AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How To Make A Profitable Website

How can you make a profitable website? Websites are the perfect little automated businesses. If you can make one which is profitable, it can generate cash for you and run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without ever taking a break!

There’s two simple strategies to monetise a website which anyone can use, even without anything of their own to sell. You can either place advertising or sell something, such as an affiliate product. After trying out these two methods I personally found affiliate marketing was the way to go. With advertising, you need a huge amount of traffic to make it profitable and you need it for free.

But with affiliate products, you can choose pretty much any product to sell and some products even pay you recurring commissions. But before you can sell anything from a website, you first need traffic. Without anyone visiting your website, you won’t make any sales, that’s for certain! To get traffic you can either buy it, using paid advertising, or earn it by creating a lot of content and getting your website ranked on the search engines.

The products you choose to sell and the marketing method you pick will have a large say in your next step. With high value digital products which pay more, you can more easily make a profit using paid advertising for traffic. With lower valued products this is more difficult and so you might choose to build your site up organically. See also See best digital products for affiliate marketing and affiliate marketing business models.

How To Make A Profitable Website – Niche Website Building

I’m a big fan of getting traffic to my website for free and although this takes some time and effort, it pays off when that traffic is coming in. Once you start getting free traffic to your website, you can promote products from it and make sales in your sleep! The main strategy I use for getting free traffic is to build a niche website and start blogging. The niche website is built in a specific way in order to optimise the opportunity for free traffic.

Start out by finding a product you want to promote. You can find affiliate products online through platforms such as Clickbank, Amazon, JVZoo and so on. Also just do a search for affiliate program in any area/topic and you’ll find a product. Choose a product you want to promote and which you can fully get behind. This might be a product which is in an area of interest to you personally, which will definitely help when you’re using this strategy.

Once you have found a product, it’s time to build your website. You’re going to be building a blog website and creating a lot of content in it for free traffic. So it’s important to choose a topic you’re comfortable writing about.

How To Make A Profitable Website – Building A Website For Free Traffic

Head over to Google’s free keyword planner and type your main keyword (relating to your product) into the planner. Let’s use the example of a golf training related product. Type “golf training” into the planner (or your own keyword) and you’ll find a bunch of other related keywords which are already being searched for on Google. Dive into the results and pick out a term which has three criteria:

It’s a potential buyer keyword – i.e. the search intent might lead to a sale
There’s a nice amount of monthly traffic for it
There’s not too much competition on Google in the search results for the term

I like the term “golf swing training aids“. It is a potential buyer search term, meaning the search intent will possibly lead to a sale, if you present a suitable product. Next, head over to Google and type your term into the search bar. You should get a number coming up at the top if you’re on a desktop computer. This will give you an idea of the relative competition for the term you have picked.

If you’re a fan of golf, and think you could create an information website on the topic, this could be a good term to choose. There’s relatively little competition on Google and lots of sponsored ads. This means that people are already selling products from this search (or at least very likely doing so).

How To Make A Profitable Website – Buying A Domain Name

The next step once you’ve chosen your keyword is to buy a domain name with your keyword in it. I’ve had a look for this one and the domain is up for sale, even though it has a hefty price tag! You can find domain names on Namecheap.com.

I probably wouldn’t spend so much on this domain as you can pick them up for around $10 or less! If your business is international, you’ll want a .com domain name ideally. However, here’s a .co.uk website which came up in the search results – probably because I’m in the UK. they have built and monetised a website using a similar strategy: https://www.golfswingsystems.co.uk/shop/golf-practice-aids/

With your domain name bought you can buy a hosting for a few dollars a month and point your domain name to it. Once set up start creating content and building out your website. You can find more about this topic here: how to build a niche website.

Buying Traffic For A Compliant Website

There’s another way to make a profitable website which involves paying for traffic. You can build a compliant website which follows the terms and conditions of the advertising platform you’re going to be using. YouTube, Google Adwords, Facebook all offer a means to send huge volume of traffic to a website almost instantly. You’re going to build an authority website which you will use for collecting emails.

An authority website is set up to offer some kind of information giveaway. One of the best ways of doing this is to use Convertri, a landing page builder which helps you build web pages which you can test and measure for lead generation.

Here’s an example of a landing page I’ve built using the software:

landing pages — Visit this landing page here.

Why Build A List?

Most website visitors simply don’t buy from a website on their first visit. This means the larger percentage of your traffic will simply leave without having taken any action. When you’re paying for traffic, that means it’s going to get costly! Building an email list allows a website owner to connect with potential customers multiple times and over a much long time frame. Studies have shown that it takes several touch points before someone will buy something online.

So whether you’re buying traffic or using a niche website to get traffic organically, it’s always a good idea to build an email list of subscribers. You can get access to an autoresponder for free here. Autoresponders are email service providers which let website owners collect emails from their site.

By offering something of value on a website, you can encourage your visitors to opt in to your email newsletter. The autoresponder follows up with an automated series of email messages. Through these messages you can promote your affiliate products on complete autopilot!

Summary

So there’s two methods of generating an income from a website. Ideally with paid advertising, it’s better to have products which pay recurring and high ticket commissions, since this will enable you to recoup your advertising budget much more easily. With the organic method of generating traffic, there’s much more work involved.

You’ll need to build your site up with quality content and get your articles/blog posts ranking on the search engines. This takes time and the effort required will vary according to the other competing websites within your niche. But once you start generating free traffic, you can make sales on autopilot around the clock!

If you’re interested in starting an online business from scratch, and getting help and support, access this training resource.

Make Money Recommending Products

You can make money recommending products online with a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Join an affiliate program, get your affiliate link and then promote it online. When someone buys a product through your unique identifying link, you earn a commission based on the sale.

There’s all kinds of affiliate products you can choose from and one of the most well known programs is Amazon’s. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any of the thousands of products available on the website.

I recommend a few products on this website. When someone buys something I recommend, I earn commissions based on the sale.

Make Money Recommending Products – How To Promote Your Affiliate Link

Affiliates promote their links in several ways and you can choose any and all of them if you wish. I’m a blogger so I create written content which attracts people to come and visit my website. I also build an email list of subscribers and promote my affiliate links in email messages. You can sign up to my email list on this website using one of the forms or pop ups.

Most affiliate marketers who are successful have built an email list. An email list allows you to build an ever growing audience of people who you can message via email. You can automate delivery of messages to your list too, so once you’ve built your infrastructure, you don’t have to be constantly writing messages.

Affiliates also use paid advertising to promote their products or build their email list. This is the fastest way to get an affiliate business going – through paid ads. Blogging on the other hand is much slower, but it’s also much cheaper too!

Make Money Recommending Products – Types Of Products

There’s all kinds of products you can choose to promote too. Physical products like you can find on Amazon typically pay less than digital products. Most physical products pay between 1% and 10% commission for product recommendations. Digital products pay much more – typically between 30% and 40% commissions.

You can also choose to sell high ticket affiliate products. These carry much larger price tags than most others and so you’ll earn larger commissions from their sale. Software type products and memberships are also worth considering because many of them offer recurring commissions. Selling a recurring commission product can give you an income for life, rather than a one off commission, which you get with most other affiliate products.

Good products to sell are high value tools, memberships and software products which are needed for online businesses, for example. These are good because they are necessary for business owners. As such, the people who purchase them are likely to maintain their membership for years, if not a lifetime!

Summary

Yes you can make money recommending products and anyone can learn the skill of selling online. Once you’ve learned how to make one sale online, you can go on and make many more. Top affiliates can make millions of dollars by simply referring sales online without even having handled the products themselves or even spoken to a customer. This makes affiliate marketing a popular business model but it’s not that easy and there’s a massive drop out rate.

Around 95% of affiliates will quit when they fail to make progress in their business. So if you think you have what it takes to be in the 5% of those who make it work, checkout this training resource to learn more and get started.

Best Profitable Niche For Blogging

What’s the best profitable niche for blogging? The uncompetitive niches typically are more difficult to monetise. The busiest niches are the best payers, but massively competitive. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, and growing, what’s the best niche to start a blog in, given the huge competition in most niches?

Top paying niches fall into the categories of health and wellness, making money and wealth, e-commerce and beauty. Less competitive niches are typically those such as travel, pets, personal finance, hobbies, eco-friendly products, home office equipment and solar energy.

So what’s the best niche to choose which is going to be profitable?

Best Profitable Niche For Blogging – Traffic

With a blog, you need traffic. Nothing will be profitable if you don’t get found. This means you’re going to need to spend some considerable time building content on your blog. If you’re only interest is in the end result of making profit from your blog, you can easily fall into the trap of building a blog you don’t actually like working on.

To make blogging a regular habit is much easier if you enjoy your subject. If you hate it, how long do you think you’ll sustain the effort in writing post after post, attempting to gain an audience?

In any topic, there’s competition, which means you should expect to work on your blog for several months just to start seeing regular organic traffic. So it’s a good idea to look at your interests and passions. Turn those into the subject of your blog. If nothing springs to mind immediately, think about a topic you’ll love learning about. If you build a blog on that topic, you can continue learning and growing. As you do, you can create more and more content on the subject.

Best Profitable Niche For Blogging – A Micro Niche

Now you might be thinking, I love a certain topic, but it’s way too over subscribed. There’s just no way I’ll get my content ranking on Google because it’s far too competitive. However, if this is the case you can find a micro niche. A micro niche is a niche within a niche. So even in a competitive topic area such as health and wellness, if you carve out a niche for yourself which is less competitive, you can still attract traffic and stick with your passion. An example of a micro niche is Yoga for seniors, or chair Yoga. The bigger niche is learn Yoga online and the bigger category is health and wellness.

Blogging traffic growth can be slow! Pick a subject you love writing about!

Choosing a micro niche can allow you to pick a profitable topic but without encountering too much competition.

Best Profitable Niche For Blogging – Choosing Products Which Sell

Any niche can be profitable if you attract enough buying customers and have a good product which is already selling. Likewise, even with a tonne of traffic, if you pick a product which doesn’t sell, you’ll never be profitable. Of course this assumes you’ll be monetising your blog with an affiliate product of some kind. Another way to monetise a blog is with advertising, but this can be difficult since ad clicks mostly pay peanuts!

I spent a long time trying to sell products through blogging without getting anywhere. I wasn’t getting enough traffic to my blogs because I chose a topic I wasn’t interested in and/or knew nothing about. Once I choose a topic I enjoyed writing about, it gave me the edge because I could continue writing in that subject for much longer than the competition.

Good products to use are those which pay high ticket commissions or recurring commissions and of course those which you completely trust and believe in. Selling a product you haven’t even bought yourself isn’t a good idea, since it’s disingenuous to sell it.

Summary

So what’s the best profitable niche for blogging? Without a lot of traffic to your blog it won’t be profitable. But even high traffic blogs sometimes fail to make money. That’s because they either attract the wrong kind of traffic or they’ve chosen the wrong products to sell to their audience.

The key to choosing the best and most profitable blog topic is to tap into your natural leanings, interests and passions. Ask yourself how you can be of service to others with your blog posts and which products are going to help your visitors the most.

Expect to be working on your blogging for several months. Ask yourself in which subject can you sustain this interest for that length of time.

One blog I built was about mushroom harvesting. I had to research each post I wrote, and I had no interest in the topic. Needless to say it was an utter disaster. After 6 months of blogging I managed to get my blog ranking on Google and I got some traffic. But I was totally disinterested in the blog after this time and it soon started falling off the rankings as another (more passionate blogger) took my place!

How To Rank A Website On Google’s First Page

Wondering how to rank a website on Google’s first page? Google has a huge list of things to determine a website’s ranking. Things such as domain age, content, backlinks, competition and so on all have an effect on whether you’ll rank. An old domain name with tens or hundreds of thousands of backlinks will certainly be more likely to rank than a brand new website without much content on it.

Where your links come from is also an important factor. Ideally build a natural back link profile from other leaders in your field of expertise. High quality website backlinks are worth far more than low quality ones. But these are hard to get. You can write guest post in order to get backlinks, but many websites don’t offer this service and if they do they have a high bar for their guest bloggers.

But there’s an easier way to rank a website and that’s through finding a good long tail keyword and building your website around it.

How To Rank A Website On Google’s First Page – Locations

Another way to get your website ranked more easily is to build a site based around specific keywords. Location based websites are the easiest to rank for because there’s less competition for certain place names. For example, I built a site for a friend who has a kung fu school in Scarborough. Here’s his website at the very top of Google and I haven’t touched the site for several years:

Of course you might not have a location based business to do this with. But if you do it’s well worth the effort. Buy a domain name with your town/city name in it and your most searched for business related keyword. Then build your site around those particular keywords.

How To Rank A Website On Google’s First Page – Competition

Most websites won’t rank on the first page. After all there’s millions of other competing websites which have more content, more backlinks and more domain authority than yours. Why should Google give you a ranking if there’s a more established one in your same niche? To compete in some niches will be tough and it can take years of link building and content generation to do so. After all this work, your site still might not rank for your chosen keywords. There’s a better way and it’s to start by looking at specific long tail keywords to build your website around.

You can use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords within your particular niche. Simply type your main keyword into the planner and look for longer tail derivatives which you can build your site around. You want to find a good keyword phrase which matches your business and which you can rank for. So it will need to be one which has a lower level of competition than the rest.

When I built this website, I wanted to get some free traffic by ranking on the top of Google. My niche is affiliate marketing but that’s super competitive. So I looked for long tail derivatives and found “affiliate marketing mentors” which had a lot less competition on Google. Compare these numbers on Google for a phrase match of both “affiliate marketing” and then “affiliate marketing mentors”.

Using Google to find keyword competitiveness

The number below the search denotes the competing websites/webpages for the chosen keyword. As you can see, it’s a lot lower for a longer tail keyword.

What Do You Want To Rank For?

It’s helpful to know what keywords you want to rank your website for in the first instance. This will give you an idea about how feasible it is. With a super competitive term, it’s going to take a long longer to rank, and you may never rank for it.

Affiliate marketing, for example is a keyword I’m probably never going to rank for. So find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty instead, and go after them instead. This might involve getting that particular keyword on every page of your website, building backlinks, making sure image alt tags are present and your headings, article titles, and content all reflect this chosen keyword.

If Google doesn’t see your content as relevant for your chosen keyword, it definitely won’t rank you for it. And of course you don’t really want to rank for keywords which aren’t relevant for your business either, because they would only bring in the wrong kind of visitors!

Less Competition & More Specific Search Intent

Long tail keywords are super important for ranking for a couple of reasons. They are less competitive and so you’re in with a greater chance of ranking for them. But they are also more specific. This means your visitors have a better idea of the content they are searching for. For example, the term “affiliate marketing” is very broad. The search intent behind this search could be any number of things from a casual browser to someone determined to get started and build a business.

But the term “affiliate marketing mentors” is more specific. The search intent is more likely to bring in someone looking for help and support with their affiliate business (i.e. my perfect buying customer!)

Summary

Ranking a website on the top of Google isn’t always possible depending on your chosen keyword for which you want to rank. If you choose longer tail keywords to go after, you have a much better chance of ranking your site. Particularly if you go after the long tail keywords which have a location name in them because you’ll find less websites in your area to compete with (for locally based businesses).

If you don’t have a locally based business, you can instead find longer tail keywords to build your site around. Do your keyword research and look for those keywords within your niche which have the least competition but will also bring in some traffic. You can use Google’s keyword planner to see exactly how many searches your particular keyword gets on a monthly basis. Use a normal Google search (and a phrase match search) to see how many competing websites/pages you’re up against.

Get Paid For Recommending Products

Yes you really can get paid for recommending products online. It’s a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. You don’t have to own the product yourself and can simply refer customers to them for a “cut” of the profit. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you. The product owner then pays you an affiliate commission based on the sale.

There’s many affiliate programs available online. You can find them in almost any area you could think of. One of the most popular programs is Amazon’s. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program, grab an affiliate link to any one of thousands of products available on the site and promote their link online in a number of different ways.

So how do affiliate marketers promote products online? Well this article is one such method. If someone lands on my content and buys something from my website, I earn an affiliate commission based on the sale. But there’s many more ways you can promote your affiliate link besides blogging.

Get Paid For Recommending Products – Choose Your Product & Promotion Strategy

Start by joining an affiliate program such as Amazon’s. Once you have joined, you should be able to access an affiliate portal on Amazon’s website. Here is where you can access your affiliate links to whatever product you choose to promote from the site.

Once you have your link, you can learn the methods of link promotion such as:

Blogging
Email marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation
PPC – pay per click
Social media marketing

You don’t have to learn all these methods. You can choose just one method and stick with it until you have fully mastered it. Some affiliates choose blogging, some use paid marketing. Others use YouTube and upload multiple videos to attract an audience. Checkout this article on 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some strategies you can use. One of the simplest and best methods of product promotion is to build an email list of subscribers and automate a series of email messages designed to sell an affiliate product.

Get Paid For Recommending Products – Email Marketing

Affiliate marketing is similar to a friend recommending a nice restaurant. The only difference is that when your recommendation leads to a sale, you can earn a commission! But if you only tell one person about your recommendation, your earnings are limited to whether that particular person buys (or not)! So to expand your potential customer base of recommendations you can build an email list of subscribers.

An email list is one of the best things you can invest in as an affiliate. It lets you automate communication with multiple people at once and build your list up over time. By providing some kind of service through your list, you can attract people who are likely to want your product/service. Build trust by offering consistent value through your emails. Some affiliates build email lists into the tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. With one email, you can recommend a single product to thousands of people at once!

You can access an email autoresponder here and get started with list building. For a step by step walkthrough of the setup process you can access a training resource here.

Types Of Products

There’s all kinds of affiliate products you can promote online and get paid a commission for sales you generate. You’ll find many on Amazon, as I already mentioned. However, Amazon’s products will typically pay only between 1% and 10% commission on any sales you generate. This is quite low, so you’ll need to sell a lot of products to make a good income from this strategy. There’s other products you can choose to recommend which are much more lucrative such as high ticket and subscription products.

A high ticket items typically has a much higher price tag than a standard affiliate product. This means you’ll earn more for each referral. Subscription affiliate products are also worth noting because you can earn recurring commissions from them. These are products such as training and mentorship products which carry membership fees and software products. Digital products are also worth considering if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate. A typical digital product will pay much more than a standard physical product. Digital products typically pay between 30% and 40% commissions.

Summary

You can get paid for recommending products and services online using a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliates are third party referrers who recommend products – typically online.

To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. The main skill to learn is some form of online marketing method such as blogging, paid marketing, email marketing or social media marketing.

Most affiliates build an email list of subscribers. The bigger their list, the more they can potentially sell and the more they will make. You can build an email list with either paid marketing or free, organic marketing. Organic marketing (e.g. blogging) will typically take longer though than using paid marketing.

If you’re interested in building your own online enterprise through product recommendations, you can start here with this online resource.

The Magical Compounding Effect Of Blogging

The magical compounding effect of blogging can give you complete autonomy, freedom to be your own boss and work from anywhere! There’s magic in blogging. At first it can be quite an uphill struggle. But over time, a blog can give you a means of expression and time and financial independence, even financial freedom. But it comes at a cost and the cost is hours upon hours of content creation. To do it, you need to pick a topic you’re happy writing about. I’ve had blogs I was unenthusiastic about, and they didn’t last. But if you can hit upon a topic which you enjoy writing about, you’re already half way there!

compound effect of blogging — Page views of my website from 2019-2022

Blogging for me took some time. I tried different topics and initially it was only about the money. When I hit on a topic I was truly passionate about, blogging became a habit. I started enjoying the process of creating content I was enthusiastic about. I was no longer checking to see whether my posts were ranking on Google or whether I’d made any sales. I just loved blogging for the sheer creative experience.

The Magical Compounding Effect Of Blogging – Finding Your Niche

One of the problems I encountered was finding my niche. I was always jumping from one topic to another. I needed the money which is why it took me so much longer. This need put me in a desperate state. No matter what I did, I was always struggling financially.

Initially with my blogs I didn’t make any sales and didn’t even get any traffic. I would write a single blog post and sit back, waiting for the magic to happen! Still no sales! Hmm, I would think. Perhaps I’ll write another one in a week. Why isn’t it working, I would think. Perhaps that course I bought was a scam – I thought!

The magical compounding effect of blogging

This happened again and again and occasionally a sale would drop in. This gave me more confidence in blogging for a living. With new found belief in what I was doing, I would get to it. I would blog every day for several weeks in a row. Then sit back and look for the evidence that it was working! Ah, no sales! Why not I thought, I have worked so hard! I would lose interest and stop blogging, only to see a sale drop in a month or two later.

This stop start insecure way of working was the cause of my problems. I was unsure of my direction. Once sales started coming in, I knew I was working. The new found belief in what I was doing gave me the motivation to work even harder, creating more and more blog posts!

The Magical Compounding Effect Of Blogging

Blogging is tough in the beginning. There’s a lot to be done for not much reward. But over time as the volume of your blog posts grow, you get rewarded with more visitors. They come from social media, shares, backlinks from visitors and various other sources. The more posts you have out there, the more chance you have of adding another visitor to your daily traffic.

There’s other things which compound over time with a blog too. If you build an email list from a blog, (you should definitely do this), you can send your subscribers to your newer posts. Each time a subscriber visits your content they will gain more trust in you. Their level of scepticism will diminish and they’re more likely to buy from you too!

If you use push engage on a blog it allows you to notify subscribers of your newly published posts. This gives you another stream of traffic which compounds over time as more and more visitors subscribe, just like with email marketing.

With more content the effects of your SEO (Search engine optimisation) gain momentum. More backlinks, more content, more shares equals improved rankings for your content. Each little trickle of traffic can be built on and improved the longer you stick with it as a blogger!

The Magical Compound Effect Of Blogging – Self Improvements & Software Tools

As a blogger I’ve definitely improved as time has gone on too. Whether you think so or not! I’m a faster typer for sure. I come up with new blog ideas faster because I’m “in the groove” blogging most weeks. It’s at the stage where not to blog feels wrong to me, because I’ve made such a strong habit of it.

It wasn’t always like this and I was pretty unsure of blogging of a means to make a living. But once my blogs started generating an income, I was able to focus more fully on blogging as a living, and worry less about picking up other work. This gives you more clarity, and you have more time and money to invest in blogging. You can invest in SEO tools such as SEM Rush, for example. The Push Engage plugin is an investment too and costs more the more subscribers you have – although you can access it for free. Aweber is an email autoresponder I use, (free to access for up to 500 subscribers)

Once you start earning from blogging, you can even test some paid advertising to bring in more traffic instantly.

Summary

There’s one thing which makes blogging more effective and it’s to find a niche which you can blog about and never grow tired of! When you can keep going when everyone else gives up, you know you have an edge! Some people blog only for the fun of it and as a creative outlet. But if you can find a niche you’re passionate about, which can become a life long hobby, and which earns you an income too, you’ll never have to work again a day in your life!

Working on a blog you love doesn’t feel like work. You get to choose what you write about. You can blog from anywhere so it can give you complete geographical freedom to be earning from a blog.

Blogging can be magical. Start with a blog post and share on social media. Add some plugins which automate this process. Use email marketing and push notifications to amplify your traffic. Add some paid advertising. Use an SEO plugin. Keep learning and growing your knowledge and soon your small trickles of traffic will be massive rivers! Turn this traffic into leads and sales, and before you know it you’ll be earning an income from your blog!

Even A Journey Of 1000 Sales Begins With A Single Blog Post!

Even a journey of 1000 sales begins with a single blog post! You’ve probably heard that saying, or something similar? With an online business selling products, the often long term goal is to build a life of freedom; one where you can work from anywhere, quit the job and live on your own terms.

Once you switch the trading time for money trap and learn instead how to use products to make money, you can automate and scale. The “deal” of selling your time for money no longer applies and you can generate an income from online selling with the business model of affiliate marketing.

But before you can turn this into a reality, there’s a lot of work to be done. First you need to find a product to sell online. There’s millions of affiliate products you can use and finding the right one for you can take some time and effort. Next there’s the task of actually selling your product. How are you going to do it? After trying many different strategies myself I finally made some progress with blogging. But it didn’t happen overnight! I failed many times before finding a strategy (and product) which worked.

Even A Journey Of 1000 Sales Begins With A Single Blog Post – Blogging Your Way To Financial Freedom!

Blogging your way to financial freedom! It sounds like a cheesy sales pitch or even an affiliate program! But with a blog you can build a digital “asset” which carries on working for you even after you stop working. To go from a standing start to generating automated sales online doesn’t happen easily. Instead, aim for a single organic “hit” on your website. Or aim for your first lead on your email list. These are the steps you need to focus on – the teeny tiny ones which are much more achievable.

If you jump ahead to dreaming of a lifetime of freedom, but don’t take any practical action, they will always be dreams! You’ll get caught up in procrastination and self doubt. A website hit, a lead, a sale are all those small “baby steps” you should be focused on achieving with an online business.

If you’re not a blogger, don’t worry. Blogging isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You can generate online sales in many ways and blogging is just one of them.

Focus On The One Thing You Can Do Today, Now

Whenever I’ve chosen a difficult goal, such as building an online business, I’ve often come up with a lot of doubt, confusion and scepticism. My mind fills with questions rather than answers. I get sceptical and think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew! This is a sure fire way to fail and if you find yourself in this particular state of mind, you need to get out of it!

Rather than focusing on the many things you will need to accomplish to achieve your goals, (and allowing this to affect your mindset negatively) focus on just one thing you can accomplish today, now.

When it comes to blogging, I like to write. So for me when I find myself in a negative state, I know that blogging will help. In fact blogging has become something I actually enjoy, rather than thinking of it as a chore. “The person who likes walking will go further than the person who wants the destination“. This was a saying I picked up from one of my mentors. It’s very true. If I only blogged to get the end goal, I would have been disappointed a thousand times and then some. But Instead I focus on doing the one thing I can do today, now. Then I celebrate the small wins, such as an organic website hit, or a lead.

The Bamboo Analogy

Another favourite analogy of mine is the Chinese bamboo tree. The bamboo tree will gestate for around 5 years before it even pokes above the soil. So if you are unaware of the nature of the plant you may assume that it has died! But if you water and feed the soil, you will start to see growth. What’s more, the Chinese bamboo plant can grow up to 90 feet within 5 weeks time!

This is very similar to an affiliate business. In the beginning, there’s very little “fruit” to show for your efforts. You might assume that affiliate marketing does not even work! But if you keep going, nurturing your knowledge and growing yourself and your business, you will find some shoots (sales)! They might not come immediately so instead look at your activity. Look for small successes which can give you hope and enthusiasm. Keep taking those steps and you will see your affiliate business grow.

The main reason people quit affiliate marketing (at an alarming rate) is the lack of evidence that it’s going to work. But this often comes before they’ve put in the work in the first place.

Make no mistake, affiliate marketing can be a money “tree” which continues to pay you long after you stop working on it! But only if you put the time in beforehand. If you’re ready to take that first step, you can start a free account here and get started.

Get Paid Blogging

To get paid blogging you need to generate a lot of website traffic through content creation. Over some time, you should have created enough content to attract some free traffic from the search engines.

With highly targeted visitors on your website you can either make money from advertising clicks or through selling affiliate products. Some bloggers charge to write for website owners. You can get paid through brand sponsorships too if you can find a company to sponsor you. Many bloggers sell affiliate products from their blog. On this site for example, I sell training and education for people wanting to earn a living online.

Placing adverts on your blog posts is another popular method of earning from a blog. Adsense, for example lets you do this by joining their program and you can place code on your site which shows up as targeted ads according to your content. When your visitors click, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue.

Get Paid Blogging – Getting Traffic

But the way you get paid blogging is only a tiny part of the story. In order to make blogging profitable, you’ll need to attract traffic and this can take more effort than most are prepared for. Certainly I never knew how long it would take to generate a steady income through blogging. Why should someone come and visit your blog anyway? You have to ask! There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and these add to an over crowded marketplace.

Depending on the topic of your blog, you could be up against tens of thousands of blogs on a similar subject. For each blog post you write, there’s thousands of others with similar titles all competing to rank on Google for the top place. It is the top listing place on Google which gets the most traffic. But in most topics this place is vastly over subscribed. Particularly in a competitive field, you can expect a tough ride to start generating traffic for free.

So what’s the answer?

Get Paid Blogging – Choose Your Passion

A lot of bloggers recommend choosing a topic you love. While this is true, you also need to pick a topic you can monetise. With advertising, you only make a tiny amount of advertising revenue. So in an uncompetitive topic in which it is easier to get traffic, you’ll only earn peanuts from your ad clicks. Such a topic can be difficult to monetise with affiliate products too, if there’s limited things you can sell.

Conversely in a competitive topic you can find it very difficult to get traffic, even though you will find more choice of affiliate products to choose from to sell. The answer I believe lies somewhere in between your passion and what the market wants. Without a long term focus on your blogging, it’s going to be difficult to get traffic. And without a good product to sell from your blog, you won’t easily make money from it.

Tapping into a product you can offer and which you completely align with, and a topic you’re going to be happy blogging about (potentially for years) is the answer. This gives you a massive advantage over the many bloggers who will quit because they chose a topic they didn’t really care about, and/or which they can’t monetise.

Get Paid Blogging

Blogging can be an awesome way to generate an income. But it can also be incredibly tiresome; especially after months of hard work and nothing much to show for it. So if you’re going to take on blogging and potentially earn from it, it’s well worth setting yourself up for success and the crux of this is to choose a topic you love writing about.

Imagine being six months in to your blogging and still you’re struggling to make sales. How do you feel? If you feel ok about it, you’re going to last a whole lot longer and eventually make it work. But if you’re frustrated and disillusioned how long do you think it’ll be before you quit?! I chose a topic to blog about in an area in which I had no interest.

Each blog post took longer to write because I had to research every single one of them! After 6 months my blog did rank on Google. But I was utterly burned out and had zero interest in keeping going. So eventually my blog fell off Google and I gave up on it. It taught me a hell of a lesson. If you’re going to be a blogger, choose a topic you love. You can’t lose if you love what you do!

Finding Affiliate Products Which You Align With

The best way to get paid blogging is not only to choose a topic you love, but to also align yourself with an affiliate product/program which you completely believe in. This was a mistake I made when I started out as an affiliate marketer. I picked several products I didn’t care a jot about and threw up multiple websites in a vain attempt to sell them. I think I sold maybe one product after all the work I put in; shed plans as I recall from a site called TedsSheds.net – long since passed!

To make sales consistently online you’ll need a lot of traffic to your blog. This will definitely require a lot of content if you want your traffic for free. But getting traffic and making sales are not the same thing. You can get traffic to your blog without making any sales.

So to give yourself the best chance of success, your products need to make sense. They need to be aligned with your content. Otherwise your visitors won’t want them.

Turning Visitors Into Subscribers

Selling products from a website can be tough. You need to give your visitors more opportunity to get to know you, like you and trust you before they will buy from you. This is where email marketing comes in. If you sign up on this website for my newsletter, you will receive regular updates from me to your inbox. This is a massively important thing for bloggers. It gives them more opportunity to sell to their visitors because they can hold a longer term conversation with them through email.

Most website visitors don’t buy on their first time on a site. They typically will need several touch points before they buy something. So to give yourself a better chance of turning your blog visitors into customers, get yourself an email marketing service and learn how to collect email subscribers from your blog. You can access one for free here.

Get Paid To Generate Leads

How exactly can you get paid to generate leads? With any business you can generate leads through offering something of value on a website and when someone signs up to your offer, you can collect their email address and send them relevant messages. This is known as lead generation and is used for multiple businesses who want to collect subscribers through a website; they sign up to your list, you offer them something of value in exchange.

If you don’t already have a business to promote through lead generation, you can promote other people’s products with a business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates are third party sales people who refer sales through their affiliate links. I’m an affiliate marketer and if someone signs up on this website and purchases something through one of my emails, I earn a commission. Anyone can learn this and email marketing is one of the best ways to sell online.

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Email Marketing

To get started collecting leads from a website you’ll need an email autoresponder. Autoresponders allow you to automate the collection of email addresses and deliver messages to your subscribers. You can access an autoresponder for free through this link.

Once you have an autoresponder, you can place a piece of code on a website. This lets you collect visitor’s information. It looks something like this:

To encourage people to subscribe to your email list, you’ll need an offer of some kind to give your subscriber in exchange for their email address. This is known as a lead magnet. Lead magnets are value offers which resonate with the needs of your website visitors. This could be an ebook, a video course, free download or information product of some kind and it is usually used by website owners to encourage their visitors to subscribe to their email list.

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Generating Leads

Generating leads is done through setting up a good lead magnet on your form and driving targeted traffic towards your offer. This can be done in several ways including blogging, paid advertising, social media, SEO, video marketing and so on.

On this website I generate traffic through blogging. With enough content on your site you can attract the attention of the search engines and get traffic for free. However blogging is definitely quite a slow strategy. For faster traffic you should use a paid marketing strategy. Platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube allow you to target your visitors very specifically.

When using paid marketing, it’s a good idea to send people to a landing page specifically built with the purpose of collecting emails in mind. This reduces the number of visitors who will simply click away after you have paid for them to land on your website! By cross testing a number of similar landing pages, you can optimise for performance so you can get the cheapest cost per lead possible.

Cross testing landing pages to optimise for performance

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Getting Paid

To actually get paid for generating leads you’ll need a product or service to sell to your subscribers. Affiliates choose from many different affiliate products available online and promote it through their unique affiliate link.

Automate a number of follow up messages through your autoresponder and help your subscribers solve a particular problem. For example, if your subscribers want help in earning from an online business, you can offer a course. Use your emails to help educate your subscribers and sell a related affiliate product through your link.

To get started as an affiliate you need to join an affiliate program and get your own unique affiliate link. Once you have it, you can promote it through your email list.

With high ticket affiliate courses and subscription products which pay out recurring commissions, you can earn considerably more than with most other products. Access a training resource to learn more here.

Summary

To get paid to generate leads you’ll need an email autoresponder. Get one free here. You’ll also need a giveaway offer to encourage your visitors to opt in to your email list. This can be an ebook or some kind of downloadable product. Some affiliate programs will even give you something you can use as a giveaway to help you build your email list.

Next you’ll need a marketing platform of some kind. You can use blogging, pay per click marketing or some other method to generate website traffic and send it to your offer. Many affiliate use landing pages because they can optimise their page for the most amount of sign ups at the lowest cost. See why use landing pages.

As visitors start landing on your offer page, and some will sign up to your offer. It can take some time before this happens but the better you become at marketing, the faster this will happen.

Once on your email list you need to offer something of value and you should make good on the promise you offer to your subscribers. Whether you are offering some free information, a pdf report and ebook or whatever, make sure you follow up with some high quality, relevant information to get your subscribers to keep opening your emails!

When they start to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy. Get this book, it’s one of the best I’ve found on this topic:

And join this course, it’s the best one I found online!

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online using a clever business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers earn commissions by promoting other people’s products through their unique affiliate links. When a sale is made, it is tracked back to the third party “affiliate” who referred it. They receive a commission based on the sale. Some commissions can be as much as 50% and some can be as little as 1%.

Physical products, for example tend to pay lower rates of commission than digital products. So if you become an affiliate on Amazon, for example, you can promote items and earn anywhere from 1% to 20% on their range of products. Digital products pay more because there are fewer costs involved in delivering a digital product. Therefore the savings can be passed on to the advertisers (affiliates). With a digital product someone can purchase from anywhere in the world and access the product immediately over the internet. Examples of digital products are ebooks, online courses and software products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

To earn commissions selling products online you first need to find a product you want to promote. There’s a huge variety of affiliate products to choose from and you can find them in pretty much any topic you can think of. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and other major online marketplaces offer affiliate programs you can join and promote a huge variety of products.

Once you have chosen a product to promote, join the relative affiliate program which lets you promote it (through your affiliate link). In any affiliate program you will get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can access your unique affiliate link and use that to send buyers to the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn commissions based on what you sell.

There’s many ways in which affiliate promote their links. You can become a blogger, use an email marketing service or promote through you social media platforms. You can create a YouTube channel or run paid advertising. Checkout this article: 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

You can pick any marketing strategy you like according to your needs. If, for example you have a busy lifestyle and not much time, you might prefer to use paid advertising to drive traffic to a landing page. From there, collect subscribers on an email list and promote your products automatically through your marketing list.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of time and not much money, you can choose a marketing strategy based around content creation instead. Blogging and video blogging are two such strategies used by affiliates to draw in website traffic to send to affiliate products. There’s also unpaid social media marketing strategies you can use too.

Choose a platform such as Facebook or Twitter, and focus on finding people in your target audience who might be interested in your product .

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Most Lucrative Products To Sell

As I already mentioned, some products pay as little as 1% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of that particular product in order to make it worth your while. Digital products tend to pay more – typically 30-40%. But there’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products to consider too. These are products which pay much more per sale than your average item.

Subscription products are a good idea too. These are products which carry ongoing monthly fees; many of them pay the affiliate an ongoing recurring commission for sales they have referred. So even with fewer sales of both high ticket and recurring commission products, you can earn more as an affiliate than with low value “one off” commissions.

Here’s an example of some high ticket products: Even at 8% commission, you can earn a nice commission if you manage to sell one of these products. With high ticket items, you can earn more even with fewer sales.

earn online from sales of other people's products

Summary

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online by becoming an affiliate marketer and joining an affiliate program. Once you have joined you will be able to promote products offer by that particular program. Amazon for example has an affiliate program anyone can join. You can then promote products from Amazon and earn from those sales.

There’s many different affiliate products you can choose from and some are more lucrative than others. For example, recurring income affiliate products and high ticket items will generally let you earn more per sale than the standard low value physical product you might find on Amazon.

There’s also many ways to promote affiliate products. From blogging, to video marketing, pay per click advertising, email marketing and social media strategies. You can even promote affiliate products offline in a variety of ways. Providing you send your customers through your affiliate link, where they purchase a product, you can earn from those referrals.

Learn more about affiliate marketing and get started here.