AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

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.