I make referrals to my clients all the time. And I get paid for it!
I'm talking about affiliate referrals, and they are a central part of my business model. If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing, it's a way for businesses to grow their sales through a network of referral partners. Amazon.com, for example, generates a huge amount of their traffic from referral partners who blog or create videos about products, and then send people to Amazon to make the purchase. Once the purchase has been completed, the referral partner is paid a commission.
Amazon is just one example. There are affiliate programs for all sorts of things. There're affiliate programs for courses, books, and online programs covering just about anything you can imagine. Got a client trying to lose weight? There are hundreds of affiliate programs for you. Working with someone who is trying to boost their confidence? There are dozens of programs you can send them to. Are you trying to cook somebody through a process, but simply don't have the time or bandwidth to teach them the basic skills they need? Bingo… find a solution you can guide them to which offers an affiliate program.
As the coach, your job is to help your client get from point A to point B. To overcome obstacles, and keep moving toward their goals. But often, your clients may not have all of the materials or basic knowledge they need to accomplish that.
So you have a few choices:
1) You can guide them through the process of discovering their own resources… asking colleagues, friends, family, or doing research on their own.
2) You can teach them those skills yourself… extending your services beyond coaching to training as well (I do a good amount of my own training).
3) You can point them directly toward a solution to their immediate needs… through your affiliate link.
Now I'm not suggesting for a moment that you point them to just any old solution that offers to pay you. It's important to review products and services you are referring people to, and determine if they are going to deliver the quality and outcome that you'd deliver if it was your own product. So how do you do that? One option is to buy things yourself, so you can review them. Another, is to contact the creator of a digital product or service, and ask for review access. And, of course, developing relationships with those who produce products in your niche can lead doing more business with them.
As you amass referral products or services that are appropriate for your clients, it might even be helpful for your to list them on your website. That way, you'll have your referral links at the ready whenever someone is in need of a solution you might recommend. On my site, I have a lot of referral links listed on my resources page, with brief descriptions of each item.
Referral marketing (or affiliate marketing) can be an outstanding way to provide added value to your clients, enhance your authority, making you a go-to solution provider in your niche, and, of course, add additional channels of income to your coaching business.
This kind of income is often called “passive,” meaning that, by doing the initial ground work (like setting up an affiliate account and listing the resource on your website), you can keep getting paid for those one-time-efforts for a long time to come. My friend and mentor, David Perdew, created a terrific introduction to this concept in his free report, Sure Fire Passive Income. In it, he details the criteria for the affiliate programs that work best, as well as other means of adding additional passive income channels to your business.
…and, yes, the link to David's report is an affiliate link. That means, if you purchase something from him, I get paid – and you get to learn some amazing stuff from one of the best online marketing instructors out there. So we both win!