Suzi Smart BearEarn a bit extra by becoming an affiliate!
Affiliate marketing isn’t just beneficial for the businesses selling products or services – it can be another source of income for micro businesses and freelancers.
Although sometimes the word affiliate has some negative associations, for me, I only become an affiliate if I believe in the product or service, not just for the sake of it or for earning money – it’s usually because I’m already recommending them to my clients, small business mentees, and associates so it makes sense to earn a referral fee.
If you’re considering dipping your toes into the world of affiliate marketing from the affiliate’s perspective, here’s why you should give it serious thought:
1. Minimal Startup Costs
You don’t need a hefty investment to get started. Unlike starting your own business where you might need inventory, office space, or employees, affiliate marketing requires minimal upfront costs. Your existing social media, website, webinars or blog are often all you need.
2. Passive Income Potential
Once you’ve established your affiliate links and content, they can continue to earn you income without constant attention. As long as people are visiting your chosen platform and clicking on your affiliate links, you can earn commissions. And, if like me you’re already referring people, it’s just a case of remembering to send the unique affiliate link. Often there is a discount for the person you’re referring too so it’s a win win for both parties.
3. Diverse Opportunities
As an affiliate, you aren’t restricted to one product or service. You can promote multiple products/ services from multiple businesses, diversifying your income streams. Although, in my case, I tend to be an affiliate for products or services my clients are already looking for. For example, it would be odd to recommend a shoe cleaner to someone looking to get a website redesign!
5. Learn While You Earn
Affiliate marketing can be a fantastic way to learn about digital marketing, SEO, and content creation too. As you work to optimise your affiliate efforts, you’ll gain valuable skills that are highly sought after in today’s digital age.
6. Support Small Businesses
By becoming an affiliate for small businesses, you support local entrepreneurs and startups. Small businesses often offer unique, high-quality products and services that can be a joy to promote.
HINT: If you or your clients run events, some ticketing software, like Eventbrite, offer the ability to create affiliate links – meaning the potential to earn back anything you’ve spent on tickets!
7. Build Valuable Partnerships
Working closely with small businesses can lead to lasting professional relationships. These relationships can open doors to other opportunities, be it collaborations, sponsorships, or even joint ventures.Plus, it might be the case that you can create your own affiliate links for other small businesses to pass out, bringing you business.
8. No Customer Service Hassles
As an affiliate, you promote the product and earn a commission for every sale or action. The responsibility of handling customer queries, returns, or complaints rests with the business, not you. Again, I would suggest that you do your homework though and only recommend good companies – the last thing you want is for one of your customers to have a bad experience and for it to reflect badly on you.
9. Growing Your Own Brand
Promoting products or services as an affiliate can also help in building your personal brand. Consider it an ‘add-on service’ to your clients to provide them with products and services that help solve their issues.
With consistent effort and by providing genuine value, you can establish yourself as a trusted voice in your niche.
Who are my affiliates?
It will come as no surprise that most of my affiliates are related to web services – either website building platforms, hosting providers or digital tools I think are amazing.
But I also have a couple of affiliate links for small businesses that I believe in and as I value their services, I’m happy to recommend them.
So if you’re looking for voucher codes or money off subscriptions, then here is a list of some of my affiliates and the links are obviously my affiliate links:
KKB Service
These lovely ladies are paralegals and provide loads of different services including standard contracts and templates.
Follow this link to go directly to their shop
Freelance Heroes
This is a great portal tool for the self-employed/freelancers offering helpful advice, free webinars, a directory, jobs board, co-working space listings and events, plus more! They’re really supportive no matter what industry you’re in.
Go here to check them out
Go Simple Tax
This is a great tool for helping you with you tax return and self-assessment submission. Perfect for new start ups who don’t have the budget for full accountancy services but want to make sure they’re doing it right.
Follow this link to learn more
WordPress.com
We love WordPress and we build mainly on WordPress.org (standalone software on your own hosting) but some people may prefer the managed version of WordPress.com and so it’s a no-brainer to be an affiliate for this service as well.
Follow this link to find out more about WordPress.com
Siteground Hosting
Siteground is great for hosting ecommerce websites as well as brochure websites – they offer a range of features and have great 24/7 support which is why we think it’s great for larger websites that might need the confidence of having support available if it’s needed.
Check out Sitegrounds hosting options here
Ecologi
Ecologi plant trees on your behalf, amongst other climate initiatives, to help you off-set your carbon. You can join as a person, or as a company and they regularly update you to tell you how your off-setting is doing.
The set up is super quick and easy.
Plant some trees with Ecologi by going here
Namecheap
I’ve been using Namecheap for domains for a while as it’s both reasonable priced, and a good service. They also offer hosting and emails.
Follow this link to see what else they do
Krystal Hosting
This is my favourite hosting platform because not only is it one of the easiest to use and set up, but it’s also sustainable hosting! Yey. They’re also a lovely bunch – we went to their birthday Oktoberfest themed party the other year, which was free for their customers to attend, and had a great time.
Get Krystal hosting here
20i
Another sustainable hosting provider is 20i. I’ve not used this as much (yet) but I have clients on this hosting who love it so I’m going on their experiences as well as their green credentials for this recommendation.
See 20i hosting options here
Create.net
Another green/sustainable option but this time for a website builder. If you don’t want to use WordPress or any of the other builders out there (check out which builder is the most ethical in this blog) then give Create.net a try. It’s reasonably priced, easy to use and they have a great support community on Facebook. It’s a small team who are genuinely interested in helping you succeed rather than a large faceless company who just want your dosh.
Learn more about Create.net here
Shopify
If you’re building an Ecommerce website then I do recommend Shopify which was built purely for this purpose. It’s not for everyone but has some great features. Feel free to book in for a free consultation using the form below if you want help deciding on the best platform for your next ecommerce website.
Learn more about Shopify here
ECWID
And, another ecommerce platform tool is ECWID, I’ve used this for clients a couple of times – it does let you create a website on their platform, but it also embeds nicely, if you already have a website but want to add a shop functionality.
Check out Ecwid here
Memtime (previously Timebro)
I love love love this tool – it saves me hours. Since I caught covid, my memory has been awful, and mix that with Autism and you get…well nothing, literally – I forget to start a timer to monitor my time and I forget to stop it. With this tool, I don’t need to! It does it all for me.
It also means I can acurately charge for projects and work for clients because it just sits in the background making a note of everything I do so I can tot it up later. There’s also a way to automatically add tasks to projects but I haven’t got around to setting that up yet.
Learn more about this wonderful tool here
Want me to be an affiliate for you?
If you think I’d be a good affiliate for your brand, feel free to get in touch – I will do some research first, and let you know if it’ll be a good fit for me. If it is then I’d be happy to add you to my list of affiliates and refer you to my customers and small business mentees.
