042 – How to Earn Money from Affiliate Marketing for Musicians

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Have you ever heard of affiliate marketing?

It’s pretty cool – you get to promote products other people have created and earn commissions on them. That’s right, you can make money from things you didn’t even have to create!

In this episode, I talk about how to get started in affiliate marketing and strategies you can use to get people to click on your affiliate links.

Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – Overlooked opportunities for musicians and affiliate marketing
00:43 – What is affiliate marketing?
01:06 – What businesses, services, or products can you promote?
01:30 – How to promote affiliate products
01:44 – Strategy #1 – Including links in your blog post or website pages
01:58 – Strategy #2 – Creating a resources or recommended products page on your website
02:24 – Strategy #3 – Create product reviews
02:58 – The importance of affiliate disclaimers
03:35 – Getting started in affiliate marketing
04:00 – Affiliate marketing is hard work
04:15 – Thanks and leave a comment

Transcription:

Thanks for joining me. Recently, I’ve been talking about some of the overlooked opportunities for musicians, and affiliate marketing I believe is one of those things that is largely overlooked by musicians.

I think there’s just a lot of misunderstanding about it and people don’t understand it properly in order to be able to utilize it and make money with it. So, it is an opportunity to help you generate more income potentially.

It’s not going to work overnight and it may take time for it to work, but that’s okay because everything you do is really going to take some hard work.

What is affiliate marketing? It’s very simple. It’s the opportunity to earn commissions on products you promote.

Affiliate marketing is the opportunity to earn commissions on products you promote. Click To Tweet

Now you can’t earn commissions automatically – you have to sign up as an affiliate with the business’s products or services that you are interested in promoting, but there is a ton of affiliate programs already out there so I don’t think you’re going to have any trouble finding some.

So, what businesses, products, or services can you promote? Obviously, you want to be thinking about your audience and what would appeal to them and what they would be likely to buy. It’s no use promoting things that they’re not likely to buy.

But other than that, there aren’t really many restrictions. You can just go to any website, any business and find out whether or not they have an affiliate program. Usually there’s a link in the footer. You can also just Google it.

How do you promote affiliate products? I’ve broken it down into three simple ways. I think strategy one and two are relatively easy to do and anybody could set this up. Strategy number three is going to be a little more intense and not for the faint of heart.

Number one, include links in your blog posts or pages. Anybody could do that. All you need to do is copy and paste an affiliate link that they give you to promote your products through and then they’ll track it for you and then they’ll send you commissions when you’ve made some money.

Number two is create a resources or recommended products page on your website. To see some great examples, you can go to ChrisDucker.com D-U-C-K-E-R or even smartpassiveincome.com. Just click on “resources” in the navigation bar and you’ll see what they’ve done.

The one on The Music Entrepreneur HQ is not set up very differently as well so if you just click on products and scroll down to recommended products you’ll see how I’ve set it up.

Number three, and again this is the most effort intensive method you could be using is to create product reviews. It could be a blog post. It could be a podcast episode, and it could even be a video. Product reviews that are honest and talk about the upsides as well as the downsides of the product, what you liked about it, what you didn’t like about it.

Offering an honest and balanced perspective is the best way to go. People will resonate with that. They want to know everything that’s right, as well as everything that’s wrong, or anything that might be missing from the product and that helps them make a better buying decision. So that’s your job.

You can also learn more about reviewing products in this episode of Using Your Power:

In most cases, you will need to include a simple affiliate disclaimer on your website any time you’re promoting an affiliate link, okay? Make sure to check the terms and conditions of the affiliate offer.

I know nobody reads that stuff, but you do need to read that stuff when you are promoting affiliate products just so you don’t get shut down or banned.

Usually something along the lines of “I will earn a commission on this product at no additional charge for you if you choose to purchase through this link”. Language like that is more than enough. But double check, triple check just to make sure that’s all you need to put on your website in terms of a disclaimer.

A very simple way for you to get started in affiliate marketing right away is to sign up as an Amazon Associate. As you know, Amazon started as a bookstore but guess what? Nowadays you can buy anything on Amazon, which simply means that whatever you can find on Amazon there’s probably a good chance you can also earn an affiliate commission on it by promoting it to your audience on your blog or website.

As I said at the beginning, affiliate marketing is hard work just like anything else and it will take time to work but it’s just one more way for you to generate more revenue for your music career. Without putting a ton of additional effort into some outside activity.

So, what do you think? Are you going to get started in affiliate marketing? Are you going to start supplementing your income by promoting products that you like and believe in? Let me know in the show notes.

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David Andrew Wiebe

Founder & CEO at Music Entrepreneur HQ

Award-winning composer, best-selling author, professional musician coach, and podcaster of over 10 years. Wiebe helps musicians like you unlock your full potential. If you'd like to be notified whenever the blog is updated, click here to subscribe.

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