How to Make Money as a Nonprofit with Affiliate Marketing

So the scenario goes…

You have a cause that you feel really passionate about. You know it can impact the world in a positive way, and help lots of people, but you’re having trouble figuring out how to make money to support your charity or nonprofit.

Sound familiar?

Nonprofits often struggle coming up with plans to monetize their mission, so you’re not alone. In fact, stats show that voluntary donations have recently gone down significantly, so nonprofits are having to be more creative about how to monetize their causes. In this article, I want to show you one very lucrative way to make money for your nonprofit mission.

NonProfits and Passive Income

Regardless of what type of business you start, it’s always a good idea to have active income and passive income. Your nonprofit may be a:

• Church
• Recreation center
• Thrift store
• Education center
• Missionary
• Ministers
• Parent Teacher Association (PTA)
• Or resource of another sort

It’s likely, you may build revenue streams like:

• Donations
• Event sales
• Product sales
• Service sales
• and others

But, it’s also a good idea to mix passive income into your income portfolio too–that’s where income streams like:

• Book royalties
• Online downloads
• Online course sales
• Or affiliate marketing

…can be helpful parts of your nonprofit revenue.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work for Nonprofits?

As a nonprofit, you’re likely to participate in activities that:

• Build an audience
• Expand your brand awareness
• Raise funds to support your cause
• And influence decisions

As a result, affiliate marketing would work perfectly. Rather than the traditional fundraiser arrangement where you’re selling physical products in exchange for a percentage of the sale or a donation amount, with affiliate marketing, you could partner with brands your audience is likely to already be using (or would potentially be interested in), and you can make money from recommending interested parties to use your affiliate link to make their purchases.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing for NonProfits

If you’re interested in making money for your nonprofit with affiliate marketing, these are the steps I recommend…

1. Choose a Niche or Target Audience

It’s important to be clear about who your target audience is, what problems they solve by coming to you, and how you can help them. Understanding your target audience well will help you to identify good products and services you can offer, and good partners that can compliment what you offer with their affiliate promotions.

2. Build a Website

Once you’ve identified your target audience, then you want to build a website. Your website will serve as your virtual storefront or meeting place for your audience. You can keep your audience up-to-date with your events, services, products, and you can post blog-style content that helps to educate them, make decisions that are relevant to your topic, and to overcome objections they might have.

If you’d like to build a free WordPress website, you can test drive how easy it can be by going here.

3. Choose Relevant Affiliate Partners

There are thousands of affiliate programs in many difference niches: from education and business to sports and entertainment. You want to join affiliate programs that your audience is likely to be interested in. To find good affiliate programs, you can check out affiliate networks, independent merchants, or search keywords like “[niche] affiliate program” in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Youtube.

4. Get Traffic

After your website is set up and you’ve joined relevant affiliate programs, the next step is to get traffic. You can get traffic by growing a social media channel or letting your audience know about new website content using social media. You can run paid ads. You can post videos on Youtube. There are a variety of ways, you can get the word out about your content and bring people back to your website.

5. Make Money

Once people are coming to your website, that’s when you have the chance to make money. You can use links like yourcharity.com/affiliatepartner and state those links to people live or in-person, so you can promote your affiliate products without actually having people come to your website, but overall, it’s the best long term strategy to direct traffic to your website, and to your affiliate promotions from there.

Conclusion

While nonprofits are most known for making money with donations, events, or products, you can also make money with affiliate marketing. Hopefully, this article demonstrated to you how this could be possible. If you have any questions about this, leave them in the comments section below.

If you’d like help getting your nonprofit started with affiliate marketing, I’d love to help. Join me here to get started with a free website and training.