AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money

Yes! You can make your own website for free and earn money from it. One of the fastest ways to build a free website is using a free website builder. Sites such as Wix.com, WordPress.com, Web.com offer a means to easily create a website from which to sell something. However some platforms will charge a small nominal amount for hosting of your site. So if you want a totally free website I would recommend Weebly.com. It lets you set up a free site in minutes and start creating content.

Here’s an example of a Weebly website I built totally free of charge:

Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Downsides

The downside to using a free website builder such as Weebly is that your domain name will look something like this: https://leedswingchun.weebly.com/. This can be a problem because if you want anyone to come visit your website, you’ll need to promote it somehow. Unless you pay for advertising, you’ll need to attract the attention of the search engines so your site can appear on Google, Duckduckgo.com, Bing etc.

This is much harder with a Weebly website because the search engines are less likely to rank it. Google prefers owner domains because they are generally of higher quality. But if you’re willing to purchase a domain name of your own, you can do this for a small for (less than $10 yearly) and point it to your weebly site.

It’s well worth this small expense because your own domain can give you more credibility and authority with your website visitors. Still, Weebly is a good option if you haven’t ever built a website and want to learn some new skills without breaking the bank.

Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Choosing Your Niche

To monetise a website you can join an affiliate program and promote affiliate products from your site. However, you will need to attract traffic to your website if you want to make any sales. Unless you’re going to pay for traffic, you’re going to need to create content to bring people to your site for free from the search engines. To give yourself a better chance of earning online, it’s a good idea to choose your niche. That is, the topic or area in which you’re going to be writing/blogging/creating video content around.

make your own website for free and make money

Sadly, it’s very tricky attracting a large audience to a free website with no content on it. You have to ask yourself “why would someone come and visit your website?”. The answer for free traffic is to create some content which attracts your target audience. To define who this is, you need to get clear on your niche and the product/s you’re going to be promoting on your website.

A good idea is to find a niche in which you have an interest or a passion. When you know about something, it’s a much easier task to create content in that particular topic. If you’re uncertain, you could choose a topic in which you would like to learn. That way, you can create content in your topic while you’re learning!

Make Your Own Website For Free And Earn Money – Monetising

Now you have your free website and your niche decided, you will need a product to sell from your site in order to monetise it. There’s literally thousands of affiliate products available online to choose from. Amazon is often a first port of call but it isn’t the only place to find affiliate products. In fact, Amazon pays pretty poorly with only a 1%-10% commission rate in most instances. Clickbank is another popular choice for new affiliates and there’s thousands of products you can choose from on the site.

You can also search on Google for “{your niche} affiliate program”, inserting your topic/niche into the search. This should bring up products which are relevant for your particular area of expertise. For example, if you were creating a website around the topic of cycling, you would look for “cycling affiliate programs”. Here’s a site I found for cycling affiliate programs.

Find a product or products which you genuinely would recommend. This will give you more credibility and you’ll be much happier recommending those kinds of products.

Make Your Own Website For Free And Make Money – Your Target Audience

Once you have chosen an affiliate program you can grab an affiliate link, banners and other sales materials from it and post them on your site. This means you now have a way to monetise website visitors in a completely hands free way!

But the journey is only beginning! You still have to get people to visit your website. not only that, but you want to attract the kinds of visitors who are going to want the things you’re promoting – your target audience. The target audience is very important for affiliate marketers because there’s millions of people who can see your website once it’s published and online. That’s not to say they will see it, but you don’t want to spend time and energy getting the wrong kinds of visitors to your site.

Spend some time thinking about who is most likely to want what you’re selling and then about what content they would be most interested in. See customer avatar worksheet for more on this topic. Once you understand your customer avatar, you can save yourself a heap of time by creating only that content which will attract the right kind of visitor.

Getting Traffic

There’s lot of free ways to get traffic to your website. One of the most common strategies is to create written content through blogging. For ideas for blog posts you can use Google’s free keyword planner. This free tool lets you see the kinds of searches which are being done within your particular niche.

Once you have created several blog posts you can promote them for free using social media and through linking back to them from other sites. Many bloggers also build a YouTube channel and post relevant videos to attract their target audience. They send them to their website where they can sell their affiliate products. You can of course test out some paid marketing strategies, but since this post is about free strategies to make sales, here’s a few other free strategies you can use for traffic:

Post your content on social media platforms (this can be automated with free plugin tools)
Link back to your content from other websites through guest posting and blog commenting
Post videos on YouTube/TikTok and link back to your website
Use Quora.com to answer questions in your niche and link back to your website. See affiliate marketing on Quora.

Building An Email List

Another way to make the most of your website traffic when it starts coming in is through building an email list of subscribers. Since most website visitors won’t buy from your immediately, it can be an idea to collect their email addresses from your website and keep in touch with them via email messages.

This is done though offering some useful giveaway on your website, such as an ebook, training course or some other “value add” for your website visitors. Once you have learned how to build an email list, you can update your subscribers when you publish new website content. This leads them back to your products which you showcase on your site. Or, link directly to affiliate products through your email messages.

You can access a email autoresponder service for free through this link.

Expectations

To make your own website for free and earn money from it does take some time and effort. But once you have built the infrastructure, you can work on traffic generation in your own time. If you make good habits out of creating and sharing your content, over time you should start to see a growth in your traffic, leads and ultimately sales of your affiliate products.

How long this takes will depend on a number of things such as your niche, the competition and the habits you build into your daily schedule. See also how long does it take to make money from affiliate marketing.

There are of course faster ways of generating an income online but they are typically involve a greater investment. Learn more about affiliate marketing through the free video series available through signing up on this website for email alerts.

How To Sell Solutions Not Products

Have you heard about how to sell solutions not products? After all, nobody wants the product, not really. They want what the product can give them. They want the outcome!

The person who buys the online Yoga course wants the yoga body or to get fit and feel purposeful. They don’t really want 100 hours of videos to wade through. Just as the person who buys the gym membership doesn’t really want to commit to turning out at a warehouse full of gym equipment. They actually want to get fit, otherwise they wouldn’t buy the membership.

The person who buys an “online business system” doesn’t do it for the features. They do it for the outcome it can give them – more time and financial freedom. What’s more appealing, is it to “Buy 100 hours of online video training” or “Quit your job and live a life of freedom“?!

It’s definitely the latter.

How To Sell Solutions Not Products: Benefits Not Features

The solution is the benefit and the product is the feature. You may have heard of using benefits not features in advertising. The benefit is the outcome desired from purchasing the product. So when you’re selling it’s important not to get too focused on what the features are. For example, on this website I promote an online business education platform. It gives you the tools to build an online business from scratch.

There’s many ways I could promote this product which would seem relevant but actually are unappealing to most people:

“Access 100’s of hours of online training videos“, “Get the tools, education and training to build an online business“. These are features and I’ve neglected to mention why you would want to do this!

As Simon Sinek says in his book “Start With Why”.

With a strong enough “why” you can overcome almost any “how”! This is why as advertisers we should focus on the outcome which is desired by the customer, rather than the features of the product.

Therefore a better tagline for my sales pitch might be one of these: “Create a life you love”, or “Build a life, not just a business”, or “Quit your job, become a lifestyle entrepreneur”!

How To Sell Solutions Not Products – The Outcome

To delve into why your customers buy what you’re selling you can start by looking at the pain points which your particular product/s solve. What are your customers problems and how can your products solve them?

Once you better understand your customers, you can focus on the main attribute which your product delivers according to their needs. If you attract customers who are a bad fit for your products, you need to change your marketing in some way.

Ideally you should be attracting the kind of customers who want what you have because your product fulfils their need.

Your USP – Unique Selling Proposition

The USP is an important branding point of most successful businesses. They succinctly tell the customer in a short phrase what their business is about and the value it delivers. Here’s a few USP’s of famous brands you may have heard of:

Hallmark “When you care enough to send the very best”

Dyson “The only vacuum cleaner in the world to maintain 100% suction, 100% of the time”

The New York Times “All the news that’s fit to print”.

Tag-lines work for brands because they distill the unique selling point of the product/company into a phrase which can be shared throughout the branding.

Summary

To sell solutions not products you need to identify your customers needs and talk to their pain points. Don’t talk to the features of the product. Instead talk about what the desirable outcome is for the customer. This speaks more directly to the needs of your customers. Talking about the features of your products can even be off putting, especially if it confuses the potential customer.

When you understand the needs of your customer, and how your products can meet those needs, you’re better able to sell with the solutions your products offer. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf to understand your customer better.

Generate Website Traffic Free

You can generate website traffic free using a number of strategies. One of the best ways to generate free traffic is through content creation. By crafting content which targets specific keywords, you can even rank on the top of Google for your certain keyword phrases. If you manage this, it can give you free traffic not only from Google, but the other search engines (Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo etc.).

But you can’t rank for any term. You have to be selective because there’s a lot of competition for the most searched for keyword phrases. More on this later.

Another simple strategy to get free traffic is to build a niche website. Niche websites are built around specific keywords to give them an advantage in the SERPS (search engine results pages). This site, for example, has been built around the terms affiliate marketing mentors. So some of my traffic comes from this keyword search on Google.

There’s other tactics which bloggers use to get more traffic to their website too. You can build an email list, use push notifications and various plugins on your site to build a larger audience. You can build backlinks to your content and promote it yourself throughout your social media presence. All of these strategies can help your SEO too, which can give your site a boost in the eyes of Google to help it move up the rankings for various keywords.

Generate Website Traffic Free – The Niche Website

A niche website is built specifically around a keyword of your choice. By using a keyword planner, you can see which terms are used when looking for your particular niche. By finding and targeting longer tail keywords with less competition on the SERPS, you can rank a website on or near the top. I used Google’s keyword planner to identify the main keyword to build this site around (affiliate marketing mentors).

You can do this is any niche. Just type your main seed keyword into the planner and it will give you hundreds of keywords which are already being searched for on Google. Identify one which gives you some traffic which you think has low competition. You can see the competition on Google with a basic search. You’ll see a number at the top of the page like this:

This number should give you an idea of the relative competitiveness of your keyword. When you find a good keyword which gets traffic, but which isn’t very competitive, you have a good fit for a niche website. Build your site around your chosen domain name which has your keyword in it.

This tactic still works and can give you an advantage when it comes to ranking a website.

Generate Website Traffic Free – Finding Long Tail Keywords For Blog Posts

The next step is to create some awesome content for your website. If you already have a website, this tactic can work well. It’s basically the same idea as I just shared. You find longer tail keywords with low competition. Use your main keyword again in the keyword planner, and choose other (long tail) keyword ideas which come up. Write lengthy articles using your chosen keywords as article titles.

I use an SEO plugin when I write my articles to help me write search engine friendly content. This gives you more chance of your content doing well on the SERPS – search engine results pages. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of my favourite plugins.

By using this tactic for all your blog posts, you will be able to get some of them ranking on the search engines and this will give you some free traffic. This does take some time and dedication and those keywords which have the least competition typically have less traffic, so it’s a long term plan. But by creating a lot of content on your site, you’ll start to see your SEO score improve and your site should move up the rankings.

Generate Website Traffic Free – Content Promotion

After publishing a great piece of content it can be easy to rest on your laurels and sit back waiting for traffic. But you shouldn’t expect traffic to come from your posts because Google might not rank you for them. If it does, think of this as a bonus, but don’t expect it! So to get people to your blog posts, you’ll need to do some work in promoting it.

There’s a few free plugins which work wonders here and can save you heaps of time:

Revive Old Posts – lets you automatically syndicate your blog posts throughout your social media presence
Push Engage – is a push plugin which lets you notify subscribers of your new posts automatically
Social media share plugins – let your visitors share your content on their social media feeds
Postplanner.com – similar plugin to Revive Old Posts and lets you automate sharing of your content

You can also promote your blog posts manually using sites such as Quora.com. Quora.com lets you post answers to questions and you can leave links in your answers too. Link back to your relevant content on your blog. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Link Building & Blog Promotion

You can also write guest post articles on certain blogs which allow you to link back to your site. The more links you build back to your site the better for your SEO, providing they are from good quality and authority websites in your niche.

Quora links are no-follow which means they don’t count towards your Google SEO score. However the links themselves can bring you a certain amount of free traffic. You can also leave comments on other people’s blogs to link back to your site.

Links are a major signal to Google about the quality of your site. A good link profile should show that people are naturally linking to your content over time. But you can build links yourself using blog commenting, guest post writing and through using question and answer forums such as Quora.com.

Email Marketing

If you’re wanting free traffic you should definitely get an email autoresponder and start collecting emails from your site when people visit it. (You can get an email service provider here for free).

Email marketing puts you in control of your traffic. Since winning traffic through content creation takes a lot of work, and paying for traffic is expensive, it serves you well to get the most out of your traffic.

To do this, you can collect subscribers from your website by offering some kind of giveaway on your blog. I offer a free video series if you sign up to my email list, plus I also use some ebooks on this website as giveaways.

Ideally your giveaway should align with your product/service and be a good match for the interests of your visitors. Once you start building an email list, you can send your subscribers back to content on your website. By offering a useful service through email marketing, you can build up a base of loyal fans who are interested in your content.

Summary

I’ve always been passionate about generating website traffic for free! It can take some time and dedication to do but it’s incredibly rewarding when it starts trickling in. Once you hit upon a strategy which works for you, you can simply keep doing it again and again!

Free traffic can be tough, especially in a competitive niche, so don’t give up if you don’t get immediate results. In the niche of affiliate marketing it has been a long road to generate even a little stream of traffic through blogging. But once you have a few trickles of traffic from a certain strategy, you can rinse and repeat it. Soon enough you’ll have streams and then rivers!

Did I miss anything? Write in the comments if so.

I didn’t mention that YouTube and TikTok are great ways to generate traffic too. You can upload videos tag them with your keywords and send traffic back to your blog. It’s also a good idea to stick with a certain strategy for some time. I stuck at Quora for a while, posting answers and linking back to my websites. Even now years later I still get traffic from work I did ages ago on Quora.com Although many of my answers were collapsed (Quora can be strict), many of them still give me another trickle of traffic.

Social media can be a great source of traffic too. Checkout my post on unpaid social media marketing.

How To Increase Leads On A Website

Wondering how to increase leads on a website? On a website most visitors will leave within a few minutes never to return. Unless you capture their email address by offering some free giveaway, such as an ebook, most of your traffic won’t convert into a sale.

Website owners know this and that’s why they will attempt to get website visitors to enter their details into a form. Once they have captured the visitor’s email address, they can follow up over a much longer time period. They can build trust and connect with their subscribers multiple times over weeks, months and years!

To get website visitors to join your list, you need some kind of offer. Ebooks, PDF’s and video courses are typically the “legitimate bribes” offered on a website. They encourage people to opt in to your email list.

But before this can happen you first need website traffic.

How To Increase Leads On A Website – Get More Traffic

While more traffic will invariably give you more leads, getting more traffic can be tough, especially if you’re creating content for that traffic. The other way to increase traffic is to pay for it using an ad platform such as Google Adwords. But this can get pricy and if you’re not getting a good return on your investment, you can easily spend a fortune without profiting.

Creating content on a website is one of the main strategies used by bloggers. With a lot of content you can attract traffic from the search engines, social media sites and through building backlinks from other websites.

One of my favourite ways to generate traffic to a website is through writing articles targeting long tail keywords. See how to increase website traffic organically for more on this strategy. More traffic doesn’t necessarily relate to more leads. You need to make sure your traffic is well targeted and aligned with your giveaway offer and of course whatever it is you’re selling.

How To Increase Leads On A Website – Increase Your Opt In Rate

Another simple way to increase the number of leads you get from a website is to increase the opt in rate. If you do this successfully, you can turn more visitors into subscribers. So even for the same number of visitors, you can get more leads. To do this you can experiment with different opt in options.

Use a popup offer on your website and show your offer on every page of your website. Use more than one offer too – you can use drop down offers, banners, links in your text and opt in forms. The more ways your visitors have to opt in to your email list, the more visitors are likely to do so.

You’ll probably see on this website I have a number of annoying popups! I have a free webinar banner which uses a drop down menu, a popup and a static form. I use banners and contextual links within my text.

How To Increase Leads On A Website – Use A Landing Page

Why use landing pages? A landing page is useful for collecting leads because it is much less busy that a normal website. On a normal website there’s a lot of copy you can read and you can browse around freely. But on a landing page there’s only two options: sign up or leave the page. This type of one page website is also known as a “squeeze page” because you’re squeezing a decision out of your visitor, or squeezing them into your email list! Here’s what a landing page looks like:

Landing pages can be tested against similar pages to optimise your opt in rate to give you the lowest cost per lead. Cross testing is one way to find the best performing page. Here’s a cross testing option in one of the pages I have built:

Two variants are tested against each other over a certain number of visitors per page. The best performing page gives you a cheaper cost per lead. You then cross test again and again trying out different elements of the page and/or targeting in your advertising.

This is much more difficult on a normal blog or website because there are too many variables. Visitors on a website can click around and look through your content. On a landing page it’s much easier to “tweak” your page until it performs at the lowest cost.

Access a landing page software here.

List Benefits Not Features

On an offer someone opts in because they see the value in your giveaway offer. So for example, if you’re promoting a free ebook, your offer title might describe the benefit of opting in a receiving your free ebook.

It’s important to know the difference between the benefit of getting your free ebook and the features of it. So for example the benefit might be:

“Make your first 10K online”

A feature of it might be:

“Over 30 pages of information about affiliate marketing”

When you showcase your offer, be sure to present the main, major benefit to your visitors. If you do this well, you should increase your opt in rate. The benefit of “making 10K online” is much easier to understand than the benefit of “reading 30 pages of something called affiliate marketing”, for example, which your visitor might know nothing about!

Summary

There’s two main things you can do to get more people signing up to your email list. You can generate more traffic and you can increase your opt in rate. Generating more traffic is considerably more difficult than increasing your opt in rate. If you use a landing page software to cross test your landing pages and optimise your opt in rate, you can drive your cost per subscriber down even further.

While this does take some testing to find your best performing landing page, once you do you’ll save a lot if you’re running paid marketing.

If you’re using content to attract your audience, you can place a few options to showcase your offer to your website visitors. Have a pop up sign up form, a static form, a drop down menu and use contextual links and banners throughout your content. The more options someone has to sign up, the more people will likely do so.

Leads For Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to collect leads for affiliate marketing is to offer something to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Most bloggers will give something away from their blog, for example. For some it’s a free ebook or downloadable file. Others offer free video courses and training videos to entice visitors to take some action and sign up to their email list.

If you haven’t already got an email autoresponder, you can access one for free. Sign up and get an autoresponder account here – this gives you the ability to collect subscribers from a website.

Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Why Build An Email List?

An email list gives you control over your traffic. Once you start building a list of subscribers, you can send them information, bring them back to your website, or send them to an affiliate product. To get traffic to a website you can either create a lot of content or pay for it. Either way, this is a cost – either your time or your money. But once you build an email list, you can tap into this asset without doing either!

landing page software affiliate marketing

Of course it can take some time and effort to build your list in the first place. One of the best ways to do this is through creating a landing page.

A landing page is a page built specifically for the purpose of collecting email subscribers. If you’re going to pay for traffic, it’s much better sending it to a landing page. If you send paid traffic to a normal website, there’s a lot more your visitors can do. They can browse around and look through your site. But on a landing page there’s only two options; sign up or leave.

This makes it easier to optimise for performance. If you’re spending money for traffic, it’s far better to turn that traffic into leads because it gives you more opportunity to sell your affiliate products to those visitors. Access a landing page builder software here.

Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Traffic Vs Leads

Most website visitors aren’t necessarily looking to buy something. Most are looking for free information. So to sell something from a website you need very targeted visitors. Review websites are a good example because visitors are often looking for a product review just before they make a buying decision. But still, they might not quite be ready to buy when they read your review. So even a review website will have a certain amount of passing traffic.

But if you can offer something of value to your website visitors, such as an ebook or video course for free, some of them will sign up to your email list and become a subscriber. This gives you more opportunity to place your products in front of them many times.

Studies have shown that it can take between 6-8 touch points before most website visitors will make a purchase. It’s difficult to create this if someone leaves your website and never returns! But capture their email address and you can build a longer term relationship through your emails if you give value and build trust.

Someone on a list can buy from you weeks, months or years after signing up!

Building Trust Through Email Marketing

Once someone signs up to your email list, you’ve entered into a contract (of sorts) with them. You have promised to deliver messages relating to their point of interest. Their reason to sign up is to receive some useful information which may be of interest to them. You may also send them to affiliate products and services which they might want.

But the main point of them signing up is for their benefit, not yours! This is worth remembering if you’re going to follow up with spammy email messages flogging your wares relentlessly! They will soon unsubscribe if you do this. Instead you should send messages which are of value and interest. If you can tie your “value add” to your affiliate products in some way, so much the better.

Ultimately, people are more likely to buy from you if you deliver value and do so consistently. Otherwise they won’t be opening your messages and they may even unsubscribe. The law of reciprocity means people will reciprocate your good intentions buy buying from you (if your products are a good fit). But only if they genuinely get to know, like and trust you!

Summary

Building leads for affiliate marketing is definitely a good idea. But you also need to make sure you are building a list which is targeted to your customer avatar. Get people on your list who aren’t a good fit for your products and you’ll struggle to make those sales.

Or, if your marketing message isn’t a good one, you can easily put people off. Build trust with a list by offering value and helping your subscribers in some way. When you do this first, and sell later, you’ll have a more authentic vibe which will naturally stand out among the spammy emails which only push products into customers faces!

Grab free access to an email autoresponder here and access a landing page software here.

Ranking For Long Tail Keywords

Ranking for long tail keywords is a simple strategy used by many bloggers. Long tail keywords have far less competition on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. So you’ve a much better chance of getting your content to rank on the top of the first page of Google. That’s where all the search traffic is! Even getting your content on the first page of Google is a challenge. But it’s much more of a challenge if you create content around competitive keywords.

That’s why bloggers find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you’re successful it means free traffic. But it’s not guaranteed that you’ll get a top place listing. To give yourself the best possible chance, use a keyword planner and choose those keywords which have the least competition on Google.

A simple method to see the competition for a possible keyword is to do a search on Google for it on a desktop computer or laptop. You should see a number at the top of your search results. This denotes the number of competing webpages brought up for that particular term. A phrase search gives you the pages which specifically relate to that term as a whole.

Ranking For Long Tail Keywords – Creating Content

The top result for your search is the best quality web page which Google thinks should rank at the very top! So all you need to do next is to create an awesome piece of content using your keyword as your blog post title.

Out perform the top existing result and create content which is longer and better than the existing top ranking. To help you do this optimally, you can use an SEO plugin which assists you with your keyword placement, links and tags. I use Yoast SEO but there’s a few other plugins which can help you with this.

Yoast will give your content a score for each SEO point which helps with your ranking. SEO (search engine optimisation) analysis includes things such as your keyword length, titles, image alt tags and links. It’s also a good idea to write a lengthy piece of content which is longer than the existing top ranking. Providing of course that your content is of high quality too!

Ranking For Long Tail Keywords – Finding The Diamonds In The Rough

Before you can write content for your keyword, you need to do some keyword research. I use Google’s keyword planner but there’s also ubersuggest. Type in your main “seed” keyword and the tools will give you a number of long tail derivatives of it. Here’s a few of the keywords which came up when I used the term long tail keyword in Ubersuggest:

Here’s a few examples from Google’s planner:

You should see the most searched for terms appear at the top of your search. To find the longer tail keywords you can scroll to the bottom of the list. As you can see in the image above, the keywords show a low monthly search volume of between 20 and 30 searches.

Although this might mean you’ll get fewer visits if you rank for those terms, a little of something is better than nothing of a lot! When you compare the competitiveness of the high search volume terms, you’ll find those terms are almost impossible to rank for.

The search term I used for this article “ranking for long tail keywords” only gets 20 monthly visits according to Google’s keyword planner.

So even if I managed to rank this article at the top of Google, I’ll still only get a share of those 20! (Some people will click on the 2nd ranking website, or the third or 4th). But by using this tactic for multiple long tail keywords, you can build many sources of traffic from multiple articles which you create. Of course there’s also Bing, Duckduckgo.com and other search engines too other than Google which account for some traffic.

How Long Does It Take?

Keep in mind that your content may not rank on Google even after you put all that work in! Once you’ve created it it’s kind of up to Google whether to rank you or not. But other search engines can also rank you too, so all is not lost! Ideally make sure your content is useful and of high quality. If it is, it’s much more likely to stand the test of time and give you some free traffic.

Ranking content on Google can take some time too. It can take days, weeks or months before your content appears depending on your site and other competition. Google uses a ranking algorithm to determine how to perceive your content:

Domain age – older domains will typically outperform newer ones
Backlink profile – how many backlinks to your site and where are they from
Content quality – how much content and how it is perceived
How visitors perceive your content – click away rate
Social media presence – is your content readily shared and interacted with?

So to give yourself the best chance of a ranking it’s also worth promoting your content as much as possible too. Don’t rely solely on Google ranking you. You can also use that content to get traffic through sharing it as much as possible. Use social media share buttons, automate share plugins and syndicate your content to as many social media platforms as you can. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Summary

Once you’ve created an awesome piece of content don’t rest on your laurels and sit back waiting for traffic! It may never come! Move on to another piece and then another.

Many pieces of content will add up and eventually you’ll have a nice steady stream of free traffic when you’ve built a lot of useful content. Make sure you promote your content too. Use an email list and send your subscribers to it. Use Push Engage to reengage visitors and bring them back to your site when they opt in. You can automate older post syndication with this free tool.

Work on building multiple sources of traffic and don’t rely on just one! Some of your content will rank and some probably won’t. I’ll check back in a few weeks and see whether this one did!

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic

There’s some free tools to increase website traffic which anyone can use. I use Yoast SEO which I believe is one of the best tools for free traffic. It helps you write SEO friendly content on your blog which is one of the best ways to build up your readership. Checkout my post on how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Long tail keywords are much less competitive than shorter terms. So if you use them and the Yoast SEO tool to help you write SEO friendly content, that’s one way to increase your traffic.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Autoresponder

If you don’t already have one, you should definitely use an autoresponder to collect emails and bring subscribers back to your content. Get a free account with up to 500 subscribers here.

The power of an autoresponder is immense. Most of your website visitors won’t return unless you capture their details and add them to your email list. Once you do, you have your own traffic supply. Most people don’t buy immediately on their first website visit either. Most will need multiple touch points before they become a customer, email marketing is a great way to do this. By sending out useful and informative emails, you can link back to new content on your website as you publish it.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Google Keyword Planner

As I mentioned above, writing content targeting long chains of keywords can give you a greater chance of getting a ranking on Google. Short tail keywords are super competitive in most niches. But long chains of keywords on a given topic in your niche can give you a nice stream of traffic if you can rank on the first page of the SERPS – search engine results pages.

To find these little goldmines you can use Google’s free keyword planner tool. You’ll need an Adwords account to use it but it’s completely free. Type your main keyword into the planner and browse for long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty on Google.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Push Engage

Push engage offers a superb option for getting more traffic to your website. It lets your website visitors opt in to receive updates on your latest posts. They will then get “push” notifications when you publish new content which brings them back to your site.

You can get a free account here which gives you up to 200 subscribers.

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Icegram

Icegram is another favourite tool of mine which is completely free and gives your visitors more options to opt in to your email list. You can use Icegram for popups, drop down banners and other form types on your website.

The more options someone has to opt in to your email list, or notice your giveaway offer, the more likely they are to do so. On this website I have a couple of options to join my email list. There’s a form, a drop down banner and a popup form – annoying I know but they work and give visitors more chance of opting in! Once on your email list you can bring them back to your site through your email marketing campaigns! Hey presto more traffic!

Free Tools To Increase Website Traffic – Revive Old Posts

While it takes some time to create content which is share worthy, it’s also a very good idea to promote your content as you publish it. This can be a vital step which is often neglected by bloggers. I was never very good at promoting my posts until I found a plugin which automated the process called Revive Old Posts.

This plugin lets you automate the sharing of your new and older posts on your blog. It’s a no brainer if you’re a blogger! There’s also other plugins which do a similar job such as Postplanner.

Social Media Share Buttons & Feeds

Social media share buttons are definitely a good idea if you want to encourage more people to visit your website. You’re going to be working hard to get people to your site, and in crafting your content! So if you give visitors the option of easily sharing your posts to social media, why would you miss this important step! There’s many social media share plugins but here’s one I use called Ultimate Social Media Share Icons.

Social media share feeds can also be a good idea and help with your SEO. They connect your social media account with your blog and give you more social proof that you’re an active site.

Cloudflare – Web Speed Optimisation

There’s various plugins you can find which will speed up your website. Google loves speed! Many website visitors will click away if your website doesn’t load quickly enough. If this happens on your website, Google will notice and start to downgrade your content on their search algorithm accordingly. It doesn’t want to send people to slow websites which take ages to load!

With sites getting ever faster to load, it pays to keep yours optimised. Cloudflare’s plugin lets you optimise your site for speed automatically.

Quality Content

While many of these tools will help you either bring back visitors to your site or get your visitors sharing content, they won’t do that unless you are offering some genuine value in your content. Google’s algorithm is pretty intelligent and they will know if your visitors are clicking away, sharing and linking to your blog posts. They won’t do it if they first can’t find it or if they don’t see your content as valuable or helpful. So the first place to start is with creating some awesome high quality content on your site.

The tools listed here will help you bring back visitors or get your content found. Building a lot of quality content is a good idea first, since that’s the foundation of what you’re building on a website.

As you build more and more quality content, it should start getting found on the search engines. But don’t rely on this, especially if your website is new. Build an email list, drive traffic through social media and pay for traffic too if you can. With multiple streams and sources for your traffic, you’re less likely to get caught out if something dramatic changes using only one strategy!

Many a website owner has lost much of their traffic overnight when Google changes their algorithm and downgrades their site. So diversify your traffic sources and build quality content!

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing

Wondering how to make money using email marketing? In this post I’m going to share the nuts and bolts of email marketing and explain some of the best ways to make money through sending out emails.

On a website, visitors come and go in a matter of minutes. When they go, they’re gone forever! But once you get your website visitors onto your email list, you can keep in touch with them for months and even years. This is one of the major benefits of building an email list. Not only can you build an email list into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but you can also build relationships with your subscribers over a longer period than is possible from a website.

When you have something useful to share with your audience, you can build trust by delivering value in your email messages. When you tie a specific purpose to something you can sell, you’re on to a means to make money on autopilot. Here’s how it’s done.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Affiliate Marketing

To build an email list you need an email autoresponder. An autoresponder lets anyone collect email addresses from a website or landing page. Marketers do this so that they can sell affiliate products through email messages. What’s an affiliate product you might ask? Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone sell someone else’s product for a share of the revenue. Affiliate products can be found online in almost every topic. This makes them perfect to sell through email marketing.

Once you join an affiliate program, you can choose a product and sell it through an affiliate link. Sales are tracked back to your referral link and you earn a commission for any referrals. To sell affiliate products online affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list. You can earn a full time income from selling affiliate products through email marketing messages.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing -Your “Target” Audience

Since there’s so many people online, it’s a good idea to start with your target audience. Your target audience for affiliate marketing is the small sub-section of the online marketplace who is most likely to buy your product. Depending on what you decide to sell you’ll need to research your prospective customer base. As an affiliate you can choose to sell pretty much anything you can find to buy online. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can sell it and earn commissions from sales you generate.

But to find “your people” for a certain product, you need to understand your customer avatar. The customer avatar is the type of person who is most likely to want or need your particular product. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf. Once you understand who this is, what their online behaviour is like, you’re in a much better position to find them online with your marketing and send them to your email list.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Building Your Email List

Get yourself an autoresponder and access the dashboard. Here you’ll be able to find a form which you can place somewhere online – such as on your website, if you have one. If you don’t have a website, you can build a free site using Weebly.com to put your form on.

To encourage website visitors to join your email list you need a “lead magnet”. A lead magnet is any kind of free giveaway which you can use to encourage visitors to join your list. Typically marketers will use an ebook, free pdf download or some other form of value add. I use a free video series on this website where you can learn about how to build a from scratch online business.

How To Make Money Using Email Marketing – Driving Traffic

Now you have a form on your website, you can send targeted traffic towards your site and attract people towards your form. This can be done in several ways but the main two are through content creation and paid marketing.

With a paid marketing platform, most marketers will use a landing page software so that they get the most out of their marketing budget and they can optimise their landing page. Why use landing pages? With a normal website there can be a lot of visitors who don’t take action and sign up to your form. So they’ll leave without having joined your list. With a landing page software you can optimise for performance by cross testing your pages against other similar ones to find the best performing page for list building.

The other method of driving traffic is through content creation. This blog post for example is an example of content driven traffic. With a lot of content on a website (or video channel) affiliates can drive traffic by being found on the search engine results pages of Google (and other search engines). Free traffic is notoriously more difficult than paid traffic. Paid traffic is fast, and much more scalable. But you will need a marketing budget to learn and build up your campaigns to make them profitable.

Sending Out Email Messages On Autopilot

One of the main advantages of email marketing is that it can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With affiliate products, you can sell to anyone from anywhere in the world. By queueing up email messages in your autoresponder, you can deliver messages for several months (or years) on complete autopilot. As new subscribers are added to your email list, messages are delivered according to the queue you have previously set up.

Once you’ve built a list of messages appropriate to the needs of your subscribers, you can leave it running without having to do much. With the right marketing engine, messages, subscribers and of course the right products, you can make sales in your sleep and scale up your online business to a global audience.

Delivering Value To Your Subscribers

Still, many of your subscribers won’t open your email messages and to get the most out your email marketing you’ll want to provide a valuable service. If you don’t, your subscribers will stop opening your emails, and you’ll make fewer sales!

If you can add value through your email marketing messages, your subscribers will continue opening emails for a long time period. You’ll be able to build more trust with them. Once your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they will be more are likely to buy.

But this might not happen straight away through your emails. Particularly if you are only trying to sell them something! If you’ve ever been put off buying by a pushy sales person in a shop, you’ll know the reason why! So instead, offer value and give. Help your subscribers with a specific problem first, and sell later!

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners

What is affiliate email marketing and how does it help beginners? If you’re a beginner affiliate, it’s definitely worth getting an email autoresponder which lets you collect subscribers and build an email list. What is email marketing and how does it help affiliate marketers?

Affiliates promote affiliate products using their affiliate links for a commission on any sales they make. An email list lets them do this very simply. TheA affiliate collect targeted subscribers who are likely to be interested in whatever it is they’re selling. By placing products in front of them, (through email messages), they can sell to a growing list of subscribers.

This whole process can be automated and you can grow a list into the tens or hundreds of thousands plus.

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners – The Form

To collect subscribers from a website, you can offer something of value to your website visitors. Here’s an offer from one of my landing pages:

By entering your details into the form on a website or landing page, you join my email list. You’ll start to receive automated messages which deliver information on building an online business. You can see the landing page here.

To get your own form, you can access an email autoresponder for free here. Sign up and once inside the back office, you can create a form using the step by step instructions.

Once you have built your form, you can place in on a landing page, website or even a free blog platform. The form is intended to capture your visitors email address. To encourage your website visitors to enter their details and join your subscriber list, you can offer to give something away – such as an ebook, pdf download or a video course, for example.

Affiliate Email Marketing For Beginners – Queue Up Your Email Messages

Once you have designed and built a form, you will need to create a follow up sequence of messages. These email messages are triggered to be sent out when someone subscribers to your list. Here’s what it looks like in the back office of the autoresponder (my queued up messages):

Long term affiliate marketers will build huge email lists of subscribers. With thousands of people on your email list, you have a much better chance of making an affiliate sale.

Email lists are used to build trust with people over longer periods of time than is possible from just a website. On a website, a visitor will only stay for a few minutes. On an email list, you can stay in touch for months and even years with your subscribers.

Building Your List

There’s many ways in which you can build an email list as an affiliate marketer. You can use a blog to attract traffic and place an offer on your site. Or, you can use a landing pages and send paid traffic directly to it. Landing pages are typically used with paid marketing. With paid marketing, you want to collect email subscribers because you’re spending money getting traffic. That traffic is worth much more if you can turn it immediately into subscribers for your email list.

On a normal website, you can attract traffic through blogging. This is a slow method but over time your traffic can grow exponentially once you have a large volume of content. For the best results, make sure you are targeting the right kind of people. Not all traffic is equal and most of the online marketplace won’t be interested in your product.

Make sure you align your giveaway product with the interests of your visitors and your product. Focus on the benefits of your offer not the features. This will increase the opt in rate of subscribers from a website.

Access A Step By Step Tutorial

If you’re ready to get started with an affiliate business – access a step by step process here. You’ll learn how to set up an email list with pre-written emails and products ready to sell. Your main hurdle then as an affiliate is to generate traffic to your email marketing capture form. This is done either with paid marketing or through content creation. You can also access training and support with this online training resource and all in one business system.

Access an email autoresponder here which is free for up to 500 subscribers.

Summary

An email marketing autoresponder is one of the best things you can get as an affiliate marketer. It lets you collect email subscribers from a website and build a list of potential customers.

It also puts you in charge of your traffic. Whether you are buying traffic using a paid platform, or building content for traffic, it takes either time, effort or money to get it! So building a list can save you heaps of money over the longer term and put you in charge of your visitors.

Trying to sell directly from a website is tough too. Most customers won’t buy on their first visit to a website. Most will need several touch points before they make a buying decision.

Email marketing lets you keep in touch with your potential customers for months. On a website, most visitors are gone within a few minutes, never to return.