AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Many Articles Should A Blog Have?

How many articles should a blog have? Blogging attracts free traffic to a website from the search engines. The more blog posts you have, the more likely you’ll attract a greater volume of traffic. Some SEO experts recommend having at least 20 blog posts on your blog but the more posts you publish the better.

After all, 20 blog posts isn’t many, especially in a competitive niche. In a popular niche, you’ll be competing with other websites who have more content and greater authority with Google. So the more content you have on your site, the better it is. With more content you’re going to attract more visitors, but this also depends on how your content is perceived by the search engines and whether you find any traffic from it.

How Many Articles Should A Blog Have?

blog traffic — After analysing over 13,500 customers, HubSpot found that blog sites with 400+ published posts received twice as much traffic as those with 301-400.

In the graph above you can see that traffic has an “uptick” once your blog posts exceeds a certain amount. In this case it’s beyond 400 blog posts. If you have less than 100 blog posts, you’ll likely see less traffic (from the search engines) than those with more. But it also depends on your blogging frequency, the age of your website, backlinks and the quality of your content, too. In a more competitive niche, you’re going to need to create more content because there’s more other websites competing in search for the terms you seek to rank for.

It’s totally possible too, to create a lot of content and it not really help your SEO. This is particularly true in a very competitive topic.

How Many Articles Should A Blog Have? – More Than You Think

Blogging is most definitely a slow strategy to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) over the longer term. Over time, as you continue to post new and relevant content in your niche, the search engines will rank your content accordingly.

A newer site will typically take a while to appear in the search engines results pages (SERPS). This can be between 3-6 months. If you only publish 10-20 posts and then stop, this is a signal to the search engines which will affect your ability to rank for your chosen terms.

A site which publishes continuously about a topic will likely do much better then than one with only a few blog posts. So ideally, make a habit out of publishing blog posts if you’re serious about growing your readership from the search engines and getting free traffic.

Targeting Keywords In Your Blog Posts

To get your posts ranking more prominently on the search engine results pages, and more quickly, you can focus your attention on writing for the long tail keywords which have fewer results on the SERPS. This can give you more chance of getting traffic because there’s less competition in the search engines results pages. This is a pretty useful tactic especially if you’re in a competitive niche. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can use Google’s keyword planner.

Type in your main keyword and look for the long tail keywords which typically have fewer monthly searches. These keywords have fewer monthly searches than the more competitive keywords. You may think this means less traffic. However, a little bit of traffic from fewer monthly searches, is worth more than no traffic from a competitive keyword.

With a two word keyword phrase, for example, you have very little chance of getting an article listed on the first page of Google. But with a five-word keyword phrase, there’s less competition. This means you have a much greater chance of landing that first page listing, should you decide to create content around that phrase.

Summary

How many articles should a blog have? Bloggers create content so that they will attract visitors from the search engines results pages (SERPS). The more posts you have, the greater your potential to attract website traffic for free. However, there’s a catch.

There’s other bloggers who are writing similar posts to yours. Google (and the other search engines) want to provide the best experience to their users. So they’re not going to rank any old content on their results pages. You need to therefore provide the best quality content if you’re going to have a chance of ranking it and getting free traffic.

A few posts will help you in a general way with your SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. But if your intention is to create free traffic, you’ll want more posts (and of better quality) than your competition. Generally speaking in this scenario, the more posts you write the better. Google will see you as more of an authority in your niche, and reward you with more first page listings.

Content Driven SEO

Content driven SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimisation) is a great way to attract free traffic to a website. In the bid to “get rankings” it can be easy to forget that you’re writing for people, not robots! So if you focus too much on the technical aspects of SEO – that is, keyword percentages, for example, or backlinks, you can forget to create content which is useful and valuable to your readers. Your content will appear robotic and this puts visitors off.

Since Google uses robots to look at your content, they will pretty much guess if you’re writing only for the robots. How people interact with your content says a lot about your website. Are you writing only for the rankings, using SEO as your primary driver, or are you putting out valuable information which is actually of use to people?

Content driven SEO is the latter and although there’s various SEO tactics and strategies which will work, putting the visitor first is a good recipe for longevity and good SEO growth.

Content Driven SEO – Sales Vs. Information

It can be tempting to only focus on those keywords which attract people to your products. Those keywords which indicate that someone is ready to buy are your “golden tickets” to more sales. Product reviews or keyword searches with “buy” in the string are pretty good indicators that someone is looking to make a purchase! But focus only on these ideas and you’ll miss another opportunity – that is, getting your site ranked as an information site in your niche.

Although information sites typically attract a different audience, the information itself will attract more traffic and often traffic which is easier to obtain through SEO than your buyer keywords.

There’s a number of main SEO points which Google uses to recognise your content and give you a ranking (or not):

Content on your page (and your niche)
How people interact with that content – do they click away or read through?
Backlinks – how many and where from?
Domain age
Plus many more

The content on your site is the biggest factor in all of these since it affects everything else. People won’t link to content which isn’t useful, nor read content which doesn’t help them. These two signals alone should make you consider the value you’re providing in your content.

With better content more people will rate your site, link to it and share it. These are further signals to Google that you’re providing some kind of value. They will rank your content accordingly. This gives you greater readership and the cycle continues – more shares, likes and links, better rankings more readership. This is the cycle you want to get to with your content. Provide shoddy content with no value to your readers and you’re only feeding the robots!

Finding Long Tail Keywords

In almost every niche only there’s a lot of competition and this is a huge factor in whether or not you can rank your content and get free traffic. Trying to rank for the most competitive terms will likely result in disappointment. Your content won’t get ranked. Those terms are also typically the ones which will bring in the buyer traffic too, which is a shame but that’s just the way things are!

An alternative strategy is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Long tail keywords are those which are 3 or more terms within a keyword chain. The longer the keyword chain, the less competition you’ll have for ranking on Google for that specific term. These terms may not be your “best” keywords for your “perfect” customer avatar. However, focusing on the “low hanging fruit” of keywords is a good basis for an SEO strategy which can ultimately bring you free traffic.

Writing for visitors with the aim of delivering value in your content can have a dramatic effect on your SEO over time.

Pre-made Affiliate Websites

You can find pre-made affiliate websites on sites such as Flippa.com, Empireflippers.com, FEInternational.com and BuySellEmpire.com. Depending on what you invest, you can find a suitable solution according to your budget and there’s plenty of affiliate websites to choose from.

More expensive sites obviously will pay more and you can pay from around $400 to tens (or hundreds) of thousands to purchase an affiliate site which is already making money. Cheaper sites will be less profitable, (or not profitable at all), so make sure you do your due diligence before investing in a website.

If you’re looking for a cheaper site, it’s probably worth thinking about what value you can add to an affiliate site which is only making a small amount in monthly commissions. For example, can you write blog posts on it, or learn some other marketing techniques to help increase the profitability of a site you buy?

Pre-Made Affiliate Websites – Alternatives

Alternatively you can purchase an affiliate website or drop shipping website from Shopify. Shopify is a portal you can use to create a “from scratch” affiliate website or a drop shipping site.

There’s a monthly free to use the platform and you’ll need to advertise it too. Although your monthly fee will likely only be a fraction of what you’ll pay for an existing (and profitable) affiliate site, you’ll be left with the job of marketing your website if you want any visitors to it. Without visitors (traffic) your site won’t be profitable.

Still, Shopify might be a solution if you’re on a budget and have the time to build out your site and choose affiliate products to put in it. The building of an affiliate site isn’t the most difficult aspect though and Shopify will help you create a site which has the potential to be profitable – with products and services you can sell.

A simple Amazon plugin for example will let you promote products from Amazon on your site. You only need to join Amazon’s affiliate program and start placing products in your digital store!

Pre-Made Affiliate Websites – Affiliate Programs With “Plug & Play” Software

Another alternative to buying premade affiliate websites is to join a program which gives you access to “plug and play” website setup. Again, much like Shopify, this lets you set up a website and sales funnel which has affiliate products on your site automatically.

With a good high ticket product range and subscription affiliate products to sell, this can be one of the best alternatives if you don’t have a large budget to buy an existing affiliate site which is already profitable. The benefit of using a high ticket product range is simple:

You can learn online marketing techniques with less risk – selling low value physical products with paid marketing can become costly and it’s much more difficult to turn a profit.
It’s easier to scale a high ticket product sales funnel once you have found a marketing strategy which works.

If you choose a Shopify store and put low value products in your digital shop (such as Amazon products), you still need to market your store to get people to find it! This can be tough if you only have low value affiliate products to offer. See also low ticket vs high ticket affiliate marketing.

Watch this video for more on this strategy.

A High Ticket Sales Funnel

You can also use a high ticket sales funnel and learn how to market it. This is a cheaper option than purchasing a pre-made affiliate website which is profitable. A high ticket sales funnel allows affiliates to earn the highest level of commission from sales of digital affiliate products. Here’s a quick overview of what your sales funnel will look like:

A high ticket funnel contains multiple products which you can profit from including entry level, mid ticket and high ticket products. It allows an affiliate to earn the most from their email list and set up a business from scratch and learn marketing. You can also get training and support in terms of your ongoing learning and development.

With this option you’ll be in charge of learning how to market your business too. Without a marketing engine driving traffic to your offer, you won’t have any traffic.

Access this video to learn more and get started.

Summary

Premade affiliate websites can be found on websites such as Flippa.com but they come at a cost. Highly profitable sites are likely to be hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy. Cheaper sites won’t be as profitable and you can find some mid-way point which is suitable for you.

An alternative is to subscribe to a platform such as Shopify. Shopify lets you build an e-commerce platform for a monthly fee which you can monetise with affiliate products. But you’ll be in charge of getting visitors to your site. Many a would-be affiliate purchases such a site hoping it will be instantly profitable. It won’t. You also need to learn marketing, which is why it’s a good idea (if you go this route) to get some training on your marketing strategy first.

Another alternative is to use a training and education platform which gives you everything you need to start an online business from scratch:

Software, websites and products ready made – simply set up by following the step by step instructions
Training and support in learning a marketing strategy – again, you’re in charge of bringing people to your website and/or landing page and getting leads.
Automated software helps you make sales and deliver emails to customers (pre-formatted for simplicity).

Learn more and get access here.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step

So how does affiliate marketing work step by step? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for referring customers to products online. When someone buys an affiliate product through the affiliate’s link, the sale is tracked back to them and they earn a commission based on the sale.

So how does this process work, what do affiliates do to make sales and how can you do it too? Here’s a bit more about this process from start to finish.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Joining An Affiliate Program

Before you can earn from promoting affiliate products online, you need to join an affiliate program. There’s many affiliate programs available online and many affiliates get their start by joining Amazon’s partner program. Amazon is a popular platform because so many people are comfortable buying from the website, even though Amazon’s commission structure is pretty low.

Once you have signed up to an affiliate program, you’ll be able to promote products through a unique link known as the affiliate link. The affiliate link tracks back sales you have made and rewards you with a percentage of the sale. Amazon affiliates can link to any product from the vast array of items on the site. Click on the site stripe to collect your unique affiliate link (pointing to any given product).

how does affiliate marketing work step by step

Once you have that link, you can paste it anywhere online in order to get people to click on it with the intention of buying a specific product. This works the same with any affiliate program. You’ll be able to access a dashboard in the associates program and collect links which point to specific products.

Affiliates need to learn how to promote those links in order to make sales. No sales equals no commissions. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. As such, you need to make these sales if you are to make any money!

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Product Promotion

There’s many ways in which you can promote your affiliate link as an affiliate marketer. Here’s a few of the most popular methods of product promotion:

Blogging
Video Blogging
PPC – pay per click advertising
Email marketing
Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid.

The huge variety of promotion methods means you can get creative with how you promote affiliate products. Many affiliates will stick with a specific strategy until they are successful, rather than spread themselves too thin by jumping from one to another.

This gives them time to learn a strategy really well. Some strategies are faster than others and more easily scalable. Paid marketing methods, for example, can be set up and going within a matter of hours. Whereas blogging can take much longer in order to gain traction and is less easily scalable. Let’s have a look at some of these marketing strategies in a little more detail. Since I’m a fan of blogging, we’ll start there!

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work Step By Step – Your Target Audience

When it comes to blogging you’ll need to be pretty patient because it can take some time before your blog gets the notice needed to sell your products on a regular basis. Before you set about building a blog, you need to choose a topic. Your choice of topic is pretty important, especially if you’re going to be creating content on a blog. Ideally choose a topic you’re familiar with or want to learn about. That way, you can continue blogging for a long period of time.

You also need to align your affiliate products with your blog topic. If you don’t get this right, your visitors won’t be interested in your products. For example, if your blog is about cars, don’t try and sell dishwashers from it! You would want a car related product which appeals to your audience.

Your target audience is the section of the online marketplace who are most likely to be interested in your affiliate product. So when they land on your content, they are likely to buy. A good example of a well targeting piece of content is a review for some kind of product. A review website works well for affiliates because it attracts the very people who are interested in a specific product. So when they land on your site, they can easily click on your affiliate link and buy it! Read more about target audience and customer avatar here.

Video Blogging

Video blogging works in a similar way to blogging. You can create and upload multiple videos which somehow relate to your affiliate product. Then link to your product (with your affiliate link) in each video in the description. With a large volume of videos on YouTube, for example, you will start to attract some passive visitors who are looking for your particular type of content.

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet after Google. But even so, it’s hugely competitive, especially for free traffic. So you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting your videos found.

This is of course similar for bloggers. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, so plenty of competition. You can of course run paid advertising on Google, or on YouTube too, but this will incur greater expenditure than content creation. Paid advertising is a much faster way to drive traffic though, so if you don’t have the patience for content creation, this could be the way to go for you.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

With pay per click, you can target your potential customers with any given advertising platform:

YouTube (Adwords)
Google Adwords
Facebook
Bing
etc.

Many affiliates will start with Bing.com because it offers cheap search advertising where affiliates can specify the keywords which are triggering their ads.

Bing also tends to be easier to get going with than Adwords, which has more checks and balances for affiliates, which can make it more difficult to access if you’re new. If you’re interested in learning more about using paid marketing as an affiliate, you can join a mentorship program here which offers products, training and support.

It’s a good idea to send paid traffic to a landing page, rather than a blog, for example. This is because on a blog, your visitors can look around and click through your content. This means your advertising budget won’t get very far and most of your visitors will eventually click away, having not taken any action on your blog. Send them to a landing page instead and you can collect their email address. This allows you to follow up with them over a much longer timescale via email marketing.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to make affiliate marketing profitable. With email marketing, you collect emails from a landing page and follow up with your subscribers by sending email messages – helping them with a specific problem.

You can then promote your affiliate products via email, by using your affiliate links in the text. With email marketing, affiliates build up an email data base of hundreds of thousands of subscribers which they can promote products and services to.

Social Media Marketing

Many affiliates will promote their affiliate links through their social media profiles. To do this effectively, you need to place a clear call to action on your profile page with some offer or giveaway.

Then you need to find people who are likely to want what you have on offer. You can do this in various ways. On Facebook, for example, you can join various groups and interact with people who have certain interests. Over time, and if you make a habit out of this, people will come and look at your profile.

Learn more about unpaid social media marketing strategies here.

Summary

Ideally as an affiliate you should work at a particular strategy until you have mastered it! When you can make affiliate sales consistently, you’ve probably spent a good deal of time learning a particular strategy. However, initially there’s a lot of learning to be done.

This initial phase of being an affiliate can be quite frustrating because you’ve yet to make a sale online. This is perhaps why so many affiliates drop out. But if you can stick at it long enough to break through and make your first sale, you can make many more. You can ultimately learn how to make sales in your sleep!

Here’s the quick version of how affiliates make sales step by step:

Join an affiliate program – choose products carefully according to your promotion method
Promote your affiliate link by studying a promotion method for at least a few months
Once you make a sale, continue with that strategy until sales come in more regularly.
Scale up if you can – if using PPC (paid ads), this is much easier, if blogging, create more content

How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog?

How long does it take to earn from a blog? There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and you’ll find competition in every niche. The busier niches will be harder to get traction in, and so it will take considerably longer in a competitive niche. Pick a low competition niche, and it can be more difficult to monetise, even with a large amount of visitors.

A new blogger can make a sale quite quickly, if they are lucky. But to earn consistently from a blog, you need a consistent amount of visitors who are making purchases from you regularly. You can of course monetise a blog with advertising too. But ad clicks only earn tiny amounts so you’ll likely need to generate a huge amount of traffic to make this consistently profitable and worth your while. See affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.

Whatever you choose to do to monetise a blog, you’ll never be profitable without traffic. So let’s look at traffic generation first since it’s so important.

How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog? Traffic

You can get traffic instantly if you pay for it. But that’s not the point of blogging. The point of blogging, if you want money from it, is to generate free traffic. Once you get enough free traffic and you can successfully turn that traffic into leads and sales, you can start earning from a blog. There’s two main elements here: Free traffic and sales! You can’t make sales without traffic, but you can still have traffic without sales! So traffic is the key if you want to make money from blogging.

There’s targeted traffic and general traffic too. As an affiliate marketer, I want targeted traffic. Targeted traffic is traffic I have specifically focused on to optimise for leads and sales. These are visitors who are more likely to be interested in the products I promote on this site. Since most visitors on a website don’t buy from you, it pays to get more of the traffic which will convert.

How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog

To get traffic to your blog takes time. Depending on your niche it can take months or years. But you can speed this process up if you find long tail keywords with low SEO competition. These are the “low hanging fruit” of keywords which relate to your product and are easier to get ranked for on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

You can also build a niche website too. This can help you get more traffic from the SERPS if you choose a niche and build a website around specific keywords.

How long does traffic generation take? If you’re blogging regularly and promoting your blog posts, you can start to see visitors quite quickly. But stop and they will quickly die off. Maintain consistency for several months and you should see your visitor numbers growing consistently too.

How Long Does It Take To Earn From A Blog? – Monetising Your Blog

Of course all this traffic is no good without somehow monetising it. You can either use advertising or affiliate marketing and I would suggest testing out both to see what works for you and your topic. Ad clicks only bring in tiny revenues and I personally found affiliate marketing to be the better bet. This means you need to align your blog topic with some affiliate offer which you feel is a good choice. It needs to be a good match for your blog topic, or your readers won’t be very interested in it.

With high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products you stand to earn a lot more per sale compared to standard products. So your choice of affiliate product is pretty important.

You can also offer something on your site as a freebie giveaway. Offer this in exchange for your visitor’s email address. By building an email list, you can make more of the traffic you get. Even with a small amount of traffic, it’s worth doing this because you can start to build a data base of subscribers to send messages to and build a relationship with. Ultimately this list is used to sell affiliate products.

Earning From A Blog – Cart Before The Horse

Don’t put the cart before the horse when it comes to earning from a blog it’s easy to get over excited and rush in creating content and hoping for a sale. But the truth is, it’s very competitive out there and if you don’t sustain the necessary traffic, you won’t make consistent sales. A “one off” sale is encouraging, but you can pay your rent from it! You ultimately want a consistent income from blogging which can be built upon over time. The best way to approach blogging is therefore to first find your niche.

Finding your niche is the most important decision because your whole blog will be built on this decision. If your decision is flawed in some way, you’re building a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage! Ideally choose a topic you love and have a huge passion for. Otherwise, it can be difficult to sustain the effort needed to go the extra mile. With blogging, expect to be creating content for several months if not years.

If you can’t see yourself doing this in your given subject area, it might not be the right one.

Summary

Nobody can tell you exactly how long it will take you to earn from a blog. Get clear on how much you want to earn. Will it be a hobby job or do you want to replace a full time income? Once you know this, it will help you to realise what is needed to create a consistently profitable blogging habit. Are you ready to write posts and promote them over the next year consistently? Or, are you just wanting a side hustle which you can only give a few hours a week to?

In any case, blogging is unlikely to be profitable for the first few months while you find your feet. Google’s sandbox means you’ll be unlikely to rank on the first page in the SERPS – search engine results pages. But there’s still other search engines and your own promotion on social media.

With the right attitude, there’s no reason you can make a good income from blogging. But be prepared to roll your sleeves up and stick with it, even when there’s nothing to show for it for some time. When you love blogging, you’re much more likely to do this and stick with it. But when you’re only looking for the outcome, it can be difficult to sustain, especially if you’ve chosen a topic you don’t care about!

High Ticket Recurring Affiliate Programs

With high ticket recurring affiliate programs, you can get a lot more bang for your buck! With most affiliate products you only get paid once. So you need to keep selling the product again and again to make anywhere near a half decent income. But with a high ticket program which offers subscription products within a single product range, you get the best of both worlds: high ticket and subscription products. That means high payouts and recurring commissions!

What are high ticket affiliate marketing products? A high ticket product is one which typically generates $500+ in commission. These kinds of products can be either digital or physical products. Since physical products pay lower rates of commission (typically between 1% and 10%), you’ll need a higher valued physical product to pay out the same as lower valued digital product.

For example, a physical product valued at $10,000, paying 10% will pay out $1000 in commission. To earn $1000 in commission with a digital product (which pays 30%) you only need a product worth a third the cost of the same paying physical product ($3333.33).

This makes high ticket digital products a much more viable business model when it comes to affiliate marketing. Not only do you earn a larger percentage of the sale, but more people are likely to buy because it’s more affordable. With certain business courses and education products it’s also a more desirable product than a high valued toy, for example. There’s a greater need for it than a $10k physical product.

High Ticket Recurring Affiliate Programs – Subscriptions

Subscription affiliate products too offer the best value for affiliates. With a subscription product of great value, you can earn for years from each customer, steadily building your customer base while each customer gives you a recurring monthly commission.

Products such as business tools, software, plugins and autoresponders are some of the best subscription products you can promote as an affiliate. Training courses, mentorships and communities are also incredibly valuable.

When someone buys a business training course which is linked to their income, they will definitely keep their subscriptions active, particularly when they start earning from them.

When you can use a sales funnel and product range which offers both high ticket digital products and subscription products, you’re gearing your affiliate business in the best way possible. Especially if you have multiple products to offer existing customers.

High Ticket Recurring Affiliate Programs – Coaching & Mentoring Programs

Mentors offers a high ticket recurring affiliate program which includes multiple products, built in sales team and subscription products. You can also choose your level of buy-in according to your needs. Each product in the range offers an increasingly more personal level of support and the more expensive products offer more “done for you” solutions when it comes to building an online business from scratch.

Higher levels of commission are also offered to those who have purchased the products themselves and wish to promote them. Have a look at the commission structure for some of the higher valued products in the range and learn more in this video.

As you can see, products in the range offer commissions of up to $4000 at the highest level (see picture below). As an affiliate it makes a lot of sense to promote a product range rather than a single product. With a product range, you can sell more products to each customer you refer.

Plus, you have more chance of selling to more people because you offer a range which suits more people’s needs. With only a high ticket product, you can only sell to those who can afford them.

But with a range of products including low ticket, mid ticket and high ticket, you can offer products which are accessible to a larger audience. Here’s a few of the lower valued products within the range. These also include subscription products from which you can earn recurring commissions.

Learn more about this product range and how to promote these kinds of products in this video.

Summary

While there’s thousands of affiliate products available to promote online, many of them pay peanuts. Your choice of affiliate product is probably one of the biggest decisions you can make when considering building an affiliate marketing business.

Low value physical products will likely pay tiny commissions and this means you’ll need to sell in bulk to make them pay. This can be tough with the growing competition online and cost of advertising.

But with a high ticket program, it’s easier to use paid marketing because you stand to recoup budget more quickly with high ticket products. Once you start selling too, your recurring commissions can grow steadily and your affiliate business can take over from your regular income quite rapidly, especially when using paid marketing strategies, which are much harder to balance with low paying affiliate offers.

The ideal affiliate business offers both high ticket and recurring commissions. Learn more and get started here.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Examples

Looking for a few high ticket affiliate marketing examples? I found a high ticket affiliate marketing product back in 2014. It was the shift I needed in my affiliate business. Before then, I struggled with affiliate marketing for a couple of years. I promoted low valued products from Amazon and eBay and because I knew the sites I thought it was the only way to do it.

Then I discovered Clickbank and started promoting digital products. But it wasn’t until I found a high ticket product that things really changed. A high ticket product can pay you upwards of $500 in commission per sale. Previously, the most I had made was a measly $40 for a digital product sale, or even less from selling physical products. Hardly worth it!

But I didn’t know that back then. You don’t know what you don’t know!

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing – What Is High Ticket?

A high ticket affiliate product is typically worth $500 in commission to the affiliate and carries a much larger price tag than most affiliate products. This is good obviously for affiliates who can sell them for a couple of reasons:

It means you can be profitable with fewer sales than your typical affiliate products, whether physical or digital
It’s also much easier to learn (paid) marketing when you can make sudden large leaps forward in your commission payouts

With low value products, when you’re starting out as an affiliate, it’s much more difficult to learn how to run profitable paid adverts. If you only make $40 per sale, you have only a small amount of “play” with your advertising costs. But if you make $400 per sale, it means you can test and measure advertising campaigns with greater confidence and less risk. When you do make a sale, it’s more likely to cover your costs and make a profit. With a low value offer, this is more difficult.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Examples:

Here’s a couple of examples of high ticket affiliate products you can find on a site called Hammacher Schlemmer. It sells several high ticket physical products and pays affiliates 8% for the sale. With physical products commissions tend to be lower than digital ones. But if you find high priced products like these, you can make huge commissions even with a low percentage of the sale:

If you sold the Amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft for example, at $300,000, you would earn $24,000 in commissions. The Killer Whale Submarine sells for $90,000 and you’d earn a commission payment of $7,200.

There’s other products on the site too which pay out nice, large commissions. Here’s a few other examples of items I found in the toys section priced over $500:

I particularly like the monster truck for $185,000! Selling one of these would mean a commission payout of $14,800.

While these kinds of products may not sell in bulk like many Amazon items, for example, a single sale would mean the same in commissions as selling thousands of a low valued product. It pays to work smart as an affiliate!

High Ticket Digital Product Examples

Digital products carry much larger commissions than physical ones do. Typically a physical product pays between 1% and 10% commission to affiliates. With digital products you can make between 30% and 40%. Digital products don’t have delivery, handling and shipping fees so they can pass this saving on to the affiliate.

This means if you sell high ticket digital products, you stand to make even more than with some high ticket physical products. With digital products too, you have larger reach because anyone with a laptop can access them. Some physical products will have certain international restrictions due to cost of delivery and the location of the manufacturers. But a digital product can be accessed from anywhere without any delivery ramifications. This makes them perfect for affiliates to sell globally.

Here’s a few digital training courses (with commission structure) which you can access here.

Training, coaching and education programs are often some of the most profitable products affiliate can sell. With a good high ticket sales funnel, and built in sales team, you can refer customers to entry level products and have higher ticket items sold on your behalf if you use a good program. Access this online business training program here.

Summary

There’s a few high ticket affiliate marketing examples for you! High ticket products aren’t the only things to consider as an affiliate either. It’s also worth having some subscription affiliate products up your sleeve too!

With subscription products you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales. With the right products and services, and the right customers, you can earn ongoing commissions on a recurring basis for years if the customer is a good fit. Business products and tools are good ones to choose because they are essential for the running and operating of certain businesses.

To get started with an online business using high ticket and subscription products checkout this video from one of my personal mentors Stuart.

Affiliate Marketing Through Email

Affiliate marketing through email is one of the best ways to sell products. With email marketing, you collect email subscribers and automate the follow up of email messages. By building a large database of subscribers, and offering useful information to the right audience, you can promote products which help them solve a particular problem. This is done through a marketing platform/strategy and through using a landing page to collect email subscribers.

Send targeted traffic towards your landing page – offering something of value in exchange for the visitor’s email address
Follow up with a course of some kind which will help your subscribers with some problem and keep them engaged (e.g. a training course for golf enthusiasts)
Sell affiliate products through your email links which relate to your messaging (e.g. An online golf training course)

Affiliate Marketing Though Email – Traffic

Of course before you can sell affiliate products to anyone you need to send people to a landing page where you can collect their email address. To do this, you need to use either a marketing platform (in which you pay for traffic with adverts), or through content marketing such as blogging or a video channel. Content marketing is a free strategy to generate traffic, but it takes much longer to generate traffic. Paid marketing is fast and you can almost instantly turn on traffic to your landing page and start collecting subscribers.

Before you start a marketing campaign on a platform such as Google Adwords through, you’ll need to understand who you are targeting with your marketing. Your target audience is the small sub section of the online marketplace who would be most likely to purchase your product/service.

By getting clear on who this is, where they hang out online, what they search for an so on, you can more easily find the right people to send to your landing page. Those people who are most likely to buy from you. To know who these people are you need to learn who your customer avatar is.

Affiliate Marketing Through Email – Choosing An Advertising Platform

There’s many ad platforms you can choose from such as:

Google Adwords
Bing
Yahoo
YouTube
Facebook
etc.

Who your customer avatar is and your product might help you determine which ad platform to use as your marketing engine; to send people to a landing page. So using the example of gold enthusiasts as above, you might find them looking for golf instruction videos on YouTube, or searching for golf training on Google.

Building A Landing Page

A landing page is an important part of selling affiliate products through email marketing. A landing page is much better than a website, for example. This is because on a website there’s many things to do.

You can browse around and read through multiple posts on a website. On a landing page there’s only two things to do: sign up or leave. This forces the visitor to make a quick decision. By offering a highly desirable offer on your landing page you are getting your visitors to overcome their potential indecision by offering a benefit driven reason for them to sign up.

In the golf example, for instance, you might offer a free video series which helps them improve their golf swing. You can access a landing page software here to help you build super fast landing pages which are suitable for your affiliate offer.

Sending Automated Emails

Most affiliates who use email marketing will automate most of their emails. Some will also send out regular “live” emails which is helpful for building trust. With live emails, you can reference something relevant and relatable which shows there’s a real person on the other end of it. This could be a reference to the time of year, some recent news or other sign that emails are from a real person and not just a “bot”!

With an autoresponder software like this one here, you can queue up pre-written messages. These can be sent our at regular intervals on autopilot.

The sending of emails can be automated for many weeks, months and even years in advance. Ideally these messages should contain a lot of value for the subscriber. If they don’t or you have the wrong people joining your email list, you’ll be wasting ad budget and your subscribers won’t be opening their messages.

When you are giving more value in email messages, your subscribers will be more likely to open your messages for the longer term. You’ll build more trust with them too if you give them something valuable. If you’re just pushing a product first, and offering nothing else, they will quickly unsubscribe and/or stop opening your messages!

Your subscribers should get to know, like and trust you, through your email marketing messages. When they do, they are more likely to buy from you when you send them products to look at.

Best Products To Promote As An Affiliate

What are the best products to promote as an affiliate? While some affiliates will say to use high valued products in the top niches, these are also the most competitive topics, and also the most expensive to promote. On the flip side, choosing a very uncompetitive niche can limit your ability to earn from high paying affiliate products, so what should you do?

Your choice of products is a major key to success in affiliate marketing. Choose the wrong product, or attempt the wrong niche and you could find yourself working really hard for very little or even for nothing – often for months!

Having promoted many products as an affiliate, I can definitely say that choosing the right product/s is massive. I once worked on a niche for several months which came to nothing. It was an uncompetitive niche in the area of mushroom harvesting! I did reach number one on Google for my chosen keyword, but found the topic hard to monetise. It was also a topic I knew nothing about and within 6 months of blogging on the subject I was totally burned out! I’ve build websites in many other niches too, most of which simply didn’t make any money.

Best Products To Promote As An Affiliate – High Ticket & Subscription

Some of the best products to promote as an affiliate pay the largest commissions. When you choose high ticket affiliate products your work will go further in terms of what you earn when you make a sale. So it’s a better use of your time. High ticket products carry a much larger cost and therefore pay affiliates a larger commission.

When you combine high ticket products with digital products too, you increase your ability to earn again. Digital products pay much more than physical ones. A typical physical product will pay between 1% and 10% in commission to an affiliate. Whereas a digital product will usually pay between 30% and 40%. So combining high ticket with digital means you get the best of both worlds. The most profitable digital products are high valued ones such as coaching and training courses for business owners, or other education products.

Subscription affiliate products too are good to choose because each sale can give you a recurring income. With the right products (such as business tools), your customers will likely maintain their subscriptions for years. This means you continue to earn a monthly commission providing they do so (per customer). This can add up and even if your monthly recurring commission is only $20 per customer, with 100 customers you have created a monthly income of $2000 passive!

Best Products To Promote As An Affiliate – Your Means Of Promotion

But there’s other things you should consider too of course. Depending on your means of product promotion, you’ll likely have more success with a topic or subject which you are aligned with. Particularly if you’re going to be creating a lot of content through blogging or video creation.

Blogging in a competitive niche can be tough and it can take months, or even years before you break through. Choosing a topic you have zero interest in can therefore be a major problem. With my mushroom blog, I burned out within a few months since I had zero interest in the topic. Plus, each post had to be researched thoroughly because I didn’t know this topic.

If you have no interest in blogging or content creation, you can instead focus on paid marketing. This can be much more scalable and faster. However, you’re going to need a marketing budget and it helps to have a multiple income high ticket sales funnel to make this more viable. Cheaper products can limit your ability to use paid marketing, especially in a competitive field.

Aligning Your Values & Interests

The best affiliate products to promote (in my opinion) are those which you can get behind and passionately promote them because you align with them in some way. If you haven’t even bought the products yourself, (and received value from them), how can you be genuine about promoting them to others?

With so many affiliates online, there’s a sea of people trying to sell. When the customer has so much choice, as they do online, trying to sell really comes across as desperate.

best products to promote as an affiliate

When you can give people value as an affiliate, helping them with their problems, you can connect with them and build trust. You can then offer products which are genuinely helpful to them. That’s a win win situation for affiliates because it means they are more passionate about their work. Since 95% of affiliates quit, unless you fulfil another need with your affiliate business, you won’t last long because your heart won’t be in it!

Summary

The best products to promote as an affiliate are those you are aligned with and truly care about. It’s hard to get emotional about a hair dryer though! Joking aside, find something you can focus on for some time too, since building an affiliate business takes a lot of time and attention. If you’re not going to enjoy the journey, you’re probably not going to stick at it for long enough to make a success of it.

There’s many blogs which will tell you to choose a high ticket product and an “evergreen” niche which can be profitable all year round. But you also need to become successful at promoting your products to succeed as an affiliate. This takes time and some dedication, if the money is the only goal, you’re quite likely to drop out (like the other 95% of affiliates who do). Find another reason which is bigger than money and you’re closer to finding your perfect niche in affiliate marketing.

How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing?

How hard is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for promoting products and services online. If they don’t make any sales, they don’t get paid, anything! Although some affiliates are able to make millions of dollars through finding customers for other people’s products, around 95% of affiliate marketer quit!

This should give you some idea about the difficulty of earning from affiliate marketing. Despite this huge drop out rate there’s also a very low bar for entry in affiliate marketing. This means almost anyone can “give it a go”, so it’s no wonder most of them don’t make it work.

To succeed as an affiliate you need to be fairly patient and resilient. It’s certainly not a get rich quick scheme. There’s also a few things which can make the affiliate journey more fruitful and less painful. Here’s a few pointers.

How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing? Mindset

Have you heard the saying “If you’re hard on yourself, life is so much easier on you”? This is definitely true of affiliate marketing. If you work hard on your business and yourself with affiliate marketing there are great rewards for those who stick at it. Although this can be tough when there’s nothing to show for your work, the results will come later if you make a decision to keep going and never quit.

Most people don’t have the certainty and conviction to do this without first hand evidence though, and this is a major problem for most people who “try” with affiliate marketing and don’t stick at it. The “do or die” mentality is a rare one and affiliate marketing requires a certain set of characteristics. If you’re just “giving it a go” for a few months to see if “it” works, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re seriously committed to learning however long it takes, this is a different mindset.

A good analogy is getting your gym membership and expecting to get six pack abs within a few weeks. It doesn’t happen not because it’s not possible, but because of all the other competing parts of yourself which stand in the way. Things such as limiting beliefs, bad habits and lack of consistency. When you’re a beginner at something too, you typically lack focus and certainty.

How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing: The Right Products

How excited are you at selling that widget you found on Amazon? Probably not as excited as getting paid? But imagine you’ve been flocking your guts out blogging for 6 months and still no sales. Will you quit? Probably. But think about something you really love to do. You never grow out of enthusiasm for it. If you can find something you are passionate about, that passion will long outlast some meaningless trinket which you’re flogging online.

With the right products you can stand behind them with your passion and enthusiasm and outlast those who are just flogging trinkets. Unless your business has some meaning for you beyond the obvious financial considerations, it’s going to be much more difficult to stay the course long enough to start making it pay.

With the right products, your journey as an affiliate is going to be easier and more fulfilling. If you don’t care about what you’re selling, the opposite is true.

Which Products To Sell

There’s many products you can sell as an affiliate marketer and many newbies gravitate towards Amazon because of its well known affiliate program.

But Amazon’s commissions are teeny tiny! They pay peanuts. So you’ll need to flog a lot of products in order to only make a small income. Digital products typically pay much more than physical products (30-40% compared to 1-10% for physical). That’s a huge leap, so just by choosing carefully the products you sell, you make your affiliate business much more viable instantly.

High ticket affiliate products offer much higher rewards still. They are those which carry a much larger cost. Subscription products allows affiliates to earn ongoing recurring commissions from previous sales. So these can again make a huge difference to your bottom line. The most profitable digital products are typically education courses and high ticket digital programs which offer more personal coaching and mentoring.

Help And Support

To make the affiliate marketing journey more straight forward you can employ the services of an affiliate marketing mentor. Mentors can help you with recommendations of the right programs and with one to one affiliate coaching and mentoring too.

This is a good idea given the high drop out rate among affiliates. A mentor can hold you accountable and give you confidence and direction. This is quite difficult when you’re going it alone because it’s easy to get distracted and veer off course. You need to maintain a steady trajectory for some time to break through and get results as an affiliate. Constantly jumping from one course to another, like many newbies do, only serves to distract you and waste your time.

Access an online resource here to learn more and get started.