AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money

If you’re wondering how to get website traffic without spending any money, this post is for you! There’s a few reasons why you wouldn’t want to run paid adverts to bring in traffic. There’s the expense for one and the unknown return you may or may not receive. You can spend a fortune and simply just lose money with paid advertising. So it’s a risk and if you do use paid advertising you should start with a small budget you’re happy to lose while you learn.

On the plus side of paid advertising you can scale up a paid campaign once you’re profitable. That’s much more difficult when using free strategies such as blogging. But there’s upsides to blogging too – such as it’s free! Free traffic means whatever you earn from your blog is yours – it’s 100% profit, (minus your time of course).

But if you have the time, blogging is a fun way to turn it into readies! It’s cheap and if you have a well targeted affiliate product on your blog to sell, it’s a great way to turn your spare time into cash!

How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Blogging

Yes blogging is a simple and cheap way to generate website traffic. Once you have decided on the topic of your blog, you can easily find keywords which are suitable for your niche and which can also bring in targeted traffic. To find these, head to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main keyword. Look for long tail derivatives. These are the keywords which you have the best chance of ranking on Google for.

While you still may not rank on the top of Google for them, having them on your website will increase your overall authority with Google too. They are also a good place to start to attract the kind of person you want as a website visitor. Attracting the wrong audience isn’t going to help you make those sales, so it’s key to determining your audience first before you start out. Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet to get clear on this topic.

Once you know who you are writing for, things get a lot easier as a blogger. You can write to attract the people who are most likely to be interested in your product – your target audience.

How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – Plugins

You can also get an SEO plugin which helps you write SEO friendly content. I use one called Yoast SEO. It allows you to balance the correct number of keywords throughout your blog posts to give you the best chance of ranking your content. See also my post on best free WordPress plugins for bloggers.

There’s a few other plugins you can get which will help you as a blogger:

Social media share plugin – lets visitors easily share your content on their social media
Push engage software – allows people to get notified when you re-post
Content syndication software – automatically syndicates older content on your social media
Pop up plugins – allows more visitors to subscriber to your email list

Plugins can make your life much, much easier as a blogger. They help you share your content more easily and even automatically. Since it’s traffic you need, the more people who can find your blog the better. Not everyone who finds your content will buy from you, but you can stack the cards in your favour with an email list.

How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money – The Email List

The email list is an important factor in turning your traffic into affiliate sales. Without one, you’re relying on people who visit your content buying from you. Since most visitors only stick around for a few minutes the chances of that happening are pretty low. Especially since statistics show most online consumers need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website before they buy something.

With an email list you have multiple opportunities to re-engage your visitors via email messages. So make sure you start building an email list from the get-go. It will save you a heap of time and effort. You can access a free autoresponder here, which you need to build an email list.

Patience

Sadly with blogging you need to be super patient because it’s a long, slow process. But if you stick with it, over time you should see exponential increase in your traffic.

How To Get Website Traffic Without Spending Any Money

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s plenty of competition in pretty much every topic you can think of. So standing out and getting known is going to take some time. However, as your volume of content grows, you should pick up some backlinks from other websites and from people sharing your content on social media. Plus, if you install the various plugins you can automate a posting campaign throughout your social media which is running in the background.

Little by little your efforts will add up and compound. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.

Ideally pick a topic you know about of have some kind of passion for. That way, you’ll be able to keep going far longer than the rest in your niche!

Summary

To get traffic without paying takes time and a bit of dedication. There’s a lot of content out there, and AI is taking a lot of the organic space now with Google’s own AI dominating the top of the search results pages. In a competitive niche, you can expect to see paid advertising at the top of the Google results pages too.

Take a look at the image below which was a search I did for “affiliate marketing” – a super competitive niche. It had multiple paid adverts and then Google’s AI machine is at the top (where organic search results used to be!)

So if you want to make a go of blogging today, you’ll definitely need the tools I suggested in this article:

SEO plugin
Social media share plugins
Automatic social media syndication tool
Email list
Push engage plugin software

How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging

How to build an affiliate business through blogging? Blogging is a cheap way to build an affiliate business by creating written content. Building an affiliate business means selling other people’s products and services. There’s various ways you can do this and blogging is only one of them. Blogging is a slow but cheap strategy of building an audience and providing them with value. Over time, your audience will get to know you through your blog posts and eventually trust you (hopefully at least)!

how to build an affiliate business blogging

When this happens, they are much more likely to buy something you recommend, (if it serves their needs). Blogging is a strategy I’ve used over the years to build my affiliate business. There’s been times when things weren’t going as expected and times when the sales were simply flooding in. The key to making blogging work for you is to be consistent with it. Over time, with enough effort in the right direction you’ll start generating traffic. Once you get visitors in large enough numbers you’ll start seeing sales dropping into your inbox.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of having made a sale online through blogging. When you make it work, it’s truly inspiring. But before this can happen there’s some work to be done. So here’s how you can build an affiliate business through blogging.

How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Your Topic

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and this means that in nearly every niche there’s a tonne of competition. Some niches/topics are less competitive than others of course and this can give you an advantage. However, I would suggest that the most important decision to make is the topic of your blog. Your topic will determine a number of other things such as how you will monetise your blog, what you’ll blog about and how long you can sustain the efforts needed to become profitable.

Choose a bad topic and you could be blogging for a long time with no way to monetise it. Or, worse still pick a topic you’re not that into, and you’ll end up throwing in the towel! There’s nothing worse than trying to come up with ideas for your blog when you have no interest in your topic! I once built a website around the subject of mushroom harvesting and I lasted about 6 months before I threw the whole idea in the bin!

For one, it wasn’t a profitable niche. I couldn’t easily monetise it. Another reason my blog failed was because I didn’t care about mushroom harvesting! I just wanted a profitable website and the topic came up and filled a need. I learned a valuable lesson though from choosing a niche I wasn’t that interested in. Don’t do it – at least not as a blogger. If you’re a blogger, you need to keep creating new content over and over. So if you don’t care about your topic, or you don’t at least have an interest in it, you’re not going to last very long. Someone more passionate will soon take your place and take all your traffic too!

How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – How To Choose Your Topic

So how can you choose a topic you’re passionate about if you’re not sure of your niche? Well start with you. Ask yourself what you’re about and what kind of interests you have. Look at products you have bought online and things you’re interested in. You can also find products you’re passionate about and that can inspire your interest. There’s millions of affiliate products you can use to generate an income online. So look at the kind of products you want to promote as a way in to your niche.

It took me a long time to find my niche and even start this website. I built hundreds of websites in various niches before this one came about. But it shouldn’t be so much hard work really. If you can imagine yourself writing about your topic for several years, you’re probably on track for the right topic.

Once you have found your ideal topic to write about, it’s worth looking for an affiliate product you can promote from your blog. There’s other ways you can monetise a blog too, such as with your own products or through advertising (Google Adsense, for example). You can even create your own ebook and sell it from your website.

How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging – Choosing A Product To Sell From Your Blog

Ideally find a good affiliate product to sell from your blog. Adsense is a difficult way to monetise a blog and you’ll need a tonne of traffic even to make tiny amounts with it. Selling your own ebook can be tricky too because most bloggers will offer ebooks for free. So selling one can be difficult. But with the right affiliate product/s it can be much easier to make blogging pay, especially if you find high quality products which pay recurring income.

A recurring income product you can sell from your blog is worth it’s weight in gold! Subscription products which offer high value, such as software and training products are a good idea. They give you more ability to create a sustainable income quite quickly. However, it’s more important to choose a product which aligns with your topic. That way, more of your visitors and followers will be interested in it. Ideally find a product to sell which ticks multiple boxes: high value, subscription, high ticket, aligned with your topic.

Blogging – An Analogy

Blogging is a long term affair. I like the analogy I often use which is to compare blogging to the Chinese bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, the plant has a five year gestation period before it even breaks through the soil. So if you were unaware you have a Chinese bamboo tree, you would likely believe it to be dead, and throw it away before it’s had chance to come to fruition.

How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging — The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The same can be said of many bloggers. You have to put in some time upfront before you can benefit from the fruit of blogging. This is why I started this blog post with the blog topic as being the most important thing. If you don’t love your topic, you’re hardly likely to keep going for long enough to see the benefits.

More likely you’ll quit before anything much happens. But choose a topic you’re passionate about and you’ll enjoy the process. It will be a much more enjoyable journey and you’ll stick with it because you’re enjoying it, not only because you want the “fruits”.

After 5 years of careful watering and fertilising the Chinese Bamboo breaks through the soil. Now I’m not saying it will take 5 years of blogging to earn money from it, it will likely take less time. But it might take several months before you start to see the “shoots” of your “plant”.

After the Chinese Bamboo breaks the soil through it can grow 90 feet in only five weeks. Blogging can be incredibly lucrative if you take the time and keep going with it. The results are linear according to your efforts, but will grow exponentially over time as you keep putting effort in.

Building An Email List From A Blog

The main key to making money from a blog, once you have found your niche and a good product to sell, is to get your blog visitors to join your email list. From a blog post, someone only has a few minutes to sell their product. After that they have left your website, potentially forever.

But if you can capture their email address, by offering something valuable in return, you have a potentially unlimited amount of time to re-engage them with your products and content.

People can buy from you years after joining your email list but the same is simply not true for someone who has landed on your blog and left. So the next step in building an affiliate business from blogging is to build an email list. See also the power of email marketing.

aweber - How To Build An Affiliate Business Through Blogging

To build your email list from your blog offer something as a giveaway to your visitors. Make sure every visitor can see your offer. I use (an annoying) popup on this website to show people my ebook, for example! While it can be annoying, people can clearly see what’s on offer so if it’s a good fit for them, they will often opt in to your email list.

You can offer free video courses, ebooks, pdf downloads and the like. The main key is that your offer is free and automated to encourage visitors to join your email list. If you don’t have an email autoresponder (used for list building) you can get one here.

Getting Traffic From Blogging

Getting traffic from blogging is one of the major challenges of it. There’s a few ways you can get people to visit your blog posts:

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation allows Google’s search “spiders” to index your content and rank it (potentially) for certain keywords on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages
Social media – by sharing your posts (and getting visitors to share) you can build quite a following simply from the various social media sites you use
Paid advertising – if you want to get faster traffic, simply buy some. You can direct traffic based on keywords or even your blog posts (using dynamic advertising which crawls your blog and creates a suitable advert)
Email list – the email list is vital for the growth of a blog because it allows you to be in control of your traffic. Send new blog posts to your email subscribers.
Referral traffic – you can get referral links from other websites and people sharing your content. You can also guest post to build links and blog comment on other people’s websites.

Creating Content

But before any of that can happen you need to create content for your website. Blogging is simply writing on a website. Blog comes from WeB Log. It’s a log on the web!

Before you start creating content it’s worth thinking about your product/s that you’re going to sell. Ask yourself what kind of questions your prospective customers might have. What are they looking for and why would they visit your website. Your blog should attract people who are going to show an interest in your product ultimately. Otherwise you won’t make any money from blogging.

So start with the search intent of your “perfect” customers – or customer avatar. A customer “avatar” is the kind of person you want to attract who is likely to buy from you. By creating high quality content (which stands the test of time) and which targets those kinds of people, you have a greater chance of becoming (and staying) profitable with your blogging.

Start by using Google’s keyword planner to “zone” in on long term keywords which might be used by your target audience. There’s more on this strategy in my post finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Also see my post best free blog plugins for WordPress. SEO plugins help you write SEO friendly content which have more chance of ranking on Google (and other search engines). You can also find plugins which allow visitors to share your posts on social media – giving each post another boost, both for traffic and SEO!

Summary

So that’s a short guide of how to build an affiliate business through blogging. It’s a great way to earn some extra income in the beginning and if you’re serious you can even replace a full time income through blogging if you stick with it for long enough!

For a step by step training and online business course you can check out my recommended course here. I would definitely recommend getting some training and educating yourself about the best products to use to build a profitable affiliate business.

Blogging is just one strategy to do so but there are others too. Paid marketing tactics are a much faster way to build a profitable online business from scratch through using affiliate products and email marketing.

Get started here.

Small Shifts Vs Large Leaps

Small shifts vs large leaps, which is better? While we would all rather make giant leaps in any endeavour, it’s the small shifts which can be maintained over the longer term. A good example is joining the gym with the goal to get a “perfect” body and fitness level in just a few months. The shift from lying on the couch to working out every day is too much! Most will quit within a month or two. Old habits are engrained and the new habit is too much to contend with.

Gyms know this when people join in January. That’s why they will ask for a 12 month contract! Most will stop coming by March!

The same can be said for building an online business. In theory we would like to be super profitable in no time at all. So we set a goal of making 10K a month in the first year. When this doesn’t happen, we are disillusioned and quit! What we often don’t realise is that all our old habits, thoughts and behaviour patterns are working against us. They don’t support our new ventures. In order to change our behaviour for the long term, we need to start with something small.

Small Shifts Vs Big Leaps

I teach martial arts, Wing Chun Kung Fu to be more precise. Checkout my Kung Fu class in Leeds here. One of the goals for a lot of people is to attain a black belt in martial arts, and often students will start with this in mind. However, this can work against you because a black belt requires years of practice, and dedication. What if you don’t like the class? When the reality doesn’t live up to the fantasy, most will drop out. Only around 1% will keep going and attain this level of achievement.

I recently started learning Kung Fu from a new teacher (from a different lineage). It was a lot different from what I had done previously. If I had aimed at getting my black belt, or similar achievement in this new style, I would have dropped out by now! Instead, I only focused on turning up to a class every week. I’ve managed to keep up this habit for 3 years now, with only the odd week missed.

It is the small things we can do on a daily basis which create change, not the large leaps we think we need to make. As Bruce Lee said “long term consistency trumps short term intensity”.

A fad is when you think you can suddenly change your life with some new, instant inspiration. While inspiration can help you change, it’s consistency which makes the difference.

Small Shifts Vs Large Leaps In An Online Business

In my online business, I haven’t always been consistent. In the first instance, I blogged for a while. Then I stopped, looking to see whether my blogging would “work” to create the income I wanted. It didn’t! So I stopped! I would spend several weeks procrastinating about what I should do, without doing anything of note! Then, a sale would drop in from the blogging. I would be inspired again and get busy blogging every day.

Some time would pass, and I would look for more sales, which didn’t come! So I would stop again! Look at what I was doing and wonder if it was actually working! Then, after another few weeks of procrastination, another sale would drop in! Back to blogging! This pattern continued until I built up my belief in what I was doing. Once my blogging became habit, the sales started flowing again.

It is this approach which happens in everything. We work at something we want to achieve, look for results, and hesitate. The same is true of the gym analogy. When we work out regularly we feel better and look better. But as we look for the results and don’t see them (because we look too soon), we doubt whether our efforts are being rewarded.

Working out every week for 3 weeks in a row will seldom bring about the long term change we desire. Much like learning a musical instrument for 3 weeks won’t make us great at it, either! Or, learning a martial art for 3 weeks will enable us to defend ourselves.

But the power of habits over the long term is much more powerful.

The Stop Start Habit

Most people are hardwired in the stop start habit. They see some results and celebrate, loosening their good habits and falling back down the curve towards “failure”. Or, worse still, they look for results, don’t see them, and quit their good habits (as with the gym analogy).

The comfort zone is a psychological phenonenum which exists throughout life in many facets. Look at how this works in your own life. At what stage do you tidy your house? Perhaps once it reaches the lowest acceptable standards which you set? At what stage do you consider changing your job/income? When you have had enough of not having enough money, or when the stress of it easts into your happiness.

The above curve shows how we aspire for something in life, but then lose our motivation when it appears, dropping back into our comfort zone (and our old habits).

To shift this curve upwards we need to raise both the lines of our dreams/goals and of our lowest acceptable standards.

Summary

While slight changes in your behaviour can seem almost irrelevant, over time small shifts can have the largest impact. Imagine how much difference working out for 30 minutes a day will make over 10 years. Compare a version of yourself who has done that (for 10 years) with a version which hasn’t. The different will be quite dramatic. Or a version of you which drinks alcohol for 10 years compared to one who doesn’t. Apply the same to anything whether it be learning a musical instrument, a martial art of building an online business.

Small shifts can make dramatic differences over long periods and are much easier to sustain than large monumental leaps. A large change is harder to sustain due to your pre-existing habits, thoughts and self perception. But small changes are less likely to interfere with your self image, identity and existing beliefs and habits.

Small things matter. Small habits matter. So if you want to make a permanent change in your life somehow, start with something small. Small shifts vs large leaps is the answer.

Can You Make A Living Blogging?

Can you make a living blogging? If so how is it done? Blogging is definitely a slow burner and it takes time to gather momentum with it. Depending on the time you put in and the topic of your blog, it can take months or even years to build a solid income from blogging. I’ve been a blogger for several years now, and I’m still not making a living from blogging entirely. But if you commit to blogging and make it your intention to blog for a living, there’s no reason why you can’t achieve it.

Many bloggers make a full time income through their blog, despite that fact that there’s plenty of competition for blogs online. There’s over 600 million blogs online and this number is growing all the time. With the advent of AI, it has become more difficult making a living blogging. Not only blogs written in record speed by AI writing machines, but Google employs AI itself in the search results. This makes it more difficult to rank your content, especially if you’re new to blogging.

So how can you build a blog which makes money, while writing about a topic you love? Well here’s my strategy for doing exactly that.

Can You Make A Living Blogging? Yes, but..

You can make a living blogging yes. But it takes time and a lot of effort. Most people aren’t going to stick with it long enough to make it happen. I’ve had several blogs which simply fell away after I lost interest in the topic. I blogged about all sorts of things when I started out as an affiliate. I blogged about recipes, mushroom harvesting, shed building and a whole lot more to attract traffic to my affiliate offers. But the main reason none of these blogs succeeded was because I didn’t care about my topic.

After several failures (also learnings if you reframe “failure”), I landed on this topic – affiliate marketing mentorship. I seemed to stick with me because I’m passionate about self help, psychology and earning a living online. The “affiliate mentor” niche therefore seemed to work for me because it’s something I’m passionate about.

So my best advice if you want to make a living blogging is to find a niche with which you’re passionate about and in which you can keep blogging for years, yes years. You can have some success with a blog within a few months. I started making sales through blogging quite early – within a few months. This spurred me on and is the reason why I’m still blogging today.

If you’re only blogging for the end result – to make affiliate sales, there’s less incentive for you to keep going when nothing seems to be working. But if your motivation is intrinsic (comes from within), then you’ve a better chance because you’re going to stick at it longer, because you love it!

Can You Make A Living Blogging – Products

The other necessity to make a living blogging is to find a good product (or products) which you can sell from your blog. I only promote products I’ve used myself personally and therefore I can recommend them with integrity. In the beginning when I started out as an affiliate, I would try and sell any old product, whether I had used it or not. But this isn’t a great idea. How can you wholeheartedly recommend something if you haven’t even bought it yourself? The answer is you can’t!

Ideally find a product which aligns with your passion. That way, you attract an audience who will also love your product. So if you’re writing about Yoga, use a Yoga course to monetise your website. But find one which you genuinely love and can recommend, or create your own course and sell that.

Good product are generally more expensive than others and although this might mean an investment upfront, it also means larger commissions when you start making sales. Plus, high quality products offer subscriptions and customers are more likely to stick with something which is super valuable, rather than the latest fad! You can find affiliate products in almost any niche with a quick Google search. But finding high quality products which will last can take a bit of digging.

Targeting Long Tail Keywords

As a new blogger, it can help to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This has a two fold benefit:

It boosts your “SEO power” or domain authority with Google, thereby increasing your rankings on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. More content (especially high quality content) in helpful for your SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
It lets you rank for the less difficult keywords and get found on page one of the search results.

Once you have created a few pieces of content for long tail keywords which have less competition, you should have increased your domain authority a little. Then start going after more competitive keywords which attract the target audience suitable for your particular products/niche.

Content should also be aimed to help and inspire your audience which you’ll build through the use of an email list.

Why Build An Email List

Blogging is time consuming and you aren’t guaranteed a place on Google’s first page, however good your content is. So in order to give yourself a better chance of building a large audience, it’s wise to build an email list of subscribers. An email list gives you control over your traffic, without which you’ll have to work really hard for (through content marketing) or pay for traffic with paid advertising.

If your advertising platform has a problem, or your rankings drop off Google, a lost redresses the balance and gives you more control. You can still email your subscribers and get traffic to your blog posts (and your offers) if you have a list which you build up over time.

Can You Make A Living Blogging – Building Your Email List

Your blog posts can be used to attract an audience to your website. However, most of that traffic will simply leave within a few minutes, if not seconds! To build your email list you need to offer something of value from your website to encourage your visitors to join your email list.

For example, I use this ebook as one of my own “lead magnets” – click on the image to download it!

Ebooks, downloads, pdfs and video courses are all good “lead magnets” you can use to build an email list from your blogging. Ideally choose something that aligns with the products you’re going to use to monetise your blog with. I offer a training and education resource to help people build an income online from scratch. (Join my list by accessing my ebook for more information).

Helping Your Subscribers/Visitors

A blog should be useful in some way to your visitors and subscribers. Otherwise, you won’t attract much of an audience and you won’t build trust with that audience. Putting the cart before the horse and trying to sell your wares before building this trust is where many bloggers go wrong. You need to put in the work first, before you can capitalise on the rewards (in terms of sales).

So help your visitors and subscribers through your content. Build trust by offering value. Once people trust you, they will keep coming to your blog and keep opening your email messages. When you recommend something, they are much more likely to buy from you if you have built this trust first.

Again, this takes time. So in order to maintain your enthusiasm, long term, pick a topic you love writing about. Recently I had someone buy a course from my email list after 5 years of being on it! This just shows the power of the email list. If you don’t capture your blog visitor’s email address somehow, there’s no chance of this happening because they will be long gone!

Passion Project & Sub Niche

Like any passion project, it can take years before you’re up and running, making the kind of money you would really like. But choosing the right topic and the right products in the first instance will put you in good stead for long term success. Make sure you offer something of value to give to your visitors, such as an ebook or video course and use this to build your email list.

As your email list grows, so will your income if you consistently offer value, and build your blog, sharing and linking to it as you go.

Checkout my other posts on blogging below:

It can also help to find a sub-niche with your blog topic. A sub-niche is a niche within a niche. So for example, if your topic is Yoga, a sub-niche might be Yoga for seniors, or chair Yoga for rehabilitation, or Yoga for back pain. A sub-niche is a good idea for bloggers because there’s less competition in a sub-niche.

As such you’re likely to gain more traction with your blogging. Sub-niche topics are also good because you get a very specific type of visitor. So if you target a sub-niche well, you can do very well with your sales, knowing exactly who is going to visit your blog and what they are likely to purchase.

Summary

Anyone can make a living through blogging if they choose a good topic, monetise it well and spend enough time on it. However, it can take months or years in some niches before you will see the “fruit”. If you intend on starting a blog, you’ll find it much easier to write about a topic you’re passionate about or at the least interested in. A passion project is also much much enjoyable over the longer term, whereas if your sole interest is the income, you might find you’ll lose interest after a few months of blogging.

Ideally choose a topic you love in a sub niche which has less competition. Monetise your blog with a high value affiliate product which you genuinely endorse, if not your own product. Build an email list and start collecting subscribers by offering a freebie of some kind. Then keep writing high quality content for your target audience and providing value for them.

How To Make More Affiliate Sales

Wondering how to make more affiliate sales? The key to making more sales is to first identify where you sales are coming from. Once you have established how you’ve made a sale, you can simply do more of the activity which brought the sale in! If you’re yet to make a sale in affiliate marketing, you need to focus on an action or activity which will bring in the sale.

For me, sales generally come through someone joining my email list and purchasing a product. So building my email list is the focus if I want more sales. If you don’t already have an email autoresponder you can get one here. To build my list I do a number of actions: create content on my blog (and video for YouTube) and run advertising campaigns (Google Ads, Bing, YouTube).

How To Make More Affiliate Sales

One of my main strategies is blogging and I’ve been a blogger for several years now. I’ll admit that blogging can be slow. You can spend a lot of time blogging and nothing happens, sometimes for months. But then, you’ll drop a sale and you can track it back to a blog post you wrote (often months or years ago)! But the good thing about blogging is that it’s cheap and you can do it anytime and from anywhere.

A faster way to generate sales is through paid marketing. If you have a marketing budget, it’s well worth running some ad campaigns and testing out some landing pages. A landing page is a specific page built with one thing in mind – to collect email subscribers. A website is different. There’s more going on on a website. That means there’s also more distractions. So you don’t want to spend money sending people to a blog really, since much of your marketing budget will be wasted.

Instead, send paid traffic to a landing page and collect email subscribers. A subscriber is much more likely to turn into a sale than a website visitor. With a subscriber, you have more opportunity to sell because they join your email list and you can continue to send them your marketing messages. Whereas on a website you only have a small “window” with which to sell. After that, most website visitors are gone forever!

How To Make More Affiliate Sales – Isolate An Action You Can Repeat

I like blogging because it’s an activity I can spend time on which I enjoy anyway. It’s also an activity which brings me leads which in turn bring in sales. Here’s a few other actions which can ultimately lead to more leads and more sales:

Running ad campaigns – testing ad campaigns is one of the best things you can do for affiliate sales. Ultimately you want an advert which performs and brings in a good ROI – return on investment
Social media activity – there’s various social media strategies you can use to attract traffic to your offer. Checkout my post on unpaid social media marketing.
Uploading videos – either for organic traffic or to run paid ad campaigns – while organic traffic can take some time to come to fruition, it’s a lot like blogging.
Emailing your list – if you already have an email list, you can increase the number of regular emails you send out. Try upping the output and see what the result it. Often I have increased my emails to include one every day and it’s resulted in more sales.
SEO – there’s other search engine optimisation strategies you can use too including blogging, back linking, optimising content guest posting and blog commenting.

In terms of SEO, small daily habits are the best because each little action doesn’t in itself move the income needle of your business. Paid ads can do that once you find one which works well. With SEO, your little efforts add up over time. So don’t discount them just because they don’t appear to make a massive different.

Create Daily Habits

There’s a John Dryden quote: We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.

Never has this been more true than with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing we get excited at first, expecting a lot to happen. When it doesn’t, we become disillusioned and give up! This is why 95% of affiliates quit. Motivation doesn’t last, and you might find yourself procrastinating and dawdling when you should be working on your affiliate business. If this happens, you simply haven’t created a strong enough habit pattern to keep you moving forwards.

Set a goal for the achievement of something relating to your habit. Then create a habit out of the action which will bring in more sales. My latest goal is to reach 1000 blog posts on this website, (today there are 896 published posts so far). This post will make it 897!

Habits are great because they help you stay the course when you don’t have the motivation! So create habits which are going to help move your affiliate business forwards and create momentum. Once you have momentum on your side, it’s much easier to stay the course.

Split Testing

Split testing is a way of looking at two similar advertisements which have a slightly different factor. For example, you can have two ads the same, but test them for different keywords. Over time, you should find one out performs the other in terms of sales. Or, you can change headings and images in your advertising campaigns. One image might outperform another and so that’s the one to focus on.

Split testing is a great way to increase your conversions by identifying a winning advert and improving on it. The long term effect of continual split testing is a highly profitable advertising campaign which is the most efficient.

Summary

So how can you generate more affiliate sales? Firstly, identify how you make sales already, and do more of what works. If you haven’t yet made a sale, find a marketing method which suits your lifestyle and budget and stick with it until you do! Then focus on doing more of what works and simply get better at it!

As you gain knowledge, you can apply that knowledge to your marketing method to get better results over time. Make sure you track your affiliate sales so you know exactly what activity created the sale. That way you can go back and focus your time on the most productive activity you have found so far.

Many of my sales have come from my blogging. So my latest goal is to write 1000 blog posts on this website by the end of the year. Wish me luck!

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Search Intent Versus Interruption Marketing

So what does search intent versus interruption marketing mean? Search intent marketing you will find through Google, and other search engines. You search for a particular phrase or keyword and up comes the results. At the top of the results page you will usually notice some paid adverts. Those are ads run by marketers who show their ads specifically for certain search phrases which match their business.

Search intent marketing is pretty good for marketers because they can limit wastage by only showing their ads to likely buyers. They know who is more likely to buy through their search intent – or the keyword or phrase they have entered into Google. So if you’re selling an yoga course, for example, the keyword which triggers your advert might be “yoga for beginners”.

Search intent marketing is also good because you can determine through experimentation which keywords are best for your business. Once you’ve done some testing, you will know which keywords perform the best and help bring in customers.

Search Intent Versus Interruption Marketing

“Interruption” marketing is so called because you’re interrupting someone on a platform in order to show them your advertising message. Facebook, for example, is a platform where you use interruption marketing. The user hasn’t particularly searched for your product/service, but you show your ads to them because they meet the criteria of your market demographic.

In some cases, the user has expressed an interest in your particular product (in the past), or one like it, and this information is used by a marketer to find them. The Facebook marketing platform is pretty clever and you can target people according to a number of criteria such as:

search intent versus interruption marketing

Age
Location
Interests
Sex
Connections
etc.

Interruption marketing is useful for marketers because they can target people who are likely to want their products, even if they aren’t specifically looking for it. So although the end user isn’t (in that moment) specifically typing in a search query, as with Google, you can still zone in on people who are likely to buy if you’re a marketer.

Search Intent Versus Interruption Marketing – YouTube

YouTube is another platform where you can find targeted individuals for the purpose of promoting your products or services. With YouTube, you can also use keywords as well as simply placing your advert in front of likely customers based on their watching habits.

If someone is actively searching for Yoga videos on YouTube, there’s a good change they might be interested in a Yoga course you might be selling. Or you could target people of a certain age, or with certain ailments, who might benefit from Yoga. You can also target people based on the videos they have watched on YouTube, their age, location and even their income.

YouTube is a search based platform and you can actively use the search bar in order to find videos of interest. But it’s also a platform which uses interruption marketing. You will have noticed that the adverts on YouTube interrupt your viewing a certain video. So you aren’t actively looking for those particular adverts, as with search intent marketing on Google.

YouTube

YouTube is a good place for a marketing campaign if you carefully identify your target market. The target market is the small slice of the online marketplace who is most likely to want your product/service. (See also customer avatar worksheet pdf). If you notice on YouTube adverts there’s often a “hook” in the first segment of a video advert. The advertiser says something to “hook” you in. That’s to engage with their target audience. Those who identify with the first few seconds of an advert will stay on and often click through to the offer/product.

If someone stays on an advert for longer, the marketer will have to pay. But if someone clicks off straight away, there’s no cost for the marketer. So the best adverts for YouTube marketers are those which repel those who aren’t interested and attract those who fit the description of the marketers target audience. This is the first few seconds of an ad – the “hook”.

Search Intent And Organic Marketing

Search intent marketing also includes organic search results you will find on Google. Those are the listings you will find on page one of Google’s search results for any given keyword. Usually there’s some adverts at the top of the page.

These are paid for ads run by Google’s Adwords program. Depending on the topic you are searching for these may or may not appear. Under those results you’ll find organic search results. These are the results which Google ranks “organically” without having to pay.

It’s worth pursuing some organic listings for your business, especially if you have a local business. However in the top niches, it’s very competitive and difficult to obtain a high ranking listing for a competitive keyword or phrase. Organic listings are highly sought after because if you can get free traffic, and make sales from your listing, you’re in a high profitable position.

However this can take a long time and a lot of effort, and there’s still no guarantee of a first page listing.

Summary

Search intent marketing is where someone uses a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc) to search for a keyword or phrase. The advert pops up at the top of the search results and links through to a website where something is for sale. The marketer carefully selects keywords which are only relevant for their business so that they have a greater chance of making a sale for each click they pay for.

With interruption marketing, you are “interrupting” the user of a social media platform such as Facebook for example. The user isn’t specifically searching for your product/service so you “interrupt” them while they are on social media. Interruption marketing can work really well for marketers because they can target people very specifically based on a number of criteria. These are things like someone’s location, age, interests and hobbies, for example.

Whether you use search intent marketing or interruption marketing will depend on what you’re selling and how you intend to sell. With a location specific business, you can focus in on your local area, which can help you save your marketing budget and not waste it on those who are too far away to subscribe to your services.

Whichever form of marketing you use, it’s useful to identify your target audience. The target audience is the specific type of person you intend to attract to your business. You can identify them through their search queries, interests, location, age, and other demographics. Once you have built up a solid idea of who your customer avatar is, you’ll save a lot on your marketing budget because you can eliminate people who are less likely to buy from you and avoid spending marketing budget on them.

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income

Trading time for money vs online income, what’s the difference? Most people are trading time for money in traditional employment. You work a certain number of hours for a certain amount of money. The problem is there’s only so many hours in a day, so you can only earn so much.

When you hit the later years in life that realise that you want your life back! You want more time and the money to do with it what you want! But there’s a problem. You must keep turning up to work over and over, no matter how many other things you’d rather do! If you quit your job, you can’t support your lifestyle.

There’s an answer which can get you out of your job before retirement and it’s the internet. With the internet, you can get paid for selling other people’s products and services. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you can choose almost any product and sell it. There’s no need to speak directly to customers or hold any products. You can sell products directly from links, affiliate links to be precise.

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income

Through the sale of products and services online, you can escape the time for money conundrum. In a job, there’s only so much you can earn because there’s only so many hours in the day. With an online business, you can sell products over and over again, and there’s no limit because you have a global audience at your fingertips. Plus, selling products online isn’t dependent on your time and the process can be completely automated. That means you can sell products while you sleep, while you’re on holiday or even while you’re doing you 9 to 5 job.

An online income can be built up around your existing job so that over time your online income can slowly replace your existing income. Once your online income overtakes your employment income, you’re in a great position if you want to quit your 9 to 5! Many people dream of living a life on their own terms, travelling and spending more time with their family. But most never are able to do it beyond the remit of their 2 weeks holiday a year from their employment income.

With an online income, you can get paid for selling products and services and automate the process so your income isn’t dependant on your time.

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income – Getting Started

Before you can earn an income online, you’ll need to set up some infrastructure and learn the strategies of selling online. One of the main ways to do this is through email marketing. Build an email list of subscribers and offer them something valuable in return for joining your email list. As your email list grows you can earn income by promoting products which are of interest to your subscribers.

Many online business owners build their lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. By sending relevant and useful information to their list, marketers can generate income through product sales.

The best thing is that this can all be done on autopilot while you’re doing other things. Once you have the infrastructure in place, you can simply send targeted traffic (website visitors) to your email list. From their the automated email messages are sent out daily to your subscribers.

Affiliate Products – What To Sell

The best products to sell are those which offer the most value to your subscribers. Products which offer the most value are the ones which tend to sell. There’s millions of products you can choose from as a product referrer (affiliate marketer). Some affiliates will head to Amazon and promote any of the thousands of products on the site. But there’s also digital products you can promote too, which offer higher levels of commission than Amazon’s physical product range.

Certain products pay much more more than others too, such as high ticket affiliate products. Those are products which have a much larger price tag than most. You can also sell products which offer subscription payments. So you can get paid over and over for each sale you refer. These are good for affiliates because you can start earning a steady income quite quickly once you start making sales.

Summary

Trading time for money in a job can mean you feel trapped not only by the need to keep showing up but also your need for the income it provides. An internet based income can be generated around existing work through the use of affiliate products. Affiliate products are other people’s products and services which you can sell for a share of the profits.

By using automation in the sale and delivery of online products, third party referrers (affiliates) can generate an income around existing employment. Over time, this can be built up to completely replace and grow beyond what you currently earn.

Once the infrastructure is in place with an online business, it can largely run on autopilot. This means your income isn’t tied to your time, as with employment. Online business owners can travel and live anywhere providing they have access to the internet and a laptop.

Learn more and start your own internet based business here.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet

There’s a few ways to generate an income from the internet and over the years I’ve tried a few. In the first instance, I tried Forex marketing. Forex marketing, is trading on the Foreign Exchange markets. I used Forex pairs and jumped in an out of the markets speculating on the small market shifts. Despite spending a couple of years learning a strategy for this, I eventually gave up on it. Around 95% of new traders blow their trading bank in the first year of trading, never to trade again.

Trading Forex can work if you stick with it and are very disciplined. But for me it wasn’t to be. I then tried a bit of buying and selling on eBay. I started off buying from charity shops in the 90’s and then found a strategy where I found bargain items on eBay itself and sold them on. You can read about the strategy I used here.

After a while of buying and selling from eBay I decided it wasn’t working out. I seemed to be spending a huge amount of time finding items and re-listing them, not to mention the time I spend queueing in the post office. So I looked for something else, which might have more potential.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Selling Online

I had learned the eBay strategy I mentioned through the purchase of an ebook, which I bought off eBay. The transaction seemed pretty simple: it was a digital book which I could buy and download instantly. This seemed to me like the perfect business model – nothing to physically post, and no stock gathering dust in my spare room!

So I decided to write my own ebook and sell it from a website. The trouble I found was in attracting traffic to my website. I couldn’t find any buyers, despite having figured out how to automate the sale from my website. So I put myself on a marketing course with the idea to sell my own ebook. (More on selling your own ebook here).

The course I joined was about affiliate marketing and I realised that I could easily sell existing products (which were worth much more than my ebook) in the same way as selling my own product (my ebook). My ebook was up for $10 but I could earn more by selling the course I purchased – even though I only took around 40% of the sale price! So I set up a website through the course and started selling a course.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Advertising

After a few setbacks, including the course creator taking the course off the market (this was back in the early 2000’s) and having my advertising platform suspended, I changed tact. I couldn’t use Google Adwords (the paid advertising platform used to sell the product). So I switched to another strategy. I started trying to earn income from advertising on a website. This is another strategy you can use to earn online. By earning income through advertising clicks, you can effectively earn a passive income online. However, the clicks are only worth tiny amounts. So you need a lot of them in order to be profitable.

After a lot of blogging, I was still only earning a few pennies a day (cents in the US). So I decided that this strategy wasn’t the best! Looking back now I now realise how much time I was spending jumping from one idea to the next! This is known as “shiny object syndrome”! Do yourself a favour and learn from this mistake of mine! Don’t look for the “quick route to online riches”. Instead, study affiliate marketing – one of the fastest ways to make a real online income and replace your employment income.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The “Best”

Whatever works is what I believe is genuinely the best. However, in my personal experience, I’ve definitely found affiliate marketing to be the best. In the early years of my experimenting with online earning methods, I made trickles from advertising revenue (Google Adsense) and I made gains and losses from Forex marketing and ebay strategies. However, the best gains for the least amount of work and hassle definitely came from affiliate marketing.

This is of course why I pursued affiliate marketing with a passion. I did of course come up against a number of obstacles. Google algorithm changes, ad platforms disallowing and disapproving (and even suspending my account) and massive drops of my ranking content on the search engines are just a few of them.

But with affiliate marketing you can find and sell the best products online. You don’t need to create a product yourself. So if you can find high value products which already sell, half the battle is already won. You then need to focus on a marketing strategy you can stick with for at least 6 months to a year; whether this is paid marketing, or a cheaper alternative, such as blogging or v’logging.

Getting Started

You might be thinking this is all too much hard work? But if that’s the case, you’re probably not in the right space to start learning affiliate marketing. Those who succeed at affiliate marketing have a big reason to succeed. It’s not easy for sure, but once you understand how to use the leverage of selling online, you will have learned a skill for life which is life changing.

Get started here with a step by step system. It gives you all the products and software you need to set the infrastructure for a solid online business from scratch. Once set up, you only need to learn how to market your sales system and generate leads. It’s one of the simplest selling systems online.

Access here and get started!

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?

If you have a website, and are attempting to attract an audience, you might have wondered where your website traffic comes from. Website traffic comes from a few main areas: organic, direct and referral, paid, email and social media.

Organic traffic comes from the search engines. So people are finding you from a search enquiry from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo or one of the other search engines on the internet. If you have a lot of content on your website, this is more likely to happen. Or much of your traffic will be for specific keywords for which you are ranking highly on the search engine results pages (SERPS). For example, if you have a store which specialises in something, that keyword is likely going to bring up your website – especially if you have a locally based business and someone is searching locally.

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?

Direct traffic comes from someone who knows your website url. So your website address is typed directly into the search bar at the top of the screen (on a laptop/computer). Or this kind of traffic can come through some unknown source too. If you use business cards and flyers to advertise your business, you might get people finding your website through this form of advertising. Direct traffic usually comes form someone who knows your website address, or has visited you before.

Referral traffic comes from other websites. If someone has linked to your website from theirs, visitors can find you through the referral link. Or, if someone recommends your website from an email, this can also be a form of referral.

Paid traffic is another possibility if you’re paying to drive traffic to your website. Paid platforms such as Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing, and social media platforms also offer paid advertising for website owners. Paid advertising is one of the fastest and most effective ways to drive customers to your business online. With Facebook, for example, you can even specify the type of person you want to attract. Demographics such as their interests and location can be used to attract the most likely type of people who will buy from you.

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From? – Email Marketing

Email marketing is also a great way to get people to your website. By building an email list of subscribers, many website owners boost their number of visitors. An email list can be built by offering a giveaway of some kind on a website.

Ebooks, video courses, downloads and discounts are just a few of the things website owners offer to their subscribers. This encourages website visitors to opt in to their email list. Once on your list, you can send out updates and new content for your subscribers to visit.

Social media is another source of website traffic. By sharing content on social media, and building communities, groups and pages etc., website owners can begin to attract people from Facebook, Linkedin, X.com and many others.

Diversifying Your Traffic Sources

Having a diverse source of traffic can be a good thing if one particular source lets you down. For example, if you rely heavily on paid traffic, but have a problem with your advertising account, it can leave you vulnerable. In the same way, relying on SEO (search engine optimisation) too heavily can give you problems. When Google updates their algorithms and your website is penalised, for example. Your rankings can quickly fall off the search results overnight, leaving you without any traffic.

So it’s a good idea to do a little of each:

Paid advertising (e.g. Google Adwords)
Email marketing – build an email list that you own
Social media marketing – sharing content on social media
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – create lots of content which can rank on the SERPS
Offline advertising – directing people to your website directly (direct traffic)

Getting More Traffic To Your Website

As you can see there’s lots of ways to generate traffic to your website. If you set aside a marketing budget each month, paid traffic is the fastest method of getting people to find you online. However, you need to be careful because not all that traffic will convert into customers. So make sure you target the right people who are most likely to buy from you. See my post on target audience and learn about your customer avatar. Then start with a low budget you can afford to lose while you learn.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation is another way to attract (organic) traffic from the search engines such as Google and Bing etc. To attract a lot of organic traffic, you need to create valuable content on your website which is targeted towards your ideal customer (customer avatar). Write content which will be useful to those people you want to attract. Share your content on social media frequently to give yourself another “stream” of traffic. You can use social share buttons and software to help with this. See my post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Offline advertising is another option to attract direct traffic to your website. Use flyers, business cards, newspaper adverts and the like.

For referrals you can write blog posts for other website owners within your industry. Do this in exchange for referral links (also known as back links). Back links are a highly valued ranking algorithm factor which can boost your content in the search results pages and give you more free traffic from Google.

If you know people within your industry/niche, you can always reach out personally to ask for backlinks too.

An Interesting Thing About Blogging

There’s an interesting thing about blogging and that is that it casts a shadow. Let me explain. Back in July I set myself a goal of getting 1000 website visitors to my blog in a single day. Check out my post “how to get 1000 website hits in one day without paying“.

At the time, I was getting on average around 200 hits on my website. So 1000 hits was a bit of a stretch for me. That’s what a goal should do though. A goal should motivate and inspire you to take actions which you previously were not taking! My goal definitely inspired me into action. I blogged much more than I would otherwise have done last month.

I didn’t quite hit 1000 hits though, in a single day. I got pretty close to it though hitting over 800 hits on many days. Checkout my stats below and you’ll see my goal definitely pushed up my traffic: (see also the importance of goal setting).

An Interesting Thing About Blogging

The thing is though, before I set my goal my traffic stats showed a much lower amount of daily traffic. When I set my goal, I was inspired to write more blog posts and to promote them (on social media) and share them every day with my list. I did this for about a month without fail.

Then a funny thing happened. I burned out and gave up! I got busy with other things and my blogging took a nose dive. However, what was interesting is that my traffic didn’t take the same nose dive as my activity did. In fact the opposite happened. My traffic kept going up! I posted a blog once a week or so, but nothing like the frenzied activity I was used to doing.

It’s now been 2 weeks since my last blog post which was aptly titled dealing with overwhelm! However, my traffic has remained fairly consistent and stuck over the 500 daily hits mark. Checkout the stats below:

An Interesting Thing About Blogging – The Shadow Effect

The “shadow” effect of blogging is the lagging activity which happens from the actions you’ve done previously. So, for example, when I write and share this post on social media, it might not get seen for a few days by some. So I might get a visitor from that social media share, but it doesn’t happen straight away. Also, I post my freshly published blogs to my email list. Well, someone on my email list might only read my post the next day, or the next week, or even a month later.

I’ve heard some subscribers tell me that they put the emails in a folder to look at at a later date.

When I share via my email autoresponder, there’s also an option to share the content with my social media business pages; which I do. So my posts get syndicated out to my Facebook pages, and other social media platforms such as X.com.

I also use a software called Revive Old Posts, which syndicates older content out to social media automatically.

All this activity leaves a shadow – a trailing digital footprint which can lead to later actions and visitors to my website. So, even though I stopped blogging for a couple of weeks after burnout, my traffic continues on.

The Tipping Point Of Blogging

I’ve written before about the tipping point in blogging. That’s where your cumulative efforts eventually “tip” your blog into the big time! The effects of SEO, continued blogging, promotion of posts, email list and your creeping results on the search engine results pages all factor in to your overall traffic. Eventually your previous efforts results in organic traffic which grows and grows culminating in a curve which grows exponentially:

However, there’s also the tipping point of the “wave” which reaches its peak and starts to fall away! I believe I may have reached this point, benefitting from the work I did over the last month or so. Ultimately the traffic will start to drop again, as it reaches the point where the “shadow” of my previous work has reached its limit.

Today my stats show nearly 500 website hits. Not bad for free and considering that I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks! However, if I continued to do nothing, I’m sure this would slowly drop over time.

Summary

An interesting thing about blogging is the shadow it casts and how your previous efforts culminate towards a rising “peak” of the traffic “wave”. Blogging has definitely taken much longer than I anticipated to get to the point of consistent traffic. Google is constantly changing their algorithm and this effects the organic traffic you may have earned previously.

We also have artificial intelligence now which is becoming almost unrecognisable from human content. That means blogging is getting more difficult! So if you want to make blogging work for you, I suggest picking a topic you’re wildly enthusiastic about so you can enjoy the process and so that you won’t get too unhappy when things don’t go according to plan. They undoubtedly won’t!