Tennis Product Affiliate Marketing and How to Create Passive Income
With any business, it takes effort and skill to implement a program. The same applies to tennis product affiliate marketing. If you are new to affiliate marketing, grab a cup of coffee and read this blog post.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a business will reward their affiliates for each customer they bring from their marketing efforts. In other words, you earn a commission by recommending products and services to your viewers or readers.
For example, let’s say you are an affiliate for a product such as a tennis training tool. If you promote this product on your website or video channel, and someone who sees your content makes a purchase as a result, you will get a commission. However, to get to that point, you must follow a few steps to get set up.
How does online tennis product affiliate marketing work?
To be a successful affiliate, you must have an online platform to promote the products and services you would like to receive a commission from. For example, you must have a website, blog, video channel, or email newsletter.
To become an affiliate for a tennis product or service, you need to find and join some online affiliate programs. Some affiliate programs you get approved automatically for. Others have more strict requirements - for example, a certain number of website visits per month.
Once you are approved for an affiliate program, you will receive a unique link that tracks everyone that clicks it and makes a purchase. The unique link may look something like the following:
- Amazon standard link:
- Amazon affiliate link:
Depending on the affiliate program you are working with, once your reader or viewer clicks the affiliate link, the program will place a cookie on their device (in other words, it will remember that device). That cookie could last 24 hours, 7 days, several months, or never expire.
How long it lasts will depend on the affiliate program you are participating in. For example, in the case of Amazon Associates (Amazon’s affiliate program), cookies last 24 hours, meaning a person must make a purchase within 24 hours of clicking your affiliate link for you to receive a commission. If the purchase happens outside of the time frame of the cookie (e.g. after it expires), the affiliate does not receive any commission.
Why do we love affiliate marketing?
1. Affiliate marketing creates a passive income.
One of the things we love about affiliate marketing is that it creates passive income and continues to earn income, sometimes for years. Passive income is making money while you are not doing anything. An example of a passive income is selling a book you wrote on Amazon. You invest some time writing your book initially, but after that, it generates income while you sleep.
The concept is the same with affiliate marketing - if people find your affiliate links and make purchases through them, you earn money without technically doing anything at that time.
It sounds too good to be true, right? The truth is, creating a passive income is not so easy because it requires you to spend a significant amount of time setting it up as well as promoting it. Only after you follow all the necessary steps correctly, you might end up making money.
To give you an example - we wrote an eBook called “Tennis Club Marketing 101” and published it in 2020. It took some time to put together the content, figure out where and how to publish it, and promote it. We did not start making money from that eBook until 2021. However, since 2021, the eBook is now earning a passive income for us. The only thing we do is make occasional revisions to the content.
The conclusion - passive income is not a myth and it is achievable, but it does take a significant investment of time and effort to get started.
2. Affiliate marketing allows you to monetize your content.
Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize a website or a video channel you have been working on. If you have valuable content published online, such as a series of blog articles, videos, or regular email newsletters you are sending out, you can monetize that content (earn money from it) by becoming an affiliate for relevant products and services and inserting your affiliate links in your published online content.
Here is an example of how you can monetize some of your tennis content. Let’s say you have a video channel where you publish tips on how to improve your tennis game. If some of those tips include products that you like (e.g. tennis rackets, tennis training tools, tennis books you love), you can try to become an affiliate for those products and include your unique affiliate links in your videos.
Many tennis products work with affiliates. To find those, you can Google for “name of tennis product + affiliate program”.
How much money can you make with affiliate marketing?
There is no limit to how much you can make! That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is ... some people make absolutely nothing. Why? Because they do not take the time to learn how to do this successfully. There are many bloggers and influencers making thousands each month from affiliate marketing!
At Resourcely® we participate in several affiliate programs. The products and services we recommend are those that we have used for many years ourselves, and believe are of high value, and will be extremely useful to our readers. We would never recommend products we have not used ourselves.
The most common misconceptions about affiliate marketing
1. Affiliate marketing is easy money
This cannot be further from the truth. As we already mentioned, if this type of marketing is new to you, it will take time and effort to figure it out. This is not an “easy money” type of scenario, and if someone promotes their affiliate program as such, it is likely a scam.
2. You have to pay money to get started
Most affiliate programs do not cost anything to sign up for. I would beware of those that ask for money.
3. Affiliate marketing is a scam
Affiliate marketing has had a bad reputation in the past - that it is a scam or fraud. That is mostly because some people engage in shady and spammy techniques and those are the ones that give it such a bad reputation. Because online sales are booming, we expect that affiliate marketing will grow and evolve to higher standards in the near future.
4. You end up making absolutely nothing
The reality is, those who make it, end up earning a solid income. Of course, some people will not make it.
5. You have to write reviews for products to make money from affiliate marketing
Your content does not need to be product-focused at all. The tennis product you are affiliated with can simply be part of your content that is focused on resolving an issue.
For example, you could be writing a blog article centered on ways to improve your serve. If a specific product you are affiliated with helps you achieve that, you could mention it and provide your affiliate link. These types of articles are not product-centered, not a review, and are focused on solving a problem and providing value to the readers, which is a win-win.
How to do a successful tennis affiliate marketing: Step-by-step guide
Step 1: Decide on a platform
The easiest way to build an affiliate program is to create a blog or a video channel. Social media, such as Instagram, is also a possibility but there are a few issues with that. Instagram can deactivate your account or hide posts if you breach their terms and conditions, and in such case, you lose all the posts, pictures, and written content (unless you can get it back live). In our opinion, it is best to have your own platform, such as a blog, where you host your content, and there is a lower chance of losing it.
A YouTube video channel is also a good opportunity to build an affiliate program. We like YouTube because more and more people prefer to watch videos than read blogs these days, so it’s a great traffic booster.
Whichever platform you choose to go with, be sure to disclose the fact that you are including affiliate links.
Step 2: Choose your niche
If you are a tennis coach, it is easiest if you focus on the tennis industry as that will be your expertise. But if you are also passionate about food, books, or another topic, you could do that as well.
“Tennis”, however, is a pretty big topic and it will be hard for you to rank high on the search results when your content is so general. For best results, try to focus on a narrower category - for example, “tennis coaching”, “tennis equipment” or “tennis news”.
Lastly, choose something you’re interested in. Oftentimes, the reason why bloggers and YouTubers fail is because of lack of consistency and giving up too early. Choosing a topic you enjoy will make it easier to stick with creating content.
Step 3: Find affiliate programs
You should choose such affiliate programs for products you would like to promote that are relevant to the content you will be making. So, go ahead and reach out to some companies and ask if they would be willing to build an affiliate relationship with you.
Some of those companies might require your website or video channel to have a certain amount of traffic to get approved.
How do I get approved by affiliates when traffic is low? You can start with those that do not require having traffic, like Amazon Associates. You could also approach others and make a case for yourself - describe your site and what you do, as well as your plan for marketing their links. Another popular affiliate program for beginner bloggers and vloggers is Skimlinks. Skimlinks will take a percentage (25%) of your sale, but in exchange, you will save tons of time by applying to Skimlinks, instead of applying to hundreds of affiliate programs one by one.
Step 4: Create content. And stick to it.
For your affiliate website or video channel to succeed, you need high-quality, user-centered content, where your affiliate links fit naturally. Make sure the content and product you are affiliated with solve the visitor’s problem.
If you are writing product reviews, make sure you actually try the product before reviewing it. If you are not able to purchase the products, start with what you already have available at home.
We recommend you start with informational content and lead to product (not the other way around). Those are the articles and videos that are typically most successful. The more helpful the content, the more likely it is the visitor will follow your affiliate link
Keywords research is also very important - that will help you determine the content people are searching for and that you should write about.
As always, stick to doing this for a while before giving up, at least a few months or longer.
Step 5: Drive traffic to your content
Once you have created some great content, you need to find ways to get people to find it and read it. Start with sharing your content on social media. You could pay for traffic to your site or do search engine optimization (SEO) and optimize your pages to rank higher in the search results. Alternatively, you could build an email list and send affiliate email promotions to those people.
Step 6: Get people to click on your affiliate links
Placing links in random places throughout your content (out of context) will only achieve one thing - it will make your content look spammy. Users are smart and will detect any level of dishonesty right away. So, place your affiliate links in relevant places. Take a look at the following examples:
- Bad example of affiliate link placement:
“Today, I’m reviewing the best tennis training tools”.
- A good example of affiliate link placement:
Today, I’m reviewing several tennis training tools that will help you improve your serve, and you can purchase them easily on Amazon. Those products are product x, product y, and product z.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we described the fundamentals of affiliate marketing and generating some passive income. These tips will get you started. However, if you wish to make a solid income from affiliate marketing, you must research this thoroughly and go above and beyond. If you are looking for help getting started, give us a shout. We are here to help!
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Marketing Ideas for Tennis Club Owners, Managers, and Coaches.