When it comes to affiliate marketing, I’m often asked, “How many products can I promote effectively?” 

Of course, there’s no universal answer that’s perfect for everyone.

But today I’ll share a few guidelines that you can use to promote many different products online effectively.

The truth is that you can promote an unlimited number of products once you learn how to promote well.

This is important so let me repeat it.

Once you learn the process of promoting one product you can use that process to promote an unlimited number of products. 

The key to effective selling online, the key to making money online, is to find a thing that works and repeat it over and over again.

It’s kind of like the Green Bay Packers with Vince Lombardi. They were a football team that won the Super Bowl. You know, they didn’t have “all these fancy mystery moves.”

What they had was this: they could run & pass and they could block & tackle.

They could do the basic things of football extremely well over and over again, and that’s one of the reasons they were so successful.

If you focus on the basics and do them well, you can sell an unlimited number of affiliate marketing products online.

Now, I want to introduce you to a concept that may be different from what you’ve heard before. It has to do with two CATEGORIES of product.

The first is what’s called a core product and the second is called a feeder product.

Let me share with you what these mean and how they can work for you.

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When you promote CORE products, you’re promoting products that almost everyone needs on some level.

An auto responder is a core product.

An autoresponder is an email system where you can pre-program messages, and then when a person joins your list, those messages go out to them automatically.

It’s a core product because it’s a product that a lot of people need.

Whether you’re a florist or whether you’re selling a business opportunity or you’re in the health niche or pretty much anything you do, using an auto responder is a very wise thing to do, so it’s a core product.

It’s one of those basic things online.

Other examples include web hosting. If you are going to succeed online you need a website of your own. And websites must be hosted.

There are many core products out there, in every niche imaginable.

You can choose a great core product to sell, and people will buy it because it’s so widely needed.

A feeder product is different from a core product in this way:

A FEEDER product is something that feeds your prospect into the next purchase.

Often it feeds into the need for another core product.

For example, let’s say that you’re promoting web hosting. You really love to promote Host Gator or another hosting company. Take a minute and think about what a person needs who gets their hosting account.

If you’ve got hosting, what are you going to do with that?

Well, you’re going to build a website or you’re going to put up a blog. So let’s say, for the sake of this discussion, that your customer’s going to put up a WordPress blog.

Now, what are they probably going to need if they put up a WordPress blog?

Well, they’ll need a good theme.

Sure, there are a lot of free themes out there they could use.

But there are some fantastic paid themes that will do a great job, make them look professional, and you get paid a commission if you’re an affiliate of those paid  themes and you send your web hosting customers that way.

What else might they need?

Well, they’re going to need all sorts of different plugins to do search engine optimization or to build their mailing list or to create other functionality on their website.

You can sell them those plugins as an affiliate, too.

What else are they going to need?

If they’re going to build a mailing list , they’re going to need an auto responder, right? You can sell them that auto responder.

You can sell them that auto responder.

If they’ve got an auto responder and they want to send out messages, you can sell them a course about how to write messages or a copywriting service, and you can earn commissions as an affiliate that way, too.

You can see from this example how a feeder product is a product that people buy that naturally creates a need for another product.

If you’re smart about it and think about your customer’s needs a bit, you can take a core product and turn it into a feeder product, by letting the sale of the core product “feed into” other sales.

If you set up a follow up system where you’re promoting the main product such as hosting, and then after they buy hosting it offers them a series of products that are relevant to their needs, now you’re promoting a feeder product.

There are core products and feeder products, and you can promote an unlimited number of them once you learn the process of marketing online.

I hope this helps you see how affiliate marketing can work for you.

Check out the other articles on this blog for more info on affiliate marketing and making money online, and come back soon for even more.

I know thinking about these things seems like a lot of work. Many people want to just follow someone’s advice, place an ad and make money. Sadly, making money online does not work that way.

If you take the time to think these things through and choose your marketing methods and the products you promote carefully, you will be building a real business. A dependable business.

A business you can pass on to future generations and one that can be automated to give you both time and money freedom.

And when you have that you will have a beautiful thing indeed.