Get Started
What is Affiliate Marketing?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

by | Feb 10, 2023 | Business Basics, Ecommerce Strategies

You’ve likely seen social media influencers create posts and videos about products they love, but did you know that they get paid every time you purchase a product they recommend? This is called affiliate marketing and it’s one of the most profitable marketing methods today. 

Many people falsely believe that they need a large social media following or vast marketing experience to become an affiliate, but anyone can make money as an affiliate if they use the right strategies. Here’s how: 

Affiliate marketing happens when an affiliate, i.e., you, an influencer, or even another company, shares a product or service with others through a unique link to a company’s website. A percentage of any sale made through the link is given to the affiliate. 

For example, if you love a specific t-shirt and want everyone to know how much better it is than other t-shirts, you could become an affiliate for that brand. You would sign up for the brand’s affiliate program, get your own unique link to the product, and share the link with your friends, family, social media followers, etc. Sometimes affiliate programs even offer discounts for individuals purchasing through an affiliate link. You’ll get paid every time someone makes a purchase using your link, and you’ll get the satisfaction of sharing one of your favorite products.

Affiliate marketing requires three parties: 

  1. The company to provide the product or service
  2. The affiliate to promote the product or service
  3. The consumers to purchase the product or service

Occasionally there is a fourth party: An affiliate marketplace. Affiliate marketplaces are like the eBay or Amazon of affiliate marketing. Companies list their offers in affiliate marketplaces and affiliates use the marketplaces to compare and choose offers that align with their interests and goals.

Why become an affiliate? 

There are many reasons for affiliate marketing’s recent rise in popularity. Here are a few:

  1. Easy to start

Becoming an affiliate is as easy as finding an offer to promote and deciding how to share it with your audience. Affiliate marketplaces are a great place to start. They make the process of finding offers even easier by listing thousands of offers in one place. This way, you can quickly find companies that share your same values.

  1. Low-risk

Companies frequently provide a script and the other assets you’ll need to market their product. You don’t have to deal with creating marketing material, working with customers, or manufacturing or shipping products. You simply share the company’s content with your audience, and start collecting your commission. 

  1. Little to no experience necessary

Anyone can be an affiliate! You aren’t required to have a large following or specific training to join most affiliate programs. You can learn as you go with the brands there to support you!

  1. Wide variety of options

With nearly 80% of companies doing some type of affiliate marketing, there’s an affiliate offer for every affiliate marketer and for every type of product: Digital, physical, service, etc. You’ll never have to worry about being able to find companies you love

  1. Lucrative

Companies typically offer 25-75% commission for every product sold. Because products are sold in a wide range of prices, affiliates can earn anywhere from $1 to over $1000 for each sale. In addition, affiliate marketing requires little to no capital from the affiliate so it has unbeatable profit margins.

  1. Passive income

When you share your unique affiliate link in your YouTube videos, blog posts, emails, social media posts, etc., you are giving people a way to buy products from your link at any time. That means you can be making money while you do the dishes, walk your dog, work at another job, or anything else! As you grow your platform, you will be able to promote products and receive large volumes of sales without much work after the initial ad.

  1. Flexibility

Affiliate marketing can be done anywhere and anytime, so it compliments any schedule.

These are only a few of the incredible benefits you can gain from starting affiliate marketing. It could change your life! Are you ready to get started?

Getting started with affiliate marketing

  1. Find your niche. 

Do you love travel, reading, gardening, or painting? Maybe you’re really interested in cleaning and organization, or fixing up old cars. Just how there are companies who sell every type of product, there are countless people in the world who share your same interests and would love to read and watch content from you. If you already have an audience, great! If you don’t, no problem! Create a social media account, blog, email list, etc., and start creating all types of content. Your audience will come naturally.

  1. Pick affiliate offers

Decide where you are going to find products and services to advertise to your audience. There are two main options for this: First, go straight to a company you admire and join their affiliate program directly, or second, join an affiliate marketplace and choose from their selection of companies and offers.

  1. Start promoting

Most affiliate programs already have marketing materials ready for you to send to your audience or post on your platform. Once your affiliate link is created, you can start promoting those materials however you want!

From there, it’s all a matter of tracking your campaigns, growing your audience, and collecting that commission. 

Looking for an offer to start with? If you’re passionate about ecommerce, print on demand, and/or making automated income, consider joining Quadra’s affiliate program! 

Quadra affiliates promote Quadra’s free masterclass. During the free masterclass we teach the strategies our founders used to create a 7-figure ecommerce business and showcase Quadra Pro, a platform where ecommerce sellers can get valuable and ongoing ecommerce and print on demand trainings, low pricing on unique, customizable products, and a library of high-converting product designs. 

To make the process easier for you, we’ve already created the masterclass and all the marketing materials you’ll need to share it with your audience. All you have to do is send them your unique affiliate link.

The auto-webinar has a 41% show-up rate and a 15% conversion rate on cold traffic. This means that 15% of people who have never heard of Quadra watch the webinar and purchase the product. This is a much higher conversion rate than most products in our space which means you have a high chance of making commissions, even if you don’t have a large audience yet. 

You’ll earn 50% of sales generated through your affiliate link throughout our entire funnel. That’s up to $662 in commissions for each person who purchases from your link!

Affiliate marketing is a low risk, effective way to have another source of income. If you want more help getting started, click here to check out Quadra’s affiliate program.

What is Print on Demand?

What is Print on Demand?

by | Feb 3, 2023 | Business Basics, Ecommerce Strategies, Entrepreneurship, Print On Demand, Uncategorized

If you’re in the ecommerce space, you’ve probably heard of print on demand, or POD, but you might not be sure what it is or how it could benefit you. Keep reading to learn how print on demand could help you establish or scale your ecommerce business.

Print on demand is a form of ecommerce selling where sellers connect with manufacturers who create white-label and easily-customizable products such as mugs, wall signs, and t-shirts. These sellers then upload their own custom designs on the products to sell in their stores. With print on demand, manufacturers only produce and ship products after they have been purchased. 

Print on demand products are fully customizable and unique so they stand out in the crowded ecommerce marketplace. That’s why print on demand could be the perfect next step for your business!

Why Customers Prefer Print on Demand

Your customers will love your print on demand product offerings! Not only will they benefit from the robust creative abilities and quality of the products, but they’ll also be able to request customizations personalized to their tastes. In fact, 1 in 5 customers are willing to pay up to 20% more for personalized products so this could significantly increase your profits.  

As a print on demand seller, you won’t have to worry about inventory or shipping products yourself! The traditional way to sell online is to find a product, order that product in bulk, and then start selling. This form of selling puts a lot of risk on your end. You could sell out within the first week or you could be left with hundreds of products still in your inventory at the end of six months. This reality makes selling online a large risk to small business owners and large CEOs alike.

Print on demand manufacturers take responsibility for maintaining stock of all their products so you have one less thing on your mind as you grow your business. They will also ship the product directly to your customer for you! This process is called dropshipping.  

Dropshipping creates a low point of entry for businesses, making it a great option if you are looking to start a business but you have limited capital. It also removes you from a number of the messier operation components of running a business so that you can focus on what you love such as creating designs, advertising, and/or expanding your brand.

A lady designing clothing for her business

Quadra Simplifies the Process

The benefits of print on demand are clear, but you might be asking yourself: Where do I find manufacturers? How do I make sure the manufacturers receive and print the right design? How do I know which products to launch? How do I know the manufacturer is reliable?

Quadra simplifies the process. Quadra builds the manufacturer relationships for you. All you have to do is select products from our extensive catalog of unique products, upload your own design onto the product of your choice, and launch it in your Shopify store. You only pay for products to be manufactured after a customer has purchased them. 

We send the product with its design to the manufacturer. The manufacturer prints the design on the product and ships the product directly to your customer. That’s all there is to it!

By using Quadra you get all of the benefits of print on demand such as spending more of your valuable time creating designs, marketing your products, and building your brand, without going through the hassles of starting a business. 

Subscribe to Quadra Pro and you’ll receive early access to unique products and manufacturer-volume pricing so you can save up to 50% compared to our free plan. Plus you’ll get access to training videos from Quadra’s Print on demand experts.

How John Sanders Achieved His Personal Rags to Riches With Quadra Marketplace

How John Sanders Achieved His Personal Rags to Riches With Quadra Marketplace

by | Sep 2, 2022 | Entrepreneurship

From pizza delivery to 7-figures in sales, John Sanders has overcome language barriers, financial disasters, and multiple business failures to get where he is today. To understand Quadra, one must first understand John, his life, and his mission.

Growing Up In Brazil

John Sanders, a co-founder of Quadra Ecommerce, was raised in Brazil, between the ages of five and eleven. His parents met when John’s father was on a religious mission in the area. After his religious service period ended, he reconnected with John’s mother and they married. John was born in the United States but the family moved to Brazil during John’s formidable years.

When John turned 11 his family moved back to the United States, which provided a unique challenge for John: the only language he knew was Portuguese. John looked like all of the American kids he was going to school with and they expected him to understand them perfectly. Faced with their expectations and the reality that he didn’t understand a word of English, John was forced to adapt and learn English or be left behind by potential friends.

From an early age, John learned skills such as resilience and the true value of effective communication. He often attributes the lessons he learned during these experiences to his future successes while building the Quadra Marketplace from the ground up.

The Infamous 2008 Recession

By the time of the 2008 recession, John had gotten married, graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in Marketing, and had a job selling software to homebuilders. However, disaster struck his personal life, as it did for thousands across the country when the recession hit. John was laid off and couldn’t find work to provide for his still-growing family.

John made several plans for how to make money and provide for his family, including contracting work and starting a business. John’s debts continued to climb even as each venture John started failed. Eventually, John had to humble himself to do something he’d never thought he’d have to do: spend his nights delivering pizzas for the local Pizza Hut.

 

For John, delivering pizzas was humiliating. Here he was, a well-educated, entrepreneurial, and motivated man and he was delivering pizzas just to make ends meet. John clarifies that “there is no shame in providing for your family and doing the hard work.” But for John, delivering pizzas was a real low point in his life. He felt like he’d failed and those feelings were compounded when he looked at his classmates and friends who were all thriving in well-established careers.

 

Enter Teespring

In 2013 John heard about a selling platform called Teespring. Teespring is a print on demand platform that allows you to sell t-shirts without holding any inventory. John took an internet training course about how to sell print on demand t-shirts on Teespring and got excited about the concept. However, when he pitched the idea to his wife she was less than enthusiastic about yet another business venture that could lead to nowhere. Because of this, John made a deal with her, he got 30 days to make a sale, or he quit trying to sell print on demand products forever.

By day 21 John was starting to get worried. With no sales and his deadline coming up he saw the death of his dreams fast approaching. John decided to lean on his heritage a little and made a Brazil-themed t-shirt. Somewhere in that third week, John made his first sale, and then he made another and another. 40 Brazil-themed shirts later and John had successfully proved to his wife, but more importantly, to himself, that his dream of selling products online was possible.

“You can still go for your dreams no matter what your situation is in life.”

–John Sanders

Quadra Marketplace Is Born

John kept selling with Teespring and eventually got big enough that the company lined him up with a mentor to show him the ropes. During this time, John’s big question was about unique products. In the print on demand space, less so now, but certainly at the time, the only selling options were shirts and mugs. John thought these products were great, and they were certainly earning him money, but he kept wondering about other products that could fit the print on demand model.

In 2017 John met his future business partner, Scott Carpenter. He pitched the idea of creating a platform that would be home to a large variety of print on demand products for sellers to take and sell on their own websites. Scott liked the idea, and together they started the long journey of making the Quadra Marketplace a reality.

Along the way, John and Scott met their third business partner, Brian Rueckert, who owned a laser engraving business selling laser-cut products to national parks. With Brian’s manufacturing experience he was a great fit for the team of Quadra founders.

The Quadra founders used their Ecommerce store, Urban Forest Woodworking & Design, to fund their work on the Quadra Marketplace app. The store also served as a way to test that Quadra Marketplace was working, because a large majority of the products sold on Urban Forest are on the marketplace’s catalog.

The Product That Changed Everything

In early 2020 this strange virus called COVID-19 was starting to make headlines. After supermarket aisles were emptied of toilet paper overnight, Brian came to John with an idea to sell a Christmas Ornament shaped like a roll of toilet paper. John agreed that Brian should run with the idea but didn’t think it would go very far. “…I’m like, this things ugly–looks like a whistle–it’s not going to do anything…We put it on the website and I didn’t even launch any ads on it.”

Like most people in early March of 2020, John thought the COVID-19 virus was going to be a passing event. Eventually, John looked at the sales on Urban Forest and was shocked to find that dumb little toilet paper ornament had made several sales–all without ads. So John started running ads and between March and April of that year they “…made close to a million dollars on just that ornament.”

With the success of the toilet paper ornament, as well as a few other products, the team was able to fund Quadra Marketplace using just the revenue from Urban Forest. Now, two and a half years later, Quadra Marketplace is live with close to 500 users and is about to close negotiations with its second and third manufacturers. The Pro subscription for the app comes with monthly training sessions that are provided live so viewers can ask questions to both John and Brian. Replays are always available and the topics vary from print on demand specifics to tips and tricks about scaling your business.

John was 44 when he first had the idea for Quadra Marketplace. The previous ten years of his life had been filled with financial problems and multiple failed business attempts, but John maintained that “it’s never too late to go for your dreams.” It took him five years to accomplish it, but John has successfully become a 7-figure Ecommerce seller and the co-owner of an up-and-coming print on demand marketplace. In an effort to help all those dreamers out there who believe it’s too late, John has made it his mission to not just create a marketplace, but to teach people how to make money using it.

“There were some people who made their first online sales ever. And for me that’s been the most rewarding thing. I look at those stories and I just smile… for me it’s not about selling product, it’s about seeing other people succeed.”

–John Sanders

While John’s life is a far cry from where it used to be, he’s never forgotten the steps he had to take to get where he is now. As a daily reminder that anyone, from any situation and any age, can make it, John still drives the same car he delivered pizzas in over a decade ago.