Quora.com is a question and answer website which can be used for keyword research and content marketing ideas. One of the first things you should know before you come to creating content is the answer to this question:
“what kind of content will best help my customer avatar?”
Why is the customer avatar (target audience) so important? Without identifying your target audience you will likely waste a lot of time creating the wrong kind of content. What is the wrong kind of content? If you’re selling something from your website, you’ll want to attract buying customers. The right kind of content attracts buying customers whereas the “wrong” kind of content doesn’t.
When you understand your customer avatar, you’re in a much better position to create content which they are interested in digesting.
Using Quora For Keyword Research And Content Ideas – Research?
So how can you use Quora for keyword research and content ideas? Start by heading over to Quora.com and typing in your main “seed” keyword. That’s the keyword which is the fundamental part of your business. So for this site, it would be affiliate marketing, for instance. Since this website is for helping affiliates.
A quick search on Quora.com for affiliate marketing and the first thing I find is a heap of questions which my target audience are asking:
The same is true within any niche. If I had a golf related website, for example, I could type “how do I improve my golf” and Quora will show me related questions to this niche.
The answers not only give you ideas for keyword research, which you can plug into Google’s keyword planner, (or another planner if you subscribe to one), but they also give you content ideas.
Creating Content Based On Quora Questions
Once you’ve done a little keyword research on an appropriate question title on Quora, you can find the ones which have the least competition on the search engine results pages (SERPS). More on this in my article find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Once you find a suitable title for your blog post (based on the Quora questions you find and keyword research) get to work on creating posts which answer these questionsmore fully. You can also use the answers provided on Quora.com to help you write them!
Quora is a great resource for this and I’ve used it for many of my blog posts. Checkout my article on increasing website traffic for free on this topic too.
By creating a huge resource of content based on Quora questions relating to your niche, you provide a resource base for your potential customers. You can share your content, optimise for SEO and provide a resource for your email subscribers. Over time and with enough effort, your website should increase its authority in the eyes of the search engines. When this happens you should start to rank for some of your keywords, according to the competition of course.
Summary
Type your main keyword into Quora.com and look through the answers which come up. This should give you some good content ideas which you can write blog posts for and/or create video content. Take the questions and type them into a keyword tool, such as Google’s free keyword planner. You can cross reference this with a search on the SERPS (Search engine results pages). Look for long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty for the best chance of ranking your content.
Create high quality content which out performs existing content ranking on Google if possible. Or use YouTube/TikTok to upload videos. Rinse and repeat for all your search terms which are questions relating to your niche/product.
If you’re wondering how you can increase website traffic for free, this post is for you! Free traffic takes a little longer to generate than paid traffic, but it’s well worth the effort. If you can get free traffic to your website, any sales you make is 100% profit. If you’re paying for advertising it will often make huge dent in whatever you earn.
Although getting free traffic to your website takes a lot more work than running advertising, that work compounds over time. With paid advertising, when you stop paying for ads, your traffic stops abruptly. But with organic (content) marketing, the content you build can bring in traffic for years.
As your volume of content grows, so does your traffic. So even if at first your traffic flow seems very slow and sporadic with organic traffic, a small stream can eventually turn into a river. In this post I’m going to share my strategy for building those little “trickles” of free traffic, which can turn into gushing rivers over time if you keep doing it.
Increase Website Traffic For Free
With a new website you won’t get any traffic unless you’re ranking for some obscure keyword which gets traffic and there’s zero competition for it. So to get anyone to visit your website you’ll have to run some paid advertising or optimise your website for certain specific keywords.
However, in a competitive niche, these keywords are usually well subscribed to, meaning there’s already thousands of other websites which rank for them. This is particularly true in a competitive niche (such as affiliate marketing for example).
So to get free visitors to your website you need to find long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. Once you find such a keyword which is a good match for your target audience,write a blog post using your keyword as your title. To get the most out of your blog posts, use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. This helps you write SEO friendly content with the search engines in mind.
You’re never guaranteed to rank your content on the first page of a search engine, but if you find those long tail keywords which have four or more words in them, you’l have a greater chance of getting seen!
Even if your content doesn’t start ranking, write high quality content which helps your target audience in some way. By doing so you increase the authority of your website in the eyes of the search engines. Share your content and promote it.
Increase Website Traffic – Sharing And Promoting Your Content
You’re never guaranteed a first page listing for your content. But by sharing and promoting your content, you’re giving more people the opportunity of finding your posts though other means. Share via social media and link back to your content from other websites within your niche. This can be done through guest posting and blog commenting.
It’s also worth building an email list of subscribers so that you can share your content with those who have already been to your website. This can be done through offering a freebie giveaway through your website. This could be an ebook or free video course, for example.
Building an email list is one of the simplest and most effective steps you can make towards getting more website traffic. You can access a free autoresponder here.
Rinse And Repeat
So you’ve written a few posts and shared them on your social media accounts. You’ve sent the post to your email list too. You may even see one or two hits on your website if you’re tracking your website traffic (which you should be doing). (I use Statcounter to track website hits and data.) Now you need to keep doing this, finding keywords (use Google’s free keyword tool) which are suitable for your audience.
Quora.com is a question and answer website which you can use for inspiration and for traffic too!
If you’re struggling for ideas for posts, I find Quora.com is a useful resource to use. You can search within your particular topic and find all sorts of questions which your customer avatar might want to know the answers to.
Write content for the questions which are most appropriate for the customers you want to attract. You can even use Quora to share your posts too. Just make sure you provide useful information within your answers before you post. See also affiliate marketing on quora.
Low Competition Keywords
There’s many low competition keywords you can find and you can find them using Google’s keyword planner, as I mentioned already. Simply type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for longer tail keywords which are a good match and which have fewer competing pages on the SERPS (search engines results pages).
Most of the least competitive keywords will have fewer monthly searches. So a good way to find them is to click on the Av. Monthly Searches tab until your monthly search volume drops. Typically, the lower the search volume, the fewer competing pages there are for the term in the search results. Also, the longer the number of keywords within the phrase, the few competing pages there will be (on Google), in general.
There’s upsides and downside to this strategy of course. If you write blog posts for long tail keywords which have fewer searches, even if you rank at the top of Google, you’ll still only receive a share of the search volume for that particular term. Not everyone clicks on the top result when they perform a search on the internet. Some will click on the second, third and forth result. However, a small slice of a little is worth more than zero share of a lot! If you go after competitive terms which have much more competition online, you’ll likely only rank your content on page 10 of Google, where nobody looks!
So, you’ll need to create a lot of content for your traffic to start building up (depending on your topic of course, and the relative competitiveness). Over time, this compounds and these small traffic trickles can eventually turn into streams and rivers!
Summary
To increase website traffic for free, first find long tail keywords which are a good match for your customer avatar. Create content which answers questions your customers might be askingand which have little competition on the search results pages. Share and promote your content through social media, Q&A websites (such as Quora.com) and through building an email list. Build back links by guest posting and blog commenting on blogs within your niche. Rinse and repeat.
Some of your content will rank in the search engines (on page 1), and some won’t! It really depends on your topic and the relative competitiveness. Each piece of content is a digital “fishing rod” in the “pond” of the search engines and of course your other “ponds” such as social media, your email list, Quora and so on. The more rods you drop into the more ponds, the more traffic you are likely to build over time. Keep building content and keep promoting and sharing it. Over time, small traffic trickles can turn into streams and rivers.
Inertia and affiliate marketing are intricately linked. For example, as a beginner affiliate, it can be difficult to get things going. You start off with a few training videos and set up a website, for example. At the beginning stage of affiliate marketing you haven’t built up any inertia. However, once you’ve set off with some kind of marketing method, you start to see some things happening. It might be a hit on your website, or a lead into your marketing funnel. You might even make a sale or two!
This gives you motivation and you gain confidence in what you’re doing. If you get to this point you can see the inertia building. Greater belief leads to more activity, which in turn leads to more results and this further ingrains your belief in what you’re doing.
This is the cycle of inertia we want as affiliates. Positive intention and belief leads to positive actions which generate the results we want. The problem arises when there’s no inertia and not much belief. When you doubt whether your affiliate business will work, or you are uncertain of your next more and procrastinate, no inertia is built. You stall instead and this fuels your doubt because nothing happens!
Either way there’s inertia in effect – whether it’s in a positive way or a negative way!
Inertia And Affiliate Marketing – Building Inertia Through Belief
Building the inertia you want in your affiliate marketing business starts with belief. If you harbour doubts, these thought “seeds” will poison your “crop”! Even the tiniest seeds of doubt can lead you to inaction. When you believe you can do something, you take action. When you believe it’s impossible, you don’t. Both action and inaction lead to results of a like mind and your belief is proven correct! As Henry Ford is noted as saying:
The Slight Edge Is A Great Book Which Explains How Inertia Can Be Channeled In many life areas
“Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”
Napoleon Hill states in his book Think And Grow Rich”
“The subconscious mind is a fertile garden spot in which weeds will grow in abundance if the seeds of more desirable crops are not sown there.”
The first thing you should sow, therefore, as an affiliate marketer is your belief, if you aren’t already doing so. When you’re fired up with belief and a “can do” attitude, nothing can stop you. When you’re full of doubt, scepticism and fear, nothing will start you! Inertia works in both cases to bring about the fruits of your thinking mind.
Inertia And Affiliate Marketing – Using An Email List
The email list is another good example of how inertia works with an affiliate marketing business. Most affiliates are encouraged to build an email list of subscribers to whom they can promote their affiliate products to. As a beginner, it can take some time learning how to build a list, but once you’ve learned, you can build a list in your sleep with the power of automation.
As your email list grows, (and once you’ve automated delivery of marketing messages), you should find you make more and more sales. But it is often at the beginning stage where doubt slips in; especially if you’re paying to build your email list with paid marketing methods. Most affiliates will quit before they have built their email lists to 1000 subscribers.
This is a shame because once past 1000 subscribers, the power of inertia takes hold. Some affiliates even build email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Since affiliate marketing is partly a numbers game, and the more people you put your offers in front of, the more will buy.
Of course you need the right people too, to join your list. But generally as your numbers increase so should your sales. Again this is inertia in action.
Inertia And Affiliate Marketing – Inertia & Blogging
I’m a blogger and I make affiliate sales when people find my blog posts, sign up to my free video series and make a purchase. In the beginning when I started blogging, not much happened! In fact, I struggled for a long time before I started seeing regular visitors to my blog posts.
I doubted whether I could actually make my blog posts work for me. When in doubt, I stalled and didn’t blog. But when a sale dropped in, you can bet I was right back at the blogging – because I had proved to myself that it worked!
Over time, as my blog posts grew in volume, more and more of them started getting shares and more started ranking on the search engines. After a time your blog can hit a tipping point, where sales drop in more and more regularly. This is the inertia in full swing. But you have to put in the work beforehand and build up a large volume of content for it to work for you.
Inertia And Paid Advertising
If you’re running paid advertising as an affiliate there’s a period when you test and measure, spending advertising budget without selling anything. This is often where affiliates will quit – because they don’t see the longer term outcome. Once you break through this phase and start generating sales through paid ads, you can tweak your campaigns to increase the sales, for the same ad spend.
Eventually, if you stick with it long enough, you’ll be able to spend $10 and make $20, or $40! When you’re in this position, making money is simply a matter of increasing your ad budget. Top earning affiliates spend upwards of $20,000 a month when they have figured out how to generate profit when spending money on advertising. But before this can happen, they start with a small budget which they can afford to lose.
It’s well worth thinking about how much inertia you have built up with your affiliate business. Ultimately you can use inertia to earn completely on autopilot with affiliate marketing once you’ve put the work in, setting up your automated systems and of course marketing.
Around 95% of new affiliates will drop out because they don’t see the big picture of automated earnings through inertia built up through the work you’ve done before hand. With a job, you always need to keep turning up to keep getting paid. But with affiliate marketing you have the benefit of automation on your side.
The fastest way to build an affiliate business through inertia is to sell a high ticket sales funnel through email marketing and invest heavily in paid marketing; testing and measuring your advertising carefully before scaling up. With recurring income affiliate products and high ticket products in your funnel to sell, you can recoup ad budget more easily and reinvest back into marketing, increasing your reach.
Inertia can work against you when you start out with affiliate marketing because there’s a lot of work needed to be done before you see any fruits of your labours. This is why so many quit (around 95%). But stick with it long enough and you can benefit from the inertia of the work you’ve put in and the automation you have created.
It’s worth knowing the most common affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid as a newbie in affiliate marketing. Forewarned is forearmed and as an affiliate there’s plenty of hurdles to overcome. Knowing these common mistakes could save you a boat load of problems. So if you’re serious about earning an income from affiliate marketing, listen up!
I made pretty much all of these mistakes myself and struggled for a long time as a beginner in affiliate marketing.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #1 – Choosing The Wrong Product/s
One of your first decisions as a new affiliate is choosing a product to promote. There’s thousands of affiliate products available to choose from and as you can imagine this can lead to a lot of uncertainty. If you choose the wrong product, either because it’s poorly paying or a bad match for your niche/interest, it’s going to have an effect. So it’s worth gaining some knowledge both about the products you choose and the commission structure it offers.
Not all affiliate products are alike and there’s a huge disparity between the various programs in terms of their commission structure. For example, most physical products (e.g. from Amazon) will pay between 1% and 10% commission. So if you choose to sell a low commission product you’ll need to sell in large volume to make it pay. Digital products pay much more, often between 30% and 40%. Then there’s subscription products and high ticket affiliate products. They pay recurring commissions and much larger commissions.
Choosing these kinds of products can give you a huge head start in affiliate marketing.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #2 – Badly Aligned Niche/Product
Even with the right kind of product in the bag, (in terms of commission structure) you can still make the mistake of choosing products which are badly aligned with your niche. For example, if you’re building a niche website around the topic of golfing, you’re going to want some golf related product to sell. Your audience needs to be well aligned with your product and your product needs to be valuable to them.
If you are trying to sell someone from a website, but your product doesn’t align with the needs of your audience, it won’t sell!
To understand the needs of your audience you should spend some time working through the customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Ideally find a highly valuable product within a topic/niche which you have an interest.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #3 – Not Building An Email List
An email list is something you should definitely build as as affiliate. Without a list you need to sell directly from a website. This is a tough thing to do considering that most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes.
Plus, people buy from a website only after a number of visitors. Statistics show that most online buyers need between 6 and 8 visits to a site before they buy. These are known as “touch points” and allow a customer to gain trust in a website or seller before they buy.
Having an email list allows affiliates to both build trust and extend the period of time with which someone can buy. It also puts you in greater control of your traffic. To get traffic to a website takes either time (when building content) or money (if paying for it). So collecting email subscribers is something affiliates should definitely do if they want to become successful.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #4 – Shiny Object Syndrome
Shiny Object Syndrome is something most new affiliates will encounter. Before getting going with an affiliate plan of action, after joining a course, another offer lands in your inbox, promising even more “ease of use” than the last one. Some may even suggest affiliate marketing is easy, if you only follow their route and of course purchase their offer!
But the course only offers the same as the last and before you have finished another shiny new “toy” lands and you begin again, tying out something else. This happened to me and I tried many courses before I figured out that I wasn’t making any headway with any of them before I jumped ship and bought another one!
To get anywhere with affiliate marketing you need to stick to a course and keep going for long enough to see some results. Sadly most new affiliates don’t see the bigger picture and quit before they even make a single sale, much less break through and start making regular sales.
Shiny Object Syndrome keeps the “dream” alive, but never offers any results because you’re always chasing something else! Find a good program and stick with it. See also how long does affiliate marketing take.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #5 – Being A Busy Fool
I first heard the term “busy fool” from one of my affiliate mentors. When you start out with affiliate marketing, it can be easy to gravitate towards the most enjoyable tasks. This could be creating logos, making videos, watching training videos or even writing a blog.
But often, the tasks we prefer to do are the least important ones which make the least difference to our business. The important tasks are often the more difficult ones which we don’t want to do.
They are outside our comfort zone. For me, this was running paid advertising and shooting videos. So I wasted a lot of time early on in my affiliate marketing journey doing the things which (although were enjoyable) and came easy to me, didn’t move my business forwards.
Don’t be a busy fool, doing things you enjoy. Focus on getting outside your comfort zone and doing the important things which really move the (money) needle on your affiliate business.
#6 – Expectations
When I started out as an affiliate marketer I listened to the “guru’s” who told me how easy it was going to be. I thought I could buy a $40 course and make my millions with a few clicks of my mouse! Unfortunately that’s simply not the case. Affiliate marketing is not easy and 95% of affiliates will quit. See affiliate marketing success rate.
It takes a lot of commitment to build an affiliate business even with help and support, the right knowledge and a solid plan. High expectations of an online business with the slow realisation that it’s not easy is probably one of the main reasons so many affiliate marketers will quit.
You can spend a lot of time as an affiliate doing the work, and yet still nothing is guaranteed in terms of results. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business which means you can earn a potentially unlimited income from it. But sadly this also means that if you don’t sell anything you don’t earn anything.
High expectations of an “easy ride” are often dashed when the reality kicks in. Be realistic and expect to put the work in before you reap the rewards. Stick with it and see the bigger picture. But don’t expect something for nothing with affiliate marketing and you won’t be disappointed.
#7- Not Learning Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model where the affiliate is rewarded for product referrals. No sales = no profit! Unless you can effectively send a paying customer to a product, you won’t make any money. To do this effectively means either paying for traffic or building traffic organically through content creation.
Content marketing is a tactic which draws traffic for free from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.). For this to work, you’re going to need to do a lot of upfront work. Most of this work isn’t rewarded immediately and it can take months before you see the fruits of your labour.
To get traffic more easily is going to cost you a marketing budget. When spending money on marketing, you’re going to need to test and measure before you increase your budget. This takes time and of course you’re going to need to spend money while you’re learning. Or, if you want a cheaper route, you’ll need to create content.
This can be frustrating especially for the beginner who expects a financial reward too soon! But once you master a marketing strategy which works, you can automate sales and scale up (if using paid marketing).
Expect to put some time and effort in here before you can reap the rewards, which may be months after you start.
#8 – Going It Alone
For a long time I struggled alone with affiliate marketing which is another common mistake. I tried to do everything myself for cheap by looking on YouTube and jumping from one cheap course to another. Unfortunately this isn’t always the solution because different courses teach different tactics.
It’s much better to join a community, where you can get help, support but also accountability. Affiliate marketing takes time and most people quit. It’s much harder to sustain the necessary effort to become successful with an affiliate business when you’re in the right environment.
Most people aren’t surrounded by like minded entrepreneurial types, but rather those who would pull them back, rather than help them succeed! Joining an online community is one of the best things you can do for success with an online business. Access one here.
#9 – Quitting
Quitting is probably the biggest mistake you can make as an affiliate, unless of course it’s definitely not for you. There’s no shame in quitting because you’ve realised that affiliate marketing isn’t a good fit, but it’s a shame to quit only because you don’t see the bigger picture.
Ultimately affiliate marketing can give you a passive income from the internet which has massive implications for freedom, flexibility, becoming your own boss, and being in control of your life. But unless you really want these things passionately, or have another strong reason to commit to the affiliate journey, there are other, easier ways to make a living.
Affiliate marketing is a little like the Chinese bamboo tree which takes several years to cultivate before it even breaks through the soil. If you’re not up for that commitment, it’s perhaps not for you. But once the Chinese bamboo tree breaks the surface of the soil, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.
This is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and it can give you financial and geographical freedom. However, most affiliates quit before their first sale which shows you that you need a lot of determination and a strong reason to keep going to make a success of it.
What’s better than affiliate marketing? Well there’s a number of ways to make money online and depending on your particular personality and situation, some methods might suit you better than others.
Whether it’s blogging, Forex marketing, drop shipping or e-commerce, there’s many ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes. Before I found an affiliate marketing program that worked for me, I tried various other methods of earning online.
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing? Forex Marketing
One of the first things I found was Forex marketing. With Forex marketing, you can earn money by trading on the shifts in the Foreign Exchange markets. As with many other strategies, you stand to lose money as well as gain!
I wouldn’t say Forex was better than affiliate marketing, but it’s another option if you’re disciplined and willing to spend a couple of years learning the craft. Plus, you’ll need to invest in studying candlestick patterns with some kind of course or tutor if you’re serious. You’ll also need a trading bank to place your trades with. This should be a large enough sum of money whereby you only trade between 1-3% of your bank per trade. You should definitely start with a demo account and trade with pretend money at first. Most newbie traders blow their account very quickly and quit!
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing – Drop Shipping/E-Commerce
Some people rate drop shipping as a better business model than affiliate marketing. This can be because it gives you more control. With affiliate marketing you’re at the mercy of the rates set by the affiliate companies you affiliate with. But with drop shipping, you can set the price of a product from your website.
Drop shipping is slightly more involved than affiliate marketing because you need to deal with customers through your own website, and take orders directly before shipping the product out to them. This can be largely automated though with certain API plugins. If you’re interested in learning more about drop shipping, checkout Shopify.com.
Drop shipping can also allow you to take regular orders too, meaning you can collect subscription customers. But you can also do this with certain affiliate products too which let you earn recurring income from selling an item. See subscription affiliate programs.
What’s Better Than Affiliate Marketing – eBay
Before I found affiliate marketing I used eBay to buy and sell and although it didn’t work out for me, there’s plenty of business owners who use eBay exclusively to earn a good living online. One simple eBay strategy to use is to buy in bulk from a wholesale website such as Alibaba.com. Create a single listing on eBay from which you can sell multiple items over and over.
There’s a lot of competition on eBay from power sellers who can afford to buy huge amounts to get goods at the lowest prices, so you need to do your homework if you’re going this route. You can find items for next to nothing, especially if the item is shipped from China, for example.
Digital Content Creation
Content creation is another way you can earn online and you can monetise your content though advertising. The most commonly known advertising platform is Google Adsense but there’s many of them which pay more than this platform.
Bloggers and YouTube’ers create content which gets found through the search engines (Google and YouTube – also owned by Google). Although many content creators also use affiliate marketing to monetise their content, you can monetise only with advertising.
With the YouTube program you’ll need 500 subscribers to become eligible for their payment method. See video monetisation with YouTube.
If you’re creative and capable of uploading multiple videos over several months on the trot, this might work for you. Or you can do the same thing as a blogger and monetise with some advertising placed on your content. See also how to monetise a blog.
Keep in mind that YouTube and Google are pretty competitive and there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and 51 million YouTube channels. The best way to become a content creator is to decide on your niche and choose a topic you’re passionate about.
Affiliate Marketing Methods
If you’re looking for another “shiny object” here, which isn’t uncommon for newbie affiliate marketers, it’s probably also worth a mention here that there’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too. So if you’ve struggled with affiliate marketing that doesn’t mean to say that affiliate marketing does not work. Sometimes shifting the way you do things can have a considerable impact.
When I started out as an affiliate I struggled, and I believe it’s the same for most new affiliates. I was promoting low value items and not making any progress for some time. I changed the way I did things as an affiliate in a few ways which led me to success with it:
I found a mentor – (Sign up here for access to a mentorship program)
I started building an email list ( I didn’t know I should be doing this beforehand) – see also don’t forget your email list.
I used subscription products (which pay out recurring commissions)
and High Ticket products , which helped me to afford:
Paid marketing – which is faster and more scalable than organic marketing
Summary
Before you jump ship with affiliate marketing remember that all of these methods will take some time and effort before you see any results and they require investment too. So if you’re looking for another “shiny object” and “magic bullet” which will allow you to make money easily and quickly online, think again! You may have struggled with affiliate marketing because you chose the wrong product or marketing method.
Still, affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone and depending on your own personal preferences and circumstances, another one of these options might suit you better:
Forex marketing – takes a couple of years to learn properly
E-commerce/drop shipping – visit shopify.com
eBay – Buying and selling – Buy from a wholesalers (e.g. Alibabas.com and sell individually)
Content Marketing – Building content and selling advertising space
Making money online is one thing, but making consistent money online is definitely something else. To make a sale online alone is an achievement. Once you’ve achieved it, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. It gives you belief and confidence that affiliate marketing can in fact work to give you an income.
Once you’ve made a single sale online, you can simply repeat the process you’ve undertaken to repeat the success, again and again. But what if your success was a fluke? What if you posted your link online somewhere and got lucky? If that’s the case it’s going to be very difficult to repeat it.
To earn consistently online you need to make the process of selling reliable, predictable and sustainable. There’s a few solid tactics you can use too, which make this outcome much more probable.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – My Journey
When I started out online I struggled to make any sales. My marketing tactics weren’t reliable and so when I finally did make a sale, it was a “one-off” which happened as often as a blue moon!
Because it was an organic sale, it wasn’t very reliable. A random person had found an article I had written. But before long the article was gone from the search engines, and from the social media feed I had posted it on. It was a fluke! But even though I had “fluked” a sale, it gave me hope!
In 2014 I found a group of affiliate marketing mentors who taught me a few things. The way I approached affiliate marketing completely changed and I was able to start generating sales much more consistently. Here’s some of the strategies I implemented.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – Build A List
I didn’t have an email list as a beginner affiliate and all my effort went into building niche websites (most of which failed to attract any traffic). With an email list you can build on something tangible. An email list gives you more control over your traffic.
By building a list there’s a couple of important advantages it gives you as an affiliate:
You can interact with your subscribers multiple times – (more difficult from a website where most people leave within a few minutes) (See how many touch points before a sale)
You extend the time period where someone can buy from you (I’ve had subscribers buy products from me even years after joining my list).
It gives you chance to build a long term relationship and create trust by delivering valuable messages which genuinely help your subscribers.
Getting traffic online is the major sticking point for many new affiliates and it certainly was for me as a beginner. You either pay for it with paid advertising or you work for it building content. Either way, it’s going to cost you: time or money. But with a list, you are building a digital asset you own and control.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – Sell Recurring Income Products
When I started out, I promoted the products I would buy online. These were generally low cost items such as books from Amazon and trinkets from eBay! Unfortunately, you can’t earn much in the way of commission from low cost physical products (unless you sell in bulk). Amazon pays affiliates as little as 1% commission on it’s products. So if you’re selling a $10 item you can earn as little as $0.10 cents from a sale.
I learned that in order to make affiliate marketing pay, I had to find high ticket products which paid a lot more. Digital products have a much higher rate of commission (30%-40% typically) and certain high ticket digital products sold for over $1000. They would pay you $300-$400 per sale.
You can also sell subscription affiliate products which payout recurring commissions. With a subscription product, each sale contributes to your monthly income which grows over time. It’s one of the best ways to earn consistently with affiliate marketing.
Use Paid Marketing
For a long time, and even now I use organic marketing to find customers for my affiliate products. But organic marketing is a difficult way to build an affiliate business. It can take months or even years to start getting the traction which you need to build a consistent income using only organic traffic – even with a list and subscription products.
My sales were always very sporadic because of this, and I couldn’t control the rate at which I attracted customers. With organic marketing you can control the rate at which you create content (and promote it), but the traffic is kind of out of your hands.
With paid marketing it’s different. With paid marketing you can “turn on” your traffic almost instantly. Plus, you can scale up, and increase your numbers of visitors by turning up your marketing budget. Paid marketing is like a tap where you control your traffic. Organic marketing is different; organic marketing is more like sowing seeds for a future crop! It takes much longer and as such many frustrated affiliates quit with trying to do everything organically.
Use A Product Range
Paid marketing is expensive of course and so you can’t very easily promote low value products and still be profitable. That’s why you should use a product range instead. A good product range offers multiple products within a product “suite”. It means you can refer customers to a low value product and the sales system automatically offers them higher priced items.
Such as system has low, mid and high ticket offers and subscription products. Because of this you can earn considerable more per customer than you would from a standard affiliate product.
Some customers will purchase high ticket items, which give you a large pay day. Recurring income products give you a more stable income more quickly and you can reinvest some of this profit back into your marketing budget at zero risk!
Be Consistent In Your Efforts
As a beginner affiliate I would create a website and then sit back “hoping” that it would come to fruition all by itself. It didn’t! I would throw myself into another project desperate for “it” to work. But the problem was Iwasn’t working consistently. I was throwing out blogs and websites hoping that “they” would simply work by themselves!
I would write a bunch of blog posts and then get frustrated because they weren’t “working”, so I would quit. A month later a sale would pop in from the work I had done previously. Only then did I believe in my strategy and get back to work. But a month had gone by with me doing nothing because I was sceptical, doubtful and procrastinating.
Once you find out the right strategy you can employ to get the results you want, stick to the path and stay consistent in your efforts. Don’t quit!
Summary
Consistency online is something which every affiliate wants but few actually attain. Initially there’s going to be a lot to do without much reward, too. But over time if you stick with it and don’t quit, you get closer and closer to an automated business which is profitable without having to do very much.
The main things I learned which changed things for me and allowed me to get more consistent in my sales were:
Building a list – a list of email subscribers puts you in control of traffic and allows you to build a digital asset
Using subscription (and high ticket) products – subscription products give you a recurring income when you make a sale.
Use of paid advertising – paid advertising is much faster and more controllable than organic marketing (which is slow and unreliable).
Finding a high value product range to sell – which gives you multiple income streams and greater access to use of paid marketing tactics
and of course being consistent in your efforts is a major “key” too. It’s easy to work like an ox for a week and then take a week off. Affiliates who make daily habits out of working on their businesses are the ones who are successful!
What is the easiest way to sell digital products online? There’s several ways you can sell products online and some are easier than others. But one of the best and easiest ways to sell digital products is by sending paid traffic to a landing page. Collect subscribers by offering some freebie giveaway to them such as a free course or ebook. Follow up with an email marketing campaign which delivers value, builds trust and promotes your digital product/s.
Convertri is a landing page software helping you to build fast pages that convert visitors into subscribers
There’s lots of good reasons to build an email list and particularly with digital products it’s because digital products tend to be more vague than physical products. With a physical product you know what you’re getting; what you see is what you get. But it can be more difficult to determine the value of a physical product because it is less tangible.
By delivering value through an email course you can also show the value of your product to your potential customers. From a website, this is more difficult because most visitors only stick around for a few minutes; after that they are gone forever. But once they are on your email list, you can extend the time period with which they make a buying decision.
Aweber lets you collect emails from a website and deliver automated messages
Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online
There’s another reason to use email marketing too and it’s because most people don’t buy a product on their first time seeing it. In fact unless a website is trustworthy, people need 6-8 touchpoints with that product/advertiser before they will buy.
This is very difficult to do if you only have a website to sell from. Most visitors will not come back after landing on your site, and they are only there for a couple of minutes if that. But once on your email list, you can follow up with useful information to keep them engaged over weeks, months and even years.
This gives you much more opportunity to interact with them, give them information about your products and build trust with them.
Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online – Traffic
The easiest way to drive traffic towards your landing page is with paid advertising. It’s fast and scalable unlike organic marketing which can take months before you see the results of your labour. One of the best ways to do it is through the use of video, too. With video you can convey more information in a shorter time period than you can with a written (text based) advert.
Over 50% of communication is unconscious, so video is obviously the answer to communicating online. The belief is that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken, although opinions vary on this. In an online video there are also cues picked up from the lighting, background and energy or “feel” of the person talking.
Before setting out and creating a video advertisement, it’s worth knowing your target audience is first so you can effectively attract the right kind of people to your product.
Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online – Product Reviews
Another common tactic of an affiliate marketer is to create a product review, either in written or video format. A product review is one of the best ways to sell online because it attracts someone who is specifically looking for the product you’re talking about, or one like it. If they believe you and you’re not overly biased (because you’re also selling the product), the visitor has a high chance of buying through your affiliate link after they have found your review.
My first affiliate sale came from a review I wrote on a free blog website (Hubpages.com). Reviews catch online users in the last step of the buying cycle. Since most people are gathering information online, and not looking to buy, it’s well worth targeting this kind of person.
Someone looking for a review has likely already decided (to an extent) that they need a certain type of product. They may have done research already and are ready to buy, or looking to buy. They just need a little confirmation or to understand whether a product meets their needs, which your review can deliver.
Summary
To sell in bulk you need a lot of people to buy through your affiliate link. This can be done through building an email subscriber base and recommending products to your list. The fastest and easiest way to build such a list is to run a paid ad campaign sending people to a landing page. Collect their details and follow up with your email messages, promoting your products.
Reviews also offer a great opportunity to earn online through selling physical or digital products. A review works really well because you attract people looking to buy something. So if you can get a review in front of a lot of people somehow, it’s a great way to sell your products. You’ll find reviews on Google in written form and on YouTube in video format too. Getting a review to rank can be the biggest challenge here.
There’s many ways to turn a single website visitor into a hundred “hits” a day. But in this post I’m going to concentrate on doing it organically. When you attract organic traffic to your website it’s free! So any sales you make is 100% profit. When I started out as an affiliate I did use paid advertising. But after getting my Adwords account banned (back in the early 2010’s), I switched to organic only traffic.
The fastest way to turn 1 website “hit” into many is through using paid advertising of course. But there’s a problem with paid advertising: it costs money! And it’s money which you aren’t guaranteed to see back again, even if you sell something. So you need to be very careful with paid advertising because you can spend a lot without a return if you’re not careful. Anyway, that’s a post for another day. In this post I’m going to focus on completely free strategies to bring more people to your website.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day- Get 1 Hit First
I chose this title deliberately because it’s very specific and measurable. When you set goals for your affiliate business it’s worth having specific and measurable goals so you know when you’ve hit the target. Being vague about a goal is no good. You can’t hit something if it’s not clearly defined. See my post on SMART goals and DUMB goals for more on this. A clearly defined goal also helps you to focus your actions around that specific target. Without a clearly defined goal, you can easily spread yourself too thin, doing unimportant tasks which don’t move you forwards.
But most affiliates who have given it a go for long enough have at least attained a hit on their website. If you haven’t started yet, sign up on this site and get going! You can easily get someone to visit your website organically. Simply write a blog post and then share it on your social media platforms. Make sure you have a counter on your blog so you know if someone (other than you) visits it.
Still no visitors? Rinse and repeat step 1 – write a blog post and share on your social media platforms. Keep doing it until you get that 1 hit and you’ve done it! As Obi Wan (Star Wars reference) would say, “you’ve taken a small step into a larger world”!
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Getting Your Content To Rank On The Search Engines
It can be quite a challenge getting your content to rank on the first page of Google. But it’s worth the effort, even if you fall short, you can still find your content ranks on lesser used search engines such as Bing, Yahoo and Duduckgo etc. You won’t get an easy ranking for the top, most competitive keyword terms, especially if you’ve chosen a competitive niche. But if you can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you’ll have a greater chance of ranking.
The longer tail keywords get fewer monthly searches of course. But a little slice of few is worth a lot more than no slice of many. Here’s a quick tip to get some of your content to rank:
Use Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword
Scroll to the end of the list (by clicking on av. monthly searches) and you’ll see the keyword terms which get the least monthly searches. These tend to be less competitive and have more keywords in them
Write content around these terms and use an SEO plugin to help you write SEO friendly content which has a better chance of ranking (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation)
Now you might not rank your content at all, so don’t hold your breath. But if you keep at it some of it will rank, especially if you do a good job of writing useful content.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day:Write For Your Target Audience
Before you set about writing a tonne of content, it’s worth mentioning what you’re going to be writing about. Don’t just choose any old topic. Make your content relevant to your target audience. The target audience is the visitor/s you want to attract to your affiliate products.
Most online traffic doesn’t turn into sales. Most people are simply browsing, gathering information. But if you focus on learning about your target audience/customer avatar, you can attract more of the people who are likely or wanting to purchase your products.
To learn more about your target audience visit the customer avatar worksheet pdf on this website. As a quick example, a product review attracts someone who is likely to buy, whereas a “how to” guide is less likely to produce a sale from your visitors.
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Sharing Your Content Automatically With Plugins
If you write a good amount of content some of it might rank on the search engines and this is a major key to attracting organic traffic for free. However, nothing is guaranteed with the search engines so it’s worth also promoting your content yourself too. You can do this by sharing content throughout your social media platforms.
This is often a step that bloggers forget after they have finished a post (I certainly did). What a waste because no one will see your content unless you promote it! There’s a few plugins you can use to help automate the process of sharing your content as you publish it. Here’s a couple of plugins you can use to help you:
How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day: Write SEO Friendly Posts
SEO friendly means they have been specifically written with the search engines in mind and the word count of your specific keywords are considered when writing. I use a plugin called Yoast SEO.
SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and by writing SEO friendly post you’re letting the search engine “spiders” know what your content is about and the keyword/s you want them to rank for. You’re still writing for the person reading your post, but a plugin can help you get the word count right and optimising your content for SEO can help you when it comes to ranking your posts.
Build BackLinks
Building backlinks was always the last thing I wanted to do, so I outsourced it to this company! You can do this yourself of course by posting on other people’s blogs though blog commenting or guest posting.
Backlinks are used by Google (and others) to help determine the authority and ranking position of a website. So a lot of back links from high quality websites which have high authority is going to do you a lot of good when it comes to ranking your content on the search engines.
If you concentrate on creating high quality content, and promoting it, backlinks should be a natural by-product of your high quality posts. People should share and link to them over time which would give you a natural link profile anyway, which is what Google looks for. So avoid paying spammy companies for many links at once, it can have the opposite affect and make your site look spammy.
Rinse and Repeat
I’d like to tell you that some magic will happen when you do all of these steps once! But sadly it isn’t going to happen! In reality, you’re going to need to spend a few months building content and posting it throughout your social media platforms.
Over time as your domain authority improves, you should see some of your content ranking with the longer tail keywords you’ve written content for. This means you’ll likely see only a trickle from the ones which rank. That’s because long tail keywords have fewer monthly searches. But just remember that this is free traffic, so it’s worth building more of these little trickles! Eventually you’ll have a stream and then a river!
You have also build a load of backlinks by sharing content throughout social media. The knock-on effect of this is people will like, share and even link back to your content over time. In turn this will help boost your domain authority and your rankings.
Tipping Point
There will come a tipping point if you carry on doing this for long enough and even though it can be tough, it’s worth pursuing. There were times I wondered whether it was worth all the hard work I put in to blogging. But then a sale would drop in (organically) and I would have another spirt of enthusiasm!
By building content which serves your target audience in some way and attracts potential customers to your products, you are ultimately placing a number of fishing lines in the river, and fishing for a catch!
Your website traffic has multiple sources:
Organic search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and Google
Social media platforms where you and others have shared your content
Backlinks from blog commenting and guest posting.
Build More Sources Of Traffic To Existing Content
Your plugin Revive Old Posts is a great one too. It quietly posts your older posts throughout your social media platforms in the background, while you get on building new content. But there’s a couple of other things you can do to speed up your traffic growth too. One of them is to build an email list of subscribers and send out regular messages to them sharing your new content.
An email list gives you greater control over your traffic, whereas earning traffic organically takes time, and paying for it cost money, a list gives you the power to send your subscribers directly to your content whenever you like!
Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website where you can post answers to relevant questions and also post links to your content. Although Quora doesn’t give you a “do-follow” link, which means you don’t get any ranking “juice” from it like with a guest post, you can attract traffic through Quora.
So by making a small daily habit out of finding and answering questions, you can build up a lot of content which links back to your blog posts. I’ve used this little tactic to great effect and it does bring in traffic, leads and sales.
Quora users look for questions they want to know about and if they find your content, they can also link to your blog post. Make sure to post only relevant content which helps to answer the question and read Quora’s terms and conditions so you don’t fall foul of their link policies. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Paid Marketing
Now I know I said this post was about organic marketing, but still a little paid advertising can easily make a massive difference to your traffic with only a little marketing budget. So it’s worth a mention here. Once you have a good amount of content under your belt, you can also use what’s called a “dynamic” advert on Google Adwords/Microsoft Ads.
A dynamic ad creates adverts which are relevant to your content and serves those ads to people looking for what you’ve written about. You can start an ad for as little as $1 a day too, which means you can test and measure your advertising at very little risk.
Summary
Each of these strategies will take some effort and time but content marketing is renowned for being a much more “slow and steady” form of online marketing than through using paid ads. Over time, if you persist, you should find more and more traffic is landing on your content; especially if you build multiple streams where they can come from:
Organic search results – through your SEO efforts and writing high quality content for long tail keywords in your niche
Social media – through your own sharing of your content and the sharing from your visitors
Back links – improve your SEO score but also bring traffic directly from other websites in your niche
Quora and other Q&A websites – answer questions, provide value and you’ll be allowed to link back to your content from Quora.com, bringing in another source of traffic
Your email list – build an email list from your blog by offering some value driven giveaway (see my ebook/video course) on your site. Send subscribers back to new content and/or your affiliate products
Paid advertising – with a little paid advertising at low cost you can easily push up your website “hits” to 100 given the time and effort. Pay more and you get more traffic!
Remember it’s the small steps you take every day which lead to the big breakthroughs over time. Don’t get overwhelmed with the size of the job ahead of you, focus only on the small step in front of you! This book is a great accompaniment to the blogging strategy:
So how long does it take for content marketing to work? By “work”, in this instance, I mean how long does it take to start producing an income from content? Content marketing can take many forms. You can create a YouTube channel or build a blog, for example. So the time it takes will depend on many variables which I’m going to define in this post.
Generally though, it will take several months to start seeing a regular stream of traffic from content marketing if you create content regularly and promote it well. How you monetise that traffic will determine how much money you can make from it. The type of traffic you attract through your content will also have a bearing, and the relative competition in the niche you choose will massively impact your success, or lack of it.
So let’s have a look at some of the variables involved in creating content and getting paid for it!
How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – SEO & Content Promotion
Typically SEO (search engine optimisation) is very slow. So if you’re relying on your content getting ranked on Google, Bing, Yahoo or on YouTube and other search engines it can take a few months. Your content may never rank too, which is a consideration. In a competitive topic/niche, there’s thousands or even hundreds of thousands of competing websites or videos. So even with awesome content which out performs others, you’re up against high authority domains and channels which will out perform you because they’ve been around much longer than you.
They may have tens or hundreds of thousands of back links which have accumulated over many years. So competing with these high authority sites can be incredibly difficult. So if you’re in a competitive field it’s going to be useful to self promote all your content. This can be done through sharing on social media and through building an email list of subscribers.
Content promotion, when done well will massively speed up your progress. If you simply publish your content and sit back waiting for it to show up in the rankings, you’re going to be very disappointed! It may never show up! So once you have published some content, always promote it through sharing it as much as possible.
How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Your Choice Of Niche/Topic
In a competitive topic, such as money making online for example, it’s going to be very competitive. With a lot of competing content out there and some high authority channels and domains taking the top rankings for many of the best keywords. A new website won’t rank anywhere near the top of Google for the top keywords.
You don’t have to rely on Google for your traffic either. You can publish your content throughout your social media presence and create a strategy for finding visitors there.
In a less competitive niche, you’re going to be able to rank your content more easily, so you can attract traffic more quickly to your content. If you have a particularly “out there” niche, and therefore little competition, you might even find yourself getting visitors quite quickly.
How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Targeting “The Right” Traffic
Not all traffic is equal, so if your aim is to get targeted traffic to your website, or channel, you’re going to need to determine who that is specifically. Targeted traffic is super important, especially if you’re monetising your website with a specific product or service. Some content will attract buyers and some will only attract “browsers”.
You really want the buyers coming to your website so before you create content, make sure you know who they are. For example, a review of a product will attract people looking to purchase that particular product. This kind of visitor is very likely to buy from you if you can attract them.
On the flip side, “how to guides” don’t attract such specific buying traffic. More likely they will take your guide and leave without having made a purchase.
How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – How You Monetise
You can also monetise a website or video channel without selling products from it using advertising placed on your content. This can be done through using Google Adsense, for example, or a similar service. With advertising on your content you get paid for each click on an advert. Your type of content will determine how much a click is worth, with more competitive topics paying more.
If you use affiliate products to monetise your content the targeting of your content is more important, since whatever you create will attract a certain type of visitor; and you want buyer traffic.
Your choice of affiliate products too is important and needs to match your niche. So in a golf niche for example, you would promote some golf related course, training or physical product to your visitors.
This can be done through the use of email marketing. This can dramatically speed up the process of making sales from a website/channel. By choosing subscription products (which carry recurring income) and high value products, you can become profitable more quickly, too.
Using Email Marketing To Speed Up The Process
Email marketing is another “ace” up the sleeve of content marketers. By offering a freebie giveaway on your content, such as an ebook, you can encourage content visitors to subscriber to your list.
An email list gives the content marketer a means to interact with their visitors on a more regular basis and build a longer term relationship. On a website, visitors only stick around for a few minutes. So they are less likely to make a purchase. But get them on your email list and you can follow up with them for months and even years.
This can dramatically speed up the process of selling from your content alone.
Your Content
Your content of course is massively important in the equation of generating an income from content creation. If visitors are impressed with it, they are much more likely to take further action on your site; share it, sign up to your list or purchase a recommended product, for example. This is a massive signal to Google (and other search engines) that your content is valuable.
If people like your content they are likely to share it and link back to it. This gives you a natural looking link profile which is a major SEO signal to the search engines. If you continue creating valuable content for long enough, you should see your content begin to rank on the search engines, further boosting your visitor numbers.
This has a compounding effect over time as more people get to your posts, more will share it and purchase from you/sign up to your list. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.
Not only do you need to create awesome content which is share-worthy, but you need to actively promote it, too. How well you do these two things are a huge factor in how long it will take you to get a high volume of traffic, leads and sales through your content.
Summary
So, how long does it take for content marketing to work? You could create a post and publish it on social media, attracting a buyer straight away, (in theory), assuming you’ve set up your site/channel to sell something. But long term consistent traffic, leads and sales will take much longer than the odd “lucky win” you might get. In most cases it’s going to take months of consistent publishing and sharing of your content before you see this. In my experience of blogging, I started seeing the odd sale early on, within a couple of months. Over time, they become more consistent as I continued building content.
These are the main factors which will determine whether the timeline of your success:
Your content quality, and action steps towards creation and promotion
The relative competition on the search engines in your particular niche (more competition means it will take longer to become established)
How you monetise your content and the type of traffic you attract is a big factor; ideally use high paying products and recurring income products
Whether you use an email autoresponder – an email autoresponder will dramatically speed up the time it takes to earn consistently from your content so you should definitely get one. (Get one for free here).
Because it can take so long to create and share sufficient content to make your efforts worthwhile, it’s definitely worth choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy working in. Imagine still working 3 months down the line without having made any sales. Are you still going to love what you do? See also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.
Breaking down big goals into smaller steps is an important move. Ideally spend some time getting clear on your long term goals. Dream big, because if you aim small you’ll only hit small! Once you know what you want, break long term goals into smaller and smaller parts. Eventually you have them broken down into steps you can take immediately, right now, today.
Keep taking those steps and make them part of your daily routine. Unless you do this, and keep doing it, your big dreams will likely stay just that; dreams.
In Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, he explains that it is the small steps we take every single day which count. We all want the giant leap forwards in life; the breakthroughs, the sudden giant success, but those who achieve in life know that it’s the daily things you do which count over the long term, not the things you wish for.
The breakthroughs come often because of the tiny achievements we have made on a daily basis over time, not from giant leap forwards which comes without any work!
Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing a big goal could be financial and geographical freedom and the ability to quit your job and work from anywhere in the world. That’s a big goal. So you join an affiliate marketing training course and start out promoting something. After a few months you wonder why nothing is happening and so you quit. This is a story which is familiar to many in the affiliate marketing space and around 95% of affiliates quit.
But those affiliates haven’t understood the power of micro habits, or the slight edge. The beginning is always going to be hard. The main problem is people are looking for the “magic bullet” the “instant win” and the giant leap forwards before they’ve put the work in. They want “evidence” that what they are doing will lead them to the promised land of financial abundance and plenty! When they don’t see that evidence, they lose confidence in their direction and stop trying. Quitting is a sure fire method of failure!
Henry Ford said “whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”. So if you’re looking for evidence that something works before doing the work, it probably means you don’t believe you can achieve it. Affiliate marketing does work, but you just have to keep going when everyone else quits to see the first shoots coming through the soil.
Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – The Chinese Bamboo Analogy
The Chinese bamboo tree is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and for breaking down large goals into smaller steps. The plant gestates under the soil for several years. So if you were unfamiliar with the type of plant it is, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s not going to grow! During this time it needs to be fed and looked after and given the right nutrients. After 4-5 years gestating under the soil surface, it can grow 90 feet in a matter of 5 weeks time.
With affiliate marketing this is also true. At first you need to set up your website and your email marketing service. You need to study a marketing method and get people to sign up to your email list and visit your website. Initially, you will only see one or two visits to a website, for example.
See this as a win and celebrate it when it happens. Then you’ll start to see people signing up to your email list. See this as a win, and celebrate it. This is the point where many new affiliates will quit. “What’s the point?” they think, “I’ve not made any money yet and I’ve put in all this work”.
But these are simply the shoots of your Chinese bamboo tree coming through the soil. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 email subscribers on their list. This is because they don’t see the bigger picture. Long term affiliates build email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. They make sales every single day on complete autopilot. But they stuck at it when they only had a couple of people landing on their website. They kept going because they understood the long term implications of it, and of quitting!
The Power Of Compounding
Taking daily steps towards your long term goals has power over a long period of time. Admittedly, you don’t see the results for a while and it can be tough keeping going when there’s nothing to show. Joining the gym is a good example of this. Most people will join a gym in January after a period of over indulgence in the festive season. They keep up their New Year’s Resolution for a bit, but then there’s nothing to show for it.
Gyms know that most will drop off by March and so they charge a membership fee – see the compound effect of selling subscription products! The main problem is you don’t see results immediately. Even after a few months, your results won’t look amazing. It’s the small daily steps which you continue to do which have a powerful effect over the longer term. Once you start looking for results, you’re in trouble.
The small changes in your body after going to the gym for a few weeks won’t look like much. But compare this to what it would look like if you did nothing!
Summary
Big goals are important because they get your excited, inspired and motivated by a vision of your future you would like to attain. When you choose goals which inspire and enthuse you, they are the right kind of goals. Goals you don’t believe will happen, aren’t good goals because you don’t really believe in them. If you don’t believe in a goal, you won’t take any action in making it happen.
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to attain and written it down, it’s time to start chopping down your large goal into small achievable pieces. If it’s a fitness goal, make a daily schedule you can stick to. But make it so tiny that it would be difficult not to keep it up when you’re not feeling like it. See also what’s better than goals. Micro commitments help you keep the momentum going to achieve your larger goals. They are so tiny, that you can even do them when you’re feeling super uninspired, which will always happen.
