AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Wealth Mindset Coach

If you’re looking for a wealth mindset coach, checkout my new website money mindset coach and sign up to my email list. You’ll get daily inspiration in the form of mindset questionnaires, pdfs and ideas for new income streams. You can also access my ebook Shift Your Money Mindset:

So why would someone want a mindset coach anyway? In this article I’ll explain why your money mindset is so important and why it can be your greatest asset or biggest liability.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Affiliate Marketing

Since this website is about affiliate marketing I’ll give it a quick mention here. Affiliate marketing allows anyone to make money differently. Most people get a job to create a steady income. They build their lives around that job, and become dependant on it. A job only pays you when you are working. If you stop working, you stop getting paid. So it’s the ultimate trap.

If you’ve ever felt trapped in a job you’ll understand what I mean. If you start a family and get a mortgage, you’re all the more trapped by your income source. But with affiliate marketing you can escape this trap. You can earn money through the sale of other people’s products and services. What’s even better is that you can ultimately keep getting paid when you stop working, if you’ve put in the work beforehand and are able to generate traction.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible forms of independent income and anyone can do it in their own time around existing employment.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Your Subconscious Mind

If you’ve ever felt stuck in some way, you can be assured that the subconscious mind is playing a part in it. Even with huge effort, unless you change things on the “inside” you will come up against some subconscious programming which is too powerful to overcome with your physical efforts alone. You may have been thinking things such as “the rich are greedy”, “I don’t deserve financial freedom”, “I’m not worthy” and so on. If so, you’ve probably been programming your subconscious mind with ideas which stop you increasing your financial abundance.

If you have such conflict internally, you’ll sabotage your best efforts to create more abundance. To get under the “hood” of your subconscious mind notice how you think about money, wealth, the rich, and yourself. There’s likely to be some negative ideas there. How was your early years and what messages did you hear from your parents around the subject of money?

Most of your unconscious programming went in before you were 10 years old. This means you’re acting out programs which you’re totally unaware of. The first step is to bring more conscious awareness to this programming.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Financial Intelligence

Most of us haven’t been taught financial intelligence. Most people earn their income, pay their bills and spend what’s left. The wealthy think differently. They know to pay themselves first, before they pay anything. This means they automatically set aside money for savings before anything else.

Over time their savings grow and they have money for more opportunities such as business ventures, property or investments.

This habit also teaches them to live below their means – when most will do the opposite. The wealthy know that this discipline will put more money in their savings and investments, even if it means living to a lower standard than they potentially can.

You can spend some time learning about how you spend money with a simple strategy. Simply carry a pen and notepad for a week and jot down everything you spend money on. From your groceries to small purchases. You’ll learn a lot about your spending habits. It’s crazy how we can become accustomed to spending a fortune on entertainment, booze or tobacco, and neglect to learn about our financial intelligence or invest in our health.

Assets & Liabilities – Robert Kiyosaki

In Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad, he outlines the differences in how the poor and the rich think. Most people think their car, for example, is an asset. But Kiyosaki says that real assets bring money in while liabilities cost money. So in fact a car is a liability. A house can also be a liability too, if money flows out because of it. Assets are things like businesses, property and investments which make money. Liabilities are things which cost money. The wealthy know to reduce their liabilities and increase their assets.

Access my free ebook “Shift Your Money Mindset” here.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Wondering how to grow your affiliate marketing business? There’s many ways you can grow your affiliate business. By focusing on getting more traffic and sales, you can grow a business. But there’s other ways to grow your business too, and it’s by growing and developing yourself.

Your business will never outgrow the thinking you’re bringing to it. So if your thinking is somehow limited, your business will reflect that. One way to grow your mindset is to get around other affiliates through an online community of growth orientated online entrepreneurs. Learn more here and get a mentor.

“You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with” – Jim Rohn. Are you surrounded by entrepreneurs who are pushing you to grow and exceed your expectations. Or are the people around you limiting you with their ideas, habits and beliefs?

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – The 80/20 Rule

Pareto’s principle states that the 80% of your results come from only 20% of your activities. As an affiliate marketer your job is to discover what 20% of your activities are generating most of your results and do more of that! If you’re new to affiliate marketing you might be at the stage where you haven’t got results yet. If so it’s a case of following some training and “failing forwards”. This means keep trying things to give you feedback. Armed with some positive feedback you can use Pareto’s principle – the 80/20 rule.

This rule is very significant to affiliates because a lot of work can amount to not much in the way of results. But once you discover a strategy which gives you sales, you can focus your work on those areas. This is why tracking your sales is so important. If you don’t track sales, you can’t focus on the activities which brought about your results.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Focus “On” The Business, Not “In” The Business.

As someone who has transitioned from employment into affiliate marketing, I’ve made the same mistakes a lot will make. It’s easy to become a technician in a business, doing the day to day superficial activities which make you feel like you’re busy (and productive), but which don’t drive your business towards the heights you really want, or “move the needle” as Sabri Suby puts it in his book “Sell Like Crazy”.

This is an easy trap to fall into for affiliates and I’ve personally wasted a lot of time on small activities which don’t “move the needle”! But by becoming aware of this, you can see the bigger picture and focus on more meaningful action steps!

Another great resource you should get is

In Michael Gerber’s book you’ll discover some of the reasons which hold you from growing your affiliate business and what you can do about it.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Small Steps Grand Vision

While just dreaming about your large affiliate business won’t make it so, just taking tiny steps might not get you there either. While daily actions steps are fundamental to your success, it’s also important to zoom out and see the larger picture. For example, is your current strategy scalable? Are you using high ticket and subscription products which give you a greater outcome for the same/similar amount of work? Are you using an email list and building a source of traffic which you control, rather than simply trusting Google for traffic? Are you getting the help and support of a community/mentors and coaches?

It’s useful to look at why you started affiliate marketing in the first place. Was it to make a small income or a large one? Is your current strategy taking you to where you want to go? If the answer is “no”, it might be time to pause and have a think.

I’ve personally found that I become overwhelmed with too much information. It stalls me, so the first thing I do every day is write a blog post! That way, I’ve already done something useful before I can get confused and overdosed with information. But still, blogging isn’t as scalable as PPC (pay per click) but it’s not as expensive either!

Focus on the big picture often (of what you want to create with your affiliate business for your life), but zoom back into the day and take the small daily step towards your vision! Grow “you” as well as your business and grow your thinking because that’s the ultimate “glass ceiling” of your business.

Technical Stuff

There’s loads of technical stuff on this website too. Checkout some of my posts of the things you can actually do to promote and grow your business technically:

How to get generate website traffic free
How to increase your opt in rate
How to grow your email list
PPC vs Organic traffic
High ticket affiliate marketing products
Subscription affiliate programs

But I’d say your mindset is the most important asset or liability you can bring to your affiliate business:

Get help and support and access to a range of high ticket and subscription related affiliate products.

Summary

So, how can you grow your affiliate business to levels beyond your imagination? Well, your imagination is the limit and if you continue to think the way you are, you’ll likely experience similar results. To change your thinking, read the books I’ve recommended in this post. Join a community and get help and support. Surround yourself with those who think bigger than you and who have achieved what you want to achieve. Continue to upgrade yourself by attending regular webinars and connecting with like minded people who lift you up!

On the “ground” (the technical stuff), you can implement strategies and techniques to increase your website traffic such as PPC (pay per click) advertising, creating content, sharing on social media and building an email list. Keep learning and improving and when the results start flowing, focus on the 20% of your actions which bring about those results! Affiliate marketing can be tough, but so are you! Before you know it, you business will be booming!

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources

Welcome to my affiliate marketing tools and resources page. I started learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s and over the last several years I’ve picked up several tools and resources which have helped me massively.

On this page I’m going to list the tools I’ve found the most helpful in building an affiliate business.

So here’s a few affiliate marketing tools and resources to help you on your affiliate journey!

Webinar – Access this affiliate marketing webinar
Sign up for a free video series – what types of affiliate products are the best!
Get access to an autoresponder completely free!
Access the best landing page software
Need more traffic – get a push notification software here
Get help and support with an online business from scratch here.
Help with SEO, content marketing, link building etc, access here.
SEM Rush – tools for any SEO challenge

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources – Training & Mentorship

One of the best products I’ve bought online is access to an online training and mentoring community. Still today, I learn from this group of online marketing, affiliates and mentors through various online groups. You can access through clicking on the image below.

You’ll find Stuart on the video. I met him in 2014 and he’s been a huge inspiration to me in affiliate marketing. One of the best things I learned was that I could achieve far more in less time if I chose to promote high ticket and subscription affiliate products, which I now do from this website.

Checkout this video here to meet Stuart and get started with the training. Even though I was already an affiliate when I found Stu, I decided to start from scratch and empty my “cup” again. He also offers a great starting place if you’re completely new to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources – Email Autoresponder

An email autoresponder has also been a massive game changer for me. I didn’t understand how affiliates were able to make such large numbers of sales. When I started using email marketing, this changed. With an email list, you can build a relationship over a longer period of time with subscribers. This is much more difficult from a website. Most website visitors are gone in a few minutes, usually forever! So capturing their email address is key to long term success.

You can access Aweber, the email autoresponder I use here. It’s totally free for up to 500 subscribers (at the time of writing). Stick with it until you have at least 1000 subscribers since this before this is the point most affiliates will drop out.

Landing Page Software – Allows You To Cross Test And Optimise Your Sales Funnel

The landing page building is another awesome tool any serious affiliate should invest in. This tool is super fast and this means you’ve more chance of lowering your lead cost. You can also split test and copy existing websites and pages you already own and duplicate them to create funnels easily.

Push Notification Software

A push notification software allows your visitors to opt in to new posts you publish directly from your website. So if you’re a blogger, this is a “must”. I’ve had a heap of traffic, leads and sales simply from adding this plugin to my site.

It’s a little like having an email list, only people sign up to get notified of new content as you publish it. When they log in, if you’ve published a new post, a notification appears on their desktop and leads them back to your website.

Start for free and as you collect more subscribers your rate goes up. It’s worth it though if you’re publishing regularly on your blog! You’ll get a lot more repeat visitors coming back to your site.

SEO Outsourcing Help

I’ve never been great at link building so outsourcing this has been a huge relief. I used this company and they did a great job, building content and back linking to my websites. They were super helpful and not at all “salesy” on the phone.

Plus they have some free tools and are always able to give you a free assessment if you’re looking to outsource some of your SEO.

SEM Rush

SEM Rush offers a great platform for anyone wanting more online visibility, especially from SEO. There’s a huge bunch of resources within the platform and it’s especially helpful if you’re optimising content and looking for free traffic.

SEM Rush offer tools for research on your competition, keyword research, link building, on-page, off-page and technical SEO. They’ll analyse your best performing pages and find those which are laying just beneath page one of Google. This is one of the best tools because it lets you focus on a strategy for SEO which gives you quick results by letting you know the best pages to improve for maximum exposure for the smallest changes.

Presell Page For Affiliate Marketing

The presell page for affiliate marketing is a page created to “warm up” a customer before sending them to a sales page/product. A good example of a presell page is a product review. Product reviews attract customers who are already in the last stage of the buying cycle.

They are simply looking for some information about a product before they make the final decision to buy something. So if you create a great product review about some item you’ve personally bought and benefited from, that would make a great pre-sell page.

In this example the customer has read your review of a product. They might even relate to your experience and trust your article if you’re genuine and sincere. In this scenario, they are much more likely to go on and purchase the product, having read your favourable review.

If they had only seen the sales page, they may not have all the information they needed to make the final decision to buy. So they might have some more questions which need answering before they make that decision.

This is why the presell page for affiliate marketing is so important. One affiliate might send someone directly to a product, through a paid ad, for example. If the customer isn’t certain about their purchase, they will look for a review of it! They find a review article created by another affiliate (the pre-sell page) and that affiliate makes the sale! Hence the power of the pre-sell page.

PreSell Page For Affiliate Marketing – The Pre-Sell Video

The pre sell page concept is used well on YouTube too with a pre-sell video. With a video you can set the scene for building rapport, communicating to your viewers through use of pain points of your target market customer persona.

If you target your advert carefully, and do some work on your customer avatar, you can find people and speak to the pains and problems they have, building rapport. Once you connect with your viewers they are much more likely to take some positive action, such as sign up to your email list or purchase the product you recommend.

The Pre-Sell Format

The pre-sell format is as follows:

Intro
Hook
Problem
Solution

In a YouTube video, the into is pretty important. After a few seconds most people will click “skip video” to get to their content. The rest who stay are who spend your advertising budget on. So you need to pre-qualify them as interested parties before you pay to show them your advert. The first few seconds of a video advert usually has an intro and a hook.

You’ll then see the problem presented (associated with a pain point). In the video ad I created on YouTube, the pain point was one I experienced struggling getting work and paying the bills. The solution presented is the internet business I found and the call to action in my video is to join my email list and access the free video series I offer!

Summary

It’s definitely worth using a pre-sell page for affiliate marketing. Sending traffic directly to a sales page doesn’t always result in a sale.

Think about the information the customer consumes just before they decide to buy something. Often this is a review or some piece of information which assures them the product is genuine. Is the product going to be a suitable fit for their needs?

Think about what you look at just before you buy a product/service online. Notice your own behaviour and it can give you clues you can use in your affiliate business. For more marketing tips visit digital marketing mentors or sign up on this website to learn about building a from scratch online business.

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!