Today is for businesses who don’t do affiliate marketing full time. You own a business as your primary source of income. You do not depend on income from working with other brands. And/or that is not your goal.

Remember three things as we head into this episode:

* Do what you want * Think long term* You can change at any time

This topic has come up in my own personal life as well as with a few of my business clients recently. So I figured it was about time I gave it a permanent place via the podcast. This is not the first time I’ve talked about affiliate marketing. So please feel free to go back and creep past episodes where I talk about considerations to make when choosing brands to work with, and different approaches to working with brands.

As with all of my content, I encourage you to take what makes sense for you, or what sits right with you in the season, and leave the rest. Or possibly come back to the rest later.

And ultimately remember that it’s 100% your choice whether you want to work with brands for compensation or not. Today’s episode is simply here to pull back the curtain a bit on affiliate marketing when your business is NOT IN affiliate marketing. Meaning you are NOT a full-time blogger, contact creator, or influencer.

Maybe I mentioned this before, maybe I haven’t, but there was a trend at the end of 2021 where full-time influencers and content creators were posting each month of the year how many brand deals they had, and how much they made per brand deal, or per month. Now I actually thought this was a really cool trend, because they were educating on how to land brand deals, how to pitch yourself, and how to negotiate for getting paid to post about a certain brand or product.

For me, this is very much so new age blogging. Full-time bloggers get paid for exposure and getting a brand in front of the bloggers audience and subscribers.

I joked that I wanted to make a post sharing how much I make per month from affiliate marketing because I feel like there is a misconception especially in the world of online health and fitness about coaches being influencers. And I’m not saying we can’t be both, but the percentage of which my business comes from my “influencing” is less than 2% of my business.

Also let’s be clear that the definition of influencer is very subjective person to person. So it’s difficult to speak definitively on the topic. Because what I’m referring to may be different than what someone else is referring to - so it’s all just semantics at that point.

So what is affiliate marketing?

In most cases, if you are not a full-blown influencer, or content creator, a brand will give you a link or a code that gives your audience some kind of discount plus gives you a small kick back, or it just gives you a kick back and your audience gets nothing. But ideally you are getting paid or compensated for sharing your link and sharing their product.

Now I know that you might think that this is an easy way to make money. And it can be. But I want people to think long term about their business. I only say this now because hindsight is 2020.

If you already love a brand, and you are a person who really enjoys sharing links or sharing things that you get, AND you do that organically with your audience already - then affiliate marketing can be a simple way to just get a kickback for doing some thing that you’re already doing.

In full transparency, when I started partnering with brands, I was in that boat. Or I was at least willing to try a product for free and then decide if I wanted to work with a brand.