AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Is Affiliate Marketing Free?

Is affiliate marketing free? Yes you can do affiliate marketing completely for free and most affiliate programs allow you to join at zero cost. This makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular online business models available. Anyone can join a program, grab their affiliate link and start promoting it online. When they make a sale, through their affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to them and they earn a commission based on the sale.

However, affiliate marketing isn’t easy and you only generate commissions when you make a sale. As a performance based business model, many new affiliates will quit when they fail to make sales. Even if you are able to make some easy success, this is difficult to sustain over the longer term. To help you succeed with affiliate marketing it is worth purchasing some tools such as:

A website hosting and domain name – which gives you your own “digital property” – free blog platforms can also be used but tend to have less authority and can they be more difficult to obtain traffic from.
An email autoresponder – allows you to collect email subscribers and promote your products to greater numbers of people
Help and support – training is definitely worth the investment if you can afford it. Going it alone isn’t recommended considering the 95% failure rate in affiliate marketing.

There’s also numerous other tools and software which can help you generate more traffic. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some free ones.

Is Affiliate Marketing Free – Marketing Strategy

Despite the fact you can do affiliate marketing completely free, it’s much more difficult to make a success of affiliate marketing if you don’t invest anything. Having your own website, for example will give you more authority with your visitors (and with Google) than a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com. A domain name only costs around $10 to purchase and a hosting can be obtained for a few dollars a month.

An email autoresponder is well worth a small investment too (around $10 a month). Affiliates use autoresponders to collect subscribers email addresses and send out automated messages with their affiliate links in them. It allows you to grow your audience quite quickly, depending on your marketing method.

While we are talking about marketing, this is pretty important issue if you don’t want to spend anything. There’s two main methods of marketing which affiliates use: paid and unpaid. Unpaid marketing methods (such as blogging) will take much longer to gain traction with and of course paid marketing costs you something, although you can start with a very low budget while you’re learning.

The best things to invest in if you’re doing everything on a shoestring budget are an autoresponder and a website of your own. The next best thing is to get help support and training.

Traffic Generation

Without a healthy amount of website traffic, you’re going to struggle to sell any affiliate product, no matter how good it is! To get traffic takes some time and/or marketing budget. With a good marketing budget you can turn on traffic like a tap! But if you’re on a tight budget and can’t afford this, you’ll need to find another marketing strategy which is free. Free traffic strategies include unpaid social media marketing tactics and content creation such as blogging or video blogging.

A completely free traffic method is to use blog platforms such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com or Hubpages.com. Write a number of pieces of content and promote them as much as possible throughout your social media platforms. This can take some time and serious effort though so it’s worth considering your marketing strategy carefully.

You’ll also need to choose an affiliate product which is aligned with your blog content. See also customer avatar worksheet and target audience for affiliate marketing.

Summary

Although you can do affiliate marketing completely for free, it’s much more difficult if you don’t have a few useful tools:

Your own domain name and hosting provider
Help, support and training
An email autoresponder – this one gives you free access and up to 500 subscribers without having to pay!

To do affiliate marketing completely for free can be done, but it will likely be much more difficult and involve generating traffic through content marketing rather than through paying for it. This is very slow and there’s a huge amount of competition online for content.

To learn more about affiliate marketing and to get help and support click here.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners?

If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may be wondering is Clickbank good for beginners? Clickbank has a very user friendly platform and it’s easy to access products and get started with your affiliate link. There’s a wide range of products you can choose from and with digital products you’ll typically earn more than with physical ones. Some products on Clickbank pay upwards of 50% commissions too! See also what are the most profitable digital products to sell online.

However, it’s not all great with Clickbank. If your account becomes dormant you may accrue charges. ClickBank sales accounts with a positive balance, but no earnings for an extended period of time, are considered dormant. If your account has a zero balance however this doesn’t apply. So you won’t get charged until you accrue some earnings. See Clickbank’s dormant charges account policy here.

Clickbank’s customer service can be a little slow too. It may require up to 7 days to hear back from their customer service department. The other downside of promoting products from Clickbank is the fierce competition. Some of the top programs especially will be well promoted by top affiliates. So choosing a sellable item comes with a lot of online noise so it can be hard to make sales.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners – Making Sales

As a beginner in affiliate marketing it can be tough making your first sale online. So I definitely recommend joining a program which will help you with your marketing. You can find one on this website – just sign up to my email list for details. Your success as an affiliate isn’t only down to the products you choose to promote but also in how you promote them. As someone who struggled for years trying to make it as an affiliate, I would definitely testify to the problems which exist in marketing.

Clickbank has a tonne of products to choose from which means you can usually find a product in every conceivable niche. But the best sellers are always well subscribed and you’ll find a lot of competition. The lesser known products often haven’t been picked up by top affiliates and are therefore more risky to promote. You can easily pick a bad product which doesn’t sell, no matter how hard you try. So your product choice is key. Ideally choose a product you align with and in which you can build a profitable niche.

Is Clickbank Good For Beginners – Subscriptions

If you’re going to use Clickbank it’s definitely worth looking for products which carry recurring commissions. These are worth a lot more to affiliates because a single sale can mean ongoing monthly commissions! You can find these products using this website. CBEngine.com can help you find the top paying products and those which pay recurring commissions too. Just beware that the top paying products are often over subscribed and there will be a lot of competition.

Clickbank Gravity

Clickbank “gravity” is a score denoted by Clickbank to its products which serves as an indicator of the best selling products. Over a 12-week rolling period, the ClickBank Gravity Score calculates how many unique affiliates are making commissions on a particular offer, with a higher emphasis on more recent product sales. More on Gravity score here.

The score is used to find quality products which are already selling, which is a good idea if you’re new. However, too high a Gravity score might also suggest that a particular product is already oversubscribed. This might mean there’s a tonne of competition for it. Ideally find a product in a topic you like which is already proven to sell but isn’t too competitive. Too low a score and you may struggle to sell your item.

Summary

So is Clickbank good for beginners? Clickbank has a huge array of digital products to sell as an affiliate. Digital products pay more than physical products too, quite a lot more. But you’ll need to actually sell those products if you’re going to earn anything as an affiliate. That’s why it’s always a good idea to get some training if you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing.

Access a training resource here to learn more and get help and support.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About?

What is affiliate marketing all about? If you’re asking this, you probably already know something about what affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties earn commissions by selling other people’s products, mostly online.

Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program. Once they have joined an affiliate program they learn how to promote their affiliate links somehow. This can be done in a number of ways and is mostly done online through marketing methods such as blogging, paid advertising, social media, email marketing and through the use of video.

When someone buys a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate who referred that customer gets paid a commission based on the sale. Because affiliate marketing can be done from anywhere globally, it’s gaining popularity as a method of earning money online. You don’t need any of your own products and it’s relatively cheap to learn affiliate marketing. It’s one of the most popular methods of earning income online.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About – Amazon

Amazon, for example, has one of the most popular affiliate programs and many new affiliates will join Amazon’s partner program (affiliate program) and earn money by promoting products from the site. Since Amazon is well trusted, a large percentage of consumers are likely to buy from them. A recent study showed that 89% of consumers would rather buy from Amazon than from other e-commerce sites.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/03/20/study-89-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-buy-products-from-amazon-than-other-e-commerce-sites/

But while Amazon is good for consumers, it’s not so great for affiliates who typically earn only between 1% and 10% commissions for products they have sold. Other affiliate products pay much more, such as digital products which typically pay between 30% and 40% commission on sales.

What Is Affiliate Marketing All About – Clickbank

Clickbank.com is a “digital product marketplace” where many affiliates will find products to promote. Unlike Amazon, Clickbank promotes digital products which generally are better payers for affiliates. You can find thousands of products on the Clickbank marketplace which makes it a simple choice if you have an existing website for a means of making money through product promotion.

To promote any affiliate product you must first join a program associated with that particular product. Not all online products and services have an affiliate program, but many do. So you can find things to sell in almost any given topic.

Digital products are good for affiliates for a couple of reasons. You can earn larger commissions typically with digital products and they can be downloaded from anywhere digitally, so there’s no need for postage. The most profitable digital products are those which carry a high value or have recurring commissions attached to them. These are things like software products which have subscription charges or memberships.

High Ticket & Subscription Affiliate Products

With a high ticket product you can earn considerably more than with most other products you can find online. High ticket affiliate products are worth much more than your standard products. As such you can earn larger amounts from their sale. A good high ticket item can give affiliates commissions of $500 and above per sale.

The highest paying digital products are either super expensive physical products or digital education products which give huge value. The most profitable products include items which pay both high ticket and recurring commissions.

With such a business model, affiliates can quickly replace an existing income if they use paid advertising and sell to a scalable audience.

Learn more an access a training course here.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Popular?

Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model because pretty much anyone can do it and there’s a very low bar to entry. You can learn affiliate marketing on a shoestring and although it isn’t easy to be consistently profitable with affiliate marketing, those who stick at it can see large financial rewards and a passive income over time.

The drop out rate in affiliate marketing is pretty high and only around 5% of those who start will continue to make it their full time income. But this is partly because it’s so accessible. Anyone can become an affiliate from anywhere globally. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. But being successful is another matter entirely because affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means if you don’t make any sales, you don’t get paid! So even though there is the potential for uncapped earnings, getting your affiliate business off the ground can be tough.

If you’re serious about earning an income through affiliate marketing it can be done alongside a job and in your spare time too. The versatility of affiliate marketing makes it a very appealing business model. Access an online training resource here.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done?

How is affiliate marketing done? Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties sell other people’s products online. When an affiliate makes a sale through their unique affiliate code (affiliate link), they earn a commission based on the sale.

Initially to become an affiliate you will need to join an affiliate program. Once you’ve joined, you’ll usually get access to a back office where you can collect your affiliate link. Once you have it, you can start promoting your affiliate product. There’s many ways to promote affiliate links and some of the most popular methods are:

Blogging or video blogging (V’logging).
Email marketing – collect emails and promote link through email messages
Paid advertising (Pay per click ad platforms such as Adwords, Bing, YouTube and Facebook for example).
Social media marketing – you can use the many social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc to post your links and find potential customers.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Blogging/V’logging

With blogging or video blogging, affiliates create content and post on a website or video platform. They optimise their content as much as possible so that they can get found by the various search engines. The most popular search engine is of course Google, so most bloggers will aim to get their content ranking on Google to get free website traffic.

This is definitely not an easy task as there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet. In a very competitive niche, affiliates will be competing against other bloggers for the top spot on Google. But they can also promote their blog posts elsewhere too such as through using social media platforms.

With blogging it can take some time to start selling affiliate products consistently. But over time and with enough content, you can even sell affiliate products passively from the work you’ve done previously. The same can be said for other content generation strategies such as through using YouTube.

How Is Affiliate Marketing Done – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular tools for affiliate marketers. It lets the affiliate collect email addresses of people and send them information on autopilot through email messages. With a large enough email list and an engaged audience, affiliates can sell thousands of affiliate products through sending out email messages and building a relationship with their list. This is usually done by offering a service of some kind through a newsletter subscription.

To collect email addresses affiliates place a form on a website or landing page. They then drive traffic to that page according to their target audience. This can be done through organic content creation or paid advertising.

Using PPC – Pay Per Click (paid advertising)

Many affiliates use PPC (pay per click advertising) to promote their affiliate products. They can either send people directly to a product sales page (through their affiliate link), or to a landing page as described above. Obviously with paid ads affiliates aim to promote a product and earn more in sales revenue than they do in advertising expenditure. Once they are in profit on a consistent basis, they can simply increase their advertising budget and make many more sales.

PPC ad platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. allow affiliates to find likely customers for their products and place ads accordingly. For example, Adwords lets you place ads in front of people according to what they search for on Google. So you can show ads only to relevant online search traffic to maximise the potential to make a sale.

Social Media Marketing – Selling Through Social Media Platforms

While you can pay on certain platforms to show your ads, you can also use various unpaid social media marketing strategies too. One strategy is to place your links in your social media profile and then find other users who are likely to want your affiliate product.

Here’s my bio on Facebook linking to one of my affiliate websites: https://escape9tofive.com

On Facebook, for example, you can do this through the use of groups. Join groups and interact with members who are within the remit of your target audience. As they find your profile to interact with you they can see your offer. A common strategy used by affiliates is to offer some kind of giveaway product (such as an ebook/video course) through their social media bio.

Once on their email list, you’ll be shown their affiliate products. Some affiliates will link directly to their affiliate products on their social media bio, if they’re not using an email list.

Summary

Affiliates use many different strategies to sell affiliate products and earn commissions based on those sales. From blogging, to video marketing and PPC (pay per click advertising).

Email marketing is one of the best strategies which affiliates use and they can build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. When an email is sent out to a list like this, with an affiliate link in it, even a small percentage of purchases can means affiliates have a very nice pay day!

But of course it can take some time to build a list like this. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, access course here to learn more.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing?

How profitable is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which third parties sell other people’s products for commissions based on what they sell. So earnings reflect the amount of products affiliate marketers sell. So if an affiliate is able to sell thousands of products there’s no limit to what they could earn – simply through referring customers to products online. Affiliates can reach a global audience on the internet and therefore sell to anyone online. With the right products and services and the knowledge of how to sell, affiliates can be incredibly profitable making millions of dollars in some cases.

However, not all affiliates are profitable. Some struggle to get into profit and the learning curve for affiliate marketing is a steep one. While you’re learning how to be the middleman for products online, there’s a lot to figure out. But essentially affiliates must learn how to become profitable by understanding a method of selling which costs less than they make. Once they figure this out, and particularly when using paid ads, they can simply scale up by turning up their budget.

In affiliate marketing the affiliate essentially learns how to spend $1 and make $2. When they can do this, they increase their budget and spend $1000 to make $2000 ($1000 profit). They can spend $10,000 and make $20,000 ($10,000 profit) and so on. This is why affiliates spend thousands of dollars on advertising, because they figured out a method of doubling what they spend.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing? Why So Many Struggle

However, during the course of learning, the affiliate will normally have to spend a marketing budget to find an ad campaign which is profitable. This might require them testing different adverts and trying out different audiences. Since most ad campaigns won’t be profitable, especially for a beginner who is learning the ropes, this is where many give up. In fact there’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing!

But for the 5% who carry on there can be great rewards. Especially if you are able to find a good product and crack your marketing strategy. There’s other ways of marketing affiliate products too and you don’t have to run paid ads to sell affiliate products. You can also build content. This article is an example of content marketing. Bloggers and video bloggers create content on a regular basis and sell affiliate products from their websites and/or video channels.

To generate organic traffic through content creation can take some considerable time and patience, and is less scalable than through using paid ads. But over time as your content grows, you will naturally attract traffic to your content. This can ultimately become a source of passive income if you are able to successfully monetise your website traffic with affiliate products that are suitable for your audience.

How Profitable Is Affiliate Marketing?

If you’re starting out as an affiliate you should expect to work consistently for some time before you start generating consistent sales. Depending on your marketing strategy, it can take a few months or a few years to be profitable consistently. Many affiliates drop out and it is the few rather than the many who become millionaires through affiliate marketing; although many people are able to make a living through affiliate marketing once they figure out how to make sales.

Your choice of product and marketing method will have a considerable bearing on how well you can do. With a cheap item from Amazon, you won’t be able to generate much in terms of commission. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% on most of its items. But through using digital products you can earn between 30% and 40% typically on sales you generate. The most profitable digital products are those which pay high ticket commissions and recurring commissions.

Summary

Your success as an affiliate will depend on a number of things including your ability to learn, stay the course and be persistent in the course of difficulties and obstacles. It will also depend on the affiliate marketing business model which you use.

Ideally choose a high ticket product to promote which also offers recurring commissions. With such a business model you are more easily able to become profitable through the use of paid marketing strategies. Without using paid strategies affiliate marketing is much more difficult. You’ll need to stay persistent with creation of content and there’s huge competition. But of you choose a topic and niche which you’re passionate about, you’re much more chance of staying the course.

Access an online business mentoring program here to get started.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?

Is affiliate marketing easy? While affiliate marketing allows anyone to profit from the sale of other people’s products online, it’s definitely not easy. However, it’s easy to get into affiliate marketing because you only need to join a program and promote your affiliate link. You don’t need products of your own and anyone can “have a go”. However there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing, perhaps for this reason.

Around 95% of affiliates don’t make it and quit. So if you want to be in the 5% of affiliates who make it work, you’ll need to work hard and in the right areas. Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, you only get paid when you make a sale. If this doesn’t happen, you can be doing a lot of work for nothing, especially if you quit!

Making an affiliate marketing business profitable is the biggest challenge and requires you to actively promote your affiliate product/s through an affiliate link. The easy part of being an affiliate is joining a program and setting up your link and website etc. The hard part is actually learning and implementing a strategy of marketing which brings in customers through your affiliate links.

While an easy sale is possible, long term sustainable profits are much more difficult. This is why the affiliate marketing success rate is pretty low.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy? Making It Easier

However, despite the large drop out rate within affiliate marketing, there have been huge leaps in software and technology over the last few years which has made becoming a profitable affiliate easier than it once was. Previously to have success as an affiliate you would need coding skills and to build your own websites and sales funnels from scratch. You can pretty much get an affiliate website (and sales funnels) up and running with a few clicks with certain programs.

This takes much of the hard work out of becoming an affiliate as well as much of the technical side of things. However, once you have set up a sales system you’ll need to learn a form of marketing. This is probably the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even with a ready made website and sales funnels up your sleeve, you’ll still need to promote your business some how. This is why many affiliates will dedicate most of their time to learning online marketing techniques and skills.

To make it easier to become profitable as an affiliate, choose high ticket products and subscription products which pay out recurring commissions. Choose a product you believe in and a topic which you have an interest. Use paid marketing if you can which allows you to get traffic almost immediately to your website or landing page.

Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is probably the most important factor (besides product choice) in whether you’ll become profitable or not as an affiliate. So choosing the right one for you is pretty vital. If you’re going to become a blogger, for example, expect your journey to be much longer than if you were to use paid advertising.

It can take months or even years to build up your traffic to a substantial amount through blogging. But with paid advertising, you can see this volume of traffic instantly with a large enough budget. Paid advertising can easily be scaled up too, of course. But you don’t want to throw too much money at your affiliate business too fast. Most ad campaigns won’t work as you expect and there’s a learning curve.

The most profitable affiliates typically have been at it for years but there’s no earning cap with affiliate marketing. This makes it attractive to the masses which is another potential reason why so many drop out.

Summary

Is affiliate marketing easy? The short answer is no! While it’s easy to join a program, build a website and setup a marketing funnel, the hard part is to make sales consistently and this requires a fair amount of tenacity and patience. If you’re going to be running paid advertising, expect to spend some budget while learning.

Many ads don’t work initially and you’ll need to work at it. With content marketing (such as blogging) you could be at it for several months before things start working. With blogging though, you can ultimately make passive income from your free traffic once you’ve put in the work before hand. While it’s not as scalable as paid marketing, it’s also a viable option for affiliates to consider. But consider how long you will sustain the effort when you’re not seeing results immediately.

Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which you only get paid when you make sales, it also means you can make nothing for some time, before you break through. How long you can stick with it will have a say in whether or not you’ll become successful as an affiliate.

Your choice of product also has a massive factor. See also the most profitable digital products.

Freelance Affiliate Guide

So here’s my freelance affiliate guide. I’ve been an affiliate for over 10 years now. I wanted to write a guide which included the things I wish I had known when I got started. If I had read this guide 10 (or so) years ago, it would have given me a much better start in affiliate marketing.

For years I struggled with affiliate marketing. When I started I was pretty desperate and in a lot of debt. So I tried to do everything for free. This means it took much longer and I was often finding out information which was unconnected.

This often sent me on wild good chases, jumping from one strategy to another, losing momentum as I did. This is known as “shiny object syndrome”! When you’re new as an affiliate you’re bound to sign up to many email lists and find out information from lots of sources. While this can be helpful it can also be confusing. Information overload is a real thing in affiliate marketing. When you’re confused, you don’t know which path to choose. As a result you’re likely to do nothing!

Freelance Affiliate Guide

Affiliate marketing is a great business when it’s working for you. But to get to this stage requires a lot of work initially without obvious rewards. That’s why around 95% of new affiliates will quit. They simply don’t see the bigger picture.

Those who stick at it do see the bigger picture. Imagine sales coming in every single day on complete autopilot and you’re getting close to what affiliate marketing can be like. But at first it simply isn’t like this. There’s lots to learn and figure out and you don’t get paid for just figuring it out. You only get paid when you make a sale. So if you’re desperate for cash, affiliate marketing might not be right for you unless you have the patience to make it though this beginning phase while you’re learning.

I like the analogy of the Chinese bamboo tree in terms of how an affiliate business can grow. Initially, with the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period of a few years – yes years – before the plant even breaks through the soil. But if you water it and give it the nutrients it needs to grow, once it breaks the soil it can grow 90 feet in a matter of a few weeks!

That’s not to say you won’t make a sale for years. You can make sales very quickly depending on your marketing choice. But to make sales consistently and in your sleep will take some consistent effort. This is tough when you don’t see the immediate rewards!

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Products

When I started out as an affiliate marketer I made a lot of mistakes. I choose the wrong kinds of products to promote for a start. I used Amazon and eBay myself so it seemed a natural progression as an affiliate to promote products through their affiliate programs. But they both pay only tiny commissions. So when I eventually made my first sale, it was for peanuts! What I didn’t know was that I could have promoted other products which paid much more such as:

Subscription affiliate products – which pay recurring commissions
High ticket affiliate products – pay larger than average commission $500+

Just this knowledge could have shaved years of my affiliate journey! So you’re welcome! When I started promoting high value products instead of low value ones, I started making real progress. Before I only struggled. Digital products too pay much more than physical ones. Most physical products will pay between 1% and 10% commissions whereas digital products pay 30%-40%. Here again you can save yourself a heap of time.

If the same work is involved selling any affiliate product online (which is often the case), why would you sell products which only pay tiny amounts?

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Alignment

Another important thing to mention here is the alignment you have between your affiliate products and yourself. Not only that, but it’s wise to choose products you’re actually fanatical about, if you get fanatical about anything! This is something I struggled with for years. I would spend hour upon hour building websites for products I didn’t care a hoot about. They all failed. When I found something I could get behind, everything changed because I believed in what I was doing wholeheartedly.

If you go about your affiliate business in a whimsical way, with no alignment with who you are and what you believe in, it’s a much more difficult journey. It’s also easier to quit. With affiliate marketing you can expect to do more than you think to break through and start making those nice sales. When you are uncertain, or unsure of your path, this is so much more difficult.

Find a strategy and a product you can stick to and your success is much more likely. Make sure you’re in alignment and there’s no doubt in your mind before you begin. That way, you’re going to have the necessary follow-though to make a success of it.

Freelance Affiliate Guide – Marketing Methods

Whatever your marketing method is, you need to be persistent until you make your first sale. Stick with a single method until you master it. Here’s another mistake I made on my journey! I jumped from one thing to another, never quite getting any traction with any.

It wasn’t until I found my passion for blogging that things really changed. I made the odd sale here and there. But until I chose my path and got busy in it, I was always looking for results before I was off the blocks! This of course led to procrastination and inactivity. Which led to zero sales! Focus on the activities you do every day, and make some good habits. Don’t look at your results until you have them. Keep an eye on what you’re doing every day.

Here’s a few marketing methods you can choose as an affiliate:

Blogging – takes some time so you’ll need to be patient and have a passion for your topic.
Paid marketing – is fast but you’ll need to test and measure using ad budget. If you don’t have an ad budget to learn with, this isn’t going to work. Expect to invest money while learning, before you find a method which is profitable.
Email marketing – most affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they sell their products too. This is definitely recommended. Get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Social media – many affiliates find their own marketing methods using social media platforms such as Facebook. Of course you can use paid marketing on many platforms too, and there’s a few unpaid social media marketing strategies you can use as well.

Products & Blogging

Aligning your products with your audience is key to success as a freelance affiliate marketer. With a blog, for example, you want to attract people to your website who are going to be interested in your product/s. Trying to sell a motorcycle tyre from a hotel reception isn’t going to work. The same is true from a website. Despite this, many new affiliates will try and sell something from a site which is unsuitable for that particular website.

Knowing your target audience in affiliate marketing is pretty important here. Your target audience is the small sub-section of the online marketplace who will be interested in what you have to sell. So if your most passionate topic to write about is motorcycles, you’ll need some related product on your site which is suitable for the people you will attract.

Your “customer avatar” is your perfect customer. It defines them with exacting detail and if you can get clear on this, you’ll shave years off your affiliate struggles.

You can easily attract the wrong audience with affiliate marketing and not sell any of your affiliate products. So all your work is wasted if you’re unable to sell, no matter how hard you work! Working smart is therefore the most important aspect of affiliate marketing since you’re only getting paid when you make a sale!

Summary

Ok so that’s a lot of information so here’s a quick summary of some of the most important aspects I feel I should have known sooner as an affiliate:

Affiliates only earn when they sell – it’s performance related pay. This means you can earn a potentially unlimited amount of money. But it also means you can earn nothing. It’s therefore important to work smart, not just hard.
Using high ticket and subscription products will mean you can make more for your efforts when you do make those sales. This was game changing for me!
- Choose a topic and product you can fully get behind and embrace. If you’re half hearted about your product and what you’re doing, you’re likely to quit too early. If you’re creating content you need passion for your subject.
- Learn who you are talking to – your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. Know this and you’ll save heaps of wasted time and effort
- Build an email list of subscribers – with a list you have greater control over your audience. Without one you are forever working on getting traffic – either through creating content or paying for it directly.

Learn more and access an online business training and education resource here.

Keyword Domain Names

Keyword domain names are still a thing, even if they are not as popular as they were. By carefully selecting a domain name which has a specific keyword within it, you can more easily rank your website for that chosen keyword. That’s not to say a keyword domain name guarantees you a ranking. It definitely doesn’t. But keyword domain names do appear in the search engine results pages (SERPS), and more so if there’s not much competition.

This website, for example, has been built around the keyword ‘affiliate marketing mentor“. And although there’s not many searches for this particular keyword, there’s not much competition on the SERPS for it either. This means the site has been able to rank on Google for that particular keyword quite quickly and with a relatively small amount of work.

Keyword Domain Names: Finding Your Keyword

So, building a keyword domain name website can work quite well if you are careful about which keyword/s you go after. If you are trying to rank your website for a very competitive keyword, it will be much more difficult. To find your keyword, it’s a good idea to know what topic you’re going to create a niche website in.

Ideally, you should choose a topic you know something about. That way, you can build a lot of content in it and continue to do so over a long period of time. This will give you more authority with the search engines and you should get some free traffic. You’ll also be able to target long tail keywords in your blog titles which have less competition. These are the keywords which may have less monthly searches, but they will also usually have less competing websites too. This gives you more chance of getting noticed in the rankings.

To find a keyword you want to build a site around, start with your main “seed” keyword. This will depend on your niche, but ideally choose a topic you’re passionate about and find an affiliate product which you can get behind. Type your seed keyword into the Google keyword planner and search through the results, looking for a suitable keyword phrase. Once you find one, you can buy a domain name which contains you phrase.

Keyword Domain Names – How Many Words?

How many words your keyword contains should give you an idea about the relative competition. A two-word key phrase will typically have a lot more competition and be much more difficult to rank for. I would recommend a three or more word keyword combination to build a niche website around.

The more words you have, the less competition you’ll find. However, you don’t want too many words in your domain name because it will start to look spammy and messy!

Although it might be tempting to aim for a two-word combination in your domain name (because of the larger volume of traffic) there’s a couple of problems with this. Although you’ll see a larger volume of traffic when using Google’s keyword planner (for two-word keywords), there’s little chance of ranking for those terms (depending on your niche of course). Also finding a two-word domain name is difficult, since many of them are already gone. To buy one you’ll be most likely paying above the odds. So look for one which is more affordable and has 3-4 keywords in it.

Choosing A Domain Name

You’ll also need to check whether the domain name you want is actually available. When I came to build this site, I looked initially for “affiliatemarketingmentors.com”.

But the domain wasn’t available so I choose this one instead. Ideally choose a domain which contains your chosen keywords in the first part of the domain name, rather than prefixed by another word. Adding something to the end of your domain name is better than prefixing your keywords with something.

If your business is international, go for a dot com. If you’re local pick the country you are in. So in the UK where I am, if I had a locally based business it would be a .co.uk.

I use Namecheap.com to buy domain names and they can be picked up for less than $10 a year.

Keyword Domain Names – Keyword Research

The most difficult part of this process is to find a good domain name which is a good match for what you’re going to create. This will depend on a few factors and it’s worth getting all your “ducks lined up” before starting this process. You should decide on your topic for your website according to your interests and the products you’re going to be promoting. If you’re not interested in your subject matter, your site is going to be more difficult to create. See also best blog niche for affiliate marketing.

You also want to choose an affiliate product first before commencing on your site. I tried this process a number of times to no avail before I figured out what I most enjoyed writing about. Once you find your topic and product, it’s much easier to make a success of a keyword domain name site.

Once you’re at this stage, enter your main keyword into Google’s Keyword planner. Look through the results for an appropriate keyword combination. It should already have some traffic to it, and be not too competitive for this to work. Don’t be too greedy and go for the high traffic keywords; they are likely not to rank. But don’t build a site around a keyword which gets no traffic either.

You can look on Google search to see the number of competing webpages for any given keyword. Try first an open search and then try a phrase search with your keyword in quotation marks “like this”.

Keyword Domain Names – Building Your Site

I’ve written a few posts on building a niche website in which I’ve shared some ideas. To build your site and get it ranking, you need to show the search engines that you are offering some content which is valuable to its end users. Otherwise, your site is unlikely to rank at all. I went through a stage of just throwing up websites which were super thin and had nothing worth reading on them! Needless to say, they didn’t rank and I wasted my time – apart from the valuable lesson it taught me!

To build a niche website and have it ranking, you will want to create some useful content which (ideally) outperforms the others in the niche. Put your main article on the front page of your website and make it as good as you can. Ideally it should be longer than 1000 words. Then build out more posts using other keyword phrases (related to your “seed” keyword phrase) which you have seen during your keyword research.

I use an SEO tool to help me write SEO friendly content on my sites. Checkout that and my other recommended free blog plugins for WordPress.

Summary

I have several keyword domain name websites and have made affiliate sales from some of them. Others haven’t done as well. The key is to keep at it and learn from your experiences. If you can find a topic you enjoy writing in, the best advice I can offer is to zone in on that!

Build a keyword domain name around your chosen topic and build out the site over several months. Your site won’t rank straight away and Google has a sandbox in which it keeps the new websites. Be patient. The more content you put on a new site the better. Google sees this a sign that you are committed to your website. A thinly built website will seldom do very well, even in a low competition niche and with a keyword domain name.

Monetising your site can be done later, although you’ll want to have looked at and chosen a product you can promote which matches your target audience first, before you build your site.

The most profitable digital products to promote are high end coaching courses. However, you should choose a product which fits your niche, so your audience will naturally be interested in what you have to offer.

Content Marketing Blog Strategy

A content marketing blog strategy can be used to drive traffic organically from the search engines. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, so getting your content found means doing better or working smarter! Do both! Write better content than the rest and work smarter by finding the “low hanging fruit”. What is the low hanging fruit?

Most blog niches are competitive with the most profitable ones usually being the most competitive. But even in a less competitive niche, you still have competition on Google for the coveted prize of a top listing on the first page. That top listing means a tonne of free traffic and that means more customers for your business. But the most competitive terms to rank for are super difficult to rank for. If a top authority domain has hundreds of thousands of back links and has been around for decades, you’ve little to no chance of beating it to the top of page 1 of Google if it has a listing for that term. So what’s the answer? The answer is to find those keywords which are less competitive than the rest – the “low hanging fruit”.

As your site gains authority with Google, you can start aiming a little higher!

Content Marketing Blog Strategy

This strategy starts with Google’s keyword planner. Type your main keyword into the planner and you’ll find a bunch of related terms which you can write content for. The most popular searches however will reveal those keyword combinations which are also the most competitive. Rather than try and compete with the “big boys” for a listing for a 2-3 word phrase, look instead for the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

These tend to be those keywords which have fewer monthly searches. But still, a small amount of a little traffic is worth more than no traffic from a competitive keyword. Those super competitive keywords look really appealing because they have thousands of monthly searches.

Why not write content for them? The answer is you’ll never rank for those keywords because there’s far too much competition. You’ll end up ranking your content on page 10 of Google if you’re lucky! You may get lucky and rank on Bing or Duckduckgo.com. But those search engines get far less traffic than Google. So even after a lot of work creating content for high competition keywords, your results will be poor in terms of free traffic. Instead, target the long tail keywords which have much less competition because you’ll have a greater chance of a ranking!

Content Marketing Blog Strategy – Finding The Long Tail Keywords

Using Google’s keyword planner, click on the Avg. monthly searches tab (second column along) until you see the numbers drop. Then scroll through the results until you find a suitable keyword. Your keyword should relate to your website (and business) in some way. The results above only get 10 (or less) searches a month, so you can scroll along to find keywords with more traffic.

Generally speaking, the more keywords in the chain, the less competition you’ll find on Google for a particular keyword phrase. You can check on Google (on a desktop/laptop computer) for the number of competing websites for any given term. Simply type the keyword into a normal Google search. Also do a phrase match search with the term in “quotes like this”.

You should see a number appear underneath your search and this number denotes the number of competing websites (or web pages) which rank for this term. This will give you an idea of the relative competition before writing your piece of content.

Writing With SEO Tools

While you shouldn’t completely write content only for the robots who are looking at your content, you should also keep them in mind too! SEO (search Engine Optimisation) will help you rank your articles and one of the best tools I use is Yoast SEO – an SEO plugin which helps you write SEO friendly content. This free plugin will help you place keywords in your headings, titles, images and throughout your content in the right amounts.

How people perceive your content is another ranking factor with Google. So you should definitely make an effort to write content which is helpful and easily digested by your readers. Make content easily sharable too. If your readers share your content it’s another signal to Google that your content is share-worthy. You can place social media buttons on your website to make this easier to do. See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress for some other free and cheap plugins I use to help my get more people to my content and rank it better on the search engines.

The more people see you content, the more they will share it, like it, link to it and the better this is for your SEO. But of course it all starts with quality content. If people don’t react supportively to your content, they will click away quickly, won’t like, won’t share and won’t link to it. This is all seen by the watchful eye of the Google bots! So make a good job of your content and it should ultimately grow your SEO standing with Google over time.

Content Promotion

Although you’ve spend a heap of time crafting the perfect piece of content, using your SEO tool to optimise for the search engines and you’re ready for a nice nap, your job still isn’t over! Blog promotion is still your job and relying on a first page listing means you’re handing over control of your traffic to someone else.

Although we would like a top listing to get free traffic to our blog, it’s never guaranteed. So promoting your blog is absolutely essential if you want to make the most out of your efforts. You can of course automate some of this with plugins such as Revive Old Posts and Postplanner.com which allow you to syndicate blog posts as they are published via social media.

The faster you get people to your posts, the more data points Google will have to determine how to view your content. So, if your content is rank-worthy, it’s worth doing the promotion yourself.

Summary

Your content marketing blog strategy should include:

Keyword research
Competitor research
SEO tools
Quality content creation
Content promotion

Even after all of this you’re never guaranteed a top listing on page 1 of Google, so it’s definitely worth going after the less competitive terms. Look at the competition on Google for the terms you choose before attempting them. Make sure you create a good promotion strategy yourself and don’t entirely rely on your ranking. Rankings can take some time to appear too, especially on Google, so don’t be impatient.

The idea is to create top quality content first which will stand the test of time. This gives you the best possible chance of getting your content listed. More listings equals more traffic. More traffic equals more shares, likes and backlinks. This improves SEO and ultimately your site will increase its authority with Google. This lets you target the more competitive keywords terms as you go on and you have a better chance of ranking for them too, if you do the same.

How Many Blog Posts Should I Have Before Launching?

So, “how many blog posts should I have before launching my blog website”? you may be wondering. It can take several months before your new blog/website is ranked on any given search engine. So holding off until you have a certain number of blog posts won’t really help you. In fact, it’s more likely to delay your site getting found. Once you publish your site, it gets indexed by the search engines. This means the search engines have found your content but it doesn’t mean you’ll start ranking for any terms.

Before your site will get any traffic from the search engines you’ll need to build some trust with them. This can take anywhere from 3-6 months and typically the search engines won’t rank a new site very quickly. If they did, and the site subsequently was taken down, that’s bad for the end user. Since the search engine’s job is to create the best user experience, they want to make sure you’re reliable first, before they start ranking your content.

So, it’s better to launch your site as it is as soon as possible. That way, the search engines can index it, and you can start building your credibility.

How Many Blog Posts Should I Have Before Launching?

So, however many blog posts you have already is the number! Even if that’s none at all! You won’t immediately see a huge number of visitors to your blog when you first launch. Google is the most used search engine and has what’s known as the “sandbox”. This is where they hold new websites for a period of time to asses whether to give them a ranking, or not.

So whenever you launch, your site will be held aside for a period of time which is usually between 3-6 months. During this time you can build your credibility through blogging on a regular basis. Once the search engines see you as a credible site, which is here to stay, they are more likely to give you a ranking (assuming you’re offering some quality content on your site).

So don’t worry about visitors arriving on your website and finding it empty. The likely possibility is that you won’t see many visitors anyway. If you were to launch your site with 30 blog posts on it, the same thing happens; your site is still held and assessed. So you don’t gain any benefit from not having published it before you started writing.

How Many Blog Posts Should I Have Before Launching? Blog Credibility

Depending on the content on your blog, and your competition, you should find within a few months your site starts ranking in the searches. It will usually appear sooner on Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo.com than it will on Google, since Google are sticklers for content and will likely sandbox your blog when it’s first published.

To build up your credibility with the search engines, start creating content and publishing it on your blog as soon as you publish. There’s a few criteria which Google (and others) use to determine the usefulness (and credibility) of your blog:

The domain age – how long has your domain been published for?
Backlinks – (a new blog won’t have any)
Content on the blog – quality and quantity
How people interact with your posts

Initially there will be very little activity on your blog, especially if there’s no backlinks and/or content. But a good sign for the search engines is a steady increase in this activity over time. For the best results build high quality content consistently on your blog once you have published it. You should also aim to promote your content too and build backlinks naturally over time. High quality content is the key because over time people should naturally link to your content, share it on social media and so on.

How Often Should You Post New Content?

Ideally make a habit of posting content regularly on your blog, while also promoting older content. You can automate the process of blog post sharing with certain plugins. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Once your site is indexed by the search engines, they will begin to see your content. As you continue publishing new content, this will have an effect on whether you are ranked or not for certain keywords.

Publishing regularly shows that you are a source of information on your topic which is generally going to be a good thing for your rankings (with quality content). Over time, with good quality content you should attract more visitors and get higher rankings. How quickly this happens will depend on your content, backlinks, and how the search engines perceive your blog.

Summary

So how many blog posts should I have before launching? The answer is to launch right now, today, however many posts you have written. Your site needs to be indexed first and typically won’t rank for months.

This means you won’t start seeing visitors immediately and you’ll need to build some credibility first. To do this, start creating content and keep doing so on a regular basis. Depending on the competition in your topic and your content strategy, you can start seeing rankings appear within a few months.

Holding back on launching your site won’t help you and may even hinder you because when you launch, the search engines are still going to start assessing your site first, before giving you any trust or rankings.

Is blogging profitable? Blogging can be very profitable if you stick with it for long enough. But with over 600 million blogs on the internet you’ve got some serious competition, whatever your niche.