Affiliate Marketing for OTPreneurs: Generating Income Without a Product or Service

Have you ever heard of the term affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing allows you to earn an income without the need to create a product or service.

In this episode of the OTPreneur podcast, we delve into the world of affiliate marketing, explaining what it is and why it could be a game-changer for your business. We'll share valuable insights, practical tips, and words of wisdom to help you navigate the world of affiliate marketing and leverage it as a side hustle for your OT business.

If you're ready to explore an avenue for generating income beyond the traditional client care model, tune into this episode now and discover the potential of affiliate marketing for OTPreneurs.

Learning Objectives:

• Analyze the concept of affiliate marketing and its potential as a passive income stream for occupational therapy entrepreneurs.
  
  
• Apply strategies for selecting and promoting affiliate products or services that align with personal and professional values within the occupational therapy niche.
  
  
• Evaluate the ethical considerations and rules associated with affiliate marketing programs, including compliance with guidelines for marketing and promotion.
  
  
• Develop a plan for leveraging affiliate marketing as a learning experience to enhance skills in online business, marketing, and audience engagement for potential future entrepreneurship endeavors.

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Thanks for tuning in! We'll see you next time

Transcript

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:00:00]:
Hey, Otpreneur. Today I want to explore the idea of generating an income without the need to create a product or service. Sound too good to be true? Well, that is the beauty of affiliate marketing. And today I want to share with you what affiliate marketing is and how you can get started with affiliate marketing as a side hustle. Welcome back to another episode of the Otpreneur podcast. It's great to have you here, and today it is just you and I. As much as I love going back and forth with my OT for life or Sarah Putt, we decided to do a few monologue episodes as she shared in her last episode. Speaking of which, if you missed that last episode, or maybe you skipped it because you saw the title emergencies or something like that, just go back and listen.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:00:49]:
To mean maybe you don't have an emergency going on right now, but trust me, you want to hear what Sarah had to say. Sarah got very real in that episode, sharing a little bit about a family emergency that kind of had to change our plans here at the Otpreneur. And this is one of the reasons that Sarah and I both got into entrepreneurship, and maybe the reason you're trying to get into entrepreneurship. The ability to have that freedom, to have the fluidity, to be able to drop everything at a moment's notice, to be with your family, whether it's to go on a vacation or to go into the hospital because someone is sick, that is a big reason as to why many of us get into entrepreneurship. And that's kind of what Sarah had to talk about in the last episode. So if you missed it, go back, have a listen. It's a good one. And since this is now the second monologue show that we've had, Sarah did one and now I'm doing one, we'd love for you to leave us a review and let us know how you're enjoying these solo shows.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:01:50]:
Do you enjoy these episodes where it's just one of us? Do you like having episodes where it's myself and Sarah? Or maybe you enjoy the guest episodes best, like we had with Danielle and me back in episode 14. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and let us know how you're enjoying the show and what type of episodes are really getting through to you. And with the intro now out of the way, let's go ahead and dive into the world of affiliate marketing. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to discuss what it is, why you may want to consider becoming an affiliate for a company, and how to get started at the very end. I'll also share a few of my tips and words of wisdom, if you want to call it that, from my experiences with affiliate marketing. So what is affiliate marketing? When I ask a room of occupational therapy practitioners what affiliate marketing is, or to raise their hand if they've ever heard of it or know what it is, I get very few hands raised. Affiliate marketing has been around for many years, but as OT practitioners and maybe even OTPreneurs, it's not a term that you would likely come across unless you were actively seeking to start an online business like I have for the last five years. Affiliate marketing refers to the process of generating an income by helping others sell their products or services.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:03:15]:
And while you may not have known it was affiliate marketing, you probably have experienced someone engaged in affiliate marketing while scrolling through your social media. In fact, think back to the last time you were scrolling through Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, whatever your social media of choice is, we don't judge here. And think about that last time where your attention really got caught because you saw someone maybe showing off a new pair of shoes, or maybe they were showing off a hair curler or a new makeup product, or maybe it was a trampoline. I don't know. Whatever it might have been and the whole story or the whole video, whatever the social media platform was, was all about how great the tool was. Maybe a few things that weren't so great about it. But then at the end of the video, the end of the blog post, whatever it was, they kind of say, hey, if you want this product too, click here and get it now that was likely someone engaging in affiliate marketing. The whole point of that post, while it was probably interactive and engaging for you, the point was to get you down to the bottom or the end of the video where you could click on that link to take you to Amazon to take you to target or whatever website it was to purchase that.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:04:36]:
Now, that person likely isn't an employee of Amazon or an employee of target. They're likely an influencer or just someone that's trying to make a few dollars on the side through affiliate marketing. So let's play this out. Let's assume that you click on the link, it takes you to Amazon, and then you decide to purchase that $20 makeup kit or whatever it might be a toy for therapy. Well, if you go ahead and purchase that, the person who got you over to Amazon is going to make a commission for your purchase and it's going to be a commission not just for that one product typically, but anything that you purchased that time around through Amazon. So if you added five other things to your shopping list and it came out to a total of $100, well, that person might be making about 4% of $100 as a commission for getting you over to Amazon. Now, you might say, hold up, wait, that person is getting four to 5%. What about me? Am I paying an extra four to 5% because that person is getting that commission? In most cases, the answer is no.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:05:47]:
Amazon, or whatever the company that you actually end up purchasing from has already baked that four to 5% or whatever the commission is directly into the cost of the goods sold. So if the product that you were marketed from social media was a $20 toy guitar and you had gone to Amazon without going through the marketer's link, that guitar would still be $20. But this marketer helped Amazon get you to the guitar. You may never have found the guitar without that marketer. So that four to 5% is a little commission for them to help get you over to that toy guitar or whatever the item was. All right, so now that you see your role as the person who was BNB being marketed to, you can see how this could potentially benefit you as the affiliate marketer yourself. If there are specific items out there that you use frequently, whether it's something from Amazon or maybe an EMR or maybe it is a email service that you use, or a website that you constantly use, most of those or many of them have their own affiliate marketing program, and you could be marketing that program to those who follow you and who, you know, might use those tools the same way that you do. All right, so before I get into the why you might want to consider affiliate marketing and how to get started, there's a few words and terms that I want to go over, because I will likely be using these, and I think I've already used a few.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:07:19]:
So I just want to point these out for you so that as you're diving into the world of affiliate marketing, you kind of have an understanding of what you're looking at. The first term is affiliates. And if you hear someone say, I'm an affiliate, or my affiliates, what they're talking about are those people who are actually selling the product. So that person that you came across on social media was an affiliate for Amazon, you can be an affiliate for Amazon, you could be an affiliate for Target, you can be an affiliate for almost any website out there or company that has an affiliate or sometimes known as a partner program. So to be an affiliate, you are the person doing the marketing now going hand in hand with the affiliates is what is called an affiliate link. An affiliate link is a special referral link that is dedicated to that affiliate. So for example, if you were to click on that link over to the toy guitar from the marketer I was talking about earlier, and you look in the URL on your computer, it might say slash a bunch of random letters for the product, and then at the end it might say ref equals John. Because maybe it was John that was the one who got you to go over to Amazon.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:08:39]:
Or it might be some unique code. That code is specific to John that is showing Amazon that John was the one who sent you there. So an affiliate link is just a highly specialized link that is designed to basically track people when they use it. That's where the next terminology comes into play, which is cookies. Everyone loves cookies except those who follow you around. Now, cookies basically are the things that track you. And that's why a lot of people are now using web browsers like DuckDuckgo, because duckduckgo is trying to get rid of cookies. And if people get rid of cookies, then basically affiliate marketing is also kind of going, unless you use a referral code.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:09:27]:
More on that in just a second. But anyways, cookies are what are used to track you when it comes to affiliate marketing. Some companies offer a very quote unquote short cookie, meaning a seven day cookie. So if it's seven days, then that means once you get to Amazon, it'll track you there for seven days. If you make a purchase within seven days, then it's going to give the purchase to John. However, maybe you don't purchase for two weeks. Well, John's cookie ran out, so John's no longer going to get that commission because his cookie is gone. Some cookies can last much longer, 30 days, 60 days.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:10:05]:
It all depends on what the company has set up for their affiliate program. I know, getting a little complex here, but I just want to let you know these things. And as I alluded to just a moment ago, referral codes, some companies prefer to use referral codes instead of special links. So, for example, let's use John again. And John sends you to Amazon, but he doesn't use a special link. Instead he says, hey, use my discount code or use my promo code or my referral code. John 23 and when you use that referral code, John 23, you might get a discount or you might not get a discount depending on how it's set up. But now Amazon knows to give John that referral commission because obviously you used his code.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:10:51]:
He's the one who sent you over there. And the final terminology that I want to talk about before we dive into whether or not you should consider being an affiliate for a program is the commission rates. Commission rates can vary widely across the web when it comes to commissions for affiliate marketing. Some of the huge companies like Amazon offer maybe a two to 4% commission, sometimes a 10% if it's something that they're, like, promoting at the time. Other companies might give you a 100% commission because they're okay with giving you all the commission on this sale because they know that if you get someone into their atmosphere, they can sell them more and more and more and make money after that initial sell. So it could be anywhere from a percentage of one point all the way up to 100% is what your commission rate could be. Likewise, the length of time that you are paid out for a commission can vary widely. You might get paid out one time, or you might get paid out for the entire life that that person is paying into that company.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:12:00]:
So again, with Amazon, it's usually a one time purchase, right? And so you are only going to get paid out your commission one time when that person makes a purchase. However, if you are marketing for an ongoing subscription, say an EMR or maybe a podcast where the person has to pay $15 a month, or, I don't know, anything else that's subscription based, you could potentially earn a commission every time that person purchases or re ups their subscription. So you might have a 10% commission that lasts one year or that lasts two years or that lasts 20 years because that person never unsubscribes from the product that they purchase from a recommendation that you gave them. So every month you could be earning a 10% commission, or whatever it might be. Some companies do have that lifetime commission. Others will say, hey, we'll give you 10% for the first six months or the first year, and then after that it ends. But I just want to let you know, because when you are choosing who you want to be an affiliate marketer for, that's something that might pique your interest and ultimately make you decide whether or not it's worth your time to be an affiliate for that company. Okay, now that I've given you a little bit of background on what affiliate marketing is and kind of how it works, I want to give you three reasons as to why you, as an occupational therapy entrepreneur, may want to consider affiliate marketing.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:13:30]:
I've got three reasons here, and this first one is exactly why I got started with affiliate marketing in the first place. And that is because you don't need to develop a product, you don't need to develop a service. You don't have to create a course or a community or anything that you actually need to sell yourself. Yet you can begin to generate an income that can help you eventually create your own services and products. The OT schoolhouse is a perfect example for this, and I know there's other OT programs out there that have done something similar where I personally was an affiliate for two professional development popular professional development online programs out there and over time I began to create my own professional development programs online. So I have transitioned from really marketing other professional development companies to now I'm using the skills that I learned through affiliate marketing to now market my own programs. And as I'm doing that, I'm phasing out my marketing for the other programs because my commission is going from ten to 15% when I market their programs to 90% when I market my own programs. Right, there are some fees that get taken out, it's more like 95%.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:14:50]:
But I can make a lot more money by marketing my own programs and I'm helping a lot more people. My second reason for why you might want to consider becoming an affiliate for another program is that you can begin to generate income relatively quickly. Like I said, you don't have to develop a product. But even more importantly, you're going to learn a lot about online business in the process. You're going to learn about websites, you're going to learn about using special links. You're going to learn how commissions and affiliate programs work. You might even realize, hey, I need a website. Or maybe you start creating videos on YouTube to create a tutorial about how to use this EMR that you're an affiliate for.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:15:32]:
When it comes to a business online or offline, learning how to market a product, whether it's yours or someone else's, is extremely valuable. Learning how to write emails so that people will actually click on links. Learning how to create a video that people watch for more than 5 seconds. Learning how to start a podcast and talk to a microphone for 45 minutes without anyone else in the room. Those are all skills that will help you one day once you have your own product to sell or your own service to market. I can definitely attribute much of my marketing ability now to some of the products that I started with selling. Whether it was something small like a therapy toy on Amazon or a $300 professional development subscription. These are all things that help me develop my ability to have and run my online business.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:16:26]:
Now you can almost think of it as an investment that's also going to earn you some income on the side when you make some sales. And the third reason that you might want to consider affiliate marketing kind of plays right off of that because who knows, you might end up being really good at it. And the thing about affiliate marketing is that the more people you have to market to, the more likely you are to bring in consistent and higher earnings. So if you start with one product and you're marketing that to 100 people, and maybe you're getting 510 people that are purchasing and you're generating an income, well, you just had a five to 10% conversion rate. Now imagine that you have 1000, 10,000, 20,000 people on your email list or your subscribers on Instagram. With a five to 10% conversion percentage, you could start making quite a bit of money. And then maybe you start to see that conversion rate taper off. So you find another product or another service that you can market.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:17:31]:
You already have the audience that you have built up, but now you have a new product to offer them, to show them, to let them know how it's going to help them. So you just went from maybe 10% of people already having what you're trying to offer to 0% of people that you have to offer this new product that you have using that five to 10% conversion rate, again, imagine what could happen. And this can go over and over and over again. You can always find a new product to potentially sell. As long as you can keep that trust with your audience. That's key. All right, if you are still listening to this podcast, you're probably really trying to figure out, okay, I'm convinced, Jason, how do I get started? If you've listened to the podcast before, then you know that we like to say niche down or find that really unique audience for you. But in this case, I'm kind of going to go the opposite direction.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:18:26]:
And I'm going to say start with Amazon or Target. Go to Amazon.com target. Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page and you're going to see something that says partner program or affiliate program. And the reason that I want you to start with Amazon or Target is because a, everyone buys from Amazon or Target, and b, you likely buy from Amazon and Target and know what you like to purchase from those websites. You should always try to sell things that you love, that you use, things that you can actually naturally speak good about. Right? So I want you to start with just something simple. On Amazon or Target. To become an affiliate for one of these companies, you're going to have to give them some information, like where you plan or how you plan to market some of their products, and they might ask you about your audience.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:19:19]:
And be honest. I have found that both Amazon and Target are pretty liberal when it comes to giving out their affiliate program to. They're kind of like, hey, anyone who wants it, take it. So be honest with them. Other programs might be a little bit more difficult to get on. Like they might want to see that your Instagram already has 10,000 followers or something like that. But Amazon and target, pretty simple. Once you're on one of these platforms, find one item that you know that you love and that you love to talk about, that you know so much about it that you can easily explain the benefits.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:19:56]:
Bonus points if this is something that you already know, some of your friends and your family members or people that you have in your audience may also want. Once you've got that figured out, grab that special link that's specific to the product page, which is simple to do. You just kind of have to follow the directions within the affiliate portal that you'll be on and decide how you're going to share it. Make a plan for how you're going to get this item out into the world, whether it be through a blog post, through social media posts. Maybe you want to create a YouTube video about it. If it's something that it's more expensive, it might be worth kind of conducting a webinar about it. What I've seen many therapists do is that they find a few different products that they really recommend and they almost make a handout for it. And then on their website they have a link that says, here's my recommended resources.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:20:48]:
And when someone downloads that recommended resources, it's a PDf file of five to ten things that people can purchase on Amazon. And each of those links to Amazon is an affiliate product or an affiliate link. So that could be one way that you start to generate an affiliate income. Your affiliate income is not going to jump off the page. You're not going to have a bunch of zeros at the end of your affiliate income right away. In fact, through Amazon and Target, it's going to be very difficult to actually start to generate a sizable income unless you have a very large audience. But going back to what I said earlier, you just learned a brand new skill that you can now rinse and repeat. You can find other services that instead of having a 5% commission, have a 30% or 40% or 50% commission and you can begin to market those items.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:21:42]:
And while you're marketing those items, you can begin to develop your own product, whether it's similar or completely different to the item that you are offering as an affiliate. Like I said earlier, I went from being an affiliate for Amazon to being an affiliate for a large professional development company that earned me like $25 to $30 for every sale rather than $25 to every sale at Otpreneur. We are not affiliates for Amazon or Target, but we are affiliates for some business types of programs that we commonly use, such as Send Fox, which is an email marketing program. We are an affiliate for Appsumo where business owners can find cheap software to help them start their business. We're an affiliate for several of the programs that we use that we love and that we are willing to recommend. I'll tell you honestly, there's also a few programs that we're not really a big fan of. And so I'm not going to be an affiliate because I also don't want your trust to be diminished by me recommending to you a program that is not great. Your trust is really important here.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:22:49]:
If you buy something that I recommend once and it's great, you're likely to buy something else that I recommend. But if you get it and it is terrible, not only are you not going to buy what I recommend in the future, but you're also going to hold that one purchase against me and you might just stop listening to this podcast, which I don't want. Right. I want to help you. And so you have to be careful when it comes to affiliate marketing because you're building trust while also selling something. So you have to keep that in mind. Trust comes first, and as a result of building trust, then you will get the sales from affiliate marketing. And who knows if your business does really well, it takes off.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:23:29]:
You start as an affiliate marketer, but then you end up developing your own product. One day you might be on the opposite side of things. You might be the person with the affiliate program and affiliates that are marketing your own programs and you get to decide what the commissions look like. If people are getting paid one time or multiple times and you are finding the people to come in to support you. It's kind of a big circle here, right? You start off as the small affiliate marketer and then one day you're eventually that person that's creating the affiliate program for others to help you make sales. Now, as we start to wrap up this podcast, I did want to finish with a few words of wisdom, a few tips, and a few words of caution as well. I hope that you have already grasped this from the way that I've talked about affiliate marketing. This is not a get rich quick scheme.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:24:21]:
It does take a lot of work, especially if your audience is relatively small. If you are marketing only to occupational therapy practitioners, it's just ot a huge market compared to if you are marketing to teachers or to parents or to individuals who live in the state of California. Right. The group of occupational therapy practitioners just is a smaller group. And it's especially smaller when you start to divide us into our specialty areas. Right. School based versus pediatric versus acute care and so on and so forth. So yeah, this is not a get rich quick scheme.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:25:00]:
And as I mentioned, trust comes first. The same reason that you often avoid all the tables at the AOTA conference or your state conference inside the hall is because you don't want to be marketed to, right. Well, online it's the same thing people don't want to be marketed to. So you have to build that trust with them before you can market to them. Another thing is that you need to know the rules. Different programs have different rules. Amazon is known for having very stringent rules. They don't want you to send out affiliate links in an email.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:25:31]:
So you got to get creative about how you're going to do that. Maybe you have to send out an email with a link to your website, and then on your website you have the link to Amazon. There may also be stipulations about when you can market someone's program. For instance, my conference that I have, I have affiliate marketers for that. But the conference is only a one time event. Right? So the marketing window for my affiliates is a open and closed time period. It's only a few weeks that they have in order to market. I let them know well in advance, hey, please don't market before this date or after this date because I don't want there to be confusion among the people who are interested in my conference.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:26:13]:
So check the rules. Usually they're not too difficult to figure out. You just kind of got to read through them and see what they are. And then my final tip here is just to enjoy the process, enjoy the process of learning how to market. Because who knows, one day if things go well, you might be on the other side of the process and you might be marketing your own product or bringing on affiliates to help you market your product. And the ability to market is just so important not only for your business but even for yourself. As an employed individual, the ability to market yourself as a professional, as an occupational therapy practitioner is huge. Being able to market yourself can help you get raises.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:26:56]:
It can help you get a job. It can help you get funding for your OT program because you are able to market the program and the job that you and the rest of your team have done. So even if you're not making a lot of money with affiliate, but you try it, there are so many other big takeaways that you can get from it other than just the money as a side hustle. All right, that is going to wrap us up for today. I hope you enjoyed this aspect of learning about affiliate marketing. And I know that affiliate marketing is not for everyone. It may not be for you, but if it is, I definitely recommend that you get started. Go on to Amazon or Target or some other large company.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:27:39]:
Many companies have one and just join their partner program. It doesn't hurt you to get started. There's no cost to be a part of it. If you don't do anything with it, you don't do anything with it. Eventually, if they see that you're not making any sales or even getting clicks to their websites, they might just shut down your account. But again, there's no harm in trying. They are not going to charge your credit card. They don't even have access to your credit card.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:28:05]:
So they're not going to charge you for being an affiliate. If you enjoyed this episode and you enjoyed learning a little bit about affiliate marketing, hit me up on Instagram over at Otpreneur podcast and let us know. Let me know that hey, this is something I'm going to try and let me know how it goes. Let me know who you decide to be an affiliate for. And if you need any words of wisdom over there, let me know. I'd be happy to respond. All right, well, thank you again so much for listening to the Otpreneur podcast. We'll be back with you in just a few weeks to continue helping you on your OT business journey.

Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L [00:28:39]:
And just remember, wherever you are on your Otpreneur journey, we are here to support you, as always is. You can learn more about us over@otpreneur.com and we look forward to supporting you. See you next time. Bye.