Let's talk about a profitable business model that most Nigerians either don't know about or completely misunderstand. 

It's called Affiliate marketing.

But first, let's start with what affiliate marketing really means.

According to investopedia.com Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services.

The third-party publishers are affiliates, and the commission fee incentivizes them to find ways to promote the company.

In simple words, it means Company A needs leads or product sales.

Then they recruit marketers to help them get those leads or product sales and pay them a percentage for each lead or sale that they make.

Affiliate marketing has been around for a while and was made popular by Amazon.com

As a matter of fact, there are 3 major types of Affiliate Marketing Programs

i. Cost per lead (CPL) - This is when an affiliate is paid based on each lead he is able to generate for a company. Lead(s) mean potential buyers.

ii. Revenue share - This is a business model where the company shares the overall revenue with an affiliate based on the customers the affiliate referred to the company.

iii. Cost per sale - This is the type of affiliate program run by sites like Amazon, Expertnaire, StakeCut, Clickbank etc

With cost per sale, affiliates are paid a certain amount of commission based on each product sales they generate.

These can be digital or physical products.

For the purpose of this article, the type of affiliate marketing we will be focusing on is this Cost per sale model.

The amount of commission an affiliate gets per product sale is set by the merchant that owns the product.

So, let's say a merchant sells a pair of shoes X for N10,000.

The merchant can decide to pay affiliates 10% of each shoe sale. That's translates to a N1,000 commission per sale.

The affiliate helps the merchant by helping him get a sale & a customer & the merchant rewards the affiliate with a commission per product sale.

What this means is:
- The affiliate doesn’t have to produce or import any product.
-They don't even have to deliver it to the customer.
-All they do is to refer a customer and get paid.

I always recommend that people especially newbies start with digital products instead of physical and the reason is simple.

Due to the high cost involved in creating a physical product, shipping it to the buyer etc, it's very rare to find  a physical product creator who is able to pay affiliates up to 25% per sale. 

However, with digital products, commissions can be as high as 80% due to the fact that there is little to no cost of creating the product and shipping to the end user. 

Here is a step by step process on how to Recommend Valuable Digital products created by Top Experts and Earn a commission in the process. 

STEP 1: you sign up for an affiliate program or platform where top experts list their products 

STEP 2: Choose a hot selling Product to Recommend to people who are in need of it. 

STEP 3: Set up an Automated and effective online selling system that that does all the heavy lifting and SELLS the HOT product 24/7. 

It is important to have access to an online selling system that doesn't require guess work as this will make selling  possible and easy even for newbies who have never sold anything online before. 

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and learnt something new.
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