Wondering how to do affiliate marketing without showing your face? Often when someone works for an employer, they don’t want their employer to know they are working on a side hustle. So they don’t want to risk showing up on a YouTube video, for example. Or, they’re just shy about showing up in person online. There are some downsides to not showing your face of course. Trust is a big factor in the online world and people buy from people. So showing your face can be a contributing factor to your success online.
However, if you’re determined not to show you face, there are of course ways to do it. Blogging is a strategy I’ve used for years and I do have my face on this site on my about me page. But writing online is one of the best ways to show up without actually showing up!
How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Showing Your Face
Here’s a picture of me on YouTube. Before I ran a YouTube campaign, I was massively shy about getting on camera and uploading my videos. If it’s only shyness that stops you from showing your face online, it’s well worth overcoming this fear. Sure you might get the odd troll on your videos but video has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to sell online as an affiliate.
A short video can convey a lot more information quickly than a long blog post too. You can build trust and connect with people much more easily through video.
But if you’re still not up for it, you can pay other people to show up for you. Fiverr.com lets you pay someone to shoot a video advert on your behalf. You can even pay actors to shoot a monologue.
There’s even a great software called doodly which allows you to create awesome videos using animation software.
How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Showing Your Face – Blogging
I’ve always been a blogger and when I didn’t want to show my face online I stuck to blog platforms. Initially I used Hubpages.com and Blogger.com before buying my own domain names and hosting my own websites.
Blogging is a great way to build an affiliate business if you can find products which you can align with an interest or passion. It does take some time and you should expect to put in some work before those sales start dropping into your inbox! But blogging allows you to show up without. showing your face. It’s a great way to get started with affiliate marketing if you’re a beginner.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is another “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Plus you can do it without showing your face! Send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers. Here’s an example of a landing page:
Some affiliate programs will offer you landing pages which are already built. Simply send paid traffic to them and build an email list. No need to show your face and your email messages are only text.
Learn more about building an online business and access tools and mentors to help you here.
PPC – Paid Advertising
There’s lot of paid advertising platforms you can use without showing up personally. Google Adwords, for example, lets you create text based advertising which show up for specific online searches which you decide. Send traffic to a landing page and collect emails to build a marketing list.
Paid marketing has an advantage over blogging, which is much slower. With blogging, you can spend months or years building content without knowing how it will turn out.
With paid marketing, you get instant traffic and instant feedback. Once you understand which ads work and which don’t, you can increase budget on the relevant adverts to grow your sales.
Summary
So if you don’t want to show your face, you can still do affiliate marketing. However, you’re definitely placing a limit on your ability to connect with your audience; so if you can it’s worth getting over this fear.
If you don’t want your employer seeing your face online, that’s totally understandable. Many employers will feel threatened if they see you building your way out of your job with an online business!
You can use paid advertising, blogging, email marketing and many other ways to get your products in front of people without showing your face.
For more information on starting your own online business with affiliate marketing click here.
Here’s my list of the 10 benefits of affiliate marketing for affiliates. There’s huge benefits for companies who use affiliates for promotion, of course. If you use affiliates to drive sales it’s a win:win for a company.
You only pay the affiliate when a sale is made, you determine the commission structure and the advertising risk is taken by the affiliate, not you! But in this post I’m going to cover the benefits from the affiliate’s point of view. When I started out as an affiliate I wrote a list of the main reasons to be an affiliate marketer, and looked at it often, particularly when I was struggling.
My list kept me going because I knew it would pay off eventually – if I only kept going.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #1
One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that it can give you a completely flexible way of working. Back in the early 2000’s when I first discovered affiliate marketing, I was working as a stuntman. Work was sporadic and it completely scuppered any kind of normal work pattern. A phone call might mean I was away working for weeks. Then, when work dried up I was back to looking for part time, temporary and flexible jobs.
It was difficult holding onto a full time job because of the unpredictability of the work. Affiliate marketing is more flexible than any job, even though there are downsides to the sporadic nature of income you can earn as an affiliate in the early days.
Affiliate marketing gave me something to work towards in a way which suited my lifestyle. I choose my own hours, work from my laptop and use blogging to compound my work over time.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #2
Another major benefit of affiliate marketing is the ability to work from anywhere. Once you’re earning an income online, you can relocate to anywhere on the globe. Many entrepreneurs I met have relocated abroad and some moved to cheaper countries where they can work from their laptops and live very cost effectively.
I’m still in the UK but affiliate marketing has given me a “portable office” and I can work from anywhere. I’ve worked in hotels and cafes and often take my laptop with me when I get to work away.
The “work from anywhere” benefit of affiliate marketing means you can earn from anywhere in the world. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. This is super cool if you’re a fan of the nomadic lifestyle or like travelling regularly.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #3 – Passive Income
A passive income from affiliate marketing can mean a lot of things. In the early days for me it was just a small infrequent trickle. But, over time that turns into a greater stream/s of income. A passive income has huge implications for your freedom and peace of mind. I wasn’t chasing the big bucks by becoming an affiliate marketer. At first, I only wanted to escape the pain and suffering caused by financial difficulties.
As time moved on, a passive income allowed me to relax a little more about money and remove the main stressors from my life. For me, these were low paid jobs which were keeping me broke and making me miserable.
Since the stunt work was so sporadic, I wasn’t able to make a consistent living from it. Affiliate marketing gave me a flexible way of working which brought a passive income stream and allowed to to relax mentally and enjoy life more.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #4 – Income Potential
The income potential of affiliate marketing is unlimited and although many new affiliates will struggle, this gave me something to shoot for. 95% of affiliates will quit which proves that affiliate marketing isn’t easy. But many affiliates can build a full time income from selling other people’s products online. A few affiliates build multiple six, seven and even eight figure businesses from selling other people’s products online.
With high ticket and subscription affiliate programs, you can make substantially more than from selling low value items. Once you’ve learned how to sell a product once, you can do it again and again. Selling products online can be automated and scaled. When you’re working in the traditional sense, trading time for money, there’s always going to be a cap on what you can earn.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #5 – Quit Your Job
Quitting a job is one of the main reasons people become affiliate marketers. Once your affiliate income becomes consistently equal to or higher than your employment income, you’ve got the option of quitting. In a difficult job, you can even quit earlier if you’re able to survive on a lower income.
A job often carries a load of costs too, such as your travel costs, uniform, and equipment. An online business can be run from home which minimises your costs and you’ll save money from all those work related expenses, which can mount up.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #6 – No More Commute
No more commute. As a stuntman, I was commuting long distances from the north of the UK to London which often took 6 hours each way. This cut into my profits and made the stunt work much less desirable over time.
The expense of commuting can rapidly cut into your income (and happiness) so not having to commute is a big win for many.
10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #7 – No More Difficult Bosses
If you’ve ever had a difficult boss, you know this is a fantastic win! Once you’re financially independent, not only can you sack your boss but you never need take another job again, ever!
Not that you need to quit your job. An independent income source can also give you an edge when it comes to negotiating your salary for example. You are working from a much more empowered position when you don’t need a job, than if you are desperately trying not to get fired!
#8 – Happiness
There’s a lot of versatility with an online business and there’s plenty of opportunity to turn it into a job you love which you’re passionate about. Money is one thing, but once your basic needs are met, it’s important to have a focus and direction which is nicely aligned with your values.
So choosing a topic you’re passionate about, and monetising it with affiliate marketing can be a great way to work at something you love while building an income simultaneously. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.
Happiness should be a priority in most people’s lives. Unfortunately it’s often the last thought after meeting all your financial needs. Why not align your passion with a means to earn an income? Affiliate marketing is one of the best vehicles with which you can do this.
#9 – Financial Independence
Being financially independent gives you more choice. You don’t need a job and this is empowering. It means you don’t have to have a job, and the shift in your mindset can mean you can negotiate better deals for yourself, coming from a place of empowerment rather than weakness and desperation. If you’re trapped by a job, it’s disempowering. Your fear of losing the job and your income makes you appear desperate. Employers can (and often do) take advantage of this power dynamic.
Once you’re financially independent, there’s a whole lot more things you’re going to say “no” to! Say no to a job, no to a commute. You can still say “yes” of course but what has been coined “Fuck You money” is pretty sweet!
#10 – Freedom
Freedom means different things to different people. But being financially and geographically free are two massive wins if you want real freedom. You can live anywhere with affiliate marketing and you can earn any amount. This can give you a lot of freedom.
Freedom of this kind can also be slightly unnerving, which is why many sabotage their efforts to attain it. Without the necessary discipline, this kind of freedom can be dangerous. Just read about lottery winners who become alcoholics and blow all their money within only a few years.
But it is often this kind of freedom which attract many affiliates to the business.
Real freedom is being able to spend your time as you choose, with whom you want. Most people don’t have this kind of freedom and given the choice wouldn’t spend their days with their colleagues at work or their bosses! Most people want to spend more time with their friends and families, travelling or simply spending time at home relaxing.
Top affiliates travel and spend time as they choose, carving out time for their business around their lifestyle choices. This is the complete opposite of working for an employer, where you spend most of your time at work, and only a small portion of your time doing what you want.
Wondering how to earn from a website? Websites are great money making machines! If you can get them to work you’ll have a passive income source. Plus you can work on your site from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. But how do you turn a basic website into a cash generator? In this article I’m going to cover some of the best ways you can do this with or without paid advertising.
One of the biggest hurdles to making your website profitable is traffic. Simply throwing a website up doesn’t mean anyone will see it. A website without a marketing strategy is not going to attract any visitors whatsoever. It’s a little like opening a newsagents in the middle of the desert. No shoppers equals no profits. Not all visitors are going to make your shop profitable either and many of your website visitors will never buy from you. You also need the right kind of visitors so you can make your online virtual shop profitable.
How To Earn From A Website – Monetisation
Let’s start with how to monetise your website. Businesses can use a website to find new customers. But without a business or product to sell of your own, what do you do to turn visitors into cash? There’s two main ways you can do this when you have nothing to sell: advertising and affiliate marketing.
With advertising, you place ads on your site. When visitors click on them, you earn tiny amounts in advertising revenue. Google Adsense is one of the best known places where anyone can use ads to make money from their website content.
Although you only earn tiny amounts from each click, with enough traffic to your site, and many clicks, this can add up. Plus, this is passive income once you’ve got it running properly.
The other strategy is to sell something from your site using affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online for a share of the profit. Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and promoting their affiliate link on their website. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.
How To Earn From A Website – Traffic
Setting up your monetisation strategy on a website is really the easy part. It can be done within a few hours. Simply place your affiliate banners on your site, or place the advertising code to allow adverts to show. The main factor in earning from a website isn’t the monetisation factor, although that’s an important part of it. The real issue which many would-be online marketers fail with is getting traffic to their site.
There’s many ways to attract visitors to your website including blogging, PPC (pay per click advertising), back linking, SEO (Search engine optimisation), use of social media, email marketing and so on. Unless you get the right kind of visitors coming to your site in large enough numbers, you won’t make much from it. So even with a well monetised site, it will just sit there and not earn any money!
There’s two types of traffic too. One of them is the kind that buys your products and the other will never buy. You want the former!
How To Earn From A Website – Knowing Your Audience
Since advertising on a website pays so little, it’s well worth putting something on your site which you can sell. Choose an affiliate product which aligns with your website topic.
Once you’ve picked a product to sell, and there’s thousands of affiliate programs to choose from, you can learn about your target audience or customer avatar. What is the customer avatar? Your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. They are the type of person who loves what you’re selling and will keep buying from you, time and time again.
With a website you have access to an international audience, assuming you can attract them to your website. So it’s important to identify those specific online visitors who are most likely to buy from you.
Otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and resources attracting the wrong people who will never buy. Once you have done this, getting that segment of the online marketplace to visit your website becomes easier. If you don’t first identify those people, you’ll be spending money/time attracting anyone and everyone to your website.
How To Earn From A Website – Content Creation & SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways you can get people to visit your website at very low cost. However, it can also be a huge challenge getting your content seen on the search engines such as Google, Bing, Duckduckgo.com and so on. See also how to build a niche website.
Creating content to attract your target audience can take a lot of time and effort, and traffic is never guaranteed from the search engines. In a competitive niche, it’ll take much longer to get noticed. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s a lot of noise. To stand out expect to create a lot of content over several months or years. See how long does it take to make money blogging.
Paid marketing is a much faster way to get visitors to your blog. However, you risk capital trying to turn that traffic into sales. So if you’re going to run ads, it’s better to send traffic to a sales funnel instead, where you can follow up with email marketing.
Email Marketing
Most website owners use email marketing to help them sell affiliate products. On a website, there’s a form or popup which leads to a freebie giveaway. Once you sign up to it, you join an email list. Affiliates market their products to their list of subscribers. An email list is a powerful way to turn a normal looking website into a money generating tool. On a website, most visitors stick around only for a few minutes. But once on an email list, the marketer can send out automated messages for an unlimited time period.
I’ve sold products to my email list even years after a subscriber has joined it. This just wouldn’t be possible from a website alone. On a list you can also build greater trust through delivering value driven messages designed to help subscribers with a specific problem. Join my email list for more information on building an online business from scratch.
PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising
With PPC – pay per click advertising, you spend money to send traffic to a website. Ideally you’ll earn more money back from selling your affiliate products than you spend in advertising budget. This can be tricky because much of the traffic you send to a website will leave without having taken any action. So to get around this problem, marketers use PPC advertising to send people directly to a landing page where they collect the visitor’s email address.
Now that visitor is an email subscriber and there’s a far greater chance they will eventually become a customer and buy one of your affiliate products.
Landing pages are a good idea because you can test and measure the response of the visitors. By cross testing different designs, you can optimise for maximum efficiency to lower the cost of obtaining a subscriber.
A landing page works well to get people on your email list because there’s fewer options for them them once they arrive on the page. On a website, there’s more options. The visitor can look around and browse your site. So they are less likely to take the action you want them to if you send them to a website, rather than a landing page.
High Earning Affiliate Products
Not all affiliate products are alike. Many affiliates will head straight to Amazon, since it’s a well-known affiliate site. But Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are pretty low and you’ll only earn a single commission from a sale. You can earn much more if you decide to sell digital products and those which carry subscription payments and high value. Subscription affiliate products can give you recurring payments. So each sale gives you a monthly income, not just a single commission.
High ticket affiliate marketing products pay much larger than average commission, so they are a good choice if you’re going to use PPC advertising, since you can more easily recoup your ad budget and make a profit.
Learn more about starting your own online business from scratch here and learn how to earn from a website.
Wondering how to make the first sale as an affiliate? Your first sale is a massive milestone as an affiliate marketer. Many would-be affiliates aspire to become financially free and make thousands per month. But this can’t happen before you make your very first sale. The first sale is therefore a significant step to help build confidence in yourself and your marketing skills. Once you can make one sale, you can make many more.
So how can you make your first sale as an affiliate. Here’s a few key components which should help you gain traction.
How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Aligning With A Product
There’s many ways to skin a cat and the same is true of affiliate marketing. You’ll need a strategy to make your sale, but rather than talk about strategies I’m going to cover some important principles. You can ready my article 22 ways to sell affiliate products for some marketing ideas.
Firstly choose a product you actually adore. Unless you’re head over heels with a certain product, it’s going to be much harder selling it. When you’re aligned with a product, you can sell it without doubt, knowing it has huge value. Ideally choose something you have bought yourself too. If you don’t actually want to buy your product, how are you going to authentically promote it to others?
Find a product which is aligned with a topic or subject that’s close to you. That way, you can create some content around your product. Drawing people to your affiliate product is easier when you align yourself and your interests with your product.
How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Before Selling, Know Your Audience
Many affiliates will rush in pasting their affiliate link hither and thither. But this seldom works unless you have a carefully selected audience and you know who you’re selling to. Your target audience is key to selling affiliate products and if you don’t even know who they are, you’re going to struggle.
To define your target audience you need to brainstorm what kind of people will benefit and appreciate your product the most. Most people in the online world don’t give a jot about your product. But a small slice of the online marketplace will step over people to buy it from you. Your work in defining your target audience and customer avatar will shave potentially months or even years off your first sale. See customer avatar worksheet pdf and define who exactly you’re going to target with your advertising/content.
Choose A Strategy
Choosing a strategy can take some time. There’s many ways you can sell affiliate products, from paid advertising, niche websites, social media strategies to content creation. Depending on your circumstances you can pay for advertising and build an email list or build a resource such as a blog which draws in traffic organically.
You can of course do more than one strategy too. Build a blog up slowly while testing your paid advertising strategy. However, if you jump around too much, you won’t get traction in any area. So choose a strategy you can stick with for some time. If you’re a blogger, like me, pick a topic you love writing about. that way, blogging become more of a hobby and you’ll sustain it for much longer.
How To Make The First Sale As An Affiliate – Mindset
If you’re looking for a sale, but not doing the work, you could have a very long wait. So your strategy needs to be for the long term. Short sporadic efforts will seldom give you any traction as an affiliate, even if they give you a lone sale.
On the other hand, you can get lucky and make a sale by pasting your link on social media. Affiliate marketing is sometimes unpredictable and so your income from it will be unpredictable too. But the goal isn’t just the first sale and no more, the goal should be to learn how to make that first sale, and then make many more with this knowledge. So the “one-off” sale isn’t the long term goal, but it will act as a motivating factor when it comes in.
With affiliate marketing there’s often a lot of work that goes on where you don’t get an immediate paid reward for it. This can seem like a trial, but it’s well worth it when sales start coming in while you sleep!
A good analogy for your affiliate business is a Chinese bamboo tree. It takes several years of gestation before it breaks through the soil. After it does though, it can grow 90 feet in just a few weeks. Your affiliate business can be the same. Once you figure out how to make your first sale, you’re on easy street and can replicate this strategy and improve on it.
Set Your Intention
Affiliate marketing isn’t always easy and you’re going to come up with a number of problems trying to make your first sale. A good antidote to this is to set your intention so that no matter what you keep going. You can always have a break, give it a rest and come back to affiliate marketing. It’s a super versatile business model which is very forgiving. Around 95% of affiliates will quit and this is important to remember. They wouldn’t quit if it was easy!
Remember what affiliate marketing can give you too which can help keep you going when it gets tough:
Complete time and financial freedom
Financial independence and freedom from a job/boss
No more commute
Live anywhere earn any amount!
That’s pretty awesome and well worth the effort. On the other side of a whole bunch of work is that freedom. Keep this in mind when you think of quitting. Build your mindset such that doubt doesn’t exist and quitting isn’t in your vocabulary!
Fail Forwards
Fail forwards is a term I picked up in the community I’m a part of. Sign up to my email list to learn more about it. Failing forwards is something you have to do as an affiliate. It’s not a direct path to success from a particular straight road. Rather it’s a path of learning from your failures. Those failures are really stepping stones to success. If you can see your “difficulties” as those stepping stones rather than some massive calamity, you’re going to do much better than if you catastrophize over them!
Each “failure” teaches you something. If a strategy doesn’t work immediately, you should at least have some feedback. Affiliate marketing is about getting more and more feedback until you can simply zone in on those sales and do more of that. Once you have made your first sale, you can use your data/tracking to do the thing which brought it about.
This can take some time but the key is to never quit. If you keep at it, and keep failing, eventually you’ll stumble on a strategy which works for you. Once you do, consider it a massive success however small the sale commission is. That sale will keep you in the game! It’ll motivate you and inspire you. Once you’ve made your first sale, You’re unstoppable! Keep going and never quit!
If you’re looking for low cost marketing ideas for small businesses, look no further! I’ve implemented many of these strategies to build a successful affiliate business from my laptop and many of these are useful for any business, large or small. So whatever size your business is, these strategies can help you build new trickles of customers at very low cost.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Website Obviously!
If you don’t already have a website, it’s an obvious starting point. You can purchase a domain name from namecheap.com for less than $10 a year and hosting can cost under $5 a month. There’s also totally free website building sites such as Weebly.com so you can totally set one up for free if your budget doesn’t allow. Ideally though, you’ll want a domain you own and your own hosting.
If you haven’t yet started building a website, you can build it in such a way to start generating traffic for free too. Checkout my article how to build a niche website for more on this topic. A niche website can be built around a specific keyword phrase so as to rank on the search engines for that particular phrase. When done well, this can give you a dramatic traffic boost at very low cost. This website, for example, was built on a specific keyword to attract visitors.
If you have a physical business which is based in a specific place, this works all the better. There’s far less competition in a specific place. So buying a domain name with your place name in it can make all the difference. For example I built a website for a friend which had the town name in it: http://scarboroughwingchun.co.uk/. You can do this for your business too, to give yourself an advantage when it comes to ranking for your main keywords.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Blogging
Once you have a website built, you can use many strategies to attract people to it. Traffic generation at low cost is best done by creating content on your site – blogging. However, there’s around 600 million blogs on the internet so in almost every topic there’s huge competition. One way around this is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Most keyword phrases, and particularly the shorter ones have too much competition on Google to have a chance at ranking. So by finding the phrases which have the lowest competition, you have a much better chance at ranking your content on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages.
Once you start ranking your content, your domain authority goes up. This can lead to more and more of your content getting found, even if you’re using more competitive terms as you continue to add content to your blog.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Free Google Places Listing
Google offers locally based businesses a free listing through Google My Business (formerly Google Places). This is well worth the half hour of your time to create.
As long as you can verify your business address, you can create a listing for your business. Google will send out a postcard with a code so you can do this.
You can also do the same thing on other search engines such as Bing/Microsoft. These types of listings will often come up before any others (even paid ads) when you do a locally based search, so it’s well worth creating one.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a must for any business. It’s super cheap and super effective. You will need an email autoresponder to collect email addresses from your website and deliver emails automatically. To do this, you need to offer something of value from your website in exchange for your visitor’s details. For example, on this website I offer information for learning how to build an online business.
Once someone joins my email list, my autoresponder follows up with an email marketing campaign which is completely automated. Email follow ups should offer some kind of value to your subscribers. You can keep them informed about your products and send them to discounts and offers.
Email marketing is very effective because it allows you to build a longer term relationship with your visitors. Whereas on a website, most visitors will leave within a few minutes, you can keep in touch via email for months or even years. See also the power of email marketing.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Business – A Facebook Business Page
A Facebook business page can be built absolutely for free so this is well worth doing. Use a specified keyword phrase appropriate to your business to give your listing more traction. When people search for a particular phrase which matches your own, they are more likely to find your listing. Here’s an example of a page I created for my online business:
Look for “Pages” on your Facebook side bar and click on the pages icon. Fill out all the fields and input as much information as you can to give your listing the best chance. You can also promote your page and place your blog content on it once you have built it.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Quora
Quora.com is a question and answer website with millions of users. It can be used to bring people back to your website. To do this you need to create some useful content on your website first. So building a blog is a good strategy to be used with this one. Once you have some content on your website, you can use Quora to answer questions relevant to your content.
Then, link to your content in your question. Quora does allow this if it’s relevant in answering the questions. Read their terms and conditions though because you can easily get answers removed if you start spamming your links. See also using Quora to drive traffic.
YouTube
YouTube is another great way to find people who are looking for information relating to your products and services. By uploading information videos to YouTube, and tagging them with relevant keywords which relate to your business, you can attract free traffic organically. YouTube is a daughter company of Google, and Google itself sometimes markets YouTube as the second largest search engine on the web.
Organic traffic is much harder to obtain than paid traffic. But if you have the time and energy to create some informational videos, uploading them to YouTube regularly can give you a nice stream of traffic back to your website. Make sure your traffic is well targeted though before you spend a huge amount of time. See customer avatar for more on targeting.
What are the low competition niches for blogging in 2023? Unfortunately most blog niches are well subscribed to. Those with the least competition tend to be more difficult to monetise anyway. So perhaps the best question to ask isn’t which is the best niche for blogging with low competition, but which niche is the best for you.
After all, blogging is most definitely not a quick fix. It can take months or even years to break through with blogging and start earning regular traffic and sales. If you’re starting a blog from scratch, expect a long journey. That journey is going to be much more pleasing and enjoyable if you choose a topic which you actually enjoy writing about.
Low Competition Niches For Blog 2023 – Sub Niches
So you might be thinking that your favourite topic is simply too competitive. If this is the case there’s always a sub niche. A sub niche can be where you strike a balance between something you can monetise and less competition. An example of a sub niche for the “making money online” category is affiliate marketing, for example.
Building blog traffic takes time!
You can find sub niches within a competitive industry by delving down and looking for more specific areas of the larger topic. So for the health and fitness niche, you might choose Yoga. For the Yoga niche you might choose chair Yoga for rehabilitation, for example. A sub niche can be great for a couple of reasons:
There’s always fewer competing websites (less competition) in a sub niche compared to the bigger niche
Having a more specific niche means your audience is more targeted. This can be a good thing for sales if you’re selling something specific.
Low Competition Niches For Blog 2023 – Finding Your Niche
Imagine you’ve been writing your blog posts for six months now. How do you feel? What ideas have you been writing about? Are you ready for another six months of this? This is a good question to ask yourself because it’s likely to take much longer than you expect before your blog starts generating income.
So it can help to brainstorm ideas before you actually decide on your niche. Writing in a niche you hate, is going to make it very difficult to sustain the necessary effort required to make it work.
I once built a blog around the obscure topic of mushroom harvesting! After several months I was completely demoralised and my blog hardly made a thing!
Although my blog ranked and got some traffic, it didn’t make any money and I soon lost interest. In a subject you’re passionate about, you can keep going for long enough to overcome the competition and get traction.
Blog Niches – Things To Consider
There’s a couple of things to consider when choosing your niche. One is how you will attract traffic to your blog. In a very competitive topic, such as making money online, there’s going to be a lot more competition than in an uncompetitive niche such as pets or hobbies.
By niche’ing down to a sub niche you can cut out some competition and get a slice of the market more easily. But ultimately it’s going to be the passion and enthusiasm which gives you an edge, so choosing a topic which you love working on is going to play a part in your success.
The other main consideration is how you will monetise your blog. Initially, you want to create a lot of content to attract traffic. This can take some time and serious commitment, so make sure you’re ready for this! Not all topics are as easily monetised as each other, so it can help to start by looking for your monetisation method before you start. With affiliate marketing, you’ll want to choose a good product to sell from your blog. Even with a lot of traffic you can still struggle to make money with a bad product. So this is a vitally important factor too!
Niches To Choose From
There’s hundreds of niches you can choose from. Here’s a short list to draw some ideas from:
Wearable Technology.
Home Security.
Glamping.
Online Dog Training.
Maternity Clothing.
Eco-Friendly Products.
Vanlife.
Garage Gym.
Pets.
Hobbies.
Ideally choose a topic you align with, delve down and find a niche within the niche, where you’ll find less competition. Prepare yourself to build a lot of content in your topic and find a way to monetise it before you start. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s going to be competition in nearly every niche. Find a topic you can create an unlimited number of posts on and get to work! Good luck!
So it’s 2023 and you’re wondering what’s the best niche for affiliate marketing! I’ve done a few posts similar to this one so feel free to check them out using the search bar on this website. Your niche is such an important aspect of your affiliate business and it should be something you align with personally.
I have tried many niches and many of them failed. My personal advice is to choose a niche you can get passionate about and enjoy working in. I’ve picked the wrong niche so many times and ended up working hard at something I didn’t really enjoy. This makes it so much more difficult, especially if you’re faced with the high levels of online competition that we have in 2023!
So imagine yourself making money as an affiliate and loving what you do. If that seems impossible in the niche you choose, you’ve probably picked the wrong one. Another way to help you decide on your niche is to choose a product to promote first. Although many “guru’s” advice is to pick a niche you love, it also makes sense to choose one you can monetise well.
Even in a topic you adore, you can struggle making any money from it. So although money shouldn’t be the priority when starting, and passion perhaps should, you also need to think about the money side too. I chose a niche which ended up being difficult to monetise, and which I hated too!
Best Niche For Affiliate Marketing 2023 – Top Paying Niches
The top paying niches are typically also the most competitive niches too. So you’re going to be spending a lot of money promoting your products, or a lot of time building content in your niche. So make sure you’re going to enjoy the journey because there’s lot of competition from other affiliates out there. These are generally considered the best niches for affiliate marketing in terms of revenue potential:
Technology
Wealth Building
Health and Fitness
Fashion and Beauty
Lifestyle
Hobby
Pet Care
Travel
Now, you can build a sub-niche in any one of these too. A sub-niche is a niche within a niche and this can be a good idea especially if you’re niche is very competitive. So a sub-niche for the “Health and fitness” niche, for example might be yoga. A sub-niche for travel might be “budget travel for seniors”, for example. Sub niches are good because you can get very targeted traffic (which is good for sales) and there’s less competition.
Content Or Paid Ads?
The best niche for affiliate marketing will be individual to you, too. Not everyone loves writing loads of content, and not everyone is great on video. Your marketing strategy and interests can help you decide on how you’re going to build your affiliate business. Will you pay for advertising or build content? Are you good at writing or video? Do you have a large marketing budget, or are you going to go for content marketing? All these factors will have a bearing on your choice of niche and your approach.
If you’re going to create a lot of content, with a blog, for example, remember you’re going to do better if you choose a topic you enjoy writing about. You can sustain your efforts far longer when you’re writing in a topic you love. Choose a topic you’re disinterested in and it’s going to be tough, especially in a competitive niche.
Since affiliate marketing is getting all the more competitive, it pays to do your research before you start down a path. Ideally choose a topic you’re interested in and/or have some knowledge about. If you can overlap your passion and mission with your vocation, so much the better! You’ll last longer, your work will be more impactful and you’ll shine out among the competition more, too.
Where is the best place to do affiliate marketing? Affiliates do all sorts of different things in order to make sales. Some affiliates will become bloggers; writing content which gets found from the search engines (e.g. Google). Others build landing pages and drive traffic from advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook or YouTube.
Some affiliates will upload content to YouTube and build a channel over a long period of time; getting their traffic organically for free. Whereas others will run a single advert using only one video and find thousands of subscribers by sending their visitors to a landing page and collecting email addresses.
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing from using social media sites, blogging, email marketing and through running paid advertising. Depending on your particular niche, product/s and available time, you could choose any one of them. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Linkedin and all the many social media sites all offer an potential opportunity for affiliates. So what’s the best place to do affiliate marketing?
Best Place To Do Affiliate Marketing?
There’s a lot of decisions to be made for affiliates. Those decisions will have a bearing on how successful they ultimately become, too. The products you choose, the niche you pick and how you market your products will all have a impact. So where’s a good starting point? Depending on your circumstances and situation, you might choose your strategy depending on your marketing budget. With a large budget, you can afford to purchase more traffic and test and measure some paid for marketing strategies.
In this case, you’ll probably want to invest in some ad campaigns. You can run banner advertising, use platforms such as Bing (Microsoft), Google Adwords, Facebook etc. Ideally run paid advertising to a landing page and collect email subscribers.
This gives you more opportunity to sell to your visitors over a longer period of time. If you send paid traffic directly to your products, you can easily lose a lot of customers (and money in the process). But collect their email address, and you can build a longer term relationships. See why use landing pages.
Best Place To Do Affiliate Marketing – On A Budget
On a tight budget and with no money for ads, you’ll need to get creative on your marketing strategy. Blogging and social media strategies might be more suitable if this is the case. See also unpaid social media marketing strategies.
Blogging is another option if you’re on a budget. Blogging is a longer term strategy for affiliates but it does work if you’re committed. But if you’re impatient, it probably isn’t for you. Bloggers can take some time before they start generating traction. It can be months or even years, depending on how competitive their particular niche is.
Ideally get an email list which you can build up over time, whatever your marketing strategy is. This gives you more leverage and better control over your traffic. Whether you use paid traffic or earn it through content generation, you’ll want to make the most of it. Get a free email autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Intrinsic Motivation
Another consideration of the best place to do affiliate marketing is from a place of intrinsic motivation. 95% of of affiliates will quit which means to be in with a chance of winning with it, you’ll need to stick at when all the other affiliates quit! To stick with affiliate marketing for months or even years without results is an incredibly difficult thing to do. If your only motivation is the money, you’re surely going to find an easier way to make the stuff – especially if you struggle, which most new affiliates will.
How to be intrinsically motivated? Find a way to offer value through your affiliate business which is in itself hugely motivating to you. For me, that means creating helpful content to help other affiliates. I enjoy the process of learning too, so I often share psychology related material which I am learning about – such as the right mindset for affiliates. Find a strategy which you can enjoy the process of. I like blogging, for example, and I find it therapeutic.
Even without the income from blogging, I would probably keep doing it! If you can find a way to build an affiliate business and work in a way you love, you’ve found some intrinsic motivation which will keep you going long after all your competitors have quit!
Summary
There’s literally hundreds of ways to do affiliate marketing and everyone is different. So ultimately the best way to do affiliate marketing is your own way and a way in which you can succeed, whatever that means for you!
If you really want a completely done for you affiliate marketing business, you’ll need to buy an affiliate website which is already making money. Sites such as Flippa.com let you do this but a high earning affiliate website can set you back a hefty price. The more money your site earns, the larger the price tag you should expect to pay.
Here’s a couple of examples from Flippa.com, one site earns $4,112 per month (net profit) and the other $14, 447, Here’s what they are selling for:
If you want a cheaper site, expect to earn less from it. There’s other options of course for “done for you” affiliate marketing businesses. You can buy a business system which gives you larger profits. A high ticket business system, for example, can let you earn $1,000 per sale for products you can sell as an affiliate.
With such a business model, it’s much easier to learn paid marketing techniques and scale up. But you’ll still need to actually learn the skills and make those sales yourself, which can be done if you’re willing to roll your sleeves up and learn how to become an affiliate.
Done For You Affiliate Marketing Business: The Typical Affiliate Program Vs. High Ticket
The standard affiliate program can be joined for free. But you’ll need to build a website, and/or landing page. You’ll need some kind of marketing strategy to build your business up from scratch. In a competitive field it can take years to build up your traffic from a blog, for example.
A much faster way is to buy a business system which gives you all the bells and whistles:
Ready made sales funnel
Pre-written email templates
Product range – including high ticket products and subscription products
Training and support
Access to training and a community of online entrepreneurs
With such a business model, you can move directly to the marketing aspect of your business, learning from scratch. You have a business model which is already working, which is your greatest asset! A sales team automatically up-sells on your behalf and you have all the tools and software needed to build a from the ground up online business that works.
What A “Done For You Business” Isn’t
It’s important to keep in mind with this kind of business you’re still an affiliate. So unlike an already earning site from Flippa, for example, you’ll need to learn how to drive traffic to your website/landing pages.
This is of course much easier with a high ticket business system which has multiple products within a sales funnel. With a standard affiliate product, you can only earn one time from each sale. But with a product “suite” you can earn multiple times: from each individual sale, from subscription products and from up-sells closed in-house by the sales team.
But although a “done for you business” offers the tools, products and software you’ll need, you’ll still be responsible for driving leads into your business, which you can learn through the training.
Standard Affiliate Journey
Doing everything by yourself as an affiliate is how many affiliates get started online. But this can be a long and difficult journey. You’ll need to find a product to sell, build a marketing strategy, create your own emails and begin to learn the ways you can drive traffic. That’s a lot of stuff to do and without a good understanding of what you’re doing, you can easily lose momentum and give up along the way. That explains why around 95% of new affiliates quit.
With a mentor, guidance, and a system and strategy already in place, you can cut your learning time right down. When you only have to focus on marketing, you’ll save yourself a huge amount of time and resources. So if you’re looking for a low cost online “done for you” business system, checkout this video and see if you might be a good fit.
Is it necessary to have a website for affiliate marketing? While the answer to this is no, it’s definitely a good idea. You can run a profitable affiliate business without a website. But like any business the more tools for advertising you have, the better. You’re definitely limiting yourself if you choose to not have a website.
Websites are tools you can use to either send paid traffic to, or through blogging, build free traffic over time. You can also simply use a landing page builder, such as convertri, for example. Send paid traffic to a purpose built landing page and collect emails. Build a subscriber base and send out automated messages to promote your affiliate products.
Or you can use a social media platform to send traffic directly to your affiliate offers. Or use paid banners on websites to do the same. There’s many ways in which affiliates promote their products. Checkout my post which covers 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Pick out the ones without the need for a website if you don’t want to build one.
If you’re going to use paid advertising to promote affiliate products, many platforms will require you to have a compliant website, rather than send traffic directly to a third party product (which you don’t personally own). Here, not having a website can limit you. Or an affiliate program might ask how you generate traffic. In some cases, if you don’t have a website, (or a large email list) you can’t gain the credibility needed to access some affiliate programs.
Is It Necessary To Have A Website For Affiliate Marketing? Benefits
This website has been built as a blogging site. Over time, (and with considerable effort I might add), I’ve been able to generate a nice steady flow of traffic to it, mostly from the search engines. This is a long process but well worth the time if you’re prepared to put some work in. Free traffic doesn’t come easily, especially today with the huge amount of competition online. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, so there’s a huge volume of content that is being churned out regularly.
Another site I’ve built is defy9to5.com which was built as an authority website for advertising purposes. Google’s advertising platforms (YouTube and Google Adwords) require you to own a compliant website. There are some requirements which may change when using a paid ad platform such as Google or Facebook. Things like disclaimers must be on affiliate sites, privacy policy, T’s and C’s and cookie notices and so on.
If you’re just starting as an affiliate and attempt to send paid traffic to a third party website (through your affiliate link for example), you can easily be refused. Even links on a website can lead to an ad disapproval. Google terms this “bridging” and they may stop your ads for it. Hence why a compliant website is so important when you’re starting out with paid advertising.
Is It Necessary To Have A Website For Affiliate Marketing?
While it’s not essential to have a website to do affiliate marketing, you can certainly benefit from using one, especially if you’re on a budget. A website can give you credibility compared with a messy affiliate link. A website can allow you to run paid campaigns more easily and even give you free traffic.
Affiliates are like “digital fishermen”! The more rods in the pond, the more chance they have of catching a bite!
Without one you can still be an affiliate and one of the best ways to promote affiliate products without a website is through a landing page. Landing page software lets you build and test different lead capture pages and build an email list. Or, if you don’t want to spring for a landing page software, there’s other ways you can promote affiliate links too.
You can use your affiliate links in your social media profiles, for example. Put them in your email signature. Link them to domain names to give you more authority and credibility. Free strategies for promoting your links are time consuming and can be frustrating. Paid marketing is by far the best way because you can see the results very quickly and they are scalable. But with paid ads, you’re going to need some credibility to even use the ad platforms. This often means owning a website which is compliant with the ad platform you’re using.
Summary
Like with any business, the more tools you have to bring in paying customers the better. A small business owner might run an ad in the local paper. They might have a Google My Business listing and some business cards. They probably have a website to promote their business, too. By building a portfolio of advertising mechanisms, they are able to test each one to see which one brings in the most business and at the lowest cost.
But by limiting their potential customer base to only word of mouth, for example, they cut themselves off from their full potential and remove their ability to grow and scale their business using tools at their disposal.
