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.
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 buyerswho 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!
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.
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.
Is affiliate marketing right for you? Wondering whether you’re a good fit to become an affiliate marketer? Affiliate marketing has a whole host of benefits you can enjoy if you’re prepared to work hard at it and make it work for you. You can work alongside another job until your business starts to generate profit. This is one of the best benefits, a I see it. Affiliate marketing is super flexible and you can choose your own hours and work from anywhere with a laptop and internet connection.
Affiliate marketing offers performance related pay. This means that unless you start generating sales, you won’t make any money! In the first instance this can be a little daunting. But once you start seeing sales come in, you’ll be glad there’s no ceiling to what you can earn. To start generating sales you’ll need to put a lot of work in beforehand, building systems, choosing your products and getting everything set up. This takes some time and commitment and during this time you’re not even selling anything! So you won’t get paid!
Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?
Affiliates who succeed are very focused on building their business. It takes time and patience and you’ll need to be disciplined with your time. If you’re better at being told what to do by an employer, for example, it may not work for you. The affiliates who generally succeed have a very strong “why”. That it, they have a burning desire to succeed and earn online, be their own boss, sack their job off, and/or ditch the commute.
People who are highly motivated can endure a lot more than those who are simply “giving it a go” on a whim. This is important because affiliate marketing isn’t that easy!
Build a lifestyle business from scratch – start here!
So if you don’t have a strong desire for one or more of these:
free yourself from your employment, or
build another income stream, or
work on your own terms
become your own boss
Have geographical freedom
Become financially independent
Become financially free
Spend more time with family
Choose your own working hours
..then affiliate marketing probably isn’t for you.
Since 95% of affiliates quit, it’s a good idea to be informed before taking a direction on your affiliate business; especially if you don’t think you’ll stay the course. The 5% of the people who succeed with affiliate marketing stay the course and commit to the journey!
Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You – Affiliate Marketing Vs. Employment
It’s definitely worth holding on to your job (if you have one) if you’re considering building an online business. A job gives you financial stability and you will need to invest in your online business is you’re serious about it.
While employment gives you stability it doesn’t necessarily give you freedom. Many people feel trapped in a job, building their life around it. With an online business, you can build it around your life! But you’ll need to get into profit first before you can enjoy the benefits of owning an online business and this can take some time and investment.
Many “digital entrepreneurs” have invested heavily in their online education, sacrificing things which most would never do. They re-mortgage houses, sell cars, even cancel their Netflix to inject money into building their online businesses! Heaven forbid! So, it can take some sacrifices in order to grow your affiliate business to a level where you can replace your income.
But ultimately once this happens, you can go full time with an online business and scale it up to a five or six figure income if you wish. This can give you both time and financial freedom since you’re no longer trading time for money. You’re using a different business model and selling products online instead. Since this can be automated, you’ve escaped the need to trade time for money in a job when this happens.
Characteristics Of Entrepreneurs
Online entrepreneurs are self motivated and self disciplined. Since you’re effectively a “solo-preneur” as an affiliate, you’ve got a lot to do and you’re going to have to do it! No one else will do the work for you!
This can be a challenge especially when you don’t see clearly the action steps you need to take. This is where an online business training resource can help you. It can give you the direction and training you need, even if you’re starting from no knowledge and as a complete beginner.
The “fuel” for your entrepreneurial journey is your self belief, goals and aspirations.As Henry Ford said “whether a man thinks he can or he can’t, he’s right”.
If you’re not great at working alone and motivating yourself, an online business might not be the best fit for you.
Is affiliate marketing right for you? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing. You can run ad budgets into tens of thousands on a monthly basis, making multiple high ticket sales. But you can also start blogging, and become a content creator.
Whether you have a huge budget or a tiny one, you can still do affiliate marketing. It can be part time or full time and you can choose hours to suit you. But ultimately you’ll want to be making some money from your efforts before too long. When this doesn’t happen this is where many affiliates drop out and quit. Around 95% of them drop out which means there’s only 5% who actually succeed long term as affiliates.
These people are highly motivated, self disciplined and have a very strong “why”? – Their reason to carry on through the disappointment and “failures” takes them to the levels where they can command their own salary, scale their businesses and quit their jobs.
Learn more and get started with your own affiliate marketing business here.
Wondering how to generate an email list? One of the best things you can do for success online with any business is to generate an email list of subscribers. With an email list you can remind people of your products and services over a much longer period of time than is possible just from a website. If you’re an affiliate marketer, building an email list is definitely something you should do.
On a website, most visitors will click away within a few minutes, and they are often gone forever. But if you can capture their email details, you can continue to send them messages. You can follow up with them over weeks, months and even years and decades.
To generate an email list you’ll need an email autoresponder. You can get one for free by clicking the image below.
How To Generate An Email List
Once you have access to an autoresponder you’ll be able to create a sign up form from within the software. You can then grab the code for the form and paste in into your website. If you don’t have a website, you can create one for free using a free building platform such as Weebly.com. Or use a landing page software (I use this one) which lets you create super fast landing pages. More on this later.
With your form in place, you can collect subscribers from a website. However, to encourage people to opt in, you’ll need to offer something of value. This can be an ebook, a video course or some kind of pdf digital download. It should be something your subscribers can access immediately once they have entered their name and address on your form.
This is known as a lead magnet. A good lead magnet will offer huge value so people are more likely to sign up. It should also encourage the right kind of people to sign up – those who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell (your target audience or customer avatar).
How To Generate An Email List – Benefit Driven Headline
Your form should have a clear benefit driven headline. This means that it’s immediately apparent as to the benefit for the visitor. Your website visitors are interested in WIIFM – What’s In It For Me! So avoid overly long titles and headings which talk about features of your giveaway download. Here’s a landing page I created with a clear benefit driven headline:
You might see some forms on a website which simply say “sign up to my newsletter”. The benefit of such a title isn’t immediately apparent this kind of headline. Ask yourself why you would sign up and you get the point! Without a strong motivation for your visitors to hand over their details, (to get your freebie) fewer of them will do so!
Traffic To Your Form
There’s various ways to get traffic to your form on your website or landing page. The fastest method is to pay for advertising and if you’re going to do this you really want a professional looking landing page. A professional landing page builder will be faster and more slick than a free website or a blog.
Landing pages are designed specifically to generate leads so you can build your list quickly. If you were to send paid traffic to a normal website, many of your visitors will simply browse around and click through your content. But a landing page only gives two options: sign up or leave. This means you can optimise it to make the most out of your advertising dollars!
Another way to generate traffic to your form is through blogging. This article, for example, is a piece of content which can attract traffic from the search engines. Content generation takes some time and effort to build up, and you’re not guaranteed traffic from Google. But you can promote it yourself too in many ways including posting on social media sites. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some helpful software.
Using Popups On Your Website
You can also use popups, drop downs and other kinds of plugins which give your website visitors more options to join your list. On this site, fore example I have a standard form, a pop up and a drop down opt in.
This gives me three opportunities to offer someone visiting my site a chance to opt in. As annoying as those pop ups are – they work. This is why so many marketers use them on their websites.
I use a tool called Icegram Engage which is a free plugin which lets you create a drop down menu. Aweber offers pop ups and a combination of different styes of opt in form.
You can of course link through to landing pages in your text as well. Checkout one of my landing pages here.
Using Social Media For Lead Generation
You can also use various social media platforms for lead generation too by sending people from it to your landing pages. You can set up your profile to showcase your giveaway offer and link through to a landing page. Quora.com, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc. can all be used in this way.
First set up your profile to offer a clear call to action, sending people to your landing page/website. Then you need a strategy to attract your target audience to your profile page. On Quora you can do this through asking and answering questions in your niche.
On Facebook you can join groups where your target audience might be hanging out. Interact with the groups and get to know people in it. Over time they will visit your profile page and see what you have on offer.
PPC – The Fastest Way To Build Your Email List
Pay per click advertising is definitely the fastest way to build a huge list of subscribers. With other cheaper methods, there’s a lot more work involved too. Blogging for example can take months of work just for a few visitors, who may not actually subscribe to your list!
Paid advertising platforms such as Facebook, Adwords (Google), YouTube, Bing etc. can all be used to target a specific type of person who is most likely to be interested in your offer. This is your target audience or customer avatar. So for example if you’re selling golf equipment, you’ll want to target golf enthusiasts through your advertising. If you were to target everyone, without zoning in on your perfect customer, you’ll likely waste a lot of money in ads.
A good place to start is with Google Adwords, or Bing. Both these platforms allow you to place ads and put them in front of online search queries which specifically relate to the offer (and product) which you are promoting through your email list.
You can also target people through the many paid marketing platforms via criteria such as location, age, sex, interests, online searches and a number of other demographics.
Cross Testing A Landing Page
But of course you’re going to need to spend money to send targeted visitors to your website or landing page. If you’re doing so, it’s much wiser to send them to a landing page where you can capture their email address more easily. On a website there’s more options and so you’re more likely to lose your visitors as they scroll around a website.
On a landing page too, you can cross test different pages to find the best performing ones. With a landing page software, this is much easier to do than to manually do it yourself.
With cross testing, you compare one landing page against another with the same target audience. When more visitors opt in to one page, over another, you will know which one to spend more money on. You can keep doing this over and over to get your lead cost down as much as possible.
Summary
Generating an email list can take some time but it’s well worth the effort. You initially need an autoresponder software (get one here). Once you have designed a form, you can place some code on a website and this allows you to capture the email address of your visitors. But to do so you’ll need to offer something in return – such as a downloadable course or ebook, for example.
The best way to collect emails in bulk is to send paid traffic to a landing page where you offer your visitors a freebie giveaway of some kind which relates to your product/service. You can use a landing page software to split test your landing pages and find the best performing one which gives you the cheapest lead cost.
Once you start building your list, you should also create a follow up series of emails which provide some kind of value to your subscribers. Build trust and offer value through your email marketing campaign and you’re subscribers will more likely want to buy from you when the time comes and if your product is a good fit for them!
What’s better than Clickbank? After all, Clickbank has thousands of affiliate products to promote. Whatever your niche, Clickbank will have some product available that you can promote! Despite the huge variety on Clickbank, and the fact Clickbank offer larger commissions than most physical products available, there’s also a lot of rubbish on the site too! So if you pick up a product which doesn’t sell, you could waste a lot of time trying to promote it.
Clickbank offers some subscription affiliate products too, which can be found using CBengine.com. These pay out recurring commissions which are definitely a good idea for affiliates. With recurring commission products, you can make more from fewer sales!
High ticket commissions are available on Clickbank.com too and these are a good idea. However in a competitive niche it’s more difficult to sell. Here’s one in the niche of trading, a well subscribed and heavily competitive niche:
See the number in the top right on the picture above? $2,528.43? That represents the average commission earned per conversion including up-sells, recurring commissions, order bumps and re-bills. See below:
This means you don’t earn that money when you make a sale right away. It includes all the subscriptions products and up-sells which typically come in later if your customer sticks around. But what if there was a way to earn these kinds of commissions from a single sale?
Better That Clickbank – High Ticket Products
Most affiliates will choose a Clickbank product which sells for around $100 – since that’s most of their inventory. This means they make only $40 on a sale. Unless they choose to sell recurring income products, they’ll need to make sale after sale to make their affiliate business profitable. This can be tough, especially when your profit is only $40 per sale. It means if you use paid advertising you’ll need to spend less that that per sale to be profitable.
Here’s a few high ticket products you can find on a site called Hammacher Schlemmer:
Hammacher.com pays 8% to affiliates which means the Mini Monster Truck could make you a cool $14,800 commission for a single sale! There’s many other high value products on the site too which could earn you over $10,000 for a single sale:
Better Than Clickbank – High Ticket Digital Products
Of course not everyone is in the market for a Killer Whale Submarine worth $90,000! Most people I expect would pay off their mortgage with this kind of money. But with an international audience it pays to think big! As an affiliate you have the power to sell to anyone online!
High ticket digital products are much more relevant in today’s marketplace for a larger audience. Although some people will be buying a $90K submarine, many more are looking to build digital businesses so they can escape their employment grind and work for themselves online. Consider how many struggling affiliates are out there compared to billionaires looking for submarines!
This is why high ticket digital business courses offer one of the best opportunities for affiliates. Here’s a run down of some of the commission structure for online business training:
Learn more about this product range and build an online business from scratch here.
Better Than Clickbank – Business Tools
Some of the best products to promote online are business tools used by affiliates themselves. Think about it. You’re more than likely to maintain your membership with a business tool such as an autoresponder, especially if you’re business becomes profitable.
With such a tool you can also benefit from recurring commissions. So a single sale can generate months and even years or decades worth of commissions.
So there’s a tonne of products out there which are better than Clickbank! That’s not to say Clickbank isn’t the right choice for you. Your success as an affiliate doesn’t only depend on the product you promote but also on your method of promotion.
Ideally find a product which is suitable for you to promote which you have some connection to. It’s tough promoting products you don’t believe in because there’s a disconnection there; a lack of integrity. It’s also much more difficult sustaining the necessary effort promoting something you have no interest in.
By choosing products you align with which also offer recurring commissions and high ticket commissions, you give yourself a greater chance of success with affiliate marketing.
Access an online training and mentoring program for affiliates here.
What is a funnel in affiliate marketing? A funnel is the term used for the process of capturing a potential customer and sending them on a customer journey through to an affiliate product. A sales funnel begins with a marketing “engine” where people are sent through to a landing page from an advert. On a landing page, a visitor’s email is captured and they begin the process of a marketing campaign. This campaign is designed to ultimately sell an affiliate product.
The funnel looks something like this in concept, an upside down cone shape. As a visitor clicks on an advert they come through to a landing page. Here’s an example of a landing page designed for a particular need:
Once a visitor enters their details into the landing page, they will automatically receive an email follow up. This email is the beginning of the marketing campaign which is used for the process of selling affiliate products online.
What Is A Funnel In Affiliate Marketing: Follow Up
The funnel starts with an offer on an advert, and this is usually also shown on the landing page for congruence. This offer will relate to the end product but also to a need which is fulfilled through the free giveaway. In the above landing page, the giveaway is a free video series. This is often called a “lead magnet” and it is used in exchange for the visitor handing over their email so they can receive email messages.
The email follow up series inside an email autoresponder
The subscriber will then receive information relating to their interest in a number of email follow ups. Over the course of several messages, they will also be shown a product. Usually this product is an “entry level” item.
Once someone in the funnel makes a purchase, they can be offered other related products which offer greater value. As an affiliate your job is to find suitable subscribers to send into your sales funnel. The follow up process is automated to provide value and sell affiliate products.
Follow up messages can be send over a long period of time. Often for weeks or even months and years. Email messages are used to build trust and send out value to help subscribers with a specific need or problem.
TripWire Funnel
A tripwire funnel refers to an offer which is triggered by the sale of another product. So when a subscriber buys something, another product is automatically offered to them.
The further down the funnel a subscriber goes in terms of product, the more expensive the products become. This allows affiliates to pitch products at customers who are most likely to be interested in them, and avoid trying to sell to those not ready to buy.
As subscribers move through the funnel, they might make purchases according to their needs and understanding of your product range. So initially the email messages are designed to increase their awareness and interest in what you have to sell.
Why Use A Funnel In Affiliate Marketing
Many affiliates simply sent customers directly to products through their affiliate links. But a funnel is much better because it allows them to build a more long term relationship with their subscribers. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. But once inside a funnel, they are given many more opportunities to buy.
Subscribers can make a buying decision even months or years after joining an email list and entering the sales funnel.
As an affiliate, if you’re paying for advertising, it’s much more cost effective to send visitors to a landing page where you can collect their details and follow up.
A funnel in affiliate marketing is the process of sending potential customers into a email marketing campaign from a landing page. From there, they receive a number of automated messages helping them with a particular problem and recommending certain products which may be of help.
Once they purchase a product, they may be offered another product, triggered by the sale. This is known as a tripwire funnel, where a sale triggers another offer.
A sales funnel is useful for affiliates because it allows them to build a longer term relationship with potential customers by offering them useful information and helping them with a particular problem. Most online consumers will require multiple touch points before buying something. A sales funnel gives them this and allows affiliates a greater length of time to make a sale.
If you’re wondering how to earn from blog writing, this one’s for you! There’s a couple of main ways to earn from a blog. You can monetise a blog with your own business, if you have one, a product you own, or with affiliate marketing or advertising. So if you have nothing of your own to sell, you can sell other people’s products (affiliate marketing) or use ads on your blog and earn a percentage of advertising revenue.
The main problem for bloggers though isn’t necessarily the monetisation. It’s the traffic. With over 600 million blogs on the internet there’s a huge amount of competition. So getting your blog found among the noise is not easy. Most bloggers will start out with zero traffic unless they have some kind of following already from somewhere else. If you’re starting from scratch, as most new bloggers will be, you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting traction.
Depending on your blog niche, it can take months or even years to build up your traffic and start getting followers. That’s even before we talk about monetising your blog. So in the first instance, choosing your topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – Your Niche
“Choose a profitable niche” is often the advice you’ll hear when it comes to blogging. But that could be many niches and profit only comes after you’ve built up your blog and started generating traffic and sales/ad clicks. So it’s worth looking at what is meant by “a profitable niche”.
What is a profitable niche? A profitable niche is one in which you can generate sales and make a profit. With blogging, your traffic is going to come from multiple sources and mostly for free. Ideally it will come from the search engines (Google, etc.) but also you’ll want to find other methods of finding visitors such as social media, email marketing and perhaps even some paid marketing.
Your niche needs to be something you align with and have at least an interest in, if not a passion for. That’s because it’s going to take some time generating content on a regular basis over the course of months and even years. If you can’t imaging doing this in your chosen topic, then it’s probably not the niche for you.
The other advice which is often handed out is “choose a topic you love”. If you love your topic you’ll work much harder on it and for longer. But you also need to align your topic with some kind of monetisation strategy. See also choosing your blog niche.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – Monetising A Blog
Let’s say you’ve spent the last 6 months creating some awesome content in your niche and have built up a fair few daily visitors from the search engines. How are you going to make money from these people?
Without anything of your own to sell the two main options are affiliate marketing and advertising. With advertising you place code on your site which converts to adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn a share of ad revenue. Adsense is one program you can use for this but there are others. With this method of monetisation, you’ll usually only earn tiny amounts for each click on your ad space. This means you need a huge volume of traffic (and free traffic) to make this profitable.
With affiliate marketing you can earn more, but only with the right products and if you make the sales. So you might even test different strategies out to see which works best. But to see any meaningful results you’re going to need traffic first. So it’s best to start out with your monetisation methods in mind before you start out. Otherwise you could waste a lot of time blogging only to realise you’re not going to make any money from it.
To monetise a blog with affiliate marketing, you need to find a product which aligns with your topicwhich you can sell on your site.
Turning Visitors Into Sales
To turn blog visitors into customers you need to:
Get them to your site through content creation – blogging, blog promotion, etc.
Get them to sign up to your email list – offer some free giveaway on your site
Offer them value through your email messages – built trust
Promote your product – sell an affiliate product
Most visitors don’t buy from a new website they have just landed on. Purchases online are often made after a number of touch points with a product or service. Amazon might be the exception here because they have built up trust with so many people over the years. But a new website is different, the visitor doesn’t know you. How many touch points does it take to make a sale? This depends on a number of factors but you can gain your visitors trust by offering them something for free in exchange for their email address.
Then make sure you continue to build trust by sending out useful and informative emails which help them somehow with a particular problem. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy. But also an email marketing campaign gives you the opportunity of putting your products in front of your visitors more regularly and giving them continuity. More “touch points” and trust equals more sales.
How To Earn From Blog Writing – SEO
SEO is an important part of blog writing and it means Search Engine Optimisation. To get more traffic to your blog means writing with the search engines in mind so that Google ( and other search engines) can appropriately index your content and rank your articles/site appropriately on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages. Get an article to the top of Google for one of your search terms and your traffic can make a sudden leap upwards.
But since there’s so much competition online for blogging, you’ll likely not achieve this immediately. You’ll need to build some trust with Google first by creating some quality content on a regular basis and over a long period of time. This can be a frustrating period and you shouldn’t rely on the search engines entirely for your results. Make sure you promote your articles and give them the respect they deserve with your own promotion methods.
You can do this in a number of ways such as through setting up automated blog post sharing on social media and placing social media share buttons on your site. You can also use SEO tools to help you rank content on the SERPS. See best blog plugins for WordPress for a list of useful plugins for bloggers.
Choosing Long Tail Keywords In Your Niche
As a new blogger, you probably won’t get your articles ranked for the best keywords in your niche. After all, with over 600 million blogs on the internet, you’ll have some stiff competition and many of them have been around for years. But still, it’s a good idea to look at Google’s keyword planner for ideas for blog post titles. This will show you other keywords which are already being searched for on Google.
The best keywords have a huge amount of monthly searches and of course it would be nice to see all that traffic on your site! But unfortunately those keywords are well catered for with older domains which have huge authority with Google (and thousands of backlinks).
But the “low hanging fruit” of long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty are your chance to get your content ranking more easily. While there’s no guarantees with ranking your content, you have a much better chance if you aim at the keywords which are less competitive. To find them you can scroll through Google’s keyword planner and look for long tail keywords with less traffic.
Write quality articles for these terms and of course use a good SEO plugin (such as Yoast SEO) to help you.
Summary
Blog writing can be a great way to earn a living. But there’s a lot of other blogs out there to compete against. To give yourself the best chance of success with blogging, choose a topic you can write about for an unlimited amount of time! Many bloggers will quit when they don’t make any money. So your best opportunity is to find a niche which you would love to write about, whether or not it makes you any money!
“The person who loves walking will walk further than the person who wants the destination”.
The same applies to blogging. If you love what you do, you’ll go the extra mile. If not, you’ll likely give up before you get the traction you desire. You also need to align your passion with a suitable affiliate product in order to make money from blogging. See also what are the best affiliate products to promote.
Wondering how to make money sending emails? Most people don’t know that they can make money through sending email messages. All you need is an email autoresponderand an affiliate product to promote. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. With enough sales and enough email subscribers on your list, you can automate sales from a growing global audience.
Here’s a little more about how all this works.
How To Make Money Sending Emails – Affiliate Marketing
If you didn’t know about a business model called affiliate marketing, let me explain. It’s a referral based business model in which third parties refer customers to products and services available online. You don’t need any of your own products to become an affiliate marketer and you can join many programs completely for free.
Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once inside the back office, you can get an affiliate link and promote any of thousands of products from Amazon. If you make a sale through your affiliate link, Amazon pays you a commission based on the sale.
How To Make Money Sending Emails – Email Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the simplest business model you can use to promote almost anything you can find for sale online. Join the associated affiliate program, grab a link and start promoting. One of the simplest ways to promote affiliate links is through email marketing. Anyone can learn how to do email marketing and all you need is an email autoresponder and somewhere to collect subscribers from – such as a website or landing page.
Place a form on a website with a simple piece of code, and hey presto, you have a means to collect email addresses from a website.
Landing pages are web pages specifically set up for the purpose of collecting email subscribers. They’re much better to help you make money with an email list than a normal website. On a normal website, there’s lot of options but on a landing page there’s only two: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to optimise their landing page for the most amount of subscribers at the smallest cost.
On a website you can browse around and look at a lot of content. Most visitors will leave within a few minutes never to return. Since it takes several touch points for online website visitors to make buying decisions, it’s much better to get them on an email list, especially if you’re paying for visitors.
How To Make Money Sending Emails – The Ad Platform
To find suitable visitors to join your email list, you’ll need to actively send website visitors to your landing page. This can be done through organic traffic or paid traffic. The fastest way to do it is through using a paid marketing platform. With paid for platforms you put ads in front of your target audience – the people most likely to want your product.
adwords
They click on the ads and that takes them to your landing page where you collect the email details. To do this successfully, you obviously need to offer something valuable, otherwise nobody would give away their content credentials! This is known as the lead magnet!
Once inside the email list, subscribers become “leads”. You then send email messages to your list of leads automatically with a pre-written queue of regular email messages. Messages should be designed to help subscribers with a particular problem while recommending certain products and services for them to buy.
How To Make Money Sending Emails – The Lead Magnet
The lead magnet is the information you offer as a “legitimate bribe” to encourage your visitors to opt in to your email list. It can be an ebook, a video series or a newsletter but it should be targeted towards your perfect customer avatar or target audience.
A good lead magnet will attract a specific audience which is aligned with the products you will promote through your email marketing campaign. So for example, I promote online business tools and training resources for the complete beginner. One of my ebooks is this one: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners:
A good lead magnet attracts a congruent audience which is aligned with your affiliate product.
The Affiliate Product/s
Of course to make money sending emails you need to sell something to your email list. This is the affiliate product you choose to promote. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from. Ideally choose a product you love and have some interest in outside of the obvious financial motivation. That way, you can create email messages which relay the value of what you’re promoting more ethically and authentically.
With a product you have an interest in, you can also build an authority website which can give you a free traffic source to your landing page. In a subject you have no interest in, this can be more difficult.
Any product which is connected to an affiliate program can be sold for a commission. Find online products and services in almost any area. Just do a simple online search for “{your subject} affiliate program” and you should find products to promote.
Different Affiliate Products
There’s many different types of affiliate products you can promote and not all of them pay the same. For example, physical products will typically pay between 1% and 10% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of low priced items to make a good amount of money. If you choose higher priced items, you can sell fewer items and still make more money. High ticket affiliate products allow you to sell a single item and make thousands of dollars from each sale. (see image below).
Digital products can be sold through email marketing too. They typically pay much more that physical products too. Digital products will pay from around 30%-40% and sometimes more. You can find many digital products on a site called Clickbank.com.
Subscription affiliate products are a good idea too. They will pay recurring commissions. So a single sale can give you a regular income. Products such as online business tools are vital for running online businesses. They are therefore good to promote for affiliates because affiliates will continue to receive monthly recurring commissions for the lifetime of the customer they have referred.
Generate Value Through Email Messages
One of the best ways to generate affiliate sales through email marketing is through offering a valuable service through your emails which is connected to the products you can promote. The more value you can offer your email subscribers over a longer time period, the more likely they will get to know, like and trust you through your emails.
When this happens, and if your product/s meet their needs, you have a much better chance of selling to them. As your email list grows over time, you can build up a subscriber base into the hundreds of thousands. Messages can be pre-written and automated too.
Ultimately, making money through email messages can be one of the easiest and simplest ways to make money. There is work upfront which needs to be done but through using automated tools and software, anyone can learn this style of online selling.
What does affiliate marketing beginners income look like? As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’re going to need to put a lot of groundwork in before you can earn anything. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model and no earnings can be guaranteed. So initially you won’t earn anything as a beginner.
However, once you figure out a method of selling an affiliate product, your income can increase quite dramatically and fairly quickly; especially if you focus on using scalable marketing tactics and promote high ticket and subscription products.
Here’s a graph showing statistics from around the world of affiliate marketers income. As you can see, most affiliates earn below $10k a year. As a beginner, you should expect to spend some time learning how to sell affiliate products before you can see any tangible results from your efforts.
Affiliate Marketing Beginners Income – Your First Sale
As a beginner in affiliate marketing one of your first priorities is to make your first sale online. This is a massive achievement. Once you have done it, you know it can be done and you can repeat this success. This is extremely beneficial to your belief. Since affiliate marketing is performance based, and you don’t get paid unless you make a sale, it can be frustrating for new affiliates getting their affiliate business “off the blocks”. If they don’t really trust the process or believe it can be done, they are more likely to quit, before they have any evidence that it works!
This is also the stage where you’re learning. You’ll need to put some time and effort in before you can reap the rewards. Sadly around 95% of new affiliates will quit in this time. That’s often because they have not seen anything for their efforts. But during the learning phase of affiliate marketing you’ll need to put a lot of effort in for sometimes no financial rewards.
The reward is there, even if it’s not a financial one. If you can see your “failures” as learning experiences, you can use them to move forward. If not you’re more likely to quit.
Affiliate Marketing Beginners Income – Belief and Effort
Belief in what you’re doing and your efforts are intricately related. If you’re uncertain of your direction or the viability of your business, you are less likely to work hard and give it your all! This is why the first sale is so important. Armed with the knowledge that affiliate marketing does actually work, and that you have made a small success, you know for sure you can repeat this success. This is hugely motivational and when you see more sales coming in from your efforts, you’re more encouraged to do the work.
But when you’re new to affiliate marketing you are likely to be full of doubt and fear. You don’t know the right steps to take and this uncertainty can lead to procrastination. This state of being certainly doesn’t lead to your being proactive in your affiliate business. You’re much more likely to quit at this stage.
Belief leads to action which leads to feedback. So if you don’t believe you can make affiliate marketing work, you’re not going to put in the work. When you are hugely motivated and have evidence that it works yourself, you’re going to do more of what works. As a beginner you don’t have this knowledgeor this belief.
Scalable Strategies And Products
There’s many directions you can take as an affiliate. Depending on your particular circumstances and preferences, you could choose a number of different tactics. Blogging, paid marketing, email marketing, social media and video marketing are all tactics used by affiliate marketers to sell affiliate products.
High ticket items give you much larger commissions as an affilite
Blogging can take some time and paid marketing strategies are much more scalable. That is, you can reach a wider audience more quickly if you use paid marketing. With paid marketing, once you are profitable you can more easily scale up by increasing your budget.
An affiliate marketing beginners income always starts at zero! As a beginner you only start making money when you start making affiliate sales. This can take some time and effort and everyone has a different experience according to their marketing strategy and products they choose to sell.
As you start generating sales your income can go up quite quickly if you’re using paid marketing and building an email list.
This will also depend on the products you promote too. High ticket products pay more than most and subscription products give you a recurring income. The most profitable digital products are often business related training and education courses. These are a good choice if you want to maximise the potential of your efforts.
