AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Lead Generation

Affiliate lead generation is the act of collecting leads, usually in the form of an email address. Some affiliates build their own list of leads and then deliver email messages to their subscribers promoting their affiliate products. Or, you can also send leads directly to an affiliate company if you’re working on a pay per lead basis.

In my personal experience as an affiliate I’ve built my own email list through offering some giveaway on my website or landing page. The benefit of using a landing page is that a landing page is a web page designed for the specific purpose of collecting emails. Whereas a website is different in that there’s more choices on a website.

On a website, visitors can have a look around and browse your posts. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to “tweak” the details on the page to optimise the rate at which visitors opt in. This allows them to drive down the cost to acquire a lead.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Why Generate Leads?

Affiliates use lead generation to build an email list of subscribers. By sending out useful email messages which deliver some kind of value, they can build trust with a subscriber. It can be a challenge to sell an affiliate product directly from a website. A website visitor only sticks around for a few minutes on average, often less. Plus they only have one opportunity to buy from you if they never return.

Since most online shoppers will need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website online before they buy, it makes sense to connect with visitors more frequently through the use of email marketing.

Affiliates therefore have a greater opportunity to sell their products through email marketing than they would from a website alone. With email marketing, an affiliate can sell a product to a subscriber days, weeks or even years after they have joined an email list. This just isn’t possible from a website so a good way to optimise your affiliate sales is to capture emails from a website by offering a giveaway of some kind to deliver value to those who opt in.

The Lead Magnet – A Legitimate “Bribe”

The lead magnet is a legitimate bribe with which you can attain the details of your website visitors. A lead magnet should resonate with your customer avatar/target audience and also align with whatever product/s you are selling through your email list.

On this website I offer my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners as a giveaway when visitors join my email list. Access here. A lead magnet could be anything but many affiliates choose an ebook or a course which can be delivered automatically via email.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Communicating With Your Leads

Once you start attracting leads to join your email list you’ll want to give them some useful information which will be beneficial to them. If you’ve ever joined someone’s email list, and all they do is spam you with products to buy, it’s unlikely you’ll keep opening their emails for long!

But if you offer them some genuine value through your email messages, and if they are a good fit for you, they are likely to open your messages more regularly. They might even start to trust you!

Trust online is a powerful thing (especially online) because there are so many people wanting your hard earned cash, it’s worth building trust by genuinely trying to help your subscribers somehow.

If you build trust first, and sell later, people are much more likely to keep opening your email messages, trust you and buy from you if it’s appropriate to their needs.

With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages ready to be sent out on autopilot when someone subscribes to your email list. You can access an autoresponder here for free.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Control

There’s another powerful reason to build an email list of subscribers too. To get visitors to your website requires either a considerable amount of work (in building content) or a considerable sum of money in paid advertising. If you use content to acquire traffic, Google can shift the algorithm any time and you can easily lose your rankings overnight, meaning your traffic can quickly drop.

Or, if you run out of advertising budget and stop paying for traffic, your visitors will drop off almost immediately.

Building an email list gives you control over your traffic so you’re not as reliant on either Google for traffic or a paid advertising budget. Some affiliates will build their list to over 100,000 subscribers! A single email sent to their list can mean hundreds or even thousands of link clicks which could mean either traffic to your website post or a sale of an affiliate product.

Control over your traffic is huge for affiliates because without traffic you can’t make any affiliate sales.

Summary

Affiliate lead generation is a powerful tool. On a website most visitors leave within a short period of time. This gives an affiliate only a small window of opportunity to make the sale.

But if the affiliate collects leads from their website, it gives them more opportunity to sell through email messages. Once someone joins your email list, you can follow up via email over days, weeks, months and even years and decades. This gives you more opportunity to give value, built trust and sell your affiliate products.

Since most online consumers will require between 6-8 touch points before they make a purchase, it makes sense to use email marketing so you can achieve this.

Affiliate Earning Websites

Affiliate earning websites are websites set up specifically to generate an income through affiliate sales. Anyone can earn with affiliate marketing even without their own product or anything to sell.

This is done by joining an affiliate program, getting a unique identifying link, (known as an affiliate link), and promoting that link online. This can be done in many ways, not just from a website. You can promote your affiliate link through an email message, through an advert or throughout your social media platforms too. You can upload videos and promote your link that way.

However, the reason many affiliates choose to build a website is that it offers an affordable way to generate traffic. An affiliate website, set up with all the bells a whistles, may be set up to sell in principle. But without traffic, it won’t sell anything.

Traffic is a major key to selling with affiliate earning websites. But it isn’t the only factor in generating an automated income online.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Types Of Traffic

Not all traffic is equal. Some people come to visit a website and only want to find some information. Other visitors might want to buy something, but the intent of most online users is in gathering information. After all, the internet is an information gathering tool.

To build an affiliate earning website which generates sales, you’ll need to attract the kind of traffic which converts into sales. This can be done by paying attention to the search terms looked at by visitors immediately before finding your website.

So for example, you might have searched for the term “affiliate earning websites” before finding this page. Each search term has a particular intent behind it. For an affiliate website you want your search terms on your website to attract buyers.

A good example of a search for someone wanting to find some free information is “how to sell an ebook from your own website“, for example. “How to” queries tend to signify that the visitor is looking for information, not wanting to buy something.

Someone looking for a review of a product, though, is very different. Product review websites tend to be a good idea for affiliates for a simple but powerful reason: the visitor is looking for something specific to buy. A good example of a buyer intent search term might be “Modern Wealthy Review“, for example, a product I promote on this website.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Knowing Your Audience

Since there’s millions of people online at any particular time, you can easily attract the wrong kind of visitor to your affiliate website. To avoid wasting your time creating the wrong kind of content, or paying for the wrong kind of advertising, to get traffic to an affiliate earning website, it’s useful to know who you intend to attract.

To get very clear on your target audience or customer avatar, spend some time figuring out who you can best serve with your affiliate product/s. What kind of person would be likely to be interested in buying from your affiliate website? Where do they live? What searches are they performing online? How old are they and so on.

When you can answer these and more questions about your customer avatar, you can begin to either create content to attract them, or pay for advertising to get people to land on your website. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you work on your customer avatar.

Knowing your audience, and specifically, the audience who is most likely to buy from you, can shave years off your affiliate experience.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Attracting Traffic

Now you have spent some time on your customer avatar, you know who you would like to attract. There’s two main ways to attract people to an affiliate earning website: either through content marketing or with paid marketing. With content marketing you create content on your website which attracts your target audience. With paid marketing, you use an advertising platform to send traffic to your site directly. See also content creation vs paid marketing.

While paid marketing is very fast, you can also spend a lot before you start selling. So it’s wise to start with a small marketing budget you can easily afford to lose, while you test and measure your results. The advantage of paid marketing is that it’s super fast and it’s pretty much like turning on a tap for traffic. Plus, you can scale up too, once you’re running a profitable campaign which gives you a good return.

Organic marketing, on the other can be very slow. You’ll need to create and promote a lot of content before you start to see even a trickle of traffic. The benefit of content marketing is that it’s free to do, although it does take time and effort. The good news though is that over time, your work compounds and the small trickles of traffic slowly grow into streams and rivers.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Email Marketing

Most affiliate earning websites have an offer you will find somewhere on the website. Often this will be obvious when you visit the site and it might take the form of a popup offer, promoting a free ebook or course.

This is a strategy which is very beneficial for an affiliate earning website – email marketing. By building an email list of subscribers, the affiliate has greater control over their traffic. They can send out regular messages to their subscribers which either promote their content or their affiliate products (or both).

Affiliates build trust with their subscribers by delivering value driven messages while promoting their products. See also don’t forget your email list.

Touchpoints

To earn from an affiliate website you need to join an affiliate program and promote your product from your site. Since most website visitors only stick around a few minutes, it’s definitely worth building an email list as I mentioned. An email list gives you a much longer period of time to let your subscribers build their confidence in you and of course offers more opportunities to buy from you too.

Studies have shown that the average online user will need 6-8 touch points before they buy from you, especially if they don’t know you. A website doesn’t offer this but you can communicate with visitors who have signed up to your email list more frequently. You can also use retargeting to place advertising in front of visitors who have left your website.

Your choice of product is an important part of building an affiliate earning website and has a lot to do with your success. Ideally choose products which are already proven to sell and which offer huge value to your audience.

Summary

As you can see there’s a lot to think about with an affiliate earning website. The easy part is setting up your website with affiliate links within it. It’s much more difficult bring traffic towards your site which converts into sales.

To increase your conversion rate you can spend more money on traffic or create more content, build an email list or use retargeting – to bring visitors back to your site. Ultimately though you need to attract visitors who have an intention to take action on your site. This can be done more simply after understanding who you want to attract to your site – see the customer avatar worksheet for more on this.

You can get started with a “plug and play” website through this training program.

Using Quora For Keyword Research And Content Ideas

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?”

quora - Using Quora For Keyword Research And Content Ideas

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:

Using Quora For Keyword Research And Content Ideas

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 questions more 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.

Good luck!

Increase Website Traffic For Free

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 -increase website traffic for free — 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 asking and 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

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 and inertia — 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.

This is one of the fastest ways to earn with affiliate marketing.

Summary

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.

The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

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.

Access a free autoresponder service here.

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?

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!

candle forex - what's better than affiliate marketing

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.

content marketing - selling advertising space on your content

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

How To Make Consistent Money Online

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.

high ticket funnel - earning consistently online

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 I wasn’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!

Learn more about this here.

Easiest Way To Sell Digital Products Online

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.

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.

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.

For more help and support with affiliate marketing click here.

How To Turn A Single Website Visitor Into A Hundred Hits A Day

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:

Revive Old Posts plugin for WordPress
Social Media Share buttons – for visitors to share your content

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: