them. A lot of people are going to seek out your affiliate links and make sure to go through them in the future. That's only going to increase your sales and your commission too. But definitely, doesn't matter what the cost of the item is. Affiliate marketing, if it's possible, you might as well do it. If you know that you're providing value, you might as well give yourself a way to get paid back in return. Over time as these articles and whatever you publish get put out there into the world and shared and climb the ranks of Google, it just becomes a bigger part of your archive. You're going to see a lot more commission down the road, too.

That's the short answer here. That's exactly what I would continue to do. Continue to add links. Try to make it easy for yourself in terms of getting links that are … or making it easy for yourself to put those links into your stuff. I think that's one thing that holds a lot of people back is the how-to of affiliate marketing. I think you can definitely find a process, make it easy for yourself, so that the next time you come up with an article, you can easily find that product and put it in there super quick so it's not even any time at all for you to do that. Again, it's definitely worth your time to do it because you're going to get more commissions down the road.

That's that. I encourage you to continue to do it. Brittany, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. Just hit the record button, ask your question. I get about a dozen questions a day now for AskPat, which is awesome. Unfortunately, that means I can't answer all of them, but if I do answer your question and if it gets featured here, my assistant Jessica will message you and you will be featured, you'll get a t-shirt and all that good stuff, and you'll also help out everybody else who has the same question or something similar to you too.

Again, thank you Brittany. Thank you to everybody else out there listening.

Thanks so much for listening in. To finish off, heres a quote from Glen Gilmore. He said, “When you lose followers because of where you stand, you strengthen your tribe.” I love that. Just because you're doing something that you believe in, don't worry if you're going to lose followers, but you strength your tribe. You strengthen that message. So when you lose followers because of where you stand, you strengthen your tribe. Think about that.

Cheers, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks guys.