One of the best ways to make money while you sleep is through the internet. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets anyone sell online through automation. You don’t need your own products because you can earn through product referrals. It’s a little bit like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Only with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend visits that restaurant because of your recommendation.
In this post I’m going to share some of the ways in which you can use affiliate marketing to make money in your sleep! There’s nothing better than waking up to an online sale. Automating the process of selling online can give you both time and financial freedom. So if you’re looking for another income stream or a way to escape the 9 to 5, this one’s for you!
How To Make Money While You Sleep – Advertising Methods
There’s many ways to earn online but affiliate marketing is one of the simplest. Simply find an affiliate product to sell and then learn how to promote it. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and services online. Here’s some of the most popular methods:
PPC – pay per click advertising – send online traffic to products directly through paid marketing
Email marketing – build a large list of subscribers and automate email messages containing your affiliate links
Blogging – this post is an example of the content I create on this website to attract people to the products I promote
Video marketing – you can upload videos to TikTok/YouTube and use both organic and paid marketing methods
Social media marketing – find your ideal customers through a variety of social media marketing activities.
Anyone can learn the skills for selling online and automate them to make sales in your sleep!
How To Make Money While You Sleep – Types Of Products
Most people have used the website Amazon to buy something online. But did you know that Amazon has an affiliate program which anyone can join? Once you have joined the program you can promote any product from the site as an affiliate and earn commissions for any sales you generate.
Here’s an example of a high ticket which affiliates can promote to earn 8% commission
Amazon’s commission structure isn’t the best opportunity for making money in your sleep however, although it’s where many affiliates will start out. You get paid between 1% and 10% commission for most of Amazon’s affiliate products. There’s other products however which pay much more. Digital products don’t require any postage or handling fees and tend to pay much more. Typically digital products will pay between 30% and 40% commission. So even with fewer sales you can earn a lot more.
Subscription affiliate products offer one of the best opportunities if you’re wanting to make money in your sleep. You can sell a subscription product and earn ongoing commissions for the lifetime of a customer.
What’s The Catch?
The catch is that there’s work to be done before you can actually start making sales on autopilot. Many affiliate marketers will quit before they get over the hump of the learning curve. If they commit they can ultimately start making money passively and grow a large international business online, even without any products of their own!
You can dramatically speed up the journey from being a complete beginner to making sales in your sleep if you:
Affiliate marketing offers a great opportunity for anyone who wants to build a genuine business online through the sale of other people’s products and services. Anyone can learn if they are dedicated and committed.
A good analogy of affiliate marketing is that of the Chinese bamboo tree. The plant has a 5 year gestation period beneath the surface. Once it breaks through the soil, the tree can grow 90 feet in only 5 weeks.
The most effective affiliate marketing strategy is always one which works for you. Depending on your marketing budget, available time and choice of products, a variety of different approaches might be appropriate. You should definitely diversify in your products.
If a particular product disappears, you’re going to be pretty annoyed if you’ve created a tonne of content promoting only that one product. You should definitely own your relationship with your audience. Spending a fortune sending traffic straight to a product puts the product owner in the driving seat. If terms of the affiliate program change, you can find yourself out of pocket and trapped.
Building an email list ticks many of these boxes. It lets you control your traffic, build a long term relationship with your audience and diversify the products you choose to promote.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Paid Marketing
There’s several ways you can build an email list and the bigger your list (in general) the more people you can serve with your content and products. Since we’re talking about the most effective affiliate marketing strategy here, I’m going to say this is with paid marketing. While content marketing is great once the work is done, and gives you free traffic (if successful), it’s slow and unreliable.
Paid marketing is fast and scalable. It’s instant too and you’ll know almost immediately whether a campaign is working or not. With content, it can take months to gain traction and much of your work (and time) is wasted.
Convertri is one of the best landing page software’s available. It offers super fast loading times and easy user friendly interface
The downside of using paid marketing is that you’ll need to spend money while you’re figuring out what works. Many of your campaigns are likely to not hit the mark. This can feel like throwing money away. But so long as you are learning from each advert you run by tracking your data, you’ll eventually find one which produces a profit.
One of the best ways to build an email list is to send paid traffic directly to a landing page. With a landing page software you can cross test your campaigns to find the most efficient one.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Video Marketing
While contextual advertising does work, video often offers a better level of communication. This is particularly relevant if you’re selling something less tangible such as a digital product of some kind. Physical products are pretty self evident. But some digital products such as business training courses, for example, will require a more in-depth approach.
This is where video advertising comes into its own. A short video can relay a lot more information to a potential customer than a line of text. You can also build a greater level of trust through video if you communicate in a deliberate way to connect with your customer avatar.
Selling digital products which solve large problems (such as building an online business) can be more difficult unless you build rapport with your potential customers. This can be done by talking in a deliberate way and relating to their pain points or difficulties.
Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategy – Products & Alignment
Whatever strategy you decide to use as an affiliate, you also need to be well aligned with your product/s. The better you know your product/s the more you will understand the needs of your customers. This might mean choosing products which you find highly valuable and useful to you personally. If you don’t care about (or understand) your product/s as an affiliate, it’s going to be more difficult building your business around them, promoting them and talking about them.
Ultimately if you’re passionate about your affiliate products you’re going to be a much more heart aligned advocate for them. If you genuinely care about what you’re doing, it’s going to show in your marketing efforts. Video in particular is a very difficult medium to be fake in. Non-verbal communication is said to amount to as much as 60-70 of communication.
Affiliates are in effect “middle-men” for the sale of products and services online. But being aligned with what you’re doing always comes across better than simply selling something only because you want the outcome (the affiliate commission).
Subscription Products & High Ticket
With a well chosen product you can earn considerably more than with even the greatest products you can find online. Some products pay much more than others. For example, Amazon products pay as little as 1% commission. So even if you manage to sell a lot of them, you can still end up out of pocket, particularly if you’re using paid marketing for their promotion. Digital products pay a lot more than physical product, in general. The standard affiliate commission of a digital product is around 30%-40%. With physical product it is 1%-10%.
So with certain products you can earn more even if you sell fewer items. This is particularly true of subscription items which pay out recurring commissions and high ticket items which pay the most one-off commissions. Checkout my post on high ticket recurring income products.
Don’t Quit!
While your individual strategy will depend on your own personal circumstances, choice of products and marketing budget, it’s also a good idea not to quit! Not quitting is definitely the best strategy for success as an affiliate marketer. Since 95% of affiliates do quit, that leaves only 5% of people who start doing affiliate marketing who actually carry on a make an income out of it.
So this seems like the simplest advice to finish off this article with! Don’t quit. You’ll probably want to quit at some point or another. This is the time to take stock of what you have learned, not to make a judgement. Affiliate marketing does work and you can make a living out of it (if you believe you can). But you’ll need to keep at it for longer than most others.
To succeed you’re going to need to fail a few times first, which is only natural for anything you want to learn. Checkout my recent post on failing forwards in affiliate marketing.
Some affiliates build content and others run advertising. Some use video and others run contextual ads. Not every method of advertising will suit everyone and your best results will come by aligning yourself to products you love and a suitable strategy which you can sustain over the longer term. It’s important to choose a path you can enjoy and this might mean trying out one or two strategies to see what works best for you.
If you’re in a full time employment (and have little available time), you’re probably better off using paid advertising. If you’re short on funds, but are more time free, content marketing might be more suitable. It’s difficult to say which is the most effective affiliate marketing strategy across the board because everyone’s circumstances are different. Not everyone will have the patience for content marketing, and not everyone will have the budget to run paid ads.
Your product choice has something to say in terms of what is affordable too, as is your choice of niche. In a top niche, your ads are going to be more expensive, so you’ll need high ticket and recurring income products to be able to compete with those other ads.
There’s a few reasons why an online commission is so much sweeter than a wage. A wage is guaranteed when you turn up to a job of course. But you need to keep turning up again and again. If you fail to turn up you stop getting the wage.
I wanted to be able to earn from online sales and have sales come in whether I turned up or not. With an online sale, and particularly with subscription sales, you can keep earning long after the initial sale. With an affiliate subscription product you can keep earning for the lifetime of a customer.
Granted you need to actually make the sale. With affiliate marketing you don’t get paid unless you actually refer a product to a customer. But once you’ve learned this skill, it can serve you for the rest of your life!
In the initial phase of becoming an affiliate marketer, I had many problems. I struggled making those sales. But I knew once I had “cracked it” that I would be able to earn independently of a job or an employer. To me this was freedom!
Why An Online Commission Is So Much Sweeter Than A Wage
Before I found affiliate marketing I was struggling to make ends meet financially. I was attempting to make it in film and television as a stunt performer but in the early days I didn’t work much. This meant I needed to pick up part time casual jobs when I wasn’t working. After years of this pattern it eventually got pretty tiresome. Even the stunt work, which was picking up meant that I had to commute for hours to get to the jobs.
This is me doubling for Jack Whitehall on the movie Bad Education
I couldn’t imagine a better job than the stunt work, but work was unstable and sporadic. I became trapped by the big pay days and couldn’t find anything which paid so well. This problem is common. The “golden handcuffs” of a well paid job traps people for years and they will sacrifice their health and well-being for the financial stability.
Affiliate marketing gave me a way out. I was willing to make much less on my own terms as an affiliate than I could make as a stuntman. After all, if I could earn even half as much from my laptop, without a long distance commutes, that would be great, I thought.
Why An Online Commission Is So Much Sweeter Than A Wage
A dream job such as that of being a stuntman is hard to beat. In my 20’s it was a dream come true to work on movies and in television. But by the time I was in my 40’s the glossy veneer had worn off. My relationships had suffered and I was tired of the long commutes and the sporadic nature of work had left me feeling uncertain of my finances and demoralised.
I couldn’t foresee being happy in a 9 to 5 job of any kind and affiliate marketing was the answer. As I became better at it, the sales would drop in ever more frequently. My decisions were no longer based on financial necessity. I found myself making better choices and becoming happier.
With affiliate marketing you can work how you like. Choose your hours and learn around an existing employment. It gives you complete flexibility. If you commit to the journey you can ultimately replace your existing income, live anywhere and plan your day as you choose. This just isn’t possible in most careers and jobs. The job always has to come before friends and family in most cases.
Having time and financial freedom is a total game changer. If you’re interested in learning about affiliate marketing you can get started here.
Summary
Here’s why an online commission is so much sweeter than a wage. An online commission, even if it’s only a tiny one, represents something much greater. It represents the potential to create a life completely on your own terms.
This is a scary proposition for many because we are conditioned to think in terms of working in a job, for a boss, and commuting as par for the course. But if you’re hating your boss, struggling with a long commute or simply looking for a different way of life, or more time with friends and family, affiliate marketing can offer the answer.
Are you ready to learn affiliate marketing basics? The better your understanding of the basic fundamental principles of affiliate marketing, the greater your chances of success. There’s a huge drop out rate within the business of affiliate marketing and around 95% of those who attempt to build an income from affiliate marketing quit completely.
But there’s various reasons for this. Affiliate marketing is super easy to start, but not so easy to master. There’s a very low barrier to entry and almost anyone can “give it a go”! You can start completely for free and there’s no cost to join most affiliate programs.
Most businesses fail within their first few years so the fact that most affiliates quit shouldn’t come as a surprise. Once you understand the main concepts of affiliate marketing well, you’ve armed yourself with some insight and knowledge which many fail to learn.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Your Customer Avatar
One of the main principles to learn is that of your perfect customer, or customer avatar. This is super important. Once you understand that the internet is full of people who don’t really care about what you’re selling, you can focus in on those who actually do.
When I started out online I had no clue either. I threw up websites in the hope that people would just come and buy my affiliate products. They didn’t, and I was disappointed more times than I care to remember.
A website thrown into the digital world online is like a barren desert. No one sees it unless you market it. To market to the people who actually want what you’re offering is the main key to success with affiliate marketing. Knowing your customer avatar is key to this.
Most people aren’t interested in buying online. Only certain searches will lead to sales. It’s these searches which you want to understand. For example, someone looking online for “how to fix a blocked drain” aren’t going to be standing by with their wallets open. They are looking for information as is the larger percentage of online users. The internet is an information gathering tool, after all.
A search for a product review on the other hand is a much more targeted online search. This type of user is more than likely looking for something specific to buy. These are the searches you want to focus on if you’re going to make sales online with affiliate products.
Who is your ideal customer? How old are they? Where do they hang out online? How can you tell them about your product in an automated way? More on customer avatar here.
Learn Affiliate Marketing Basics – Marketing
It’s in the name: affiliate marketing. But despite this it can be easy to think that products sell themselves. Many affiliate “guru’s” will exaggerate the ease with which online selling is done. It can be easy, of course, but generally it’s not so for a beginner, hence why so many quit.
The right products do sell themselves but as an affiliate marketer you need to put yourself between the customer and the product. Any point of contact between you and the customer can be termed “marketing”. A user landing on your website gives you a point of contact to communicate your marketing message. Someone opening your email message gives you another point of content.
Most online buyers won’t buy on their first point of contact, especially with someone they don’t know. It takes typically 6-8 points of contact before someone will buy online, unless the website is already well known to them – such as Amazon, for example.
This means you need to create multiple touch-points in many cases, before you can sell online.
Email Marketing – A Fundamental Marketing Tool For Affiliates
It’s very difficult to create multiple points of contact only from a website. This is why successful affiliates will always have an email list. An email list allows you to build trust and create multiple points of contact with potential customers. On a website, most visitors only hang around for a few minutes. This gives you little chance of making that affiliate sale. But get them on your email list and this timeframe is dramatically extended. I’ve had subscribers from my email list make purchases even years after they joined.
People often never return to a website they once “happened” upon, but once you have someone’s email address you can set up an automated marketing campaign which keeps them in the loop – potentially for decades!
By delivering useful marketing messages, which help your subscribers in some way, you build trust. Once you have someone’s trust it’s much easier to sell them your affiliate products. The online shopper today is pretty discerning. They won’t fall for the hard sell and have plenty of time to shop around. But give them value and build trust and you’ll become their first port of call if they decide they want your particular product/service.
This is where the email marketing tool comes in. With an autoresponder, affiliates can collect email addresses and build a large list of subscribers to promote their products to.
Choosing A Niche & Product You Love
Choosing your niche is an important decision for affiliates. Your niche is the topic or interest which which you can build your affiliate business around. For example, if you’re interested in fitness, you could choose to build around gym workouts. If you’re interested in cooking, it could be recipes which you build a website or resource around.
A niche you love is much more likely to succeed than one you’re only half interested in, or not at all interested in. If your marketing method is going to be content creation, you’ll need to build a lot of content. If you run out of ideas after a couple of months, it’s likely to fade away. But if you’re bringing a lot of passion to your topic, you can create in it for months and even years.
Likewise with the affiliate product/s you choose to promote. If you’re only interested in the end result – making money, it might not be enough to inspire you take consistent action in your affiliate business. So choose a niche and a product you’re proud to promote and which you genuinely believe in. I made the mistake of picking a niche I had zero interest in at one point. I spent 6 months building content on a website and eventually ran out of enthusiasm for it!
Mindset
This post wouldn’t be complete without a mention of your mindset. I always scoffed at mentors who talked about mindset because I only wanted to learn the strategies for making money through affiliate marketing. Little did I know how important mindset really was.
Your mindset is paramount to success with affiliate marketing and you need to learn the strategies for keeping yourself in an upbeat mentality. If your beliefs don’t support your affiliate business, sooner or later you’ll come a cropper. If you’re surrounding yourself with naysayers and you allow friends and family to talk you out of building your affiliate business, they will definitely do so!
Don’t have a “give it a go” mindset when it comes to affiliate marketing. Have a “never quit” mindset instead. Remember each “failure” is no failure at all with affiliate marketing. It’s only feedback with the right mindset. If you see each problem you encounter as a failure, it will soon or later dampen your enthusiasm. Keep your spirits high and keep reminding yourself of your goals.
If you’re read this far congratulations. You’re definitely more likely to succeed as an affiliate with this knowledge. I’ll also add that I was pretty much failing before I found some affiliate marketing mentors who helped me. Having subscription products to sell and high ticket items is also a complete game changer. You can sign up on this site to access the same help and support I found over 10 years ago when I found a group of coaches and mentors.
Are you ready to stop wasting time on the internet? Most of us are consumed by the internet in some way or another. It’s a modern day disease! The algorithms running such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are designed to keep you on them. They show you more and more content of the kind you like; to suck your time away and keep you engaged!
Time enjoyed wasting isn’t wasted time! Still, hours on your phone or laptop each day equates to years of your life lost over time. So what’s the answer?
One solution is to remove distracting apps such as Facebook and YouTube from your phone. At the very least turn off notifications. Once your apps are popping up with little red icons, and you’re jumping to attention at them, your phone is using you, you’re no longer using your phone!
Stop Wasting Time On The Internet – Build An Online Business Instead
Building an online business has made me super aware of the time suck-age which happens when you’re online. Once you get into habits of checking social media, replying to messages instantly and checking your email inbox constantly, you’re no longer in control. You’re reacting to stimulus rather than choosing purposeful pursuits.
So one of the best ways to put yourself in control of your time is to choose a purposeful activity. Don’t log online unless you have a specific reason to. In Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week he suggests strategies to control your time online. Avoid constantly checking emails and designate only two specific time slots daily for doing so. This free’s up your time and mental energy, which can be used on more productive pursuits – such as building an online business, for example!
Stop Wasting Time On The Internet – My Daily Average – OMG!
Looking at my daily average time spent on just my phone is horrifying! 4 hours and 20 minutes spend looking into my screen!
Admittedly some of that time is to look at statistics and reply to emails I receive for the online business. But I would hazard a guess than most of it is spent browsing social media and sharing amusing memes! This definitely isn’t the best use of my time!
One of my productive habits however is creating content such as this post.
Strategies To Organise Your Time
There’s several strategies you can use to fight big tech. Those algorithms are run by artificial intelligence – so it’s your brain against AI when it comes to getting addicted to social media. You will lose unless you deliberately take back control on your time.
You can set app limits using your phone or remove the apps altogether. Spend time digitally detoxing completely for at least a day a week. You’ll probably find the itch to grab your phone at some point, especially if you’re hooked. Place your phone in another room from your bedroom and remove the desire to grab your phone first thing in the morning.
Here’s a great video from Tim Ferris on how to not let your phone use you:
Be Productive Instead – Build An Online Business
Now you’re more aware of the massive suck-age of time your phone creates, why not use that time to build an income online instead. If I spent as much time as I do on my phone actually working on my online business I would surely be much more successful with it by now!
If you’re ready to start, join a step by step course which shows you exactly how to get started, even with no products or experience.
I started out doing affiliate marketing without much money – so I looked for low cost affiliate strategies I could do for very little financial investment. In the very beginning this meant totally for free.
I used blog websites such as Hubpages.com and free website building programs such as Weebly.com. The blogging platforms you can use are many, and you can choose from sites such as Blogger.com, Medium.com, WordPress.com to write posts completely for free.
My very first affiliate sale came from Hubpages after writing a review of a software product I had purchased. But I had some problems after that and my account was shut down. Free blog platforms have their problems and one of them is getting traffic to your content.
As time went on, I realised it was worth building my own websites and hosting them on my own domain. This gives you better standing both with the search engines and your visitors. Your own domain name gives you a greater authority than a free blog site. Plus, gaining approval from the search engines (particularly Google) is much more difficult on a free blogger site.
Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – The Niche Website
The niche website has definitely been the best low cost affiliate strategy I have used. I’ve written a post on how to build a niche website but I’ll explain a little here too. The way I build niche websites is to start with some keyword research. I research keywords that I would like to rank my website for first.
Of course the most competitive keywords are generally well over subscribed. It’s difficult to rank for them and the domain names are usually gone or incredibly expensive. So instead of going after those top (more competitive) keywords I look for the diamonds in the rough – those keywords which are less competitive but which still give the opportunity to sell affiliate products from.
This niche website has been built around the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors” and is an example of site which has generated free traffic and sales.
Back in the early 2000’s you could throw up a niche website with only a few pages on it and rank at the top of Google for your chosen keywords. Today this is much more difficult to do. You’ll usually need to show Google that your site is worth a listing at all – let alone a top place. In a competitive niche (such as affiliate marketing) it’s more difficult to rank a website than a less popular one.
Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – Blogging
Blogging is a fine compliment to building a niche website. A niche website can easily fail too and I’ve built many of them which simply didn’t work. The key factor to making your niche website a winner, I believe, is to choose a topic you can continue to enjoy working on, despite of the money.
Many of my niche websites failed mainly because I only wanted the end result of them – sales on autopilot. I threw them up and they offered little in the way of value for their visitors. Some made a sale or two, but it was hardly worth the effort really, for all the work I put in. But when I found a niche I could put some love into – like this one, things changed because I enjoyed working on it! This meant I could out-last others in the same niche who wouldn’t put the same love and attention in.
One of my blogs was on a site built around the subject of mushroom harvesting! I knew nothing of this topic, but I was trying to rank a website on Google and this keyword had very little competition.
I did manage the rank the site, but it was difficult to monetise. After a few months I ran out of love for writing on the topic. Because I knew little on the subject I had to research every blog post I wrote! This made it much more difficult to sustain the effort needed to keep building content.
After a while another (more passionate) blogger overtook my place on Google and mine fell away. I simply couldn’t sustain the effort needed to maintain my place on Google. After several months of unrewarded work on this site, I eventually let it die! But it was a lesson learned. Choose a topic you can monetise, and choose one which you are passionate about over the longer term.
Low Cost Affiliate Strategies – Facebook
Another low cost affiliate strategy I learned was through using Facebook. Although I didn’t pursue this strategy as much as the blogging, I did find it to be effective. The strategy involves setting up a lead magnet on your Facebook page. Then join groups where your customer avatar will be likely to hang out.
Chat with people in those groups and help them out with problems. Don’t spam, simply chat. Spend a bit of time each day leaving comments and interacting in group chat. Over time, some people from those groups will visit your profile and notice what you’re offering.
It’s a simply free strategy to encourage people to visit your Facebook profile and therefore notice your affiliate offering. You can read more about this strategy in my post unpaid social media marketing.
Quora
Quora is another great resource for low cost advertising if you’re prepared to make a daily habit out of posting on the site. I used Quora.com quite effectively to build traffic back to my various websites.
quora
Start by opening an account on Quora and answering questions in your niche. If appropriate, you can link to content on your website in your answers. Providing those links are repeated multiple times, and they are relevant to the answers you are giving, they are allowed. Directly affiliate link posting isn’t allowed however. If you do this you’ll get a warning and then you’ll get banned!
Make sure you are posting value in your answers as shorter answers with links to your content are likely to be removed. For more on this strategy visit my post affiliate marketing on Quora.
Failing forwards in affiliate marketing is a concept I learned from the community of online affiliates I joined. You can access them through signing up to my email list on this website. It’s a simple idea. Unless you try something out with affiliate marketing you won’t know whether it works or not. Despite whatever training and coaching you have received, you won’t get anywhere with affiliate marketing without getting your “feet” wet. Much like the saying you can’t learn to swim without getting in the water, failing forwards means trying (and most likely failing) with some kind of marketing efforts.
For me, I had already failed many times with affiliate marketing when I found coaches and mentors to help guide me. I was well versed in “failing” at least! Just not succeeding! But the act of placing an advert, writing a blog post or uploading a video are all examples of how you can step out of your comfort zone and learn something.
One of the most difficult aspects of affiliate marketing is actually getting started with some kind of marketing strategy. But unless you fail, (usually many times), you’ll never learn to get good at any particular marketing tactic.
Failing Forwards In Affiliate Marketing – Blogging
For me it was blogging where my first online success landed. I made my first sale through a review blog post on a free blogging site (Hubpages.com). It was a short lived success, but a success none the less. It motivated me to keep going with affiliate marketing and the reason I’m still doing affiliate marketing today.
I figured that if I could make a single sale online, I could make many more. Before this happened I had written many posts and they all amounted to absolutely nothing (in terms of sales). But in reality, they had all helped me to overcome my reluctance to get started and actually take some “baby steps” towards building an income online.
I had failed forward so many times than one of my posts actually worked! This gave me faith and of course the data which proved not only that affiliate marketing did in fact work, but that I could make it work for me!
Without faith that affiliate marketing can work for you, you’re hardly likely to even try. But without falling and getting up many times, you likely won’t find a strategy you can run with.
Failing Forwards In Affiliate Marketing – Running Ads
I was at first very reluctant to run paid ads and in the early days of being an affiliate I had my Adwords account shut down by Google. Back in the day this was pretty bad and I couldn’t get it reinstated. But before I got shut down, I was running ads and making affiliate sales. I was about to start increasing my budget and bam – no more account! This made me switch to a purely organic method of marketing using video and blog posts to build authority from a website.
Organic marketing is tough and you need to work relentlessly (often without reward) in order to get free traffic and eventually make sales. Paid marketing on the other hand is different because ultimately you can have an advert which works consistently. Once you “arrive” here you can simply leave it running to make sales and profit.
You can easily scale up too, which is why many affiliates use this method. However, most people will experience a lot of ads which don’t work, before they find one which actually brings in the profit. Again this is where failing forwards matters. Unless you’re prepared to learn from these “failings” you can’t expect to win in the end.
Failing Forwards – Niche Websites
I’m a big fan of building niche websites of which this is one. But my success with niche websites was hard won. Before I had a website which actually worked, bringing in sales consistently, I built hundreds of the suckers! Most of them failed miserably! One of the first ones I built was called tedssheds.net and it actually ranked for the keyword from which it was built. I sold a Clickbank product from it – shed plans.
In all the time it was ranked on Google, I made one lonely sale – netting me a grand total of $40! But it was a win at the time. It showed me that organic marketing could work. I also built websites for many other Clickbank products in my early days as an affiliate – most of which, I might add, simply didn’t work at all!
I had followed some early course I found back in the early 2000’s which taught niche website building. After literally throwing up several websites (none of which ranked), I pretty much threw in the towel. It was only circumstances which kept me going ( I was struggling to make ends meet as a stunt performer).
Not Quitting
95% of affiliates will quit so the answer is to be one of the 5% who doesn’t! Not quitting might just be the winning formula for success in affiliate marketing. But not only not quitting, but also looking to your results as “feedback” (whether you deem them “good” or “bad”) is the sign of the thinking entrepreneur.
That feedback simply isn’t possible unless you attempt something which you haven’t yet tried. Failing forwards means to keep trying new things until you find something which works for you. As the saying goes “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford
Failing forwards therefore, is a good strategy for life in general, and not just in affiliate marketing. If you’re serious about earning an income online, join an community of online entrepreneurs by signing up on this website for the free video series.
Summary
When a toddler first tries to walk, they stumble over and stand up again. They don’t think “ah well, I guess walking just isn’t for me”! They get up again and again until they are trotting around happily by themselves.
The same can be said for anything new which we attempt. Just like the toddler, as newbie affiliates we are learning a new skill. We can’t expect to be experts without falling over a few times and we can’t fall over unless we first try and stand up!
With affiliate marketing, standing up means getting help, joining a course, running an advert for the first time, building an email list, or writing a blog post. Take the first step and get help from a group of online mentors and coaches here.
“Baby steps” is a great term when it comes to building an income online with affiliate marketing. There’s a lot to learn and do and it can be quite overwhelming. Even now, after years of being an affiliate, I’m overwhelmed at times. Should I start a new website, or a YouTube channel? What niche should I choose? What products can I sell? The vast array of choices leaves many would-be affiliates completely dumb founded. Instead of doing something, they get overwhelmed and do nothing as a result.
This is when it comes down to making your choices simple. Take a “baby step” forwards. A “baby step” is something small and easily manageable. Thinking of the whole picture at once only results in overwhelm. You simply can’t do everything at once which it takes to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Even trying to do so is exhausting just to think about.
Why “Baby Steps” Is Important For Affiliate Marketing
Despite not looking at the bigger picture when you’re taking tiny steps, it can be useful to do so now and then. After all, you’re building an affiliate business for a reason. That reason will be different for everyone. For some it’s the geographical freedom it provides. For others it’s more time with their family or to quit a job which is draining all their time. Get really clear about your reason because it helps give you drive and motivation when things are tough.
Once you see the bigger picture and are full of motivation to make it a reality, it’s time to actually do something. It’s time for baby steps! Depending where you are in your affiliate journey, this might mean different things. For me, I’m starting with a blog post. But if you haven’t found a product to promote or set up an email list, that may be the step for you. (If you’re just getting started you can sign up on this website for the video series.)
Here’s a few examples of what baby steps might be appropriate:
One thing that successful affiliates are particularly good at is motivating themselves to do the work that is necessary. This can often mean seeing the bigger picture of the long term benefit of continuing to act when most will quit. For me, this was “seeing” (in my mind’s eye) a passive income continuing to come in even when I wasn’t doing the work.
So this motivation kept me blogging, for example, even when nothing seemed to be happening! Each day, I would continue to create a new blog post on my website, even if I didn’t feel like it.
The effect of NOT doing the work was also a motivation for me. If I quit, I would find myself back in lack and poverty, the circumstances I was trying to escape. This worked as another form of motivation to keep doing the work!
Summary
Filling your mind with everything you “must” do, to make an affiliate business “work” is exhausting and often results in burnout and overwhelm. It’s much better to focus on the long term outcome, (which fills you with huge motivation), and then focus on the one thing you can accomplish now, today, rather than the many things which are out of your control or which you don’t yet know!
Baby steps is what has helped me to keep going even when I was unsure of my direction. Making daily habits is also a good idea. Once you have established a habit, such as blogging, it feels wrong NOT to do it. With this kind of momentum you have a much greater chance of success with an affiliate business. See also my post on the power of micro habits and the book by Stephen Guise – Mini Habits.
Don’t forget your email list! Your email list is one of the best things you can invest in as an affiliate. I often have some time out and remember the power of the email list when I return. As an affiliate marketer, the email list is one of the best things you can invest in. You can even get an email autoresponder for free too, so there’s no excuses!
Why is the email list so important for affiliate marketing or online business? An email list puts you in charge of traffic. If you’re an organic marketer, relying on free traffic from content creation, you can’t “turn on” your traffic instantly. You have to build content and wait! With paid traffic you can effectively turn traffic on – but it’ll cost you. But once you build an email list of subscribers, and start building a relationship with them by delivering valuable content, you have control over your traffic. You don’t have to rely on a Google listing or buying those clicks. Instead you send out emails to your list and send them to your content or your affiliate offer.
Why List Building Should By Your Top Priority
With a small number of people on your email list, you can’t expect miracles to happen. But as you grow your email list, into the thousands and tens of thousands, you have a lot more leverage. Providing you are offering something of value to your subscribers, and you get the right kind of subscribers on your email list, you should see your subscribers buying your affiliate products.
As your list grows, you make more sales. The same isn’t necessarily true of building content. Much of my content doesn’t work in attracting visitors unless I give it a push somehow. Only a small fraction of content on this blog for example gets ranked on the search engines and gets me free traffic.
But with a list the more people you have on it, the more will open your email messages. It’s a numbers game. A small percentage will buy so the larger you can build you list the more sales you should make.
Don’t Forget Your Email List – Who Do You Want On Your List?
Not everyone on the internet should qualify for your email list. You want targeted “buyers” not disinterested freebie seekers! Granted you’ll likely get a mixture of people, but if your paying to send traffic to your email list, make sure it’s for the right kind of subscriber.
To know your best subscriber you should do some work identifying your perfect customer or customer avatar. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this. Your “perfect” customer can be identified by looking at those types of people who regularly buy from you and remain loyal customers for life. Then not only buy, but them continue to subscribe to your services and get value from them.
Most people on the internet aren’t interested in what you sell. So identifying your target audience is a skill worth learning. Ask yourself where they live, how old they are, what their interests are and so on. By doing some work on your “perfect” customer, you can save yourself a lot of wasted time (and marketing budget) paying for the wrong kind of people to join your subscriber list.
How To Build An Email List
Once you have acquired an autoresponder, follow the tutorials and place some code on your website. This gives you a form which you can use to collect email addresses from subscribers. You can use a blog website (like this one) or purchase a landing page software if you’re using paid advertising.
I like blogging and sometimes I run paid advertising too. Using organic marketing is a much slower way to build a list and you can’t easily build so quickly. So the best way to build an email list is through sending targeted (paid) traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers details by offering something of value in exchange.
Your value driven offering much be enticing enough to help website visitors overcome their resistance to handing over their details. Since there’s so many people collecting email addresses online, many are rightly sceptical of handing theirs over! So your giveaway (free) offering must be relevant and of high enough value for them to subscribe.
Driving Traffic To Your Offer
There’s many ways of driving traffic to your offer but before you do this make sure your offer is clear. Make sure your offer highlights the benefits (not the features) of the visitor signing up to your email list. The benefits are the WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me” which is ultimately the outcome or the goal of them signing up to your list.
Once you’ve set up your offer page you need to drive traffic to it. There’s many ways to drive traffic and both paid and unpaid strategies can work. Whichever way you’re going to drive traffic it’s important to identify your most valuable (buyer) traffic. Much internet traffic isn’t looking to buy. Information seeking visitors aren’t as likely to buy as those looking for a specific product, for example.
By being careful with the content you create and the targeting of your paid advertising, you can save a lot of time and/or money! Here’s a great article on the different ways to drive traffic to your offers.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article “Don’t forget your email list”! If so, please share it! If you’re interested in more information on building your own online business, sign up to my email list on this website, best wishes!
Looking for passive income ideas to make money while you sleep? One of the best ways to make passive income from a standing start is through the internet. While many suggest buying property or trading and investments, those ideas are great if you have the money to invest. When I started out online, looking for ways to make a living, I didn’t have the money to invest in property or stocks and shares. I didn’t have the time to wait years until my investments matured!
I tried many online earning strategies and eventually settled on affiliate marketing because it shone out from the rest. You can earn a passive income in many ways online including through using advertising platforms such as Adsense, selling your own digital products or using the affiliate or drop shipping models. But affiliate marketing for me was the one which worked the best. It’s simple. You join a program and promote other people’s products with affiliate marketing. You don’t need a massive investment, only the time to learn some strategies, principles and techniques.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: Blogging
With affiliate marketing you can implement lots of different techniques to make sales online. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. There’s no inventory to hold, investments to make (besides your education) and you can work from anywhere! One of the cheapest ways to sell affiliate products online is through blogging.
I started blogging because of this back in the early 2000’s and it wasn’t all plain sailing. But I made my first affiliate sale quite quickly through a review article. From then on I was hooked! I knew if I could make these sales consistently it would be my ticket to a passive income and more choice and freedom in life!
Blogging can take some time however, but once you have put the work in upfront, you can leverage your “body” of work to make affiliate sales automatically. This website, for example, has over 700 articles on it now. Many of these pop up through Google, Bing, Yahoo search queries and lead to affiliate sales. More on blogging in my article get paid blogging.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: Email Marketing
Another useful tool up the affiliate marketer’s sleeve is email marketing. With email marketing you can automate email messages to be delivered to tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers; building trust online and selling products and services online through your messaging.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products online. From a website it can be quite tricky to sell something to a visitor. Most website visitors only stick around a few minutes. But once you capture the email address of a website visitor you can follow up over months and even years with your email messages. This gives you a much longer timeframe to build trust and sell your products.
Passive Income Ideas To Make Money While You Sleep: PPC – Paid Marketing
Paid marketing is one of the best and fastest ways to build up an income through the sale of affiliate products. By targeting specific search queries or individuals according to their interests, age, location and other useful demographics, you can sell affiliate products directly or by combining paid marketing with email marketing. This can be done by sending paid traffic to a landing page where you capture a visitor’s email address. From there you can automatically follow up with an email marketing campaign to sell an affiliate product. By using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products, you can much more easily recoup your advertising budget and become profitable.
Initially it will take some time and effort learning paid marketing techniques to drive traffic to affiliate offers. But once you hit upon a winning campaign you can simply leave it running, making sales on complete autopilot! Most affiliates who run paid marketing strategies will start with a low affordable budget and slowly increase it once profitable.
Summary
You only need one strategy to make a passive income from the internet but you need to stick at it until you have mastered it. When I first started out online, I made the mistake of jumping around from one strategy to another. This meant I didn’t get much traction with any of them, since I wasn’t giving enough time towards any one given tactic.
Once you have chosen a good affiliate product to promote online, you need to pick a strategy which works for your given situation and circumstance. If you’re working full time, you’ll probably want to choose a paid marketing method which can work while you’re away from the computer. But if you have a lot of time and less disposable income, you’ll probably want to pick a cheaper strategy such as blogging or content creation.
