How to learn when you earn: the salesperson

Are you a salesperson? What is a salesperson? You are a salesperson if:

• you are selling stuff for your profession


• as a kid in school you loved to sell small things to get more pocket money


• you roam markets and garage-sales, finding a bargain cleaning it and resell it


• you just looooove sales

If one of the above applies on you, then consider yourself a salesperson. On the Internet, a lot of

salespeople end up as affiliates.

How to earn affiliate revenue

You earn affiliate income by:

• selling or


• promoting other people's products

through your own website and

• collecting commissions.

Like any salesperson knows: if you are good and selling a lot, you can make a good income...

You also know that:

• the salesperson selling houses earns a much higher commission than


• the salesperson selling eggs on the market.

On the other had: the salesperson selling houses maybe has a few sales a year, where the salesperson selling eggs has a few baskets of eggs sold each day. This means depending on what you sell:

• you earn a lot of small commission each day or


• you earn a few big commissions month

Remember that in the beginning of being an affiliate: you are in the second group:

• you only earn a few commissions each month if all goes well.

Knowing this, you need to give yourself at least half a year in order to evaluate if you are learning and earning! If you don't have this patience, you are not a salesperson and you better choose making revenue with advertisement as your "learn when you earn" strategy.

What affiliate products do you sell?

You sell:

• what you are passionate about


• what is "good in the online market"


• what you obviously know inside out

What is good in the online market: do you buy a watch online? Not yet. Do you buy a book online? You might. That's why there is amazon.com selling books through affiliates and you don't hear about people selling Rolex watches online...

So start with products that are already successful. You eliminate the risk of promoting products that people may not want. In addition, your website keeps simple: the transactions with the customers are handled by the third- party site you affiliate yourself with.

Difficulty with affiliate products...

You are recommending a product, so you need to know your product. A good salesperson listen to his client and solves the clients questions with the possibilities of the product. I mean: do you buy something from a salesperson that cannot answer one single question about the product he or she is selling?

So if you are a salesperson: you need to do your homework: know what you are selling. This can be difficult as that sometimes means you need to purchase the item you are promoting yourself first. So be prepared to invest not only time but also money in the products you are recommending.

Know the product you recommend in order to sell!

How to become an affiliate?

Making money as an affiliate requires a simple copy and paste of the HTML code provided by the third party you affiliate yourself with. Mostly it has a little picture with a link to the third party you affiliate yourself with. Like:
"To buy this item: click here"  

Your visitors then reach the product you recommend on the third-party website. That is the first step, but:

• you don't have any money earned yet and


• your visitor left your site.

Now you have to sit and wait... If you told the truth about the product you were recommending, then this visitor could buy the product. Only when this visitor makes a purchase, your collect your commission.

So what is keeping you from starting to be an affiliate? Your own website of course! How to set up a cheap (or free), good, decent website we will tackle in the post after the next post.

In our next post we will explain:

how to learn and earn when you are not a salesperson.