What is a Tangible Product In Affiliate Marketing?

First of all you must be wondering what is a tangible product?

So now that you’ve decided to work online as an affiliate marketer, you need to decide on what sort of products you will promote or market. Will you promote tangible products or digital products or maybe a little of both?

First of all you must be wondering what on earth is a tangible product and what is an intangible product?

Contents

What Is A Tangible Product?

A tangible product is something that can be physically touched or felt with our fingertips.

Example of tangible products:

Clothes
TVs
Jewelry
Books
Tools

What is an Intangible Product?

An intangible product is something that can’t be touched or felt.

Example of intangible products:

digital books
computer software programs
TV shows
online courses

When it comes to Affiliate Marketing there are many marketers who refuse to promote or have any dealings with physical products. They would prefer just promoting digital products because they think that it’s too much trouble to deal with physical goods.

On the other hand there are Affiliate Marketers who only promote tangible products.
Finally, there are Affiliate Marketers who have very successful online businesses promoting both tangible (physical goods) and digital (something that can be downloaded off the internet).

With respect to affiliate marketing on my own websites, I have some websites that I promote strictly tangible products and on other websites I promote strictly just digital products. I also have a few sites that I incorporate both digital and tangible products.

For example, let us say that you have a gardening website because you love to garden and you write about your gardening experience on your blog.

In the process of writing about your gardening experiences you have a favorite tool that you use and you want to talk about what you like about it and things you don’t like about the tool.

You can then promote that specific product/tool on your blog post by putting in your affiliate link.

So by doing this you are promoting or marketing a tangible product which would be the tool you talked about in your blog post.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t also promote a digital book on the same page. Let’s say you found a downloadable digital book from ClickBank on composting or maybe a Kindle book from Amazon about composting, this would be a relevant digital product that would go perfect on your gardening blog post on composting.

So you see both tangible and intangible products can go hand in hand on your website.

When it comes to tangible products there are actually 3 basic ways that you’ll be able to deal in tangibles if you would like to totally focus only on those or maybe supplement these with your digital download links.

3 Basic Ways To Deal In Tangible Products

1. The first would be to become a seller of tangible products yourself.

most likely mean selling on eBay
or launching your own website to sell your own products

Pros:

You are in total control of everything

Cons:

It’s your responsibility to make sure you have enough inventory on hand
if an order is placed, you will have to box the item, take it to the post office and then ship it out
also you will have to accept returns and be able to refill the order

2. The second option is to become a seller of tangible products by using a dropshipper.

By using a dropship account, you’ll often have to pay out a fee in order to get started with your own personal website – for example, wedding accessories.

The client will likely find your website online and place an online order, paying you for the tangible products that they purchased. You will then turn around and pay the agreed percentage of your earnings to the dropship company and they will ship the tangible product to your customer direct.

Pros:

you don’t have to deal with inventory or shipping or returns

Cons:

but you still have to deal with customer relations, even though you are just the middleman.

3. The third option you have for selling tangible products is to become an affiliate marketer of tangible products.

Pros:

Millions of people shop online especially around the holidays (this is when most affiliate marketers make a lot of money)
Holidays aren’t the only time when you can promote tangible products and make money.

If you open an Amazon Associates Account, you’ll be able to sell anything on Amazon.com using your specific Amazon ID and collect commissions.

In addition, you can acquire an ID from LinkShare or ShareaSale and promote tangible items from flower boutiques, costumes,tools, Wal-Mart, and perhaps even travel companies (like luggage)!

Cons:

You need to learn the best practices for affiliate marketing and what is the best way to promote tangible products.

My Conclusion to What is a Tangible Product when it comes to Affiliate Marketing?

To sum all this up I would recommend that as a beginner to online marketing try your hand at both tangible and digital products and see which you like better.

As for me, I do a little of both but I make most of my online earnings promoting tangible products.

The reason I believe this, is that once your audience begins to trust you and your website, they will buy through your website as long as you are helping them find the products that they are looking for and giving them more information on those tangible products than they would be getting from the online store itself.

If you are a total beginner and need a step by step course I highly recommend Pajama Affiliate Learn to Blog for Money.

I hope this post has answered your question on What is a Tangible Product when it comes to Affiliate Marketing? If you are still not sure than leave your questions below and I’ll answer them as soon as possible.

Next post I’ll be discussing digital products and how you can make money with them.

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