How to Make More Money as a Hair Stylist With Affiliate Marketing

I visited my hair stylist the other day and she was complaining about her job – how little she gets paid for working long hours every day. I am sure this is a situation that most of you can relate to, whether you are working in a salon or in the office. 

Seeing that I know a solution that she doesn’t, I thought I would use this opportunity to teach her how to make more money as a hair stylist using the affiliate marketing technique.  

Why Do Affiliate Marketing?

We all know that starting a business is a long-term solution to become financially independent. But the fact is that you need a lot of investment – shop rental, equipment purchase and staff management – in order to get a salon up and running. The nature of the job requires you to be in the shop at all times and profits could fluctuate according to the seasons.

However, things are different when it comes to affiliate marketing. With a few hundred dollars, you can set up a WordPress website with your own brand and open an online business. Using your skills and knowledge, you would promote hair products from other companies and earn sales commissions whenever someone buys through your recommendation (specifically, your affiliate links).

Without having to rely on walk-in customers, you can still profit from product sales all year round. Since this is primarily a web business, you have the flexibility to work from any place you desire.

What Type of Products You Can Promote

When you visit any online store, you are likely to see the following items being listed under the hair niche category. Is there a product below that particularly interest you?

• Shampoo
• Conditioner
• Hair Color
• Styling (for men and women)
• Styling Tools
• Salon and Spa
• Hair Extensions
• Hair Supplements

Since you are the expert, you would know which product works better or is more cost effective. Your information and experiences are extremely valuable to the online readers, hence product reviews would be your bread and butter as an affiliate marketer.

What Exactly Is a Product Review

In layman’s terms, it’s your personal recommendation to a potential user. Remember the last time someone asks you what type of shampoo is best for curly hair? How did you respond to that? Did you just show them the product or did you try it out on your client’s hair?

Either way, you are actually doing your very own marketing talk by just demonstrating the product and that’s what a product review is all about. In this context, you’ll be writing articles, showing images and videos about the product on your website. When a product review is published, it will get indexed and ranked over time.

Obviously, this wouldn’t be the only page on your site. Over the next few months, you’d be writing about styling guides, hair care tips and etc. and you’d link those articles to your product review page whenever relevant.

Remember, the more articles you have pointing towards your review, the more readers you can convert into buyers.

Where to Search for Affiliate Programs

I would start with popular online retailers because they would have an established eCommerce site that people already know about. Other features that I would consider are;

• Having a wide range of hair products that are constantly in stock.
• Provide customer feedback in the product profile section – you can then use these comments to support your own review.
• Offers free delivery for a certain amount of purchase – when shoppers buy more, you’d earn more.
• Offer good customer service in terms of refunds or replacement.

To make things easier for you, I did some research and found a list of stores that fit the criteria which I’ve mentioned. I’ve also included their payout commissions for your reference.

• Amazon Associates – starts from 4%
• Folica – 5%
• HQ Hair – 2-7%
• Sally Beauty – up to 12%
• Sephora – up to 10%
• Earth Tone Natural – 10%

How Much Can You Earn

There are several ways to answer this question and since your ‘primary’ product is your content, you’ll need to understand what keyword research is all about.

When people go online to search for information, they usually type in queries such as questions or phrases. Anticipating what people have in their minds in regards to hair products is the first step of keyword analysis.

If someone who’s interested in ‘hair styling products’ type in the exact terms, she’s going to get a lot of results from Google, but chances are, she’ll never find your product review page under that term.

This is because you are targeting a very competitive key phrase which is used by more than 280 websites (look at the QSR value). So in this case, you’ll take forever (or never) to make your first commission.

Now, let’s change the strategy and use a more descriptive keyphrase, a term that truly represents what people want to know and most importantly, indicates that they are interested in buying a particular product.

Let’s try ‘how to curl your hair without a curling iron’. I know, that’s a very long keyphrase, but guess what, there are only 52 competing websites for this term according to Jaaxy Keyword Tool.

What if we use a more specific keyphrase like ‘Conair curl secret review’? Slightly more competitive than the first one, but still less than 100 competitions.

For your information, the Conair Curl Secret sells for $79.99 on Amazon. At 4% commission, this product can fetch about $3.20 per sale. Now, if this review rank on the first page of Google and you get about 19 visits per month, you can expect to earn about $60.80 in total commission.

The interesting part is that these visits are often recurring and as your site matures, more traffic would come from various sources to read your review. So even though you are only earning $60+ for the first initial months, this figure could potentially escalate to $600 or even $6000 for months and years to come.

That’s a lot of potential from just ONE product. Can you imagine the business opportunities that you’ll be getting reviewing other products that you have experience with?

Turn Your Passion Into an Online Business

From this article, I hope you realized that you can actually turn your skills into an online business and not just thinking about how to make more money as a hair stylist. With an entrepreneur mindset, you’ll become more successful in what you do.

So, want to get started in affiliate marketing? Then join my recommended online training here and I’ll walk you through the process. 

Have any thoughts or questions about this topic? Just leave your comments below and I’ll get back to you.

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