Build Your Own Sales Army: How an Affiliate Marketing Funnel Can Sell Your Products for You

What if you could have hundreds of people promoting your products without putting them on your payroll?

What if they wrote blog posts about your business, created social-media content, published product reviews, made videos, sent emails to their audiences and recommended your products to potential customers?

And what if you only paid them when their marketing actually generated sales?

That is the power of affiliate marketing.

An affiliate marketing programme can turn your online business into a sales machine powered by people who have a financial incentive to promote what you sell.

Instead of trying to find every customer yourself, you build a network of affiliates who actively search for customers on your behalf.

And with systeme.io, you can build the sales funnel, manage your affiliates, track commissions and automate important parts of the process from one platform. Systeme.io currently provides built-in affiliate management on all plans, including its free plan.

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest—and potentially most powerful—ways to sell products online.

The concept is straightforward.

In simplified form:

Product → Affiliate → Audience → Click → Funnel → Sale → Commission

The affiliate is effectively becoming an independent salesperson for your business.

But unlike a traditional salesperson, you don't have to pay them a salary, office expenses or a fixed marketing fee. You reward them when they produce results. That performance-based structure is what makes affiliate marketing so attractive.

One of the biggest problems facing online entrepreneurs is not creating a product.

It's getting enough people to discover it.

You can have an outstanding ebook, course, coaching programme, software product or physical product—but if nobody knows it exists, you won't sell much.

And getting attention online can be exhausting.

You have to compete for:

Affiliate marketing offers another possibility:

Let other people help you build your audience.

Your affiliates already have audiences.

Instead of starting from zero, you can give those people a reason to introduce their audiences to your business.

Imagine you have 100 affiliates.

One writes a blog post reviewing your product.

"The 10 Best Products for..."

and includes yours.

You haven't personally created all of that marketing.

Your affiliates have.

And they have a financial incentive to keep doing it.

This is the fundamental power of an affiliate programme:

You build the infrastructure. Your affiliates expand the reach.

Think about the traditional online-business model.

You create the product.

Then you have to become:

That's a lot of jobs for one entrepreneur.

Affiliate marketing changes the equation.

You still need to build a great product and a compelling sales funnel.

But you don't necessarily have to personally create every piece of promotional content.

Your affiliates can do that.

This is where systeme.io becomes particularly attractive.

Instead of stitching together separate services for:

Systeme.io brings these functions together.

Its current platform includes sales funnels, email marketing, website/blog functionality, marketing automation, payments and affiliate management.

Systeme.io and its affiliate-management system allows you to create your own affiliate programme.

You can configure things such as:

Systeme.io says its affiliate-management feature is included on all plans, including its free plan.

That means the technology required to start building an affiliate-powered sales system can be considerably simpler than assembling multiple separate platforms.

Explore Systeme.io’s Affiliate Management System

This is one of the most exciting aspects of the model.

Affiliate marketing can potentially create an enormous amount of third-party content around your brand.

Imagine 100 affiliates promoting your business. Suppose each creates just five pieces of content. That's potentially: 100 × 5 = 500 pieces of promotional content.

That content might include:

You could never create all of that content yourself. But an affiliate network potentially can.

Let's say you've written a $12 psychological thriller. Instead of relying exclusively on your own website and social-media accounts, you create an affiliate programme. You offer affiliates a 40% commission. That gives them a $4.80 potential commission on each $12 sale.

Now approach:

Now consider the content they could create:

Every piece of content creates another opportunity for a potential reader to discover your book.

And your affiliate funnel does the rest.

The internet has changed the rules of marketing.

You can build a system that allows other people to help you grow your business—and rewards them for doing it.

That's the real opportunity behind affiliate marketing.

And systeme.io gives entrepreneurs the infrastructure to put that idea into practice, with sales funnels, email marketing, automation and affiliate management brought together in one platform.

And let your affiliate network take your products to audiences you could never reach on your own. Your next customer could come from someone you've never met. Build the system that makes that possible.

Start building your affiliate marketing funnel with systeme.io.