 It's passive income, you can do it while you're sleeping. So every time I get in my beauty sleep, I'm getting paid for all the money. I like that. Welcome to The Journey. I'm Nealey. And I'm Morgan. And we're your GoDaddy guides for today. And in this episode, we're talking about how to use affiliate marketing for your business. All right, Morgan, why don't you tell us what is affiliate marketing? So affiliate marketing, it's super simple. Basically, you're a reseller for somebody else's product or service. So anytime that you post a link about this product or you write a review or just have a link on your website and one of your readers clicks and purchases that product, you get a small commission for every purchase. It's easy, it's awesome. And basically you get to sit back and enjoy all the money coming in. Right, it's like passive income, right? Yeah, it's passive income. You can do it while you're sleeping. So every time I get in my beauty sleep, I'm getting paid all the money. I like that. I don't have to have my own products or services. I don't have to deal with customer support, any of that. I just post about the products and services that I love and I use and then my readers get to reap the benefits because they're coming to my website, they're reading about my reviews or whatever I'm posting about. And if they like what I'm talking about and they end up purchasing, then I get a small kickback. It's great. I'm all about it, right? Especially sleeping and getting paid. Like what better is that? Goals. Goals, hashtag goals. All right, so we know what affiliate marketing is but how do we get started? Like what's those first steps? So the easiest way to get started is to tap into your own community. So if you already have a community of people who follow you, whether on your website, on your YouTube channel, on your Instagram, wherever it is, is go to them and start sharing the products and services that you love and using those affiliate links. The next step is to take it to your fans because you'll have members of your community but the next level are those fans who basically your word is gold to them and anything you do, they will buy, right? Because they just trust you, they love you. And so going to your community, going to your fans but also tapping into the traffic that you're getting from your website already. Those people may not be part of your community or your fans, they just might be finding you through Google but they're coming to you through Google because you're ranking high and they're finding articles and reviews and anything about that product or service that you're talking about. So start with that audience first and you're gonna have a lot of affiliate income. All right, so I really love the community aspect. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you've seen others use to really tap into that community with affiliate marketing? Yeah, there's an example that I love. I'm a part of this Facebook group. It has over 100,000 members and it's a private group. So you have to request to be a part of this group but it's just for clothing and shopping deals. And so anytime that the admins find a great deal or you can ask like, hey, I'm looking for Birkenstocks, is there a deal on this? They will go, they will find the best deal out there and they'll share the link and then you'll see everyone like, thank you so much. It's Christmas, people are excited to buy using that link. We all know it's an affiliate link but we're excited because we're getting a deal and the admins are happy to provide us a link because they're getting all the money. All right, I love that and especially you go back to it, getting paid while asleep and now those users can probably go on Google and search for deals by themselves but that's the power of affiliate marketing is you're giving it to them and you're basically doing a service and because of that they're gonna buy your link. I'm so appreciative that they can just go find the deal for me. My time is worth way more than searching for every single little deal. That's their job and that's why they have their affiliates for these companies and so if they can just do that for me and I can click the link and I can give them a little kickback, I'm happy to do that. All right, so tell me a little bit about how we should go about choosing who to, like what affiliate we should use? Well, first off, you should find affiliates for products and services that you love. You shouldn't sign up for every affiliate program just so you can get credit for all of these different things because that's inauthentic and that's not what your audience is coming to you for. Most likely they're coming to you for your niche, your specific category, the things that you focus on. So I would find those affiliate programs and sign up for those. And if this is your first time, just start small. Maybe start with one, you can do the Amazon affiliate, you can do Target. There are so many out there and go from there. Right, and what a lot of people do use is the Amazon affiliate, especially with the shopping, right? Like you go on, find the product, get the link and get that kickback. All right, so I signed up for affiliate marketing. I'm ready to go, but I wanna get paid while I sleep. How do we go about doing that? Yeah, so every program is different. Some programs you'll get paid every 30 days if you have sales. Some, it's different windows. Others, what's really cool is if someone clicks your link, they have different windows with the tracking cookie on when a customer can purchase. So some you have 48 hours and anything a customer purchases using that link, you get credit for. Some it's 30 days. So everyone is different, but you just gotta look into it and know that it's normal to have a longer window, especially for customers to return products. You're not gonna get credit for something that gets returned. So just look into it and know that it's probably on a monthly or bimonthly cadence. And that's super cool, right? Like not all of us are ready to buy it right now. We wanna kinda check it out, but if we go back, it's still your affiliate link and that's awesome. I love it. So I've got my affiliate marketing set up. I know how I'm gonna get paid and they've given me links and code all this nonsense to me, right? What do I do with it? First place is to start on your website. So you can put banner links in your sidebar. If you're doing a review post, you can put it at the bottom of the post. I have an animation news and reviews website. And so occasionally we'll get product to review for the new Disney movies that come out, the new Blu-rays. And so I make sure on my post that I mentioned the Blu-ray at the beginning that, hey, we're reviewing the Cinderella Blu-ray and I'll include a link to the affiliate right there just so they know, hey, I want this right now. I want to read your review. I just want to click and buy it, right? And then I will do my full review and at the bottom I'll have purchase and then I'll have different affiliate links. For my readers, I actually include quite a few. I include one for Amazon, I include one for Target. I actually include one for Best Buy because Best Buy does these crazy bundles and people like that. And so I just give my audience options so they can, after reading my review and deciding, yeah, I want this, they can buy where they want. Right, and you can also use it on social media. What's super popular is people have their review on YouTube of whatever it is and in the description I'll have some more info and then there are affiliate links right there. Yeah, so I go, for my website, what I'll do is I'll go look at all the new releases coming out for the year and I'll just auto-schedule on the release date saying, hey, this is out on Blu-ray now and it includes a link. So there's lots of ways that you can do this. Wherever your subscribers are, your followers are, your fans, your readers, get in front of them. And don't, I mean, you got to really read your audience. You don't want to do it too much where it's like, are you just a non-stop affiliate site? I was about to ask you that, like, how much is too much? Because I've been to sites and it's literally like every other line is an ad and it's just crazy to me. Yeah, and that's up for you and what you want your site to be. If that's what your site's all about and people keep coming and they love it, great. But it's up to you how you wanna balance your content. But that reminds me of something that's really important to do on your website is that you need to disclose that you are an affiliate. So on that post at the top very clearly or at the bottom, there's full FTC guidelines on this but you need to say this post contains affiliate links. By clicking on this, we get a small percentage. This is how our site keeps running or our business stays running. It's up to you how you wanna phrase that but you do need to call that out so that way people know, okay, this is what I'm getting into. And then you can also have a link to your full affiliate disclosure statement, you know, which is a separate page where you can really detail everything out, all the affiliates that you're members of and so on and so forth. And that's so great. That openness and honesty and transparency, not just for regulations but for your audience, your visitors, your customers, they wanna know that you're someone that they can trust and when you do that and you give value to them, they're gonna wanna give value back to you. Yep. So affiliate marketing, super easy. You can get started today. Again, it's a way to tap into your audience that already is coming to you for reviews, products, services, they love your content and it's a way that, hey, let me help you sort of thing, right? Absolutely. So comment below if you think affiliate marketing is right for your business. While you're there, smash that like button, subscribe and ring the bell so you know when the next videos are out. This has been the Journey Signing Off.