AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus On The One Thing You Can Do Today, Now

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

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

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

The Bamboo Analogy

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

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

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

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

Get Paid Blogging

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

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

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

Get Paid Blogging – Getting Traffic

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

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

So what’s the answer?

Get Paid Blogging – Choose Your Passion

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

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

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

Get Paid Blogging

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

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

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

Finding Affiliate Products Which You Align With

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

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

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

Turning Visitors Into Subscribers

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

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

Get Paid To Generate Leads

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

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

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Email Marketing

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

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

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

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Generating Leads

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

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

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

Cross testing landing pages to optimise for performance

Get Paid To Generate Leads – Getting Paid

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

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

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

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

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

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

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

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

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

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

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

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Most Lucrative Products To Sell

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

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

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

earn online from sales of other people's products

Summary

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

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

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

Learn more about affiliate marketing and get started here.

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!