Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to make passive income. Unfortunately, most people fail at it, and the reason is cause they don’t follow a few basic rules.
The ones below are the 5 rules I follow to choose what products to promote, and how to make it work!

#1 – PREFER RECURRING PAYMENT PRODUCTS

I rarely affiliate for single-payment products. I definitely prefer recurring payment products, especially the ones that are difficult to quit!
Don’t worry, I’m not promoting drugs.
I’m affiliated to software like Teachable, ActiveCampaign and Elementor. There are a few things these tools have in common.
  • They need to be paid monthly or annually.
  • Moving to a competitor or quitting them is difficult.
Let me give you an example.
If I create my website and all my landing pages with Elementor, it will take me a long time to move to a competitor. I will need to recreate all my pages with the new tool. In the same way, if I quit paying for Elementor, I won’t have the possibility to modify the pages I created with it.
Or take Teachable. I have my online courses on it, and all the content is uploaded on the platform. Moving to a competitor means a lot of work to migrate all my content, and quitting the service would mean deactivating my courses.
These 2 characteristics combined assure you a recurring commission and a low probability that users will quit paying for the service.

#2 – PRIORITISE PROGRAMS THAT HAVE LONG TIME COOKIES

Cookies are online stalkers. They track your clicks, and they recognize if someone bought a product because of your recommendation. In this case through your affiliate link.
Most of the people anyway don’t pay attention if a program offers short time or long time cookies. To be more precise, let’s assume someone uses your affiliate link, but she doesn’t buy. Then she revisits the page without using your affiliate link and buys the product. If the purchase was made within the cookie time, you get a commission anyway.
Amazon, for example, offers just 24-hour cookies on regular affiliate links. I suggest you promote only products that offer long time cookies.
Search for this info in the detail page, and usually is well hidden like those tiny texts at the bottom of contracts that end up fucking up your life.

#3 – CHOOSE PRODUCTS YOU ALREADY USE

If you’re familiar with a product and you use it consistently, you could teach how to use it and keep users paying for it.
It’s always a great idea to publish tutorials and guides on how to use the products you promote. If you have a YouTube Channel or a blog, they’re great channels to educate your followers on how to use those products productively.

#4 – PROMOTE THEM JUST WHEN THERE ARE DISCOUNTS

Apart from the affiliate links you may have in your articles or videos, you should promote those products via email or ads, just when these products are running discounts.
Target only your warm audience, people who read or watch your content.
It’s firstly a way to award your followers. Those discounts are a win-win situation. Plus, your followers are well aware of the benefits of using those products and will be happy to spare some money.

#5 – SIGN TO THOSE PRODUCTS NEWSLETTERS

If you want to promote a product, you definitely need to sign up for their newsletter.The reason is cause when they’re gonna launch a promotion, you’ll be the first to know it.
Sometimes they even send you content that you can use for the advertising.