AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing

It’s not easy overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing. The limitations are in the way we think, rather than in our businesses. You can’t grow a business beyond the level of thinking you bring to it. So it is our thinking which determines the invisible “glass ceiling” of our business. We all have certain fears and restrictions within us which determine the way we do things. With affiliate marketing if we let these things stop us taking action, they will limit our business and our cashflow.

Here’s a few common questions about affiliate marketing which are frequently asked, for example:

“Can I do affiliate marketing without a website?”

“Can I do affiliate marketing without a laptop?”

“Can you do affiliate marketing completely for free?”

While these are valid questions, they also imply limitations. While you can do affiliate marketing without a laptop or without a website, and completely for free, they are all examples of limitations which will potentially stop someone from attaining the level of success they really want. A better question might be “How can I succeed with affiliate marketing?” or “What do the top earners do in affiliate marketing?“, or “what should I do to succeed with affiliate marketing“.

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing

I’ve definitely experienced these kinds of limitations myself when it comes to building an affiliate business. One of the most prevalent ones (for me) is definitely spending money. When I started learning about affiliate marketing I was terrified of spending money, (because I didn’t have any), so I did everything for free. I bought a couple of (cheap) courses to learn some things, but largely I went it alone.

Perhaps you can relate? While you can do affiliate marketing on the cheap, it’s definitely worth paying for some help and support at the very least. It’s also worth paying for an email autoresponder and a website of your own. Even if you’re on a tight budget, not doing so will severely hamper your progress.

Then there’s paying for advertising which can allow you to build an affiliate business much faster than with cheap and free marketing methods, which are slower and less reliable. But what if you can’t afford a marketing budget or to invest in getting coaching and mentoring? What then?

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing – Failing Forwards

Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Fear is a powerful emotion which masquerades as “safety”. while our brains are keeping us “safe”, they are also keeping us from growing. To grow an affiliate business requires you to step outside the comfort zone which you are familiar with. You must fail in order to learn! Failure isn’t an option, it’s compulsory!

There’s a saying in affiliate marketing known as “failing forwards”. It means trying stuff out so you can learn from it.

When a child starts to learn to walk, they get up and fall over again thousands of times. But they never give up! But that’s just what affiliates do and the 95% drop out rate is testimony to this.

The problem we have as affiliates is that we are largely working alone. This means we never get to see our comfort zone, we only experience the results of whatever action we are focused on. So it’s easy to fall into a groove we are comfortable with, without ever seeing ourselves as the problem.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing – What Limits Are You Placing On Your Actions As An Affiliate?

What limits do you place on your actions as an affiliate? Do you stop working when you’re tired? Have you set a limitation on what you will spend on marketing, or on training/education? Have you invested in yourself and getting help and support, or are you skimping on it to save some money? Do you have a marketing budget? What products do you promote and why? Ask some pertinent questions in the following areas of your affiliate business to uncover some possible reasons why you’re holding yourself back:

Are you investing time/money in continuous education?
Do you have a marketing budget, however small?
How much time do you spend every day on your affiliate business?
Do your circumstances limit the time you can spend on your business?
Are finances limiting your ability to grow your business?
Can you spend more time/money on your business?
Do you have a good support network who encourages your business growth and helps you personally?

Identify an area of your business/thinking which is somehow limiting. List 10 things you can do about it.

Some Simple Steps To Push Your Comfort Zone

There’s lots of things you can do to “nudge” your comfort zone towards growth even when you’re faced with limiting circumstances:

Access a free autoresponder service if you don’t already have an email list
Start an Adwords/Microsoft account and set a marketing budget as little as $1 a day!
Write a blog post each day/week
Access training and support
Upload a video each day/week to YouTube/TikTok
Read a page of a self development book each day

What you resist persists and it’s likely that the very thing you are avoiding is the thing you need to do to grow yourself and your business. One simple way to identify your weakness is to look at the things you avoid doing!

Words Become Things

Thoughts become words and words become things. Another useful way to identify your limits is to start observing the things you say both to yourself and others. Our limitations often come over in the things we say, the excuses we make and the fears and limitations we discuss.

Stop giving your thoughts and words to limitations and give them to faith and belief instead. When you can unpick your limiting beliefs you can start to unravel the limitations you’re bringing to your affiliate business.

Your business will never outgrow the limits of the thinking you bring to it. If you’re thinking small, and in terms of limitation, there’s no doubt this will effect your affiliate business too.

Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill: “Mind control is the result of self-discipline and habit. You either control your mind or it controls you.”

Summary

To overcome limitations you must first identify them. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know you have it. Your business will never outgrow the limitations of your thinking.

Start by looking at the reasons your business isn’t doing as well as you might like. This may come out as a list of excuses. Write them down and identify some of the limits you might be holding in your mind.

Then write out ten possible actions you can take to change the situation. It’s likely that some of these actions will be uncomfortable. That’s a sure sign they are the things you must do!

Take some gentle steps to soften your resistance to these steps by breaking them down into tiny micro commitments in the right direction. For example, you might not have a large marketing budget, but you can afford to run an advert at $1 a day just to soften your resistance and get the momentum needed. You can also learn from the data you collect, even if the test doesn’t result in a sale/commission.

What other micro steps can you take towards overcoming the resistance you have and your invisible barriers to success which show up as fear?

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the pitfalls of affiliate marketing? It’s easy to see the up-sides of affiliate marketing. It’s a business model which can allow you to become financially independent and choose how and where you work! Earnings are potentially unlimited and you can work from anywhere in the world from a laptop!

However, with such huge benefits, it’s unsurprising that there’s many pitfalls of affiliate marketing as well. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business where you only get paid if you sell. Most new affiliates will struggle to sell anything within their first few efforts and this leads many to quit before they’ve given it a proper chance. There’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing which means only a tiny few will actually make it work for them to generate a reliable income.

The journey to making your first online sale is definitely a challenge and it’s much more difficult if you go it alone. So it’s worth getting help and support if you’re going to take it seriously and give yourself a proper chance.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing – Getting Off The Blocks

Getting started as an affiliate is easy. Simply join an affiliate program and learn how to promote your affiliate link. Sounds easy. But in reality there’s a lot to learn and implement, and most of the time it won’t result in a sale. As you try things out in your marketing efforts, you might expect things to work more easily than they do in reality, and this can be pretty tough and it’s where a lot of people drop out.

What you want to happen and what actually happens are very different. But if you can keep going for long enough it gets easier. Once you’ve made a single sale consider it a major break though. At this point you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it once. This can help you overcome a lot of mental baggage. If you’re full of doubt it’s much more difficult than if you’re full of self belief!

I’d say one of the major pitfalls of affiliate marketing is this beginning stage. You are likely to be sceptical and full of doubts and fears. Plus, you haven’t proved it to yourself yet or taken any action. So you’re not only encumbered by doubt but also inactivity. You need to take a lot of action to blast yourself through these barriers. This takes a lot of belief and conviction, which is part of the problem if you don’t have it! Not only do you need huge self belief but you also need to consistently take action amid the lack of tangible results.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing – The First Sale

The first sale is a major milestone and signifies a huge effort on your part, unless of course you had a lucky early win, which is possible of course. A “lucky” win might be a win without much effort. But this can also be a negative because if you believe every sale will come so easily, you’re going to be disappointed later when this success isn’t easily repeated.

Once you start proving it can be done to yourself, you’ve overcome a major barrier to success; your own scepticism and doubt. To scale this success up to larger success is now possible but this requires more effort, time and/or marketing budget. If your first sale is made through paying for advertising, you can easily scale up and repeat it. But if it’s organic, it can be more difficult to scale up.

Ideally you can make sales in your sleep with affiliate marketing and build a scalable income without having to deal with customers or handle products. But in reality this takes a lot of effort and/or a large marketing budget. If your traffic source is organic, it can take months before you see regular traffic, leads and sales. If you’re paying for traffic, it’s going to cost you!

Psycology

The psychology of affiliate marketing is quite interesting. It will definitely help you if you understand some of the psychological pitfalls before you start. Most people learning affiliate marketing haven’t come from a sales background and so their past employment can actually work against them. For example, if you have a technical role in a job, you get paid for turning up and doing the work. No matter how well a company does, the workforce gets the same pay packet each week. This can lead you to imagine the same is true of affiliate marketing. However, it doesn’t work like this as an affiliate. You only get paid when you sell something.

This means you need to focus on those actions which create this result. But most people aren’t programmed this way. Most people gravitate towards the activities which are comfortable and familiar!

Being a “busy fool” is therefore a thing to be avoided as an affiliate. A busy fool can spend all day on the superficial activities which although might be enjoyable, don’t move their business forwards.

When results aren’t forthcoming, it’s easy to blame your marketing strategy or product and therefore move on to another “system”. Again, this is human nature looking for an easier path. This is known as shiny object syndrome and before you make any ground or headway with a particular affiliate strategy, you’re off looking for the next “shiny object”. See also affiliate marketing psychology.

Summary

While affiliate marketing can allow anyone to earn from anywhere, there’s many pitfalls with the business model and most would-be affiliates don’t make it work for them. With a 95% drop out rate, you know it’s not going to be as easy as some make out.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means if you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. It can take an enormous amount of effort just to get off the “blocks” with affiliate marketing and although it gets easier the longer you do it, most people think it’s going to be easier than it actually is.

If you have a long term view and are prepared to do the work it can be a great solution. The flip side though is that you can replace almost any income with affiliate marketing. There’s no limit on what you can earn from it. If you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing and making it work, get started here.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business?

Are you struggling with your affiliate business? I was too, but in 2014 I joined an online community and got help and support. I learned how to get traffic, convert traffic into leads and sales and stay the course when things got tough. Having others around you on the same path is vital for your success with an online business. It gives you belief and holds you accountable. Without a strong support system, it’s easy to look to friends and relatives for support but unfortunately this can have a negative effect, as your circle are seldom online entrepreneurs and often they don’t see your vision.

Here’s a few of the things I learned which helped me overcome my affiliate struggles and get my business on track.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Email Marketing

Before I got proper help, I was struggling to get traffic to my websites. This is one of the major problems for affiliate marketers. Unless you get traffic, and the right kind of traffic, in the right numbers, you’re never going to succeed with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Get enough people to your offers and you’ll sell something eventually.

Of course not all traffic is equal and you need to know who to attract to your products. Attract the wrong kind of traffic, and no amount of visitors will give you a sale. More about this later. The first “gem” I learned was the power of email marketing. I didn’t have an email list and this gives you a major disadvantage. Without an email list of subscribers, you’re relying on your website traffic converting into sales.

This can be difficult even if you attract the right kind of (buyer) visitor. Most online users will require a number of touch points before they make an online purchase. So if they only interact with your website once, most will leave without buying anything.

An email list puts you in greater control of your traffic and allows you to make a number of connections with potential customers and over a long period of time. On a website, most people leave within a few minutes which means you only have this time to sell to them, if you don’t get their email address.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Products

Before I got help, the products I was selling paid only peanuts. I sold books from Amazon, for example, which only paid a few cents for each sale I made. Plus I wasn’t selling products in the volume I needed in order to replace my employment income.

But even with only sporadic sales, some products can allow you to replace your current income much more quickly. For example, if you promote products which pay out recurring income, a few sales quickly adds up to give you a rolling monthly income. With one-time commissions, you only get paid once per item, so you need to sell in larger volumes.

Subscription products, such as training courses and digital software are a good example of those which pay out recurring income. They are also good products to choose because they are vital for businesses. Email autoresponders, business training and other software which helps online businesses are good examples of products which people will subscribe to potentially for years.

High Ticket Items

Another example of a game changer for affiliate marketers is high ticket products. High ticket affiliate products pay out much larger commissions than standard products which affiliates often choose. When I started affiliate marketing, I assumed a lot about what people buy online, much of which was false. I would sell things which I personally bought online, and which I could afford.

My mentor taught me to look at what the wealthy buy online and focus on selling those kinds of items instead.

With a low valued item, say one valued at $100, you can only earn around 40% commission maximum (if it’s a digital product). Physical products pay much lower levels of commission (usually from 1%-10%). But with products valued at $10,000 and above, each sale brings a much larger rate of commission – whether your product is digital or physical.

Help And Support

Consider two affiliates each working towards replacing their employment income so they can become full time affiliate marketers. One of them surrounds themselves with mentors and coaches who have already achieved this, the other goes it alone and only has the support of their friends and family. Which one has the best chance of success? Of course it’s the one with the mentors and coaches.

I tried everything alone for a long time, thinking I would save money if I did it all by myself. The problem with this approach is that there’s many pitfalls with affiliate marketing and most aren’t prepared for them. So when things don’t work out, 95% of affiliate marketers will quit.

Finding other affiliates and mentors who can keep you on track and offer support and accountability is vital if you’re going to succeed online. It’s simply too difficult otherwise. No one succeeds in a vacuum doing everything alone.

Get help and support – find an online community here.

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