AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

The Power Of Blogging

What is the power of blogging? Blogging can be super powerful over time because it can attract your target audience for free. This is something which initially will take a lot of work. At first, you might find there’s a lot to do and you’ll need to create a lot of content on a blog just to get the teeniest, tiniest bit of traffic! For businesses and affiliate marketers blogging can give you some leverage, and it’s especially useful if you don’t have a large marketing budget.

Blogging is free of course and you blog to attract traffic from the search engines such as Google. But there’s over 600 million other blogs out there too, all wanting free traffic. This means if you choose a particularly popular niche for your blog, you will have some stiff competition.

It can take weeks or months of work before you start seeing people coming to your blog for free. At this point, many new bloggers will see blogging as futile. But if you keep going, you will start to stand out among the many other blogs. When this happens, it can be magical!

The Power Of Blogging – Exponential Gains

Blogging is slow and labour intensive. You’ll need to publish a lot of content before the search engines (especially Google) takes any notice and starts to rank your content. If your blog website is new, there even may be a sandbox period of time where Google sidelines you. This means in the early months of blogging on a website, you may see nothing for all your efforts in terms of free traffic.

But that’s no reason not to do it. Long term bloggers have built up such a volume of content that they get customers through their blog completely for free. This is surely something worth working for if you own a business or are an affiliate marketer.

After a certain period of blogging, you should see an “uptick” in your number of visitors. This might be after a few hundred posts or a few dozen, depending on your niche and the competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

You might expect your blogging to give you gains relative to the work you have put in. But this is seldom the case. More likely you will see very little for your first hundred posts, particularly in a popular niche. This is why you need to promote your content yourself, and not rely on Google to rank it.

The Power Of Blogging – Effort Vs. Results

Bloggers all would like to have tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors coming to their content every single day! It would mean more leads and more sales, if you are using your blog for business. But before this can happen, you need to put in a lot of work. Most people can’t sustain this effort if it doesn’t align with something they would do otherwise anyway, or that they enjoy.

So many bloggers will give up if they choose a topic which they don’t love writing about. I gave up on a blog I was writing for over 6 months because I had no interest in the topic. I only wanted to earn from a blog somehow and I had to research every post (because I didn’t know about the topic) and I had no passion for my topic either! It was a big mistake – but one I learned from!

Here’s a graph from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. I think it’s quite a good representation of the path of the blogger!

Where many bloggers quit is “the valley of disappointment”. This is where what you think should happen with a blog meets what actually happens.

I nearly quit too, thinking maybe I’m wasting my time blogging. But once you get to the place where these lines cross, you will experience traffic rising exponentially on your blog. When this happens nobody knows! It will depend on a number of things including your number of blog posts, quality of posts, other blogs within your niche and how Google perceives your blog posts. But one other thing you can control is what you do after you publish a post.

The Power Of Blogging – Blog Promotion

Yes blog promotion is a massive factor in getting people to your blog posts. Why do all that work writing a post and then just leave it to Google to decide whether you get any traffic or not! Promoting your blog posts gives Google (and other search engines) data on how people perceive your content. People may even share your content themselves once they see it. Plus, your blog promotion might attract leads and sales of course too!

I like to automate as much as possible when it comes to blog promotion. So I use social media plugins to enable visitors to easily share, and post planning software which syndicates my content as I publish it throughout my social media presence. Take a look at some of my recommended best blog plugins for WordPress:

Revive Old Posts – automates post sharing on social media – both old and new
Postplanner – similar software to Revive Old Posts.
Social Media Share Plugin – puts share buttons on your site to help your audience share your content
I also use Yoast SEO – to help me write SEO friendly posts.
Push Engage – Alerts subscribers to your new posts
Aweber – email marketing software lets you send people back to your newer content via email messages.

The Power Of Blogging – Why It’s Good That Blogging Is Tough!

Blogging is tough, especially at first. Google won’t give you a tonne of traffic easily. This is a good thing though because if new bloggers could easily rank and get traffic, it means that older bloggers would lose their rankings! Long term bloggers are rewarded with greater volume of free traffic because they’ve put the work in already – and continue to do so.

The greater volume of quality content you have on your blog, the more credible you are as an authority in your niche. Those who are committed to creating quality content over the longer term will get rewarded with free traffic. If you “dabble” with a blog and write a few posts and then quit, this is a signal to Google that you’re not creating regularly, or taking it as seriously as some other might be. So your content is less likely to get traction through ranking on the search engines and your competitors will get the traffic.

Finding The Low Hanging Fruit

New bloggers can get traction quickly though if they find the “low hanging fruit” and create quality content which out-performs what’s already there. This can be done through finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

These are the keywords which get fewer monthly searches, but also have far less competition. It can be easy to look for those short term keywords which get the most traffic when using Google’s keyword planner. But this is a mistake, especially for new bloggers because these terms are super competitive on the SERPS – search engine results pages. A newer blog simply won’t have the authority to rank for these competitive phrases.

By finding longer tail search phrases, you can more easily rank your content and get found. As you build a library of content based around these kinds of terms, you should find more traffic is arriving on your website for free.

Summary

There’s huge power in blogging and if you choose a subject you can create an unlimited volume of content in, you can keep going long after others have quit. This gives you an advantage over those who only want the outcome of financial gain from a blog! As one of my mentors said “The man who enjoys walking will go further than the one who wants to arrive”!

Initially though it can be tough coming up with ideas for a blog and getting traffic. To start generating traction from a blog might takes weeks, months or even years. Ultimately a blog can give you free traffic, leads and sales. This can give you complete financial and geographical freedom if you figure out how to earn from blogging.

But before you can earn regularly from a blog, you need traffic and a lot of it! This takes time and many will quit when nothing happens.

Blogging Earning Potential

What is the blogging earning potential? While many bloggers don’t earn from their blogs, some bloggers can make six figure incomes from blogging. Finance blog Millennial Money reports that after just two years of building traffic and subscribers, bloggers can make upwards of $100,000 annually.

During the first year of a blog your earnings can vary dramatically. Depending on your monetisation strategy and your ability to attract traffic to your blog, you can earn very little. You can monetise a blog with various advertising platforms and place ads on your content. Or find a good affiliate product or products which are a good match for your topic.

The biggest barrier to a blog is traffic generation and beginner bloggers can easily lose belief when nothing much happens for a while. But if they keep at it for long enough, there’s a tipping point.

Blogging Earning Potential – Blog Tipping Point

The blog tipping point happens after you’ve put a lot of work in. It might come after a few weeks or a few months. Once you’ve build a lot of content and make an effort in building backlinks and promoting your content, you’ll start to build traffic from a number of sources to your blog:

From your blog promotions on social media accounts
Through your email list
From the search engines results pages (SERPS) – through your SEO (search engine optimisation)
From backlinks you have built
From social shares from your visitors (through a share button, for example)
From backlinks your visitors have built to your content

In the beginning a blog can take a while to generate traction and a lot of work. But stick with it long enough and you should see some traffic coming to your site with or without your input.

This is where the huge blogging earning potential comes in.

Blogging Earning Potential – Traffic

But before this can happen you should expect to do a lot of work first. After all there’s over 600 million blogs out there on the internet covering most available topics. This means there’s going to be plenty of competition for your blog ranking on the search engines (mostly Google).

So ranking your blog may take some time and commitment, especially in a competitive niche. To give yourself the best chance of success with a blog, it’s a good idea to pick a topic you enjoy writing about. Otherwise it can be difficult coming up with new ideas and writing fresh content continuously.

Once you start earning from your blogging, it means you’ve proven it can work! Before this happens it can be a little daunting writing blog posts, especially if you’re doing it only for the money!

If you enjoy writing, you’ll go much further than the person who is only wanting the end result. This is why it’s a good idea to choose a topic you’re passionate about when it comes to picking your niche.

Monetising Your Blog

There’s a couple of main things which stand in the way of you making money from a blog. One is your blog topic and the competition. Choose a topic you’re not bothered about, and your interest will likely wane long before you break through to the tipping point. The other thing is how you monetise your blog. Ideally find a good affiliate product which is suitable for your audience and which you can wholeheartedly promote from your site.

You can also monetise in other ways using advertising programs such as Adsense, Advertising/Publisher Networks, Ezoic Ads and so on.

With adverts on your blog posts you can make small amounts from each click from your visitors. But with affiliate product sales you can make a lot more. To generate more interest in your affiliate products using your blog, you should definitely build an email list of subscribers. That way, you can take your subscribers back to new blog posts and follow up with an email marketing campaign to showcase your affiliate products in more detail.

Why Use Email Marketing From A Blog

While a blog is a great way to generate free traffic, most website visitors don’t buy from a blog on their first visit. It takes multiple “touch points” for a visitor to become a buyer. This is where the power of email marketing comes in. On a blog, you only have a few minutes to make the sale, after which time your visitor is gone forever!

But if you capture their email address you can keep them in the loop and follow up for a much longer timeframe. I’ve often have subscribers on my list make a purchase even years after they have signed up to my list.

This just wouldn’t be possible from a blog. Also with an email list you can follow up with email messages and help your subscribers out with a specific problem they might have. Build trust, and over the longer term, they are more likely to buy from you.

Summary

The blog earning potential is unlimited and many bloggers enjoy six figure incomes (and above) from working only part time on their blogs. But they do this because they’ve put the work in before hand.

This is the secret to blogging and although you should expect to work hard for very little in the beginning, the rewards will come later if you choose a good topic you’re passionate about and stick to your blogging habit for as long as it takes!

You should also continue to learn about SEO (search engine optimisation) and employ email marketing to collect subscribers from your blog too.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential

The affiliate marketing earning potential is unlimited and some affiliates earn six figure salaries and above. But many affiliates will struggle when they start out and there’s a 95% drop out rate. The average salary of an affiliate marketer in 2023 according to Glassdoor is £38,040 (or $47,245.10).

It is the earning potential of affiliate marketing which appeals to many who get into the business. The entry level requirements to become an affiliate are incredibly low, especially compared to other traditional business models which would require equipment, business premises and staff. With affiliate marketing you only need a laptop and internet connection. Anyone can start from anywhere, providing they can join an affiliate program and get online.

This perhaps, in part, explains the huge drop out rate. But for those who stay there can be huge rewards.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – Large Value Products

Many new affiliate will join a program which they know of such as Amazon’s. Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs available. But Amazon’s commissions are tiny and you can earn as little as 1% on a sale.

So if you sold a $100 you would only earn $1 from the sale at this level. Digital products pay much more – around 30% – 40% and then there’s high ticket affiliate products. With a high ticket affiliate product you can earn as much as $500 and above from a sale. Take a look at this item:

The Golf Cart Hovercraft sells for $58,000 and pays 8% to affiliates who refer the sales. So you could earn $4,640 in commissions if you refer a sale as an affiliate.

With higher valued products and services, affiliates can earn substantially more per sale than with low value products. Some new affiliates don’t know about this and try selling lower valued products which can be much more difficult. To earn the same from lower priced items, you’ll need to sell thousands of them. Compare this to just one sale and you can see the difference in earning potential according to the products you choose to sell as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – List Building

Most top affiliates will have an email list in which they provide some kind of value in exchange for a subscribers email address. Top affiliates build email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. With such a list you can send out a single email and make tens of thousands of sales, or with a high ticket item, one or two sales would earn the equivalent income.

The bigger your list becomes, the greater the earning potential of your affiliate business. To build a list can be done through generating content on a blog, for example, or through using paid marketing.

Paid advertising is the fastest way to build a list and affiliates use advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube, among others.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potential – Subscription Products

Subscription products can vastly increase an affiliate’s earning potential. A subscription product might be a membership fee, or some kind of software product. Good subscription products offer a large value. An example is a business tool such as an email autoresponder. Autoresponders are used to build online (and offline) businesses by collecting email addresses and automating follow up messages.

Since this tool is vital for some businesses, customers of the product are likely to maintain their membership subscription for years if not decades. If you have referred the product, you can earn a recurring income from the sale. You can essentially earn a lifetime recurring commissions from these kinds of products with the right customers.

High Ticket & Subscription Products & Product “Suites”

A product “suite” is a product range and can be very lucrative for affiliate marketers. With a “one off” product you only earn a single commission per sale. This means you need to keep finding new customers in order to keep earning commissions. But with a product range, you can refer a customer once and benefit from later purchases they make from a product “suite”.

High ticket mastermind courses, training courses and mentoring programs are good examples of product ranges. These can be super profitable for affiliates because they can earn from multiple strategies including subscriptions, low ticket, mid ticket and high ticket items within a product range.

Combining this kind of business model with the use of email marketing can give you the largest affiliate marketing earning potential.

Get started here and learn how you can use this kind of online business model.

Summary

The affiliate marketing earning potential is unlimited since it’s a performance based business model and you can use automation to sell other people’s products online to a global audience.

The average salary of an affiliate marketer in 2023 according to Glassdoor is £38,040 or $47,245.10. Despite the huge potential of earnings in affiliate marketing many affiliate struggle to make their first sale and lose motivation. There’s a huge drop out rate of around 95%.

This is why it’s important to get the right knowledge and training if you intend to become an affiliate. Get started here and build your own affiliate business from scratch.

High End Affiliate Marketing Secrets

What are the high end affiliate marketing secrets used by the top super affiliates? Why is it that most affiliates fail and some succeed? One of the main tricks or “secrets” of the top affiliates is to use high end courses rather than sell low value items.

With a high end course, you can earn substantially more as an affiliate, even with fewer sales. This is one of the main secrets of the top earning affiliates. They don’t focus on selling thousands of low value products. Instead, they sell a few high end products from which they can earn the same amount, if not more.

Most new affiliates will start with a popular website such as Amazon. They pick up a product and start learning a marketing method. Unfortunately this strategy is already working against them. Amazon only pays between 1% and 10% on most of its products. So for a $100 item, you stand to earn around $10 maximum if you generate a sale as an affiliate. Even if you use the most profitable items on Amazon, you still only earn once per sale.

To make a sale as an affiliate you need to successfully refer someone to a product through your affiliate link. This can be done in many ways, but one of the simplest methods is through paid advertising. To make a profit using this method (and using Amazon) you’ll need to pay less than your commission value in advertising costs to make a sale.

For most of the low value products on Amazon, that’s less than $10! That’s incredibly difficult as it gives you no room for experimentation and error. So many affiliates will go mad creating content and attempting to get traffic to their affiliates sites for free, another incredibly difficult and time consuming task.

High End Affiliate Marketing Secrets – Digital Vs. Physical

But with high end affiliate products you can earn much more per sale, ongoing recurring commissions and also from later purchases from those same customers. Each customer is worth much more with a high end product or program, so you don’t need as many customers to become profitable.

With a low value product you only make a few dollars on a single sale. That means you need to sell in bulk, which can be a huge challenge.

Let’s compare a high end product which sells for $10,000. For a digital product you earn earn up to 30% on a sale, much more than with physical products (from the likes of Amazon) which only pay up to 10%. There’s high valued items on Amazon too, of course. But the commission rate means you still earn a smaller amount than with digital products even from these sales.

Sell a $10k digital product and you’ll earn $3000. Sell a $10k physical product and you could earn as little as $100 (at 1% commission).

High End Affiliate Marketing Secrets – Recurring Income Products & Product “Suites”

A high end affiliate marketing training course not only sells for $10k and gives you more profit with a 30% commission structure, but you can also earn ongoing commissions from sales of a membership or subscription product. A high ticket sales funnel will typically contain a multitude of products from a single product range or “suite”.

Affiliates promote the first product in a range of products and later products are automatically offered to customers when they make a purchase. This is known as a tripwire funnel where a specific action automatically triggers another offer.

By having multiple products to sell in a range, subscription and membership products and high ticket affiliate products, the “high end” affiliate can earn more from each customer than they would from trying to sell a single affiliate product many times.

This is one of the biggest “secrets” of affiliate marketing success. Your sales funnel automatically gears you for a better outcome, once you start generating sales.

Marketing High Ticket Vs. Low Value

With a high ticket sales funnel, filled with high value training courses and subscription products , you can earn far more per customer than through selling any old affiliate product you would find online. This gives you more leverage and more ability to learn a marketing strategy which works.

If you’re running paid advertising selling a low value product, your margin for experimentation and error is very small. You can easily run up a huge advertising budget deficit without making it back in sales, just while you’re learning.

But with a high valued product range, you can earn large chunks of income from product sales which can be injected back into your marketing budget. A bigger budget gives you more reach with an online business.

The typical sales funnel will give you around $1 per month per subscriber, as an industry standard. But with a high valued product range this is more like $5 per month per subscriber. This gives you much more leverage when learning your marketing strategy and more access to the more expensive advertising platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, for example.

Summary

A low value affiliate product is much more difficult to promote with the faster and more scalable marketing strategies (using paid marketing). But with a high valued product range which also offers recurring income products, an affiliate stands to gain much more for the same amount of effort as selling the low value affiliate product.

It also gives them better opportunity for using scalable and faster marketing strategies.

To learn more and get started with your own high ticket product range, click here.

Keywords For Blog Titles

There’s a few reasons why you should use keywords for blog titles. As a blogger, you want to attract traffic to your website. Ideally free traffic from blogging. But that doesn’t happen easily and you’ll need to work hard (and smart) for some time before your website is super busy with traffic. In a competitive niche it can take even longer too.

But one way to give yourself more chance of your content ranking on Google (the most popular search engine) is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Short “tail” keywords are two to three word combinations. These are typically much more difficult to rank for because of the huge competition. So instead of writing articles with two or three word titles, look for longer strings of keywords which give you a better chance of getting found on the SERPS – search engines results pages.

To find suitable keywords for blog titles, you can use Google’s free keyword planner tool. You’ll just need an account with Google Adwords to use it.

Why Use Keywords For Blog Titles?

Some say you should find an enticing heading for your article titles which “draws” in visitors when they see your headlines. Many of the most popular articles on the internet use this tactic to get eyes on their content. Checkout Buzzsumo.com for some of the most popular trending pieces of content online to see which articles do the best.

While this can work you also need to get your headline seen first! Which works fine if you’re promoting rabidly on the various social media platforms. But if you’re on a low budget, that can be tough, even with some free tools which help you automate the process.

Using keywords as your blog titles is a different tactic; although the two can cross over occasionally and you can find a good keyword which also is an enticing headline too! With a keyword based headline, you can attract more attention from the SERPS – search engine results pages, which can give you free traffic. Particularly if you choose a title which has low competition.

Using the keyword planner for blog titles can also help inspire you to create a lot of content on your blog. Coming up with new ideas for blog posts can be one of the biggest challenges for bloggers. But with Google’s keyword planner there’s an almost unlimited supply of ideas which are already being looked for.

Aligning Keywords With Your Product/Service

Aligning your blog titles with your particular product or service is just as important (if not more) as getting your content ranked. Imagine getting your content ranked after months of work, only to find that most of your visitors have zero interest in your product/service. All that work for nothing!

This is not what you want as a blogger. Of course most website visitors aren’t going to buy from you and only a small percentage will take action on a website. That’s why you want to also build an email list and use the power of email marketing.

To make the most out of your content you want to target your audience carefully. You don’t just want anyone coming to your website. You want your perfect customers coming to it! To know your perfect customer you can do some work on your customer avatar. The “customer avatar” is your perfect customer. You want to find small cross section of the online marketplace who is going to be most interested in what you have to offer.

So before you start writing, ask yourself whether the content is something which will attract the right kind of person to your website. Ask yourself what the search intent is of that particular keyword.

Summary

So there’s a few reasons why I personally use keywords for blog titles.

You can use Google’s keyword planner to plan your article titles
You can see how many monthly searches each keyword gets on Google
It gives you plenty of blog post ideas
You can see the competition for each keyword with a Google search (and a phrase match search)

Ideally find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty – this will give you more chance of a top page ranking for your chosen keyword on Google.

Make sure your keyword aligns with the product/service you’re offering. That way you don’t waste your time attracting the wrong audience. You can do a simple “sniff” test for this. Simply ask yourself whether the search intent might bring a paying customer to your website.

While many of your blog posts won’t rank, some of them will. If you do a good job writing quality content, you should start seeing your content rank, if not on Google, on other search engines providers. Start with the longer tail keywords which have very low competition and build a lot of content over time. As your domain authority improves you can start aiming at the more competitive keywords.

Easiest Business To Startup

Looking for the easiest business to startup? One of the easiest business models you can use is an affiliate marketing business. You can start an affiliate marketing business without any products of your own and without any prior experience. Affiliate marketing is the online referral based business system where third parties are paid commissions based on selling other people’s products and services, mostly online.

To make a sale online all you need to do is join an affiliate program and get your affiliate link. Then learn how to successfully promote your affiliate link online. Most affiliates will use one or more of these tactics as their marketing strategy:

Blogging
Video blogging
SEO – search engine optimisation
Paid advertising
Email marketing
Social media marketing

The main thing you’ll need to learn to sell affiliate products is online marketing strategies and anyone can learn this. Affiliate marketing can also be done from anywhere at very low cost. All you need is a laptop, internet connection and a few online tools and skills which can be bought and learned. This definitely makes affiliate marketing one of, if not the easiest business to startup from anywhere!

Easiest Business To Startup – What’s The Catch?

Yes affiliate marketing is easy to do. Anyone can join an affiliate program and learn how to promote their unique affiliate link. Affiliates earn commissions for sales they generate. There’s no upper limit as to what you can earn either. Plus, you can work from anywhere and choose your own working hours! “What’s the catch?” I hear you say!

Well despite all these benefits many affiliates will drop out and quit; around 95% of affiliates in fact. The affiliate marketing success rate is therefore pretty small at 5%. But the same can be said for most businesses. The difference is, almost anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing, which means many people do. The barrier to entry is so low because you can join a program and promote your link absolutely for free. No other business model is so easy to access.

A traditional business has a few more limitations. Before you can even attempt to build it you need business premises, staff, equipment and perhaps a franchise “buy-in” if you go that route. All that is prohibitive to the masses and that means you can only start with large capital to invest. No so with affiliate marketing.

Easiest Business To Startup – Starting Is Easy!

So anyone can join an affiliate program and call themselves an affiliate marketer. But to achieve success is another story entirely. Many affiliates will quit before they even make a single sale online. The most difficult part of affiliate marketing is the marketing. Without marketing you only have a link, which won’t earn you anything unless you put it in front of a buying customer.

To learn the skill of online marketing takes some commitment which most new affiliates don’t want to give.

There’s all kinds of products you can promote online too. How do you choose which ones to use? Just in terms of commissions there’s a huge range in what you can earn from promoting other people’s products online. Physical products pay from 1%-10% commission on average, and digital products will pay between 30% and 40% typically. But there’s high ticket affiliate products too which pay much larger commissions than most. Subscription affiliate programs pay out recurring commissions

The 6 Figure Sales Funnel

The easiest business to startup (using the affiliate marketing model) is the high ticket sales funnel model. With a high ticket sales funnel you offer digital products (which pay the largest percentage in commissions) and high ticket products (which offer the most value and the highest cost). Combining these types of products with those which offer recurring commissions gives you the best “bang for your buck”! So for each sale you make you can earn ongoing commissions and the potential of a later sale should you customer buy another product later from the same range.

This is by far the easiest business to startup, but that doesn’t mean it’s a given you’ll succeed. Even with such a great product range you still need to learn how to market your sales funnel and this is something which takes a bit of time. But such a sales model allows anyone to learn online marketing techniques more easily, because they can recoup their marketing budget very quickly with a high ticket sale.

If you promote products from Amazon instead, for example, the commission structure only pays between 1% and 10% commission on a sale. This gives you very little breathing room for learning how to run paid advertising and come out ahead.

Learn more about this online business model here.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is definitely considered one of the easiest business models to startup. But it’s not easy, especially if you choose low value products to promote which offer tiny commissions.

But if you choose a high ticket sales funnel which has multiple items within it and which offers recurring income commissions you have a much better chance of success for a couple of main reasons. You’ll obviously be able to make larger commissions when you do make a sale and therefore more profit, but you’ll also be able to access the more expensive paid marketing platforms which charge a premium for their use.

Paid marketing is much faster and more scalable than other cheaper forms of online advertising, such as blogging, for example. So with a high ticket product range, and through using paid advertising, you can be profitable quite quickly and with the minimum hassle. Plus, you can leverage existing businesses which offer built in sales teams and use plug and play software which makes the whole process of setting up your online business fairly straight forwards.

To learn more take a look at this video.

How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog?

If you’re wondering “How can I increase traffic to my blog?” listen up! This post is for you! Getting free traffic does take some time and effort. But if you’re consistent with those efforts on a daily basis, your blog can start getting more and more traffic: steadily and certainly.

Firstly to get traffic to a blog you’ll need to create a lot of content. Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty to write your posts about. That way you have a greater chance of your posts ranking on the search engine results pages. Despite those shorter tail keywords getting tonnes of traffic, you’ve very little chance of ranking for them because of the huge online competition; even in an uncompetitive niche!

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and they can’t all rank number one on Google for their chosen keywords. So looking for the “low hanging fruit” of keywords means you have a chance of ranking; especially if you make a good job of creating some quality content for those particular keywords.

How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Writing Quality Articles

So start by using Google’s keyword planner and make a plan of finding those long tail keywords in your niche which have traffic, but also low competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

If you go after the more competitive keywords, you’ll often have zero chance of a ranking on the first page of Google. Even with some long tail keywords, it can be competitive. But a small chance of a ranking for low search volume keywords is better than no chance of ranking for high search volume keywords.

Create a lot of high quality content and use an SEO plugin to help you write. I use Yoast SEO which is free for WordPress. Yoast gives you an easy to use plugin which helps you write for SEO. But also you should write for your visitors, since the people who actually read your posts aren’t robots!

How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Automate Content Promotion

While you should aim to steadily grow your volume of posts over time, more content doesn’t automatically mean more visitors. You also need to promote your content and get eyes on it. Otherwise Google (and the other search engines) can’t see how people are reacting to it. This is one of their ranking factors among others. Google uses a lot of factors to indicate how to rank your content including:

Backlinks from other sites – how many and the quality of them
Volume of content on your site
Quality of your content
How visitors interact with your content
Age of your domain
Topic you cover and other competing sites

You can promote your content on social media, through email marketing and you can also use some paid advertising to do it too. Ideally you should automate the distribution of your content as you publish it. You can give yourself a hand with this by using a few free plugins:

Revive Old Posts – lets you syndicate your content (new and old) to your social media profiles
Social media like buttons – use them to encourage easy sharing of your content from your visitors
Push Engage – lets visitors opt in to be notified of new posts as you publish them

How Can I Increase Traffic To My Blog – Pay For Traffic

Another quick and simple way to increase traffic to your blog quickly is through running some paid advertising. You can even use platforms which will crawl your blog and create dynamic ads based on your content. Set up a Google Adwords dynamic ad in minutes and it will show ads based on your content.

You can also set your budget at a level which you can afford, from as little as a few cents a day if you wish. Paid traffic is of course the fastest way to generate traffic. Plus, it’s easily scaled up when you’re ads are working, bringing in sales.

Build Backlinks

Backlinks are an awesome tool if you want to generate more traffic to your blog. Backlinks have a double fold benefit to bloggers.

They can bring in traffic directly from the websites which link to them.
They boost your SEO score with Google and the various other search engines, boosting your listing power on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

It’s no secret that backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors of Google so it’s definitely worth taking the effort to build them. Back linking starts with creating valuable content which people should naturally share over time. If you build a back link profile (manually) which doesn’t show a natural progression over time, it can be flagged as deceptive practices and you’re back to where you started. Google may penalise you and down rank your content as a result.

Ideally build backlinks from other authority websites within the same niche as yours. This can be done by reaching out to website owners who offer guest posting opportunities. Start with a Google search for guest post opportunities within your niche. You can also comment on some blogs and they allow a backlink to their site.

If building backlinks sounds like your idea of a nightmare, you can outsource this task to the professionals. I’ve used this site for outsourcing of my SEO.

Keep Going

Over time if you do enough of the above measures, you should start to see your traffic growing. But with blogging this can take some time and it will of course also depend on the niche you have chosen to build your blog in. In a competitive niche, it will take much longer to attract free traffic than in one will little competition.

After around 400 blog posts is typically where you should see a big uptick in your traffic stats. Google have recently changed their algorithm (again, sign) and this has meant a lot of previously ranking content has taken a hit. Unfortunately there’s no way around it – you are a little reliant on the search engines for your traffic as a blogger. It does however remind you to take charge of your traffic through building an email list.

Build An Email List From Your Blog

An email list puts you back in charge of your traffic. By sending out regular updates you can send subscribers back to your newer content. Getting eyes on your content is a good thing because your visitors will share it with their friends (if they have any!) and on social media. Some will even link to your content if they are a blogger themselves.

To build an email list from your blog you need to offer something of value to your website visitors. An ebook or some kind of free course is perfect. Make sure you showcase your offer on every page of your site, so more of your visitors get to see it. Have a clearly defined benefit driven offer which is appealing to your visitors. See also the power of email marketing.

Summary

You can increase traffic to your blog in many ways. Here’s the shorter version:

Write quality content which is optimised for the search engines – use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. This is the cornerstone of all your other strategies, so make your content as good as possible.
Build backlinks by reaching out and doing guest posts, blog commenting or outsource this task to a professional.
Use plugins which help you syndicate your content and get more eyes on it – Revive Old Posts, Postplanner, Push Engage, social media share plugins etc. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Build an email list – an email list puts you in charge of your traffic. I use this autoresponder.
Keep going – although it can take some time and serious effort to build your blog readership, it’s worth the effort in the long run. Make a habit out of doing the above over and over and never quit!
Don’t forget to thank me when you make it!

Make Money Writing Online

You really can make money writing online, and while there’s fierce competition, there’s also a few different strategies. You can become a blogger, write guest posts or be a freelance writer.

Freelancers write for anyone who will pay them and you can find work on sites such as Fiverr.com and Upwork.com. Or you can build a following online with Substack.com. Substack.com is full of creative writers who charge subscription fees for people to see their work.

As a blogger you can create content and publish it yourself on a website. Free blog sites such as Hubpages.com, WordPress.com and Blogger.com allow anyone to create content and publish it online completely for free. You can monetise your work with ads or affiliate products.

But there’s downsides to writing online too. Many blog sites are well over subscribed and getting found in the online noise can be difficult.

If you’re selling a subscription access to your work, you’ll need to build up a portfolio first so people know what they’re getting. With sites such as Fiverr and Upwork, writers work for next to nothing from countries such as the Philippines and India where the cost of living is low. This can mean it’s all the more difficult becoming established as a writer and making a good living from it.

Make Money Writing Online – Blogging

Blogging is one of my favourite ways to make money from the internet. You can monetise a blog in a number of ways once you have built up some traffic to it. This does take time and you should think carefully about your blog topic before you start out. It can take several months or even years to become established as a blogger. But once you are, you can even earn a passive income from blogging.

A simple strategy to make money from blogging is to write about a topic you have passion for and sell affiliate products from your blog.

Initially there’s quite a lot of work to be done with blogging. But over time you should find more and more people naturally visiting your content once you start appearing on the search engine results pages of Google. At this stage you can monetise your blog through using adverts or selling affiliate products. To sell an affiliate product from a blog you can simply link to it with your affiliate link. There’s affiliate programs available in almost any topic you could think of. To find them, just look on Google for “{insert your topic} affiliate program”.

So if your blog was about motorcycles, you would look for “motorcycle affiliate program”.

You could then join the program and promote products relating to the topic of your blog.

Make Money Writing Online – Getting Your Content Found

The hardest part of blogging is getting people to find your blog on a consistent basis. To do this, you will need to create a lot of content upfront, before you can make any money from it. Many bloggers simply blog for pleasure, rather than to make money and there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet. That’s a lot of competition and Google can only rank so many blog posts on the first page of their search results – where most people look for online content.

But once you are established you can even make money from your blog on complete autopilot, making affiliate sales in your sleep! See also how to earn from blogging.

Summary

There’s a variety of ways to make money writing online:

Use Upwork.com, or Fiverr.com to bid for freelance writing jobs
Do a Google search for freelance writing jobs
Become a blogger and create content on a website – sell affiliate products from your blog
Use a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com or WordPress.com to write for free. Monetise your content with affiliate products or advertising space.
Create a lot of content on Substack.com and charge a subscription to view your work.

Like any freelance work you’ll likely have to put in some hours establishing yourself as an authority in your writing field. There’s stiff competition online for freelance jobs and for bloggers too with over 600 million blogs online.

Checkout “Niche Blogging For Profit” for more on my blogging strategy.

Autopilot Money Making Websites

Autopilot money making websites can earn money around the clock – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A website can be seen around the world. Websites are the perfect money making machines if you have something worthwhile to sell and you can get the right people to it. Those two things are the key ingredients to making an autopilot money making website which actually works.

Many people are already doing this with a business model known as affiliate marketing. It’s a business model which lets anyone sell from a website. You can do this too even if you don’t have anything of your own to sell. Affiliates are basically third party referrers of other people’s products and services. They recommend products, mostly online, and get paid a percentage when they make a sale.

Autopilot Money Making Websites – Affiliate Marketing

Anyone can build a website and sell affiliate products from it. All you need is a website of your own and to join an affiliate program. (There’s one you can join through my website – click here). The program I promote on this site will also help you build your own website and set up your affiliate links. An affiliate link is a tracking code which lets the product owner know who has referred the sale. When a sale is made through your unique code, you earn a commission based on the sale.

To make sales from a website, you need to get people to buy from it. Since most online visitors need several touch points before they will buy anything, you’ll only get a small percentage of people buying when they land on your site.

As a beginner, setting up a website for the first time, you won’t get any traffic either. You’ll need to learn how to get traffic to your website. Otherwise, you won’t be able to sell anything!

Autopilot Money Making Websites – The Email List

Affiliates also build email lists from a website and although the website will attract a visitor, it’s often the email list which actually makes the sale. An email list is a much more powerful tool for selling online than a website. In combination with each other, they are awesome!

The website attracts the visitors. Once on your site you can offer them something for free, if they join your email list. Once on your email list, you can follow up with them and build a longer term relationship (with automation).

It is through this email list that many affiliates are able to build large businesses.

Autopilot Money Making Websites – Getting Traffic To Your Website

But before you can build a list from a website, you’ll need to get people to it! You don’t just want anyone coming to your website either! You want targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is different to any old website traffic. With targeted traffic, you have hungry buyers who are looking for exactly what you have! They are the small sub-section of the online marketplace who are wanting or in need of exactly what you’re offering!

using Google Adwords for advertising your website — adwords

To get this kind of traffic to your website you first need to identify who these people are. You do this by identifying your “perfect customer” – your customer avatar. They are those people who will buy from you and keep buying from you because you fulfil with your products and services their needs.

Once you have identified your perfect customer, you can target them with advertising using one of the many ad platforms available such as Google Adwords, YouTube of Facebook for example. You can also build content and become a blogger or YouTube channel if you’re looking for cheaper methods of getting website visitors.

You must offer something valuable to your website visitors and email subscribers. Otherwise, why would they buy from you? This leads us to your monetisation strategy – your product/s!

Choosing Affiliate Products To Promote

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products online which you can choose from. You can use sites such as Amazon, Clikbank.com, JVZoo.com etc. to browse through the various items you can sell. Ideally, find something which you would find useful yourself to promote. The more valuable a product, the more you earn earn from it through promoting it online.

Physical products, like you would find on Amazon, tend to pay less than digital products to affiliates. So you can earn more promoting digital products of the same volume and price as physical ones. Physical products pay between 1% and 10% commission. So if you promote a $100 product you could earn between $1 and 10$ per sale. With digital products you can earn usually between 30% and 40% commission.

There’s also high ticket products which carry a larger than average price tag. These are a good idea for affiliates. Subscription products too offer great value if you’re selling them. They allow you to earn recurring commissions from each and every sale!

Blogging For Traffic

Blogging is one of the most cost effective ways to generate website traffic. With the right audience, you can sell affiliate products directly from your site, or build an email list and sell to your subscribers.

While blogging is cheap, it’s time consuming and it does take some time before you can generate a lot of traffic. Paid marketing is far more effective at generating traffic quickly but of course you need to make sure you’re making profit before you can increase your marketing budget and scale up to a global audience.

A blogging strategy which works is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Write a lot of content for these kinds of keywords and you should start getting some free traffic from the search engines.

Using Landing Pages Instead Of A Website

Another way to automate online sales and build an income online is to skip the website completely and build landing pages instead. A landing page is a one page website designed for one purpose – to get visitors to sign up to your email list. Landing pages are very effective at doing this because there’s only two options on them – sign up or leave.

On a website, there’s many options and visitors can browse around to their heart’s content! When you’re trying to sell from a website, this doesn’t always work in your favour. within a few minutes most of your hard-earned visitors have left, never to return.

But if you can capture their email address from a landing page, you can follow up with an automated email marketing campaign. This is one of the most effective ways to earn online.

Summary

One of the best ways to profit from autopilot money making websites is to use a landing page software to create single page websites. Send targeted traffic to it using a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, YouTube or Facebook. Collect email subscribers and build a large email list. Send automated messages to your email list providing some kind of value and follow up with your links to affiliate products which help and serve them.

Many affiliates will build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They can sell affiliate products in huge numbers to their subscribers with a large enough list and once they have understood how to build it correctly using their customer avatar and through promoting high value products and services.

Start your own online business from scratch here.

How To Earn From Blogging

If you’re wondering how to earn from blogging there’s a couple of popular ways. If you already have a business or a product to sell of your own, blogging is a great way to build your presence online to sell your own stuff. But if you don’t have a service or product of your own, you can sell other people’s products from a blog. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

Affiliates are third party referrers of products and services. Just by referring website traffic to a product, you can earn commissions based on sales you generate. Another popular way to earn from a blog is through advertising. Ad companies such as Google will pay you to place ads on your blog. When your visitors click on your ads, you’ll earn a small amount of the advertising revenue. With enough traffic to a blog this can give you a nice passive income.

But before you can earn from a blog you’ll need visitors/traffic. Without traffic, no matter what you offer on a blog won’t matter. This is important to recognise especially if you have never built a website or a blog. It can be an easy mistake to think that just by having a website, you’ll automatically find visitors to it. But sadly this isn’t the case. Just building a blog won’t get you any visitors, unless you promote your blog somehow.

How To Earn From Blogging – Traffic

Traffic is the key ingredient if you want to earn from a blog. Without it, you won’t earn a dime! So before you even think about your monetisation strategy it’s worth thinking about how you’re going to get traffic to your blog. Most bloggers get traffic organically over a long period of time through content creation. Although you can also promote your blog posts in various ways such as through social media, by back linking to them and even using some paid advertising. But ultimately a blog works through getting traffic for free.

To get traffic in an uncompetitive niche can be quite easy. You only need to publish a few blog posts and if there’s not much competition, you should find some traffic coming to your site fairly easily. However, there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and an uncompetitive niche is becoming more difficult to find. In a very competitive niche you’ll find a lot of other bloggers covering the same topic as yours. So for you to find the first page of Google with your content can be quite difficult.

The ultimate goal of bloggers is free traffic but ideally this will come from Google, and other search engines. Once you have created enough content, and done so wisely (more on this later), you should find visitors coming to your website more and more easily.

How To Earn From Blogging – Ranking On Google

Google is the most used search engine and although there are others, such as Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo, for example, most people use Google. This means your best chance of getting free traffic from the search engines is to rank on Google for the keywords you use in your content.

With the more competitive keyword terms, there will be more other content ranking on Google to compete with. So your best chance at getting a first page listing on Google is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This can be done using Google’s own keyword research tool – the keyword planner. Start by typing your main keyword into the planner and scroll through the list of keywords which come up.

You will see that the most searched for terms are generally two or three word combinations. These are typically more competitive. As you scroll through the longer keyword terms (3 or more words), you’ll start to see the monthly search traffic dropping for these kinds of terms.

At the very end of the list you’ll start to see longer tail keywords which get very little traffic. These are the terms which you’re most likely to rank for, should you decide to create some quality content for them. Although the monthly traffic for these terms is low, you have a much better chance of ranking for them on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

How To Earn From Blogging – Niche Websites

To earn from blogging will take some considerable effort and patience! Sorry to say, but there’s a tonne of other bloggers out there who have been around for a while. They have built a tonne of content, backlinks and online presence already, so your new blog probably won’t generate much traction without a lot of work.

You can also build a niche website which can give you a head start in terms of ranking. This can be done by purchasing a domain name with your main keywords in it. Although keyword domains don’t have the ranking power they once had, it’s still a factor and they can give you a slight advantage over other blogs in the same niche.

You’ll need to do a bit of keyword research before you buy your domain name. Find one which is suitable for your topic and which you think you can rank for.

Product Choice

If you’re planning on monetising your blog with an affiliate product, it’s well worth scoping out your products first, before you get started. I once built a website around a topic and only after months of work did I realise that it was very difficult to monetise. There were simply no good affiliate products I could align with my niche.

Your choice of affiliate product to offer from your blog is pretty important too. With a bad product, you won’t make any sales. But a good product won’t sell either if you haven’t aligned your blog topic with it. Think about who you are writing for and whether they will want what you’re selling.

Since it takes a fair few months as a minimum to generate sales from a blog, you’ll want to pick a topic you enjoy writing about. Otherwise, it can be difficult to keep going for long enough.

Turning Traffic Into Leads

Most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website. They need to trust the blogger and the product/s you are offering. The exception is a well known website such as Amazon of course, where people are pretty happy to buy from now because Amazon has built a lot of trust over the years.

But most people will visit your blog site and leave without actually buying anything. Only a tiny percentage will return and buy or buy on their first visit. To encourage more sales from a blog site, you can capture details of your visitors and follow up via email. Email marketing gives bloggers a much better opportunity to sell to their visitors. They can follow up with email messages over a much longer timeframe and build a longer term relationship with their potential customers.

You’ll probably notice some kind of giveaway offer on most profitable blog websites for this reason. By offering something to give to your visitors, you can capture their email address and start building trust. Email messages can be used to demonstrate the value and usefulness of the products you promote and build a long term relationship.

Summary

With an email autoresponder, bloggers can collect email addresses from their blog and automate a follow up sequence to help their subscribers with something. This lets them connect their blog visitors with their affiliate product/s in a relevant way.

Since this whole process can be automated, it means once all your “ducks are in a row” you can generate automated sales from the internet.

You can also earn from blogging without using affiliate products. This is done through using ads on your site. Google Adsense offers this service but there are others too. See also Adsense alternatives.

The main problem with putting ads on your site is the tiny amounts you earn from each click. You need huge volume of free traffic to make this work so it’s best to find some kind of affiliate product too, if you can.