AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Passive Income On The Internet

How do you earn passive income on the internet? There’s a few ways you can do this. Many online marketers earn a passive income through the selling of other people’s products and services online. A business model known as affiliate marketing allows anyone to earn through product recommendations. Join an affiliate program and promote your affiliate link to earn a commission based on the sale. To actually make the sale takes a bit of understanding, however. Many affiliates use email marketing to sell their products but you can also use content such as blog posts and videos.

With enough content on the internet, you can start attracting an audience. When those visitors buy something through your affiliate link, you earn a commission.

Passive Income On The Internet – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become popular since Amazon started their affiliate program back in July 1996. See also when did affiliate marketing start. It meant anyone could join their program and earn money by promoting any product from the site. Since then there’s been thousands of other affiliate programs which have allowed affiliates to promote all kinds of products and services online.

Amazon’s affiliate rates range from 1% to 20% commission but you can earn a lot more from other types of products. Digital products, for example pay much more. A typical digital product will pay between 30% and 40% commission, much more than the typical physical product you can find on Amazon.

You can also sell digital business software too. Business tools and services are particularly good for affiliates because they can pay recurring commissions. With a subscription product paying out a recurring commission you can earn a regular income from each sale, rather than a one-off.

You can also sell high ticket affiliate marketing products too which pay out much larger commissions than the standard products you might find as an affiliate marketer.

Passive Income On The Internet -Making A Sale

Affiliates sell their products through various means most of which can be fully automated.

This is what makes a passive income possible through affiliate marketing. Here’s a few strategies which affiliates use to get their affiliate links in front of customers to make the sale:

Blogging or video blogging – affiliates build content (such as this post) or a video is uploaded to YouTube, for example.
Email marketing – with email marketing affiliates can build huge email lists of subscribers and send out automated messages to thousands of subscribers simultaneously.
Social media marketing allows affiliates to reach an audience through posting on social media platforms and interacting with other users
SEO – website owners use Search Engine Optimisation to float their websites to the top of the search results on Google. People find their content and buy through their links.
Off line marketing strategies are available for affiliates to use too, if they choose but most will use online strategies which can be tracked, grown and scaled.

Affiliate marketing is great for a passive income because you don’t need to interact with customers personally. You simply send them to the product directly through your link and the product owner fulfils the delivery of the product/service.

Blogging

I use blogging to make affiliate sales through websites like this one. By building lots of content on my blog, I am able to increase the search engine traffic which finds my content.

I offer free information through my email list (join on this site through one of the sign up forms). When someone joins my email list, I provide free information about how I got started earning online. If someone buys one of my recommended products or courses, I earn a commission based on the sale.

niche blogging - passive income on the internet

Because some of these products offer recurring commissions, I only need a few sales a month to make a consistent income. Subscription payments accrue over time and build up into a nice monthly recurring income.

Anyone can learn how to do this and it can give them a completely flexible way to earn a living.

Summary

It can take some time and effort to make a passive income on the internet from affiliate marketing. But it’s well worth it if you can stick it out. Some of the best ways to do it are through using an email marketing list and running paid advertising. Use high ticket products and products which pay out recurring commissions for the best return on your investment.

Learn more and get started here.

Why Is It Important To Post A Blog Regularly?

Why is it important to post a blog regularly as a blogger/website owner? Blogging regularly is primarily important because you’ll want to attract a larger audience to your website. At first, it can be difficult to attract website visitors to a blog, particularly for free.

Once you commit to regular blogging, and if you blog in a certain way, you can attract free website visitors from the search engines. It can take some time and commitment to make this a reality but a regular blogging habit will give you more authority with Google and the like. If you’re only a sporadic blogger, this will have an effect on your ability to increase your domain authority and therefore ranking positions of your blog posts with Google.

Why Is It Important To Post A Blog Regularly?

Posting regularly on a blog establishes you as an expert on your topic too. The more content you have created on your blog, the greater your website authority will appear when Google and other search engines assess you.

As your authority increases so will your ability to rank your content on the first page of Google. Older content can also rank so as your content volume increases you should hit upon a point where website traffic increases exponentially.

A good blogging habit will make it much easier to create the necessary volume of traffic you want to increase revenue from blogging. If you try and create a lot of content at once, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain your post quality. Posting regularly means you can maintain article quality and provide value to your readers while building up your blog post volume over time and increasing your website’s authority in the view of the search engines.

Why Is It Important To Post A Blog Regularly – Use Of Push Notification Plugins

It can be a good idea for bloggers to use push notification software on their blogs. This lets visitors opt in and they will be sent pop up notifications when you create a new blog post.

Here’s another reason why it’s a good idea to keep creating new content. As your subscriber base increases with a push notification, you’ll spend more on your subscription.

So building regularly daily blog posts means you’ll get a lot more visitors as they are sent these notifications. Since you’re paying a subscription for this, it’s worth creating the content to draw your subscribers back to your site. This software works wonders for traffic and sales!

Email Subscribers

If you’re collecting email subscribers from your blog, you’ll want to keep them updated with your regular posts too. Again, building a large email subscriber base comes with costs so it’s well worth keeping your email subscribers updated on your latest posts.

Posting blogs regularly shows your subscribers that your business is current. If you regularly post new, informative content on your blog, you show your visitors and subscribers that you are active in your business and the information is up to date.

Not Posting Regularly Means Losing Traffic

If you’re a blogger and only post occasionally, this will be noticed by the search engines. They may downgrade your content compared to other bloggers in a similar niche. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, it’s hugely competitive out there! So by posting regular content you not only increase the volume of your potential traffic, but your authority with Google and the other search engines.

This has a knock on effect – greater authority means higher rankings. More content means more potential high rankings and a greater volume of traffic. However it’s also important to maintain a high standard with your content. So it’s not always a great thing to post in high volume if that means your quality is going to suffer. See also how many articles should a blog have and how many blogs should you post a month.

How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad

Are you wondering how to make money as a digital nomad? Digital nomads are people who travel freely while working remotely using technology and the internet. There’s a few ways to earn from the internet and the most popular ones are to either sell products or use advertising. One of the most effective ways to earn online is through affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you don’t need anything of your own to sell. You earn by promoting and recommending other people’s products online. This can be done in a number of different ways. Digital nomads often have a blog or create a video log of their journeys. Through their content they can recommend products and services and earn commissions through referral sales.

How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – Blogging

One of the most popular ways of earning online is through blogging. Bloggers create written content on a website. The term blog comes from Web log. As your blog grows in popularity, you can attract thousands of visitors organically through the search engines, such as Google.

This can take some time and depending on your blog topic, it can take anywhere between a few weeks and several years to earn money from a blog. See also how long does it take to earn from a blog.

In a very competitive topic, blogging will likely take longer than in one which is relatively untapped. Once you start seeing website traffic appear through your blogging efforts, you can monetise your visitors by offering something to sell. You can find affiliate products which cover thousands of different topics. So whatever your blog is about, by finding a suitable product to sell you can convert some of your visitors into customers!

How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – YouTube

YouTube is another place where digital nomads hang out. They often create videos and upload them to the site. If you’re travelling a lot, this can inspire you to shoot videos of your escapades. Much like with blogging, the more content you put on your channel (or website), the more chance you have of attracting an audience.

In terms of blogging there’s around 600 million blogs on the internet. YouTube is slightly less competitive but even still there’s around 51 million YouTube channels. So again, you’re faced with some competition for users. To get people to find your channel and videos, use specific keywords within your video titles. The fewer competing videos/blog posts for these keywords, the more chance you have of getting found organically when someone does a Google/YouTube keyword search.

How To Make Money As A Digital Nomad – Choosing Affiliate Products

Making money from creation of digital content can be pretty tough, especially if you’re trying to get traffic organically. You can run advertising instead, which can be a much faster way to generate an income online.

But either way it’s a good idea to carefully choose the types of affiliate products you’re going to sell. Amazon is one of the first places affiliates will head to when they attempt to sell online. But be aware that Amazon’s commission rates are some of the lowest. They pay typically between 1% and 10% commission on any sales you make, (with a category at 20% including Amazon Games).

So most of the products you’ll find on Amazon don’t pay very much. This means you’ll need to generate a lot of sales to make it pay. A better option is to use digital products. With digital products you can earn from 30% to 40% commission on a sale, a much larger proportion of the sale price. If you also choose to use subscription affiliate programs and sell high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn a lot more per sale. So you don’t need to sell as many to make it worth your while.

Choosing A Niche

Your “niche” is the area or topic you decide you will build your blog or YouTube channel around. Since paid online marketing strategies can be expensive, it’s a good idea to spend some time creating content to generate traffic. To do this effectively, you’ll need to craft content which draws in traffic from the internet. You can then send those visitors to your affiliate offers and make money based on sales you generate.

Building content and generating traffic from it can take time. So if you pick a topic you’re passionate about, the journey is much more fun! Choose a topic you’re not so interested in, and it will be much more difficult.

The Email List

The email list is one of the best ways to make money through digital technology. From a blog or a YouTube channel, or any other social media marketing method, affiliates can send their traffic to a landing page or a website where they can offer something in exchange for an email address.

This is one of the best ways you can earn online if you carefully align your niche with the right affiliate product/s. (See also target audience for affiliate marketing).

On a website or YouTube video most visitors will only stick around for a few minutes and only a very small percentage of your visitors will buy something straight away. In fact it takes typically between 6-8 “touch points” for a visitor to buy something online.

Once you get them to sign up to your email list, this period of time can be extended to months and even years. You can also build trust and give your subscribers multiple touch points to help them understand your products/services better.

Summary

To make money digitally from your laptop from anywhere is great for nomads. It allows them to travel without a base or business premises. All you need is a laptop and internet connection to get started.

There’s other ways to generate traffic online, such as paid marketing too. So whatever your situation, you can learn strategies for generating an income online which suit your particular situation and circumstances.

Access a step by step training resource to get started here.

Low Hanging Fruit Keywords

Low hanging fruit keywords are the keywords with much less competition than the rest. For new blogs especially, Google won’t give you much authority until you’ve proved yourself. When you have a bunch of content on your site, they might start to approve your blog. But if your blog posts have highly competitive keywords in their titles, Google won’t rank them on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. This can make it really difficult to get traffic to a blog for free.

So, instead of writing content using high competition keywords in your blog titles, use low hanging fruit keywords instead. Those keywords tend to have much less monthly searches. So you won’t get heaps of traffic even if you rank highly for them. But with many pieces of content, you’ll start to attract trickles of traffic from the SERPS. Plus, you’ll gain a growing authority from Google as you start to increase the volume of content on your site.

Low hanging fruit keywords are key to building content and authority and getting free traffic to your website/blog. As time goes on, your authority increases and you can rank for more competitive keywords too.

Low Hanging Fruit Keywords – Finding Them

To find low hanging fruit keywords you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Type in your main “seed” keyword and you should see a bunch of related terms which have been searched for on Google’s search engine. Here’s the search I did when I came upon this article title:

As you can see, the search tool throws up a bunch of related terms. Sift through these terms and look for the longer tail keywords. These tend to have fewer searches. Short tail keywords (of two to three terms) tend to have a larger search volume but they’re usually more competitive too. So ranking your content for them is much more difficult.

To help determine a keyword terms difficulty, head over to Google and type in your chosen keyword. For me, this was “Low hanging fruit keywords”. Here’s what came up with a normal and a phrase match Google search:

Look at the numbers which appear under the search bar. These numbers indicate the number of websites/pages which compete for these particular terms. So a high number would indicate a large volume of competition and a low number would indicate less competition.

These numbers indicated that I had a chance of ranking for this term, so hence I’m writing this article! These numbers will only appear on a laptop/desktop computer and they don’t appear on a mobile.

Finding The Lowest Hanging Fruit

The lowest “hanging fruit” when it comes to keywords are those with zero monthly searches. These terms don’t even appear on the search tool because there’s not enough data on them.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean those terms are never used, just that the tool doesn’t pick up that information because the numbers are so low. Plus, some searches will not have been done yet, even though they will appear in the future. So getting content out there for these search terms can work wonders if there’s hardly any competition.

Since these terms can be hard to find, look instead for those with the smallest monthly search volume. To do this, type in your seed keyword and click on the Avg. monthly search volume tab above the column of results until you see the longer term keywords with the lowest search volumes. Usually this is from zero to 10 monthly searches.

Now you can take the search terms you want to use and type them into Google to compare the relative competitiveness of them.

Creating Content

Once you find a good long tail keyword with low SEO difficulty it’s time to write some content for it. Use an SEO tool to help you write Search Engine Optimised content for it. I use Yoast SEO. This tool will help you get your keywords in your titles, descriptions and other relevant fields. It will also help you get the balance right as to how much to use your term within any given piece of content.

Ideally write a high quality article which will stand the test of time. It can also be useful to look at the current top result on Google. This can give you an idea about how many words and what standard Google already ranks highly. Then set about out-doing this content with your own.

With high quality content, your visitors should get some value from your writing. In this case, they are more likely to link to it or share it on social media. With a bad piece of content this is unlikely to happen at all. Over time, more backlinks and social media shares will affect your authority with Google and how your website is perceived. So write high quality content if you want your articles to rank.

Some of your content simply won’t rank, and you’re never guaranteed a ranking. But keep creating content and build up the volume of posts on your blog. Over time, your Google authority should improve and this means you can write for more competitive keyword terms and be in with a chance of ranking for them later.

With a new blog, it is very unlikely that Google will rank your content for a competitive term; even if your content is better than whatever else is out there!

Low Hanging Fruit Keywords – Ranking On Page 1-2 Of Google Already

“Low hanging fruit” keywords can also refer to those keywords which you already have on your website, but for which you aren’t currently ranking highly. So if your content ranks on the bottom of page 1 of Google, for example, or at the top of page 2, you might be able to affect change quite easily, (hence low hanging fruit).

To find these terms you can use software such as Google search console or SEM Rush. They can show you the content on your website which could rank near the top of page one, with only a little work.

Once you have identified a piece of your content which could easily move up the rankings to near the top of page one, you can go to work on that content and improve it. Build more backlinks and add to your content. Go over it and look for ways to improve it and correct any errors.

As you improve your page score, you should see it move up the placings listing.

The best way to work on increasing your traffic can be to identify your website’s pages which rank on page one or two (near the top) and which have a good search volume for that particular keyword. Then a little work can go a long way!

7 Figure Affiliate Marketing

7 figure affiliate marketing means you’re earnings are between 1 million and 9,999,999 . Top earning affiliates will typically spend huge amounts on their advertising budgets, so this 7 figure sum might not be all profit.

Be aware of affiliates who show you their earnings because they usually don’t show you how much they have spent in marketing costs. It can be astronomical! So a 7 figure affiliate might have spent $500,000 in their marketing budget to make 7 figures in sales.

Before an affiliate will “up” their budget though, they have done some testing of their advertising first. A marketer will test out numerous adverts and find one which is consistently profitable. Once the relationship holds between spend and sales, you know you have a winner. You can then effectively spend money to make sales. When you’re spending $100 and making $200, you can start scaling up your business. Spend $1000 and make $2000, spend $10,000 and make $20,000. Assuming the relationship holds you can keep doing this until you’re making a nice 7 figure income.

7 Figure Affiliate Marketing – Best Strategies

Not every affiliate will get to this level of earnings and it is your business model which will determine whether it’s even possible. If you’re selling low value products from a blog, you’re very dependent on your traffic source. If a sale can only bring in a tiny commission, you’re going to struggle.

But if you choose a high ticket products and use a system or strategy with multiple products within a range, including subscription products, you’ve already got a much better strategy which is more scalable. With paid marketing too, you’re in the driving seat. With organic marketing strategies you’re much more at the whim of the search engines and it’s much harder to scale up your business.

A High Ticket Business Model

With a high ticket product range, you can earn much larger commissions when you make a sale with affiliate marketing. You can also earn from the recurring commissions brought in by memberships. This system has a couple of advantages over a standard affiliate product which only pays you once, and typically a low-level commission:

You can earn larger amounts quickly
This means you can more easily afford paid ads, which are much more scalable

Without paid ads, you’re stuck using organic methods which are very much slower and much less scalable. You’re relying on SEO and search, building content and backlinks.

Testing And Measuring Ads

With a high ticket sales funnel, affiliates can run advertising until they find an ad which gives them a good conversion rate. By tracking all their website hits, leads and sales, they can determine whether an advertising campaign will be profitable.

With low value affiliate products this is much more difficult because you make less per sale, so it’s harder to run paid advertising can come out with a profit. Everything needs to be tracked and measured before you increase your ad budget. Otherwise you can easily “burn” through your budget and still not make any sales!

For more information and to get a high ticket sales funnel check out this video.

Earn Money By Posting Articles

Can you really earn money by posting articles? Freelancers earn money writing for other people’s blogs. However, with the surge in AI there’s a whole lot of bots writing now instead of people.

So even if you could land a gig using UpWork or Fiverr.com, both of which are very competitive, the work may not last for long. To even land a job, you may have to work for free while you build up your profile and collect reviews. Since there’s hundreds of writers on these sites, who have already built up a reputation, you’re going to need to do a lot of work to make this profitable.

As a freelance writer, you’re selling your time writing content for cash. But you can’t earn from your work unless you keep working. This is becoming more and more difficult because of AI which can write articles and create content in a fraction of the time, and for much less cost than a freelancer can offer.

Earn Money By Posting Articles – Blogging

So how else can you earn money by posting articles? Another strategy is to use affiliate products and build a blog of your own. Once you have a resource which you own online, you can sell affiliate products from your blog.

It can take some time to build a profitable blog, but once you have a nice source of traffic from content you’ve built, you can sell products through it. This can also bring in a passive income once you’ve spent enough time on it.

So, how do you build content on a blog and earn money from it? Start by choosing a niche in which you wish to write. (This blog is centred around the topic of affiliate marketing. So I post articles on this and related topics).

Over time, your blog will generate free traffic, if you stick with it for long enough. At this point you can start to monetise your blog. You can either do this through the sale of affiliate products or through placing advertising on your site. When someone clicks on your ads, you earn a percentage of advertising revenue.

Earn Money By Posting Articles – Choosing Your Niche

Your choice of niche for blogging is pretty important. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and this means there’s plenty of competition, in most niches. However some niches are more competitive than others. In a super competitive niche, it can take a few months before you can earn from a blog. But in a less competitive one, it can start generating an income in a matter of weeks.

Ideally pick a niche which you have a passion or interest in. That way, you can continue writing indefinitely. In a niche you known nothing about, it can be tricky. You’ll need to research each post and it will be less of a passion project. This can mean you’re more likely to quit before it becomes profitable.

If you’re not passion about your topic, it will also affect your writing. If you don’t love your topic, your readers will be uninspired too! Hence it’s much better to choose a topic you love writing about.

Getting Traffic To Your Blog

A blog won’t earn any money unless you get traffic to it. To get traffic you need to create a lot of content. This can take a bit of time and effort but if you stick with it, you can ultimately attract free search traffic from the SEPRS – search engines results pages.

To give yourself a good chance at getting traffic from the SERPS, you can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Most keyword terms in any given topic are fairly competitive. Two and three word phrases, for example, will have a lot of content already on the search results. So by finding longer tail keywords for your article titles, you can get your content found more easily.

As you create more and more pieces of content for these terms, you’ll start to increase your authority with Google (assuming your articles are good, of course!).

Getting Started With Blogging

You can get started with blogging completely for free using free blog platforms such as Hubpages and Blogger.com etc. However, it’s also a good idea to build your own website. Your own domain name and hosting will give you more authority with Google and with your readers. Google doesn’t rank content based on free blog sites as highly as it does owner websites. So it can be much more difficult to get traffic to your free blog platform than your own website.

Getting your own website is pretty simply. You need to purchase a domain name and get some hosting. There’s plenty of videos explaining how this is done online, so I won’t go into it here. See also how to make a profitable website. You can also access a step by step process for doing this through this website. (Sign up on this site for more information).

Once you have your website setup, you’ll need to write articles in order to start generating traffic. See also niche blogging for profit for more on this.

Monetising A Blog With Affiliate Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available online to choose from. Pick an affiliate product which aligns with your blog topic. That way, more of your visitors will be interested in what you’re selling. To sell from a blog you can link to products within your text, place banner advertising and build an email list.

The power of email marketing is pretty huge for online selling. On a website most people only stick around a few minutes. But email marketing gives you the ability to sell to them over and over again; even months or years after they sign up to your email list.

Access a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing and learn how to sell through your blog.

For more information on affiliate marketing, blogging and getting help and support earning online, sign up on this website using the popup or form.

What Is A Niche Website For Affiliates?

What is a niche website for affiliates? Affiliates create niche websites to attract a specific sub-section of the online marketplace through organic marketing. By creating content in a specific topic, they can attract the attention of the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.

When your niche site starts ranking on the search engines, you can attract traffic for free. This traffic can be monetised either with affiliate marketing products or through advertising space.

So, a niche website is built with a specific destination in mind. That is, to generate traffic from the search engines and sell affiliate products. If successful affiliates can make a passive income from a niche website.

What Is A Niche Website For Affiliates?

Before building a niche website, you need to decide your topic/niche. Choosing a niche to build content around can be tricky. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and there’s lots of competition in pretty much every topic. So before you rush off and build a site around your favourite topic, it’s worth doing some research first. Certain topics are hugely competitive and therefore it will be much more difficult to obtain free traffic due to all the other websites competing within a popular niche.

Before you choose a topic ask yourself a couple of important questions:

Will I enjoy writing/creating content within this niche?
Can I sustain it for several months?
How competitive is the topic?
Can I monetise this niche?

A niche website can become profitable within a timespan of a few weeks or a few months. Certain competitive niches will take much longer. It really depends on how much content you can create in that topic and the relative competition on the SERPS. A busy niche will usually take longer than an uncompetitive one.

Choosing A Product To Sell

Another way to choose a niche, besides picking a topic you’re interested in, is through the product/s you choose to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate products available online and your product choice can be another way to help you decide on a niche.

Without a useful and valuable product to sell, your niche site won’t be profitable, however much traffic you can get to it. Some of the best products are digital products such as tools and software. Digital products also pay much more than physical ones too. Typically a physical product will pay between 5%-10% commission whereas a digital product will pay a lot more: between 30% and 40% commission. So even if you sell fewer products from your niche site, you can earn more with digital items to sell.

High ticket items are also worth a look. A typical high ticket affiliate product will pay at least ten times than of a standard affiliate product. So again you earn more even with fewer sales.

Subscription affiliate products are another consideration. They can let you earn recurring commissions from each sale.

Selling Affiliate Products From A Niche Website

A niche website is designed to attract traffic. This is generally done through content creation and SEO – search engine optimisation. But most website visitors don’t buy on their first visit to a site.

In fact, research shows that before making a purchase someone will visit a website 6-8 times! To help this happen, most niche websites will have an email opt in offer. This allows the website owner to collect email subscribers from their site and follow up with email messages.

Products can more easily be sold through email marketing because it gives you more opportunity to create more touch points with your visitors. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes. Most never return. Once on an email list, you can follow up with them for months, and even years and decades, promoting your products to them many times.

Choosing Your Keywords To Build Your Site

Once you have decided on a topic for your niche website, you can use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords around your subject area. Type your main keyword into the planner and look for suitably uncompetitive keyword combinations which would make a good match for your topic.

You can then use a specific keyword to build your site around. While this isn’t absolutely vital, a keyword domain name can help you rank a site. This site, for example, was built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing but some ways are definitely more effective than others. Before I had much success as an affiliate I tried a number of strategies which didn’t work very well.

I sold products which hardly paid me andI built websites which didn’t get any traffic. I jumped from one thing to another, looking for the “easy” path. But none of it worked. It wasn’t until I got the right help and support that things changed.

In this post, I’ll share some of the affiliate marketing do’s and don’ts which I think have helped me the most on the affiliate journey.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing: Do Get Help

So my first “do” is to get help and support and even though there’s a hundred affiliates claiming that their’s is the “best” whatever, not every program is alike. I jumped from one program to another, many of which are no longer operating. But affiliate marketing is much more difficult alone, so whatever program you join, it’s always worth getting some kind of training and support.

Ideally find a program which offers a community of other like minded individuals who’s expertise you can tap into. (There’s one on this website – just sign up to my email list).

If you go it alone, you’ll have to trawl through numerous YouTube videos, many of which will be offering up conflicting advice. Access an online community and training resource here.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing – Do Build An Email List

I struggled for some time before I understood the power of email marketing. Without an email list you’re stuck trying to send traffic directly to an offer. This can be costly if you’re using paid marketing and also wasteful – since most traffic won’t buy. If you’re building content, it’s going to take time and most of your website traffic will leave without having taken any action.

With an email list, you can extend the time period with which someone can make a buying decision. On a website, most are gone within a few minutes. But once on your email list you can send out information and build a longer term relationship over months and even years. Get an email autoresponder for free here.

Do’s And Don’ts Of Affiliate Marketing – Don’t Send Paid Traffic To A Website

Using this same logic, it’s a good idea to send paid traffic to a landing page, rather than a website. If you are sending paid traffic to a website, unless you’re doing it very cheaply, and even so, you’re much better off sending traffic to a landing page.

Why use landing pages? A landing page is specifically designed to capture your visitor’s email address. Although not everyone who lands on the page will opt in, once you do capture their email, you’ve got a greater chance of converting them to a customer.

Since paid marketing is expensive, it’s well worth doing this. Get a landing page builder software here. With a landing page, you can test and measure and optimise for performance. This can help you get your cost per lead right down and your profits up. It’s much more difficult doing this on a website because there’s so many choices for your visitors. On a landing page, there’s only 2: sign up or leave.

Don’t Rely On Low Paying Affiliate Products

Low paying affiliate programs, such as Amazon’s, can pay affiliates as little as 1% commission! 1%! With low value products you’re going to need to sell a huge number of items to make your affiliate business profitable.

So although this kind of program can allow you to sell a variety of products, and is well trusted, it’s not the most profitable business model. Digital products pay much more than physical products (30%-40%) so they are going to be more profitable even with fewer sales. There’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products you can consider and subscription affiliate programs which pay you a recurring commission for each sale.

Amazon also has a bad rep when it comes to affiliates and it often slashes affiliates’ ability to earn. When I started out as an affiliate I use eBay and Amazon but both paid peanuts when I eventually made a sale.

Do Use High Ticket Products & Subscription Products

While Amazon can help you subsidise your income as an affiliate, it may not be the best way to earn online. Commissions are way higher with high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs. With a subscription sale, you can earn every month for the life of a customer. So a sale can bring in an income, rather than a one-off commission.

Good subscription products, such as business tools and software will likely be maintained by the customer. If so, you could be making lifetime commissions from making those sales. With business essentials such as email autoresponders and data tracking products, for example, a profitable business will definitely keep their subscription going if these tools are essential for online success.

Don’t Expect Overnight Success

While there are many affiliates who do incredibly well, their success comes after a lot of work and time invested. They build email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers and promote high valued and subscription products to their subscribers.

Over time, and through learning marketing strategies, you can create huge financial success with an affiliate business. But many affiliates quit even before they make their first sale online. In fact, the success rate for affiliates is very low – around 5%. This means around 95% of affiliates drop out. Make sure you’re not one of them by staying focused and motivated even when things are tough.

“Overnight success” comes often after many months or even years of hard work. So don’t expect too much too soon. It takes time to build an online business but it’s worth the effort if you want to escape the 9 to 5!

Don’t Expect Huge Traffic From A New Blog

Don’t expect a huge amount of traffic if you’re going after organic traffic from a blog or a YouTube channel. It can take a long amount of time and effort before you can attract website traffic organically.

Paid marketing is far faster and more scalable. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and around 51 million YouTube channels which means whatever niche you’re in, there’s going to be some competition. In a popular niche, expect to work for longer.

Do Learn From Your “Failures”

Without “failures” in affiliate marketing there can be no successes. Failures are really only learnings and unless you step into the unknown frequently, you’re never going to learn anything. All the affiliate marketing theory in the world won’t help you when it comes to affiliate marketing. You need to get your hands dirty and try a few things. Most of them don’t work! But see this as feedback rather than a failure.

Keep trying things and make a habit out of taking small daily steps with your affiliate business, however you’re feeling. Make sure you track everything and when you do make your first sale, you can see where it came from and repeat it without too much trouble. This is where you’ll gain traction. But without the initial effort, you won’t get to this stage at all.

If you’re ready to start, access a training resource here.

Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail

There’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail and quit! Only around 5% of affiliates actually go on to earn a living from the business. So what happens to the 95%? Affiliate marketing is a great business model in which anyone can earn money through promoting other people’s products online. It can give you a means to earn from anywhere and a potentially unlimited income source. Surely this is reason enough to overcome any difficulties involved?

But initially affiliate marketing can be incredibly frustrating. The ease of entry and low cost means anyone can “give it a go” too, from anywhere in the world. When those sales don’t quickly start popping into your email inbox, it’s frustrating. Especially if you’ve done a bunch of work, for which you aren’t getting paid. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means you don’t get paid unless you make a sale.

This is the crux of the problem for so many who try and quit in affiliate marketing. If only those people saw the bigger picture. If only they had the time, resources and patience to continue; they would see that they can earn passively, if they only stuck at it for long enough.

But for those juggling family and a full time job, it’s just too difficult and there’s no time left for themselves. They need income now, not in 6 months or a year!

Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail – The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The Chinese bamboo tree offers a great analogy for affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo gestates under the soil for 5 years and during this time it needs to be watered and fertilised. But once it breaks the soil, it can grow 90 feet in five weeks. As with the tree, affiliate marketing has a gestation period. Depending on your method of marketing, affiliate marketing can take months or years before it bears “fruit”!

It is this gestation period where most will quit affiliate marketing. They work for a while and get frustrated with the (lack of) results. Most affiliates will give up before they even have built an email list to 1000 subscribers.

But it is when they numbers get up with either your website visitors, subscribers or sales that things get exciting for affiliates. Once they reach a certain critical point in their affiliate journey, they can use their activities to learn which actions create the most favourable results. Once they have data which shows which actions make the sales, they can do more of that, and create awesome results.

With subscription products you can earn recurring commissions, potentially for life. But you need to break through and make your first sale before anything tangible can happen.

Most Physical Businesses Fail Too

Most businesses fail, so affiliate marketing is no different. But because anyone can do it from a laptop, it is assumed that it’s easy. With a bricks and mortar business, there’s a huge failure rate too. The difference is that with a physical business there’s many more barriers to entry. You need a large investment for a physical business, business premises, staff, equipment. It’s a commitment. But with affiliate marketing this is much less so. You can even begin doing affiliate marketing for free.

The ease of entry and assumption that affiliate marketing is easy give people false hope. This quickly turns sour when things don’t go according to plan.

If there was a large barrier to entry, fewer people would try it and there would likely be a larger success rate for affiliate marketing.

Lack Of Experience

Without any experience in selling online, it can be easy to follow a flawed strategy. Low paying affiliate programs offer commissions as low as 1%, so even once you’ve made a sale, it’s very difficult to make a living with such low rates. I struggled for years trying to get traffic from a flawed strategy and didn’t know to build an email list.

Without a list, your traffic has to come from organic or paid sources, which are expensive or difficult to build. So you can spend a huge amount of time, or money, and without getting anywhere.

When you’re unsure of your direction, lack focus and don’t have anything to show for your efforts, it’s very difficult to sustain your faith and belief in affiliate marketing. So the likelihood is that you’ll quit sooner or later.

Trying Everything For Free

Trying to build a business completely on the cheap is another reason so many affiliates fail. I tried this for a long time too and did make some progress. But doing it all for free is very difficult. There’s free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. YouTube can be used for free too. But getting traffic to your website or channel organically takes a huge amount of effort. You’ll need hundreds of pieces of content to get anywhere and even though you may make an odd sale, it’s very difficult to get consistency through organic reach.

Paying for training, software, an email autoresponder and hosting your own website should be the minimum if you’re serious about making a success of an affiliate business. If you’re unable to do this, it’s going to be much more difficult.

Paying For Advertising

With any business you need customers and affiliate marketing is no different. If you want to build quickly, you’ll need to pay for advertising. Since advertising is expensive, it’s worth buying a high ticket sales funnel so you can recoup your costs more easily and of course make a profit. With low value affiliate products it’s going to be much more difficult.

Some marketers recommend starting out with a $20k marketing budget! So if you’re trying to build a business on a shoestring, you’re already at a massive disadvantage compared to those who can afford such a budget.

The alternative to paying for advertising space is to build content. But there’s also huge competition for this. So you’ll need to spend a lot of time building and sharing content just to get a slice of the pie!

Summary

So there’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail. Lack of experience, lack of funds, unrealistic expectations and impatience are just a few reasons why the majority of affiliate marketers fail.

Affiliate marketing takes time to learn and you aren’t paid for that time. Rather you need to spend time in “learning mode”, pay for training and then turn your knowledge into action too. It can take months or years before you start to see sales and commissions coming in.

Most people aren’t expecting this because they don’t have a background in business. Most people come from an employee mindset which is very different from the mindset of an entrepreneur – which is needed for affiliate marketing.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing?

How easy is affiliate marketing and can anyone make a go of it? With only a 5% success rate for affiliates, you can bet it isn’t easy. Lots of marketers selling their courses will tell you it is easy, to sell their courses. But the truth is that although you can make an easy sale, making consistent sales with affiliate marketing, and making a living from it is much more difficult than most are prepared for.

But, there’s a few things you can do to make your affiliate journey much, much more straight forward. Going it alone and jumping from one strategy to another is a sure fire way to struggle. Get the right help and support, and things can be easier. That’s not to say easy, but easier! See also the easiest way to start affiliate marketing.

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing – Different Routes To Success

Some affiliates will use paid marketing and build an email list. They can have success relatively quickly, especially if they use a high ticket sales funnel and sell a product range which gives them recurring and high ticket commissions. But if you don’t have a large marketing budget, or a high ticket system, it’s going to take a lot longer to arrive at the same level of success.

Another route is to create written or video content. Over time, your content can attract an audience and you can sell products from a website or YouTube channel. You can even build an email list organically too, although it will take much longer than with paid marketing.

It is in this interim phase that a lot of affiliates will quit. Why bother creating lots of content when you’re not being rewarded for it, right? Well it can take months or even years before a blog, for example, becomes profitable consistently. Not many people are prepared to put in that long term effort, to only reap rewards later, maybe or even never! There’s a lot of risk there.

If you haven’t chosen a path, affiliate marketing can be very confusing too. You can jump from one idea to the next and never really get any traction. This is frustrating, so it’s best to find a course and strategy which you can stick with for some time. Give it time and have patience!

How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing – How To Make It Easier

To make affiliate marketing easier, follow a path and choose a direction. Use high ticket products and subscription products. This can make a massive difference and you’ll be earning a recurring income from any subscription products you manage to sell. High ticket items give you a massive pay day and this can help you sustain your marketing budget and give you more confidence and momentum.

Build an email list of subscribers. This puts you in control of your traffic. Without a list, you’re either paying for traffic or building endless content to attract it, which happens very slowly.

Get help and support. Going it alone makes the journey of becoming a success with affiliate marketing much more difficult. When you surround yourself with other like minded people, the journey is much easier and faster.

The “Easy Money” In Affiliate Marketing

Ask long term successful affiliates about the ease with which they earn and they will tell you to get started immediately! When you’ve actually sold thousands of recurring income products, you continue to earn from them month in month out. Money flows into your bank account without you having to turn up for work or do anything, if you don’t want!

The thing is though, most new affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. So they will never see this side of the business. The trick to getting to the easy money, is doing all the hard work which most people aren’t prepared to do.

It can take months of struggle, learning new skills and fighting with your laptop. But ultimately the result is a passive income which comes in whether you work or not. If you can keep this in mind while you’re learning, and not expect an income immediately, you stand a chance at joining the 5% of affiliates who build a passive income and can quit their jobs!

The First Sale

Getting your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone. You prove to yourself that it works and you’ve got some real world experience and data to back it up! You can then use this experience to sell many more products and focus on the activities you used to make it work!

The first sale can take months or it can happen immediately by chance. There’s really no exact formula and everyone has a different experience. Someone could post their affiliate link on social media and make a sale. Someone else could spend months creating content and sell nothing! To give yourself the best chance of success, you need to decide simply to never quit! It’ll give you more opportunities to eventually make that sale and learn from your “failures”.

If you don’t have this “die hard” attitude towards your affiliate marketing business, it might not be for you!

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