Get paid for your knowledge and experience

If you run an outdoor company or advise people on what clothing and equipment to buy, then there are numerous ways in which you can earn money or benefit from your knowledge and experience.

A few of my friends have sponsorship deals from various companies, receiving sample items from these companies in exchange for a review and/or a photo of them wearing/using it in action. This is great if you’re a photogenic world-class mountaineer or have a large following online, but if you don’t, you can still optimise your knowledge and experience in other ways.

There are people in this world that make substantial amounts of income from affiliate marketing.  The concept is very simple – you send someone to an online shop, that person buys something, you get paid for your time and effort. Commission varies hugely, but once it’s all set up, you don’t have to do anything (except get the correct affiliate link in place), and you’ll receive money every month or quarter for doing what you’d do anyway!

Commissions vary and, whilst the amount of commission may seem rather small on a £10 water bottle, if you’re advising numerous people to go out and spend a couple of thousand pounds on clothing (or even better, a group of people!), it can add up.

One of the more popular affiliate platforms is (you may have guessed already), Amazon. As most of the world are already Amazon customers, it makes sense to start here. You need to register as an affiliate here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/, which make take a few days to process.

Once you’ve registered, you then look at the products that you recommend to your clients and get a specific link that tells Amazon that the click through came from your account. Either you do this as you browse, or you can type into the following box what product you would like the link for:

Whether or not you just get the text link (I then convert this to a hyperlink in my documents), or you create a link with a photo is personal preference.

Another popular portal is Affiliate Window.

They handle 2100 affiliate accounts for numerous companies across five sectors (including Sportsdirect!), so there’s plenty of goods and services that you can promote:

https://darwin.affiliatewindow.com/affiliate-signup/account-details

There are countless affiliate schemes to sign up for, each with different referral schemes and products/services on offer, and with differing commission rates, so shop around!

Want to go a stage further? If you’re ever told someone about a service that you currently use (van/travel insurance, mobile phone provider, hotels, transport providers, price comparison websites are just some), then you can get an affiliate link and earn from referrals.

The beauty about these affiliate sites is that is doesn’t cost your client or you any more (unless you’re paying for ads), the cost is passed onto the online shop. This is exactly why affiliate schemes exist and these costs are factored into the product or service provider’s marketing spend.

I hope you find the above useful, please share or post your comments below if you know of any other ways to optimise your valuable knowledge!