Getting started:
Introduction of the course
Welcome to the Printful Affiliate Marketing Lessons!
In this course, you'll learn affiliate marketing basics, details about the Printful Affiliate Program, and steps on how you can get started as a Printful affiliate.
Here's the course outline:
* Affiliate marketing for beginners
* How the Printful Affiliate program Works
* How to advertise Printful to your audience
* Guidelines you should follow and bonus tips
If you already know what affiliate marketing is and know how Printful's Affiliate Program works, skip straight to the lesson #3 and learn how you can market Printful to your audience.
Mark as done.
1. Affiliate marketing for beginners
a. What is affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular ways of earning passive income online and it's one of the top advertising channels for both new and established online retailers.
Simply put, affiliate marketing is when you find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a portion of each sale you helped make happen. In other words, you earn affiliate commissions for promoting a product—the company rewards you for every new customer you've attracted.
You've probably heard the term referral marketing as well. It overlaps with affiliate marketing in that both drive new customers to a business through recommendation. The difference is, in affiliate marketing, the marketer doesn't know their referred customer personally. In referral marketing, the marketer—or, rather, brand advocate—promotes the brand to people they know.
The Printful Affiliate Program works for both cases, so feel free to spread the word about Printful to whomever you'd like.
If you really want to make money with affiliate marketing, there are a number of steps you have to take before you can start earning your affiliate commissions.
b. How to get started with affiliate marketing
Step 1: Choose your affiliate niche
Before you get to more serious steps like building your affiliate website, you need to decide on your niche. That means narrowing down the list of topics you'd like to create content about.
Start by answering this simple question — what are you passionate about?
Because if you don't know a lot about, say, tech or gadgets, there's no point in running an affiliate website about these things. It's much easier to work with a topic you know about or have an interest in.
Is it ecommerce? Fashion? Maybe fitness or travel, perhaps something else?
The good news is, the Printful Affiliate program is a good match for a wide spectrum of affiliates. They already work with fashion influencers, bloggers, and ecommerce entrepreneurs. Another question you have to ask is whether there's affiliate money to be made in your niche. That's why it's important to research what's out there and what your options are.
Step 2: Research the affiliate offers
Once you get around to doing a bit of research, you'll see there are probably more affiliate offers than you had imagined. They can be split into two categories:
in-house affiliate programs
programs hosted on affiliate networks
In-house affiliate programs are standalone websites/businesses run by the companies they're connected to. The company handles affiliate payouts themselves and provide tracking tools so you can do things like follow your stats and prepare reports. You sign up for such a program on the company website.
The Printful Affiliate program is in-house. They offer affiliate partners tracking and reporting tools to keep track of their efforts. Some of their partners like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Amazon have affiliate programs as well.
When you create an account with an in-house affiliate program, you're connected to one particular company. In an affiliate network, however, you can be part of multiple affiliate marketing programs using one account.
Here, you create your account on the affiliate network, and the network takes care of the reporting tools and payouts. CJ Affiliates, ShareASale, and Rakuten are some of the largest affiliate networks.
Step 3: Build an affiliate website and start creating content
The final stage of the set-up is building your affiliate website. You can easily create one with such user-friendly, drag-and-drop site builders like Weebly or Wix.
Nearly 30% of all websites are built on WordPress—it's versatile, it's free, but you'll need to host your website on a cloud to power it. A solid, cost-effective solution is shared hosting. We recommend SiteGround where plans start at $3.95/month.
You'll also need to register a domain name—domain.com and GoDaddy.com are just a couple of the service providers you can choose from.
When you've launched your site, you can start publishing content and start ranking for visitors. It'll take a while for you to start getting decent traffic, but once you're there you can start monetizing your site by incorporating affiliate promotions.
2. How the Printful Affiliate Program works
a. Commission structure and affiliate period
The commission structure of the Printful Affiliate Program is revenue share. It's based on your performance—you receive a share of the money your referred customers have spent on Printful.
As a Printful affiliate partner you receive commissions for 9 months after your referred customer's first order.
You get 10% from every Printful order made by your referred customers. The formula for calculating your commission is:
Let's say the customer you referred placed the following order:
If the order is refunded, the respective commission will be subtracted from your commissions total.
Affiliate payouts are made in USD via PayPal. You have to collect at least $25 to request a payout. Each payout request is processed manually and fulfilled in 1-3 business days.
b. Your affiliate link
Your affiliate link is a combination of any Printful URL and your affiliate ID:
You can change your affiliate ID if you like—it could be your name, company name, or anything else. To copy or change your affiliate link, go to the Affiliate link tab on your Affiliate Dashboard.
This is how affiliate links work:
Someone visits your site and clicks your affiliate link;
They are directed to the Printful website;
A cookie file is automatically saved on their browser. The cookie expires in 30 days;
If the person completes a signup and becomes a Printful customer, we use the information stored in the cookie to link this customer to your affiliate account.
You'll see your referred customers on your Affiliate Dashboard. From there you'll be able to track their sales, your commissions, and other statistics.
3. How to promote Printful to your audience
a. How to write a blog article
In this lesson you'll learn how to create affiliate marketing blog articles, landing pages, and more.
According to Smartblogger, affiliate marketing is one of the fastest ways to monetize your blog.
To get your affiliate blog post really out there, try these tips:
Choose a niche topic related to Printful. The format could be educational, like a series of how to's: “Costs of starting a clothing company”, “How to generate passive income with t-shirts”, etc.
Think about the questions your audience is asking and answer those questions Compare Printful to other POD drop shippers illustrating why Printful is the best fit. Take a look at our competitor comparison chart to get an idea of what to compare (here’s an example comparing t-shirt templates and mockup generators)
Write from your personal experience with Printful and talk about why you recommend using it Create in-depth product or service reviews. You could review a Printful service or product that your audience might appreciate. Here's a draft article to get you inspired.
Talk about Printful features — our product personalization tool, ecommerce integrations, the mockup generator, the Printful mobile app, etc.
Pro tip: The competition for keywords like “How to start a t-shirt business” is high. Try more specific, low-competition keywords with good traffic to get results—“How to sell custom phone cases”, “What's embroidery on demand”, etc.
A landing page is another way to promote your affiliate link. Once the page is up on your site, link it in your social media posts, blogs, and emails.
You can create any other type of content as long as your audience is into it. Think ebooks, podcasts, and online courses on Udemy. It's not only future online businesses that you can target, you can also promote Printful to folks who like making custom one-offs for themselves.
Don't forget you can always spruce up your affiliate content with their free visuals and production footage. And as far as written content goes, don't forget the importance of proofreading - for this, I recommend using Grammarly.
b. Social media promotion strategies
Social media is a 21st century marketing must, so definitely use the power of social networks when promoting your affiliate link. Here are a few ideas on how to reach out to your audience through their favorite platforms:
Publish a story with a link explaining how Printful works Post a photo of products custom-printed by Printful. This is a good way to attract B2C customers—one time shoppers who aren't necessarily thinking of starting an online store.
Share Printful-related content on your personal and/or business account—from quick shoutouts to updates from Printful's Facebook page
Participate in Facebook groups or create one yourself
Quora and Reddit
Be active on forums and discussion sites (t-shirtforums.com, Quora) and subreddits like /r/ecommerce, /r/smallbusiness, /r/askmarketing, and /r/tshirt. Try doing keyword or question searches (“How to start a t-shirt store?”, “POD suppliers 2019”, etc.)
YouTube
Create YouTube tutorials on how to start selling with Printful. Be helpful. Cover all the steps: “How to choose and integrate an ecommerce platform with Printful”, “How to add products and set up your store,” and so on. Here's an example: “How to sell t-shirts online” Do a product review or unboxing video. Be honest in your videos—share your thoughts about the printing, product quality, fulfillment times, product lineup.
Each social media platform has a different style of engagement, visuals, and text. If character count is an issue, try shortening your URLs. If you're struggling with visuals, try platforms like Canva and Pablo.
c. How to drive traffic to your content
If you're just starting out your with your affiliate blog or website, you might have some problems getting traffic. One of the ways to tackle this is with paid advertising.
I'll share a few ways you can run paid advertising campaigns to boost traffic and get your content noticed, whether it's a blog article or social media post.
An obvious choice. More than just a social medium, it’s a key platform for online ads where targeting and creativity work wonders.
Google Ads
Another option is promoting your content on Google Ads, but you'll want to do some research first. One ground rule is – no bidding on brand keywords! So while your content will mention Printful, avoid using it as a keyword.
If you want to know more about keywords, you can read Prinful SEO keyword guide.
The email user base is still growing, and a recent survey showed that email has an ROI of 4400%, significantly higher than other marketing format. So make sure you've got your {linkEmail}email strategy in check.
To get more out of your affiliate links, you’ll want to look into growing your subscriber list (you can use tools like Sumo for that). Once you have a solid list and have learned how to write marketing emails and campaigns, you'll start seeing results.
d. Deep linking 101
The more specific the content, the better the conversion rate. A great way to boost conversions is by deep linking—linking to a specific piece of content rather than a site's homepage.
So in the case of Printful, try using landing pages and other specific URLs instead of our homepage. Remember, you can turn any Printful URL into an affiliate link by adding /a/[affiliate ID] at the end of it. You can generate deep links in your Affiliate Dashboard under Affiliate link:
Here are some Printful landing pages with high conversion rates you might like to use for your affiliate marketing campaigns:
If you're looking for something even more specific and want to go on a full-on content hunt, have a scroll through the Printful sitemap.
4. Affiliate marketing regulations to follow
a. Printful Affiliate Terms of Service
When creating blog articles, social media posts, videos, or any other online content that features your Printful affiliate link, whatever you publish must be in line with our brand image and in keeping with Printful's Terms of Service, especially Acceptable Content Guidelines.
Sites where you promote your links cannot be associated with any content that can be considered vulgar, racist, sexual, or otherwise deemed offensive by Printful.
You must also steer clear of using misleading or deceptive claims in your copy:
Become a millionaire by selling t-shirts with Printful Earn $10k in 2 weeks with Printful
Even if it's less clickbaity, make your messages honest and purposeful:
Start your t-shirt business with Printful Build your brand with Printful
For more affiliate do's and don'ts, please consult our Affiliate Terms of Service.
b. FTC guidelines
Another ground rule when creating Printful affiliate content is to be compliant with the US Federal Trade Commission guidelines regarding affiliate disclosure.
The FTC requires that you properly disclose your relationship with the business you're endorsing. It doesn't matter whether it's a commission, a flat fee payment, free products, or a discount, you receive—they're all means of compensation for endorsing a product online. If you fail to disclose this relationship, either you or the business you're endorsing could get fined.
According to the FTC, the fact that you're promoting affiliate content should be "clear and conspicuous". However, it depends on where you're promoting. For example, on Twitter and Instagram, adding a “#sponsored” or “#ad” could do the trick—there's limited space for an in-depth disclosure.
There's no prescribed format for disclosing the relationship on Facebook, blog posts, or other online content. I encourage you to visit the FTC site to learn more.
Congratulations
I hope you found my Affiliate Lessons useful! Make sure to check out my affiliate advertising guidelines and free advertising materials.
And if you have any questions, I'm only an email away – codyking@officialckmbiz.com
I HOPE THIS GUIDES HELPS EVERYONE OUT! PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SHARE THIS BLOG POST IF YOU FOUND THIS USEFUL. THANK YOU!!!
To Our Success,
Your friend,
CKM (codykingsmusic) by Cody King
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