AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?

How much money can you make from affiliate marketing? Top affiliates can make millions of dollars. Whereas new affiliates will make nothing until they learn how to make a sale. Affiliates are basically third party referrers of products and services online. As such they are paid by performance, not for the hours they put in but for the sales they generate.

This can be frustrating for beginners who put in a lot of hours without seeing any sales. This accounts for the low success rate of affiliates. But with patience and guidance, anyone can learn how to make affiliate sales online. Once you do, you can automate and scale the process.

The average salary for an affiliate, according to Glassdoor, is $59,060 per year in the US or £38,040 in the UK.

How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too. You can use paid marketing platforms to advertise, or you can create content on a website for example, or through a video platform such as YouTube. Some affiliates use email marketing to sell affiliate products, whereas others send people directly to products. Some use social media and free strategies, and others use paid ads.

The diversity of options for affiliates makes it appealing for beginners and there’s a very low barrier to entry in affiliate marketing. Almost anyone can “give it a go” and this is another reason for the high failure rate among affiliates. Anyone can join an affiliate program such as Amazon’s, and promote products for free.

This also makes affiliate marketing incredibly competitive, and it’s not easy, especially if you go it alone. To make sales you need to get your audience to buy a product through your unique identifying link, or affiliate link. Once you learn how to do this, you can do it automatically using systems and technology, scaling up to reach a growing global audience.

But this interim period of learning can be frustrating, and it takes some time and patience to learn properly.

How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing – Products & Marketing

Depending on the products you choose and the marketing methods you employ, affiliate marketing can be a small side income or a full time business. With a scalable strategy, you can quickly build a 6 figure business out of affiliate marketing, with the right products and services. But this doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a marketing budget to do. Alternatively, if you want to create content you can build an affiliate business more cheaply. But it typically takes much longer to do and progress will be slower.

Blogging, as a marketing strategy for example can take months or even years before you are making regular sales. Paid marketing on the other hand can quickly take off globally if you find an ad that works and turn up your budget.

how much do affiliates make — Source: Affstat full 2016 affiliate marketing benchmark report here.

Low value products will pay you less obviously than high cost ones. But there’s other factors at play in affiliate marketing too. Some products will pay only 1% commission for a sale, like some from Amazon, for example. Other products, such as digital products can pay much more.

The most profitable digital products are the ones which offer the most value; digital business tools, subscription products and high ticket products, for example. The least profitable ones are physical products which are low cost and pay low commissions. So by choosing the right products, you can give yourself a head start if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate.

Choosing Scalable Strategies Vs Content

The best way to do affiliate marketing is to start with a high ticket product offering and use scalable strategies. That way, once you find a profitable ad, you can scale up and reach a larger audience, making profit on the way. This of course requires some investment of time and capital. Start with a small ad budget and test various ads until you find one which works. Then scale up by increasing your marketing budget.

You can of course choose a cheaper method of marketing, such as blogging, which will take longer and is less scalable. Blogging though can have a tipping point where your traffic reaches a critical mass.

When this happens, you will get more traffic, leads and sales without paying for advertising, through the search engines. This typically will take several months to happen, or even years, depending on the competitiveness of the topic you choose. But ultimately content generation can give you passive sales and without spending on advertising.

How Much Can YOU Make?

The all important question is how much can you make with affiliate marketing? Since around 95% of affiliates quit, you can assume that it’s not an easy path to riches! So you’ll need to bring a lot of patience and tenacity with you if you want to become a successful affiliate. Affiliate marketing is very different from a job and you’ll need to learn some new skills and mindsets to become an effective affiliate.

Since pay is performance related, you won’t get paid until you start making sales. Getting a solid foundation to your affiliate career is an important first step, as those who rush into it will seldom stick. Sign up on this website for more information and some free resources. See also money mindset coach for information on how your mindset around money can affect your business.

You can become successful as an affiliate quite quickly, or it can take some time, depending on your marketing strategy and product choice. Ideally use high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate products which pay the most and recurring commissions respectively.

How Much Can A Beginner Make In Affiliate Marketing?

How much can a beginner make in affiliate marketing? A beginner in affiliate marketing typically will make less than $1000 per month.

All beginners start from zero of course and since affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, it can take some time to generate traction. How fast you start making sales will depend on a number of things:

Your marketing tactics – will you use paid advertising, or content generation?
Choice of product – some products pay more in commissions than others. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
Your niche – if you’re building content in a niche, or running ads in a niche, a top niche will be more competitive than a quieter one.
Your work ethic and how productive you are
Focus – do you know what to do and how to do it?

How Much Can A Beginner Make In Affiliate Marketing?

There’s no reason why you can’t make an income from affiliate marketing if you’re focused and persistent. However, everyone wants results quickly for a couple of reasons –

the money
to prove it can be done!

When you’re starting out, you could join an affiliate program and within the first day post your link online somewhere and make a sale – in theory! Depending on the product, this could give you a commission of $1 or $1000 depending on the product you choose to promote. High ticket affiliate products will pay much more than low value physical products too. So if you’re promoting products off Amazon valued less than $100, expect very small commissions when you do make those sales. So, you’ll need a lot of them to make even a small income.

Subscription products should be considered too if you’re a beginner. With the right subscription product you can start earning a regular income much more quickly because they pay recurring commissions.

How Much Can A Beginner Make In Affiliate Marketing? Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy too has a lot to do with how much you can make and over what timespan. With paid marketing and a high ticket offering, you can make larger commissions much more quickly than if you were to use blogging, for example. Blogging is notoriously slow, but if you were to choose a good niche, and focus on it every day, you could be making a regular income of $1000-$3000 within a year if you are persistent.

Longer term bloggers make much more of course. With blogging you need to attract an audience and this will compound over time with more and more content. So initially it can feel as though nothing is happening from a blog and then suddenly you’re making more and more sales without doing very much. Again your success will depend on your ability to stay the course when nothing much is happening and the niche you choose.

In a popular niche, such as money making, you’re going to need to work for much longer to see gains. In a less competitive niche, you can more easily attract traffic and therefore make more sales more quickly, if you have something good to offer your visitors. See also the fastest way to earn from affiliate marketing.

Build An Email List

Whatever you do as an affiliate you should definitely build an email list. A list allows you to collect email subscribers and sell your products to them. However, most affiliates will quit before they even reach 1000 subscribers. That’s a shame because when your list starts growing so does your income.

The larger your list is the more products you can sell. Some affiliates will grow their lists to over 100,000 subscribers. They automate the sending of emails to their list and sell products on complete autopilot.

With a large list and some high ticket affiliate products to sell, your income can go up quite quickly as an affiliate. But of course it takes time to build such a list. If you’re using paid marketing to build it, this can happen quite quickly – within a few months. But if you’re using content marketing and organic traffic sources (such as blogging), it can take much longer to build a substantial list.

Consistency And Focus

As a beginner affiliate it can be easy to focus on what isn’t working in your affiliate business. You look at your lack of sales and exclaim “this doesn’t work”! But what you miss is the bigger picture when you do this. You might have only just started and therefore you have no traffic, no email list and no audience. Only when you start to generate traffic and leads can you generate sales, and this can take some time and patience.

When you understand where you are going, and stay focused and consistent in your activities, you’ll make progress. Wanting results too early is likely to at least dampen your spirits which can lead to inactivity. The faster you can understand your journey, whether using paid ads or content, the better you can accept the timeframe of it and just knuckle down.

Without consistent daily effort in an affiliate business, you’re likely to have very slow progress.

Summary

How much can a beginner make in affiliate marketing? This depends on so many factors that it’s impossible to say definitively. You need a lot of drive and focus to succeed as an affiliate and around 95% of new affiliates will quit. With only a 5% success rate in affiliate marketing, you can see that it’s not an easy path. However, if you’re persistent and determined, you can make good money with affiliate marketing.

With a strong focus and good plan you should be able to make $1000 – $3000 a month within your first year, depending on your marketing strategy and product choice. With a large marketing budget and high ticket sales funnel this can be considerably more. If you’re using content creation as your marketing strategy, it can take much longer.

Through getting the proper training and support, this can be considerably increased and hastened. However, do remember that there’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing as it is a performance based business model. No sales equals no commissions! The flip side of this also means there’s no upper limit to what you can earn from it.

Access a training and education platform for further help and advice here.

Most Profitable Blog Niches

What are the most profitable blog niches and can anyone be profitable with a blog? Not all blogs are profitable and with over 600 million blogs on the internet, in a variety of difference niches, it can be tough competition.

Especially if you choose a popular niche. In a popular niche, it’s much more difficult to get traffic to your blog because there’s so many other bloggers writing similar content. Google, the most popular search engine, can only rank one piece of content at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPS). It is typically the blogger who has been around the longest and/or has built a huge amount of content and hundreds of thousands of back links to their blog posts, who ranks on top.

With a high Google ranking you can get a lot of free traffic. This is often the highest priority for bloggers. Without traffic they can’t sell anything from their blogs. Without sales they won’t be profitable. So to be profitable as a blogger, you need to consider two things:

The topic you will write about on your blog posts, and how that will attract traffic
How you monetise your blog – whether you use affiliate products and/or advertising and what affiliate products to choose to maximise profitability

Most Profitable Blog Niches: Traffic

Even with a top listing as a blogger, you are still sharing traffic for that particular keyword phrase. The #1 result in Google gets 34% of the organic traffic. (see also the value of Google result positioning).

So even with a tonne of work building content and back links, you still only get 34%! Bloggers also build traffic in other ways of course. You can share content on social media, do guest posting, build an email list and even pay for traffic.

But blogging is a strategy where the idea is to rank content on Google (and other search engines) and get free traffic. With enough quality content, and with some tenacity and determination, you can build hundreds if not thousands of blog posts on a website. This means even if many of your articles don’t rank at all, some will; especially if you find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, and target them with your content.

This can give you more chance of ranking your posts, because there’s a lot fewer posts competing for the longer tail keyword phrases. To write this much content takes a lot of time and effort, and even though you can outsource some of the writing, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you have a passion for, or at least an interest in. That way, you can sustain the necessary effort required much longer than your competition can.

Monetising A Blog

Monetising your blog can be done with a few strategies. Assuming you don’t have your own product or service to offer, these are the most popular:

Affiliate marketing products that suit your topic
Advertising platforms (Adsense & Adsense alternatives such as Mediavine, Ezoic, Adthrive etc.)

While there are affiliate products in most niches, many of the most profitable ones are in the top niches which are evergreen. That is, they sell all year round. Seasonal topics, such as Christmas, Easter and other seasonal/holiday related products only sell during a certain time of year. They are therefore typically less profitable.

Here’s some of what are thought to be the most profitable blog niches. A study was conducted by RankIQ.com. They analysed data from 803 blogs that were making $2000+ per month and/or getting 50,000+ monthly sessions. The niches that had the highest percentage of blogs (with over 50,000 monthly sessions) were; food (42.8%), lifestyle (13.3%), and travel (10%). You can read the full article here.

Bloggers make the vast majority of their income from ads, affiliate products, sponsored product reviews, their own products, and online courses. The following were the highest earning blog niches:

Food
Personal finance
Lifestyle/Mommy
Travel

The study showed that the food bloggers made 42% of their income from ads and only 10% from affiliate products. However this wasn’t the norm, and the study also showed that Pro bloggers making between $7500 and $25000 per month get 33.3% of their income from ads and 42.2% from affiliate products.

Can Anyone Be Profitable With A Blog?

It’s worth mentioning too that not all blogs are going to be as successful as these bloggers are. Note that the study was conducted on only 803 blogs that were making $2000+ per month and/or getting 50,000+ monthly sessions. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and most of these make next to nothing! So just by starting a blog, don’t think you can easily make these kinds of figures without a lot of effort. Bloggers income varies wildly and those who have just started blogging will likely make nothing for some time.

As your blog grows, so does your traffic, but it can take some time before your traffic explodes to the levels needed to make regular sales, or advertising fees. When using ads on your blog content, you’ll usually only receive tiny commissions on each ad click. So you’ll need a high value of traffic in order to make advertising work well from a blog.

With affiliate products you can increase the likelihood of your visitors making purchases (or repeat purchases) from your blog in a number of ways:

Use an email list – offer a giveaway product in exchange for your visitors email address – such as an ebook lead magnet
Use push engage – which alerts subscribers to new posts you publish
Run retargeting from your blog – target people who have been on your posts with an advert, bringing them back to your site
Use subscription affiliate products – where each sale gives you a recurring income, rather than a one off commission

Get Paid For Sending Emails

Thousands of people get paid for sending emails and selling affiliate products and services they don’t even own! Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone earn by selling other people’s products.

How do they do it? They build an email list of subscribers, and sell affiliate products to them via email messages. There’s all kinds of affiliate products you can sell too, both physical products and digital products.

The most profitable digital products are typically those which offer huge value. – such as business training and education programs. There’s far fewer processing fees for postage, manufacturing and handling with a digital product. The savings are passed to the affiliates who promote them and most digital products pay between 30% and 40% commission. Here’s how they do it.

Get Paid For Sending Emails: Target Audience

Before you can send emails to your email subscribers, you need to collect their email address. This is usually done from a website or landing page. A landing page is a simple web page which is specifically designed for the purpose of collecting email subscribers.

More on this later, but to get people to your website or landing page, you can use an advertising platform. Google Adwords, YouTube, Facebook and many other social media platforms accept payment to run advertising on their platforms. You can also target people very specifically depending on the audience you want to attract.

You can target people by age, interests, sex, location, income and many other demographics. To find the right audience you need to get to know your customer avatar. The customer avatar is the “perfect customer” who will be most likely to want the products/services which you are selling. This is an important part of the online marketing process and you should spend some time on your customer avatar if you want to get paid for sending emails.

Get Paid For Sending Emails: Why Use A Landing Page

The landing page is an important part of subscriber acquisition. If you send people to a website, there’s a lot they can be distracted by. On a normal website, like this one, there’s many pages to browse through. You can click on multiple things to look around. But on a landing page there’s only two options; sign up to the email list or leave the web page. This makes a landing page much easier to optimise for performance.

using a landing page — Here’s an example of one the landing pages I have built.

Marketers test different landing pages against each other to see which page performs the best. Elements such as headings, benefits, and even colours and type faces can have a bearing on the effectiveness of a landing page.

Email Marketing Messages

Once a subscriber opts in to your email capture form on a landing page, they will start receiving email messages. You can automate the sending of these marketing messages by using a software called an email autoresponder. The autoresponder allows you to place a form on a website and collect email subscribers.

aweber - sending emails via email marketing

You can then automate the delivery of messages to your subscribers which help them with a specific problem/challenge. For example, if you join my email list, you’ll receive emails about how to build your own online business.

Email messages should aim to help your subscribers first, rather than simply hit them up for sales! If you appear as a spammer, sending endless emails asking for the sale, chances are good that most of your subscribers will stop opening them, or even opt out of receiving them altogether.

Since there’s a lot of marketers doing this, it pays to make your messages useful and meaningful. That way subscribers will be more likely to continue to open your messages when they receive them.

Building Trust With Your Subscribers

The purpose of sending these marketing messages is of course to sell products through your emails. But before you attempt to sell something via email, it’s important that your subscribers trust you.

If you’ve ever left a store because of a pushy sales person, you’ll know that shoving your products down people’s throats is never the best way to make sales – particularly online. When you’re making a purchase online, it’s a buyers market. People are more likely to shop around and look for the best deals online, because they have the luxury of time.

So in order to gain the trust of your subscribers, you must deliver huge value first, and make the sale later. If your customers don’t like your messages, they are very unlikely to buy. In online marketing it’s known as know, like, trust. When a subscriber gets to know, like and trust you through your email messages, they are much more likely to make a purchase through your emails, especially if your emails have given them loads of value already.

Products – Can Make Or Break You

A good product sells itself. Products which offer huge value are the best ones to use, because people will pay more to solve larger problems than for those items which are unessential. For example, business tools are a good idea if you want to get paid for sending emails. A business tool is an essential thing if you want to build a business. An email autoresponder for affiliate marketers are an example of a business tool which is needed in business.

There’s all sorts of products you can promote to your email list too. Amazon, for example has thousands of products you can choose from. You can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any one of them through email marketing. Be aware though that Amazon’s product range pays commissions which are on the low side.

Digital products pay much more and the most profitable digital products will give you a much larger pay day too. With high ticket affiliate products you can make much more with fewer sales. You should also consider using subscription affiliate programs too which pay recurring commissions.

See this video series for a free video series & more information on selling through an email list.

How Many Blog Posts To Get Traffic?

How many blog posts does it take to get traffic to your website for free? The general consensus is that you should post more often if you want more traffic. Two to four times a week is the commonly accepted minimal content amount, if you want to grow your audience organically through blogging.

Post more often, and you’re likely to get more traffic. But there’s more to this than the number of times you post. There’s a few main elements which will play a part in whether you get traffic or not, and in how quickly it comes:

The topic of your blog – in a competitive niche, you’re going to need to create more content for a tiny amount of traffic, less so if you tap into an untapped niche with less competition
Your content – ideally write at least 1000 words with each blog piece you write. Your blog quality is determined by Google (or another search engine) which uses a number of criteria to make that judgement.
The competition – obviously in a saturated niche, you’re going to need to do more work for a smaller amount of traffic. In a “noisy” niche, you have your work cut out getting noticed.
How you write your blog posts – by targeting low competition long tail keywords, you can stand out more quickly with less work.
How well you promote your content. Creating content is only half of the job. To have your content work for you, you should spend also promote it.

Let’s look at all of these factors in more detail.

How Many Blog Posts To Get Traffic: Blog Topic

My blog topic is based around affiliate marketing, which is pretty competitive. There’s thousands of pieces of content already written on this topic, which makes it much more difficult to compete. If I was to write a blog around the topic of something less competitive, I would expect the journey to be an easier one.

If you choose a topic you’re not that bothered or interested in, it’s going to be difficult coming up with new content pieces. Writing in a topic you love will definitely be a better decision, especially if you need to write for months in order to get traffic.

In a competitive niche, you’re going to need to work longer to get a small amount of traffic. But you can also work smarter by targeting long tail keywords in your content.

How Many Blog Posts To Get Traffic: Content Quality

Not all content is equal. Some blog posts are only 300-400 words long and others are 2000 words. The content which gives the most value isn’t always the longest, but your blog length will definitely be a ranking factor. For the more competitive keywords, it’s going to be tougher to rank your content. This is why many bloggers find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty and write for those keywords.

With highly competitive keywords, it’s unlikely your blog posts will rank at all. That means the only way to get traffic to them is to share with an email list or post them on other sites or social media platforms. For a new website, Google will often “sandbox” it until it has proven itself. This means your content may take months to rank, even if it’s better than the other content out there.

Blog Promotion

Writing a blog post is only the first step. You also need to promote your posts to make the most out of them. Otherwise you’re relying completely on the search engines to index and find your content. This is not a good idea, particularly as most of your posts won’t rank, even if they are of high quality. Older, more established websites with thousands of backlinks are much more likely to rank than a new website.

By going after longer tail keywords you give yourself more chance of ranking, but you still have no guarantees of ranking. Therefore it’s important to make the most out of your content by posting it, sharing it and promoting it as much as possible. You can do this by:

Posting content on social media – you can even automate this process with a simple plugin (see best blog plugins for WordPress).
Placing share buttons on your website – to make it easy for visitors to share on social media
Sending your new posts to your email subscribers (get an email list for free)
Paying for ads to your content
Building back links to content from other websites – guest posting and blog commenting

Traffic & Sales

Traffic to your website isn’t the full story either. Once you start getting traffic organically like this, it comes in dribs and drabs, not a flood! Initially you will start to see the odd visitor to your site, then a few and over time maybe 10-20 a day, then 50-100 and so on.

This can be tough initially, especially if you have chosen a tough topic. This is why you should choose something you love to write about. It makes the process much easier. Once you start getting traffic, it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll make sales. Depending on how targeted your traffic is, and what you’re selling, it can still take some time to make a website profitable.

Targeted traffic isn’t the same as any old traffic. targeted traffic means you’re specifically creating content to attract a specific audience – ideally that audience who will want whatever you’re selling. See also customer avatar worksheet.

Traffic Into Sales

To turn traffic into sales isn’t as easy as you might like it to be. Most website traffic is people looking for information. With a product review, for example, that’s traffic looking to buy something specific. This is why it’s important to understand your target audience, before you go ahead and create a tonne of content.

It’s easier to turn the “right” traffic into sales than the wrong kind of traffic. But either way, most people need several “touch points” with a product/service before they make a buying decision. How many touch points before a sale? This depends on your traffic and products by typically it’s between 6 and 8. Most of your website traffic won’t convert into buyers! Only around 1-3% will. You can improve this statistic with a couple of strategies:

Target your content carefully with your “perfect customer” in mind
Build an email list which allows you to build longer term relationships with potential customers

To build an email list, you can offer something of value on your website. This encourages people to sign up to your list to receive your emails. See the power of email marketing for more on this.

Summary

So, how many blog posts to get traffic? How much traffic do you want? What is your niche? The answers to these questions should help you see what you need to do as a blogger. In a competitive niche, expect to work longer to get traction on your blog. By learning about who you want to target with your content, and by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can make the most out of your work. You’ll also need to promote your blog posts as much as possible if you want traction.

But still, blogging is definitely a longer term marketing strategy than paid marketing. Ultimately though a blog can give you free traffic, which is why there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, competing for that free traffic! Most bloggers agree that the more you post, the better. An average of posting two to four times a week is recommended as a minimum. Will you get more traffic if you post more often? That depends on all the factors mentioned in this post!

If you choose a topic you’re passionate about, the blogging journey is more about the journey than the destination, plus, you’re more likely to succeed because you’ll enjoy it.

“The man who enjoys walking will go further than the mane who likes the destination”.

Is Making Websites Profitable?

Is making websites profitable? There’s many ways to make websites profitable yes. Building them can be done for others, or as a side hustle independently. You don’t even need to sell your own products from a website you build either. A business model called affiliate marketing allows anyone to sell other people’s products and services from a website. You can also monetise a website using advertising.

So you can profit from a website without having to touch it ultimately. Websites can be built to generate income around the clock because they operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week all year round. When you sell affiliate products from a website, it doesn’t matter what timezone you’re in either and you can sell products globally without having to deal with customers or handle products yourself.

Digital products are incredibly popular with website creators and they allow anyone to make a purchase and accept delivery without postage, manufacturing or handling costs. This saving can be passed on to affiliates who promote them. This makes affiliate marketing a lucrative industry for those who learn the strategies to benefit from these online sales.

Is Making Websites Profitable?

Many website creators are also bloggers. They build a website and start blogging to attract an audience to sell their products to. A website without an audience isn’t profitable though and you’ll need build websites for a specific purpose if they are to be profitable.

With all the free website builders now available, it’s becoming more difficult to sell your services as a website builder, (to sell the sites). But that doesn’t mean people don’t still do it. Website building services are still hugely profitable. But making websites to sell other people’s products is a more viable business model. With traffic, websites can generate sales on complete autopilot once they are set up. So you’re probably wondering how to make a website profitable?

There’s a few ways to build websites which can make a profit. Plus, there’s lots of platforms which offer the ability to do this for you, (and charge for the privilege). Platforms such as Shopify offer to give you an instantly built e-commerce store, even if you don’t have any products. But you’ll pay a monthly premium for this, and there’s a problem if you don’t have any visitors.

Is Making Websites Profitable: Traffic

Making websites can be profitable yes. You can sell them, or build them in such a way as to become profitable. An affiliate website is built with the sole purpose to sell affiliate products. But without traffic, it won’t work. You need visitors to come to your website to make it profitable.

There’s around 600 million blogs on the internet at the moment and this number is steeply climbing. This makes it difficult for newcomers to get their slice of free traffic from the search engines.

To do so, you’ll need to create a lot of content on your site, to get traffic for free. The other way of getting visitors it to pay for it using the paid advertising platforms available online such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. But these platforms are costly, so you’ll need something worthwhile to risk your advertising budget on! If you’re selling low value products from a website, it can be prohibitive to do so.

This leaves a couple of main options, other than building sites to flip (sell): organic traffic vs PPC (paid traffic).

Organic Marketing Of A Website

To get free traffic to a website takes some time. You can build a website around certain keywords to attract a specific audience, and you can build content on the site too. See also how to build a niche website. Once your site is attracting traffic, that traffic is free! Therefore anything you make from the site is clear profit! But building free traffic takes time and the “sands” of Google’s search engines results are always shifting!

Blogging is a good strategy to attract free traffic from the search engines. Those visitors can then be monetised with either advertising or affiliate marketing products. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense. Blogging does take some time though. Depending on your topic (and products), it can take months or years to build a site so it is organically profitable. A faster way is using paid marketing. Sending paid traffic to a site is both fast and scalable. But that means quite an investment, and you can lose money while you’re learning how to do it.

Pay Per Click Marketing

Pay per click (paid advertising) is another way you can send targeted traffic to a website and make it profitable. But you’ll need a good monetisation strategy and many affiliate products won’t pay enough to make it worth your while. For example, Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs. But Amazon’s affiliate commissions are pretty low; they only pay typically from 1%-10% on their items with many falling into the 1%-5% categories. With such a low commission structure, it can be very difficult to monetise an affiliate website with Amazon products while using paid marketing as your marketing strategy.

However, there are also affiliate products which pay much more. Digital products, for example pay affiliates 30%-40% commission on average on anything they sell. The most profitable digital products offer subscriptions and high ticket sales – giving them recurring commissions and larger than average commissions. With a recurring commission product, you can sell a item and continue to get paid for the lifetime of a customer, which can potentially be for years.

All In One Affiliate Program

Looking for an all in one affiliate program? A good all in one program will have products, training, software, and of course personal mentoring. It is the personal mentoring which I believe makes for a good all in one affiliate program. Without it, there’s going to be something missing for most people.

The mindset you need to succeed at affiliate marketing is pretty important. Since most affiliates will quit, in fact 95% or thereabouts, you need to take your affiliate business seriously and not expect miracles for minimal input.

While products, training and “drag and drop” software can take the heavy lifting out of setting up your affiliate marketing “shop front”, it is the mindset you bring to your marketing which has the greatest impact on your success.

Still, a good business model will definitely help you too. So a good all in one affiliate program should have a number of products within a sales funnel which you can earn from.

All In One Affiliate Program: Products

The products you choose to sell as an affiliate has a great deal to do with whether you’re successful or not. With certain products, you’re going to need to sell thousands of products in order to make a good income. Physical products for example will pay lower levels of commission. Amazon, for instance, typically pays affiliates between 1% and 10% commission on products you sell from the platform. That’s pretty low and you’ll need to sell in bulk to make such a business model profitable.

Digital products on the other hand pay much more; typically between 30% and 40% commission. So selling fewer digital items can actually make you more in commissions than if you chose to promote physical products.

Subscription products are something to consider as well. With a subscription affiliate program you can earn recurring commissions from previous sales. This means only a handful of sales can give you a nice monthly passive income. Whereas with one time commissions you’ll need to continually sell in order to keep those commissions coming in reguarly.

Then there’s high ticket affiliate products too which can be game changing for affiliates. With a high ticket product, whether physical or digital, you can make ten times that of a standard affiliate product, or more.

The Best All In One Affiliate Program: A Product Range

The best all in one affiliate programs offer a range of products for you to sell including:

Digital products – pay the largest commissions and which you can sell globally with no postage or delivery costs
Subscription products – pay recurring commissions so fewer sales can easily add up to more commissions and a regular income more quickly (perfect for beginners)
High ticket affiliate products – higher than average value products are a game changer. You can recoup ad budget more quickly and get profitable faster.

The most profitable digital products you can sell online are those within a product range which contain both high ticket and subscription items. With a product range you can sell multiple items to a single customer, plus your variety of offerings give more people the opportunity to become customers.

Here’s an all in one affiliate program which offers these plus everything else you need.

All In One Affiliate Program: Support

Support and help is the most important ingredient in building an online business from scratch. Without it, it’s easy to lose momentum and give up. Affiliate marketing can be a frustrating business, especially if you have worked for some time and haven’t seen any sales. The journey of affiliate marketing is different for everyone but it’s normal to spend some time working before the sales start appearing. Depending on how you spend your time, results will always vary.

To stay consistent during adversity, you need to be resilient and this doesn’t come natually to everyone. Having a support system around you is important to help keep you focused and hold you accountable.

Maintaining a positive outlook and staying producive and consistent are paramount to your success as an affiliate. If you are surrounded with people who add to your scepticism and doubt, there’s a strong chance you will join the 95% who quit.

Having regular check ins with other affiliates and leaders in the field of online business gives you a massive advantage over those who don’t have it. It keeps you positive when you know you’re on the right path. When you’re uncertain, it only serves to feed your indecision, scepticism and doubt, which leads to indecision, procrastination and inaction.

Get Started

Ready to get started? An all in one affiliate program will give you everything you need to succeed online, even without anything of your own to sell and without any previous experience.

Here’s what you’ll get:

A step by step training resource with modules to complete
A product range you can promote as an affiliate
Software and trainings to set up a sales funnel of your own
Access to mentors and coaches and tailored packages to suit your commitment and budget.

Access an all in one affiliate program through this link, or the image below.

Modern Wealthy Review

Here’s my Modern Wealthy review. I’ve been an affiliate for some time now and I met Stuart Ross, creator of the Modern Wealthy course in 2014. Back then, he and his business partner Jay Kubassek created an online mentorship program called the SFM (Six Figure Mentors) which helped aspiring entrepreneurs break into the digital marketing space with software, business tools and of course products to sell.

More recently Stuart created “Modern Wealthy”. This is a course for anyone wanting to learn online marketing or build their own online business from scratch.

The Modern Wealthy training can be accessed for $37. Click here to access it.

Stuart is going to explain and walk you through….

Profitable businesses modules
Six-figure niches
Email marketing
Multiple income streams
Authority marketing secrets
Autopilot traffic, sales & Income.

You will also get the Modern wealthy E-book along with access to the FB group, plus the affiliate marketing 101 and e-commerce 101 bonus courses.

So If you watch the 7 videos. Read the book, and work through the bonuses. You have ALL the information required to go away, take action and become successful with marketing online. There really is no information left out at all. It’s all there.

How you choose to use that information will of course determine your success with any online venture. Don’t get confused with a course providing information and a “done for you system” which this definitely isn’t; although you can use products and services within the course to earn commissions based on what you sell (more on affiliate marketing later in this article).

Modern Wealthy Review; Earnings Disclaimer

Having taken several online courses myself including spending some time on Stuart and Jay’s previous courses and trainings, I can say that Modern Wealthy is an absolute bargain for a beginner (or a novice) wanting to learn how to set up and market a business online. You’ll get far more value than you pay at your $37 price tag, assuming it remains at that price which I highly doubt!

Still, there’s a caveat to all online training and education courses. It remains a factor that needs to be mentioned. While many can see that their online success is based on their own efforts, there are still some who have an entitlement attitude when it comes to online courses. So if you think this is some “get rich quick” scheme which requires no work for success, you’re definitely mistaken.

Personally Stuart has always been clear on this which is what attracted me to his trainings several years ago. Before I met Stuart, I tried many online courses which promised the moon in terms of earnings. They all let me down!

Stuart definitely doesn’t do this and is careful to always state that earnings are never guaranteed.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Earnings from affiliate marketing are based on your own efforts and the strategies and tactics you employ to sell other people’s products online. The affiliate model is a great one especially if you have nothing of your own to sell or promote. But you still need to actually sell an affiliate product in order to make any money from it! This can be difficult, especially when you’re starting out. There’s all kinds of things which stand in your way. Mostly the lack of knowledge is the largest hurdle.

Having already done quite a bit of training on affiliate marketing, I went through the training in Modern Wealthy to refresh my memory and perhaps learn something I was missing.

I found many pearls of wisdom in Stuarts videos and course materials. They helped me personally with building my own affiliate business and identify areas which I needed further work and development. Things which I had forgotten or neglected. Having a firm grounding in the fundamental principles of online marketing is the bedrock to building a solid online business. Stuart is the best person to share these insights because he knows them so well and is great at articulating them.

Should You Invest In Modern Wealthy?

The Modern Wealthy is for serious people who want to learn how to build an online business, or further grow their own business using online marketing strategies. Before I found Stuart, I was attempting to build a martial arts school and massively struggling. The training helped me build my school alongside building a affiliate business.

training an education for online marketers

I was able to learn various strategies. These included things like Facebook advertising, blogging and YouTube strategies. I continue to learn an invest in my education because I’m committed to the journey of becoming a more effective marketer. If you’re looking for another way to build an income, and are prepared to put the work in, this course might be suitable for you. Whatever your reasoning, I would recommend investing in your knowledge of online marketing. The future is uncertain for many industries and sectors. Online marketing is here to stay!

Access The Modern Wealthy here and please sign up to my email list for further information on affiliate marketing and the various marketing strategies available.

I’ve been through the Modern Wealthy program and this is my genuine Modern Wealthy review. Still, it’s not for everyone I suppose but if you’re genuine about building an income online this is a great starting place to build your knowledge and get further help if required.

Disclaimer: *I am an affiliate for this program and if you do purchase through my links I will receive a commission based on the sales I make.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory

Selling products online without inventory can be done in a number of ways:

Drop shipping – sell another company’s products and ship them directly to the customer
Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products and services through a unique tracking link online
Shopify store – can be set up with a simple plugin to directly link to existing drop shipping/affiliate products
POD – Print On Demand – printing T-shits and clothing on demand with specific logos and designs.
Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) – Products are handled and shipped by Amazon fulfilment centres.
Sell Digital Products – With a digital product, you can automate the sale online. No need to handle or ship products yourself. You can also find other people’s digital products which you can sell (affiliate marketing).
MLM – Multi-level marketing is a business model in which people recruit other sellers and earn a percentage of their profit.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory

While there are certain business models which can help you sell online without products of your own, many of these services will charge a premium for their assistance. Some will only charge a percentage of what you earn and some can be done without a charge, (other than your marketing efforts). Of all these different business models my favourite is affiliate marketing for a number of reasons:

You don’t need your own products with affiliate marketing
Choose from a number of products available online
There’s multiple affiliate programs you can join and thousands of products you can choose from

Like all other methods of selling online, there’s always a catch! Affiliate marketing like drop shipping, or Print On Demand or a Shopify store will all require you to market your website/product. Marketing is therefore the key skill you will need to learn in order to be profitable with most of these methods.

While many business models will work and become profitable with the right amount of customers, it’s still your job to find those customers and websites don’t serve themselves. You must learn how to send the right customers to your products to generate sales. Even if you’re not having to fulfil those product deliveries yourself.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory: Traffic To A Website

Setting up a website to sell something is the easy part, whether you use a Shopify Store, the drop shipping or affiliate marketing business models. Once your store is set up, it has the potential to sell products to its visitors. However, that is only the potential store and you’ll need to find a strategy for sending targeted website traffic to your store if you want to make any sales.

To do this there are a few different strategies:

Paid traffic – is the fastest method to get people to your online store. Pay per click according to your marketing budget.
Organic traffic – is another way you can attain an audience for your online store. This requires you to create content and work on your SEO – search engine optimisation so you can attain free traffic from the search engines.
Social media is another option for finding potential customers to send to your website and there are paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.

Whatever methods you choose for your marketing strategy has a huge impact on your success. With paid marketing you can get traffic quickly. But with organic marketing it can take much longer and is much less scalable.

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of building an income online through selling someone else’s products/services. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once joined you can choose any products from Amazon to promote from a website. Or, use your affiliate link to promote products anywhere online.

Amazon though is not the best payer in terms of affiliate products. There are far more lucrative products to choose from. High ticket affiliate products and subscription products for example are the best payers. A high ticket affiliate product will typically pay $500 and above per sale. Subscription products are good for affiliates because they pay out recurring commissions. So a single sale can bring in monthly commissions for potentially years to come; especially if you choose valuable products which are necessary for business, for example.

An example of a good digital product to sell is Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder and it’s useful for online business owners.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing

Want a landing page for affiliate marketing? Landing pages are pages specifically designed to capture email addresses. They only have two options for visitors. They can sign up to your email list, or leave the page. Websites on the other hand have many options for visitors.

On this website, you can browse around, look through my blog posts and access a bunch of free resources. But on a landing page visitors either leave or sign up – that’s it! There’s good reason for this and it means you can more effectively drive your traffic into your email list.

Why build an email list? Simple. If you send traffic to an ordinary website there’s a lot greater chance your visitors will leave without making a purchase of anything, never to return. If you’re paying for those visitors, (which you are one way or another; either with time creating content or with paid ads), you’re losing potential customers.

Once you get a website visitor to subscribe to your email list, you can follow up and build a relationship by giving them value through your messages. But on a website, they only have a few minutes and most of them leave. That’s why a landing page for affiliate marketing is so important.

You shouldn’t send traffic to a normal website with paid traffic because you’re throwing money away. Instead, send them to a landing page and collect their details. If you test and measure your landing pages, changing elements to make them more effective, you’ll be able to get your cost per lead down, and make greater profits when you start scaling up your affiliate business.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: Software

Convertri is a landing page software like no other. It lets you cross test landing pages against each other, capture other websites and copy them and gives you data which will help you optimise conversions on your landing pages.

It’s also super fast, which is massively relevant with landing pages. Many visitors will click away if a website is running too slow. So optimal speed on a landing page is vital to increase conversions and get your costs down.

Access Convertri here and start building your landing pages.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: Cross Testing

One of the best things about landing page software is that you can easily cross test your landing pages against each other to see which one performs the best. You can start with two wildly different landing pages, and run paid traffic to them collecting emails and building an email list. Pretty soon, you should see one out performing the other in terms of opt in rate. Once you have identified a winning landing page, you can split test it with a different heading, picture, or copy to see which one performs the best again.

By doing this many times, you will eventually come up with a landing page which is the best performer. Some affiliates can even get their landing page performance up to 40% or even 50%. At 50% opt in rate this would mean a half of all traffic being sent to your landing page opts in.

You should of course expect some visitors to leave your landing page without having taken any action at all. But once you have a good opt in rate, and your numbers are good in terms of cost versus sales, you can scale up your affiliate marketing business simply by turning up your marketing budget.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: The Advert

A landing page is not the beginning of the sales funnel of course because you need to send qualified traffic to a landing page in order to collect emails. To do this you will need an advert. You can use many platforms to run advertising including Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube and so on. Video advertising is a good idea because you can convey more on a video advert than you can on a text only advert.

Here’s a video advert I recently ran on YouTube which sends targeted traffic to my landing page:

With a good advert, landing page and follow up email marketing series of messages, you can send the right people to products and services which will help them. Once you are profitable consistently with your advertising you can slowly increase your marketing budget.

Other Traffic Methods

Of course you can also use other methods for generating traffic to a landing page too. This blog is another strategy for generating leads for me. So if you don’t have a marketing budget to run paid advertising, you can create content or post on social media to obtain traffic. However these methods of traffic generation are typically much slower than by using paid traffic and also much less scalable.

Blogging, video blogging, posting on social media, SEO (search engine optimisation) are all methods you can use as an affiliate to attract traffic which you can then send to a landing page.

Email Marketing

Once you have captured your visitor’s email addresses you’ll need to follow up with email marketing messages and offer some kind of affiliate product (or your own product/service) which is relevant for the kind of person you have sent to your landing page.

To automate this process you can get an email autoresponder. I use Aweber which offers free access for beginners. You can open a free account with Aweber here or click on the banner below.

Email messages should be used to deliver value driven content to your subscribers. With so many marketers running email campaigns, you want your emails to get opened consistently. The best way to do this is to offer genuine and honest help and advice to your subscribers with information that is valuable and useful.

If you only send them links to affiliate products it soon become clear that you’re only interested in the sale! So they will likely unsubscribe from your list! But if you aim to genuinely help them with a problem, they are much more likely to trust you and continue opening your messages over the longer term. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they’re much more likely to buy from you.