Looking for a Flippa business for sale? Flippa.com is one of the top online marketplaces for online businesses. You can buy and sell e-commerce websites, affiliate websites, blogs, apps and other businesses on Flippa. Checkout the website here.
There’s a huge range of website based businesses on Flippa but many of them carry a large price tag. Checkout these two e-commerce websites currently for sale on the site:
Profitable business websites like these sell for a pretty penny! But there are cheaper offers available too. However, the more you are prepared to pay for an online business the more profit you’ll be likely to make. But what if you don’t have this kind of money to spend on an “instant business”? Well, there’s other ways you can earn online, without having to invest such high figures.
Flippa Business For Sale – Affiliate Marketing
One of the most popular business models is affiliate marketing. You can buy affiliate websites from Flippa.com too and depending on the website’s profitability, you can do this on a budget you can afford too. You can search by cheapest website by clicking on the sort by drop down box and click on Lowest price. You’ll find auction listings from as little as $1!
However, cheaper sites such as these will tend to generate fewer sales and be less profitable than the more expensive ones. So one way you can build an online business on a budget is to buy a cheap affiliate website and learn how to promote it to get it more profitable.
You can of course create your own affiliate website too, and sell anything you like. So long as you can find a product/service which has an affiliate program, you can use it to generate sales from a website and earn an income.
Learning Affiliate Marketing
Many new affiliates start out by joining an affiliate program such as Amazon. Amazon has thousands of products anyone can promote in order to earn commissions on sales they generate. You only need to apply to Amazon’s affiliate program and get accepted.
Once in, you can generate affiliate links to any product on Amazon’s vast warehouse of products. The main thing you need to learn to become a successful affiliate marketer is how to generate sales through your affiliate link. You can sell affiliate products in many ways. Here are some of the most popular methods:
If you’re interested in learning more about affiliate marketing you can access a free video series here.
Buying From Flippa Vs. Building Your Own Business From Scratch
Buying a ready made affiliate website from Flippa can be pretty costly and buying a cheap website from Flippa may not give you the profit you want. So a common middle ground is to learn some skills which enable to you build something of value yourself. One of the key skills which affiliate marketers learn is how to generate traffic to their websites; since this can be the most difficult part of building an online business.
Building an affiliate website is easy. But making it profitable is much more difficult. That’s why around 95% of affiliates quit!
If you’re looking for the easiest affiliate marketing method, you’re not alone. Most affiliates want to know this. Why choose the hard method, right? Unfortunately it’s not always so cut and dry with affiliate marketing. There’s so many ways in which affiliates can promote their products, and there’s so many affiliate products to choose from. Your choice of product and your promotion method/s will have a huge impact on your ability to make affiliate marketing work for you.
Your budget plays a significant role in your marketing method as an affiliate too. If you don’t have an advertising budget, you’ll need to find some methods which are cheap or free. Sadly these are typically going to take a lot more time and effort than if you’re using paid advertising.
Free traffic methods for affiliate marketing aren’t the easiest! They are slow and unpredictable. Blogging, social media marketing and building a YouTube channel are examples of cheap or free marketing methods. Depending on the competition in your affiliate marketing niche, it can take months of hard work before you break through and start generating sales. Many affiliates quit for this reason, even after months of hard work.
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Think Big!
One factor which can dramatically alter the course of your affiliate marketing journey is scale. With pretty much any affiliate offer this is true; the more people you can get in front of your product, the more you’ll sell. To reach people in larger numbers requires getting a lot of website visitors and/or building a huge email list. The email list is the best resource for anyone who wants to build an affiliate business and reach a large number of people quickly. You can access an email autoresponder for free here.
To build an email list takes time and/or money! To build one fast you’ll need to use paid advertising. Otherwise you’ll need to build a resource such as a YouTube channel or through blogging, for example, but this is far slower. So, to answer the question “which is the easiest affiliate marketing method” succinctly I would have to say:
Build an email list
Using paid marketing
But there’s a few caveats to this premise too, because you can still burn through a lot of cash using this method and still fail!
Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Types Of Products
Your choice of product has a huge deal to do with whether you’ll be successful as an affiliate marketer too. Even with a large marketing budget, a good product, and an email list, you can make mistakes. For example, you can send the wrong kind of traffic to your list. You can pay too much to build your list, and not recoup your marketing budget, or make a profit.
With the right product and audience, you are in with a much greater chance for success as an affiliate. So what is the right kind of product to promote as an affiliate?
There’s many products to choose from an you can become an affiliate marketer quite quickly and easily through joining any affiliate program. Amazon is a good example of where many affiliates will gravitate to. But with Amazon, you can only make tiny commissions on sales you make, depending on what you sell. Amazon pays between 1% and 20% on items you promote from their site. So with a $100 item, you can make as little as $1 for making the referral. If you’re paying for advertising, that only leaves a tiny margin for profit and you’re more likely to run up debt than to make a profit.
With paid ads and email marketing, you give yourself the best chance of reaching the most amount of people in the shortest possible time with your affiliate products. But what if those people aren’t interested in your product, or can’t afford to buy it? You’ll spend a lot of money and sell nothing! This is why it’s vital to understand who you are aiming your advertising at – your target audience or perfect customer “avatar”.
Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will love you, your products and become a lifetime fan. When you can understand them and their needs, you can “zone in” to what makes them tick and communicate in a way which will appeal to them personally.
You can also aim your advertising campaigns to your target demographic using the various online marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Google Adwords, Bing etc. You can do this by age, location, marital status, income, interests and a whole host of other important demographics. When you define your ideal customer very specifically, you can save a heap on otherwise wasted advertising and marketing aimed at the wrong type of person.
What product do you genuinely want to sell? Do you have an interest in the product yourself? Who is your target audience and how are you going to find them? Answer these questions well and you’re in a much better position to do well with an affiliate marketing business.
When I started doing affiliate marketing I rushed in trying to promote anything and everything to anyone! It just doesn’t work because 99.9% of people online don’t want the thing you’re selling! You need to find the 0.01% who do! To do this in a competitive market is either time consuming or expensive or both. Running ads is expensive if there’s a lot of other competing affiliates in the same niche. Blogging, or building a YouTube channel is competitive too if you’re going after free traffic.
But if you can align your passions with your product, you can keep going for much longer than most people will. You can sustain the necessary effort much longer than your competition, which is particularly important if you’re building some kind of authority website for traffic generation.
Power Of The Email List
I’ve already mentioned the email list in this article but it deserves a bit more attention because of how important the email list really is. Some affiliates will try and sell directly from a website, which can be done. However it’s much easier to sell from a list because of the timeframe you can cover with an email list.
On a website, someone only hangs around for a few minutes at the most. After that they are gone forever. Statistics show that most people don’t buy immediately from a website, especially one which is unfamiliar to the visitor. It takes several touch points before someone buys from you. This can’t be achieved on a one-time visit to a website. So if you’re an affiliate who is struggling making sales, this might be the reason.
Offer your website visitors a free giveaway and collect their email details from your website. Now you can follow up with emails, giving them help and advice and building trust over a much longer time frame. I have sold affiliate products to subscribers on my list who have joined it years before hand. This simply could not happen on a website.
Summary
So if you’re read this far you have probably realised that it’s not so simple as the “easiest” affiliate marketing method. You could choose a single “method” such as paid ads and building an email list, but falter on your product or get your target audience wrong, or even your messaging. I would definitely attest to the significance of using an email list and paid marketing. But for some, paid marketing might be out of their budget.
Even with paid marketing, some adverts will fail, and you should expect to lose some marketing budget while you’re learning. (See this as investment, rather than loss). If you’re not in a position to do this, you’ll need to use some cheaper marketing methods such as blogging, for example.
Easiest way to do affiliate marketing – with a six figure funnel, paid marketing and an email list
Blogging certainly isn’t the easiest way to earn from affiliate marketing. But if you find a topic you love, you can build a huge resource and attract free traffic, potentially for years to come. This can give you a nice, passive income if you align an affiliate product which is compatible with your topic and offers good value to the customer.
Overall, a single “method” of doing affiliate marketing is not really enough. You also need a strategy – a guiding overview which covers methods, messaging, marketing and product choice, and aligns with your long term goals, values and ideals.
If you’re serious about building a sustainable affiliate business from scratch, have a look at this video.
What is the best online business in 2023? While there’s many online business models you can choose from, one of the best is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and it can be done from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. But while affiliate marketing is a simple and effective business model which anyone can use, there’s a few downsides.
One of the main downsides is the massive competition online from other affiliates. So getting your start in affiliate marketing can take some time and effort. There’s a few choices you can make in affiliate marketing too, which makes it quite a versatile business. You can create content, such as this article, you can run advertising, build an email list, use social media and so on. So whatever your budget there’s usually an option which will suit you.
Affiliate marketing is pretty hands off too. You don’t have to deal with customers or products and you can simply refer customers online to existing products and services.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023? Downsides To Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing you’re business is in sending qualified (website) traffic to products and services online. When you make a sale you are paid a commission based on the products you have recommended. If you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid! That’s a big downside but as with any business if you don’t attract customers you don’t have a business. With affiliate marketing the key is in building a steady stream of people to the products and services which you choose to promote.
There’s therefore two main choices which will have a huge bearing on your levels of success with affiliate marketing:
The products you choose to promote
How you promote them
Yes there’s huge competition online but there’s also a huge opportunity too if you set off in the right direction in an affiliate business. With the wrong products and marketing methods, it can be difficult to get any traction. But get the right trajectory and you can build a very successful affiliate business quite quickly.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023?Your Marketing Methods: Paid Vs. Unpaid
Your marketing method is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as an affiliate marketer. You can build content, create a YouTube channel, build a blog, build an email list and spend time on social media building an online business. But if you don’t have the right information, you could spend years doing this to no avail! One of the best ways to start generating sales quickly as an affiliate marketer is through using paid advertising. With paid advertising, you can turn on traffic to an affiliate offer almost instantly.
With blogging, as an alternative, it can take many months before you even start to see website traffic. So depending on your budget and circumstances, you can choose accordingly. However, you can still run an advertising campaign even with a low budget, just to learn how to do it. Paid advertising is much faster and more scalable. This means once you hit a winning advert, you can add more budget to reach more customers and make more profit – just by turning up your ad campaign budget.
Organic marketing, such as blogging can be a great strategy too. Although it’s slower initially, your content can eventually attract traffic passively, giving you sales and greater profit because you’re not paying for advertising.
What Is The Best Online Business In 2023?Products To Choose From
Affiliate marketing is a super versatile business and you can choose to sell almost anything you can find online! So long as a product or service has an affiliate program, you can join that program, promote that product and earn commissions based on your sales.
However, not all products give you the same opportunity. With products from Amazon, for example, the rates of commission are incredibly low. So although there’s a huge choice of products from Amazon to choose from, most of them only pay peanuts. Amazon typically pays between 1% and 10% commission on product referrals. This means you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make a reliable income.
Digital products offer greater levels of commission; typically between 30% and 40%.
High Ticket & Subscription Products
Both high ticket and subscription products offer the best opportunity for online business in 2023 for a few reasons. With a high ticket product you can earn substantially more from a single sale than with most affiliate products. High ticket products carry commissions of at least $500 per sale.
Subscription products too are great for affiliates because they pay recurring commissions. With a recurring commission from say, a business related software product, you can earn commissions all year round from a single sale.
OT – One Time, S – Subscription and HT – High Ticket affiliate products
Business products are particularly good for affiliates to promote because they are so necessary and essential for online businesses to operate. An example of a vital business related product is Aweber – an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders are used in businesses to capture email addresses and automatically send out email messages over a period of time. If you’re considering building an affiliate business from scratch you’ll definitely need one. Get free access by clicking on the image below.
Get Started
So if you’re looking to start a new venture in 2023, I highly recommend doing affiliate marketing. But while affiliate marketing is one of the easiest business models to use, it can be easy to get lost in the many choices along the way. What products to use, how to collect emails and how to generate website traffic and so on can all leave you in a state of overwhelm. The best thing you can do is get help and support in your product choice and marketing methods and strategy. Watch this video with one of my personal mentors Stuart who will explain a little more about this business model and a few others too.
What are the best products to sell internationally? Today you can pretty much sell anything anywhere. But if you’re promoting your own products you’ll need to think about international postage, which can be a bit of a problem.
Even if you’re an affiliate selling other people’s products, many programs, such as Amazon, will require you to join in each country separately in order to sell internationally; since technically, every country has its own program. See this article for more information on international selling on Amazon.
Physical products definitely aren’t the best products to sell internationally. The selling of physical products can be done from anywhere to anywhere, but the postage will be different for every country. There’s a lot of potential problems with international postage, handling and different tax laws operating in different countries.
For this reason sone of the best products to sell internationally are digital products.
Best Products To Sell Internationally: Digital Products
Why choose digital products to sell internationally? It’s simple; there’s little hassle, no postage costs and transactions are instantaneous and can be done online from anywhere globally. You can therefore save a heap of problems selling digital products. Not to mention that digital products pay affiliates a larger cut of the profit, due to these savings.
With physical products you have manufacturing costs, handling costs and postage. The affiliate receives a small amount after everyone else has taken their cut. Amazon, for example, pays affiliates between 1% and 20% on sales the affiliates make. So it can be very difficult to profit as an affiliate for Amazon. But digital products pay much more: between 30%-40% in most cases.
There’s no rules with digital products crossing borders, no fees to pay and no potential delays. Digital products therefore offer one of the best options for anyone wanting to sell internationally from a website.
Best Products To Sell Internationally: Subscription Digital Products
While many digital products aren’t in the same demand as physical products are, some are incredibly useful. For example business related products are vital for the running and operation of online businesses. By selling digital software products, marketing products and training products, you are offering some of the most sought after products on the market.
An example is Aweber, which is an autoresponder service used by affiliate marketers and online business owners. One of the main benefits of selling such as software is that Aweber pays out recurring commissions to it’s referrers. This is something which could not happen with a physical product. A physical product only pays out once.
So if you sell a physical product you need to sell many of them in order to be consistently profitable. However, digital products can be software products, training products and other related services which can pay out recurring commissions to those who refer them (affiliate marketers). The best recurring affiliate programs are those which offer a huge value to the customer and are useful for a lifetime.
Best Products To Sell Internationally: Training & Education Related Products
Another type of product which sells well internationally is training and education programs. One of the biggest problems you can solve with a product is the problem of income. Online business training and education programs offer one of the best types of products you can promote as a third party affiliate.
Access a free account here & learn more about these programs.
These types of program help people build online businesses and offer coaching and mentoring to get people up and running online with their own businesses.
Selling online means either building content or running paid advertising, or both. Since paid advertising is expensive, high ticket affiliate products are a good idea because they allow you to more easily profit when using paid advertising methods.
Summary
So what is the best product to sell internationally? One of the best types of products to sell globally are digital products because there’s no postage or handing costs. Affiliates are therefore passed larger rates of commission; around 30-40% compared with 1-10% typically for physical products. Digital products can be sent automatically upon purchase which makes them some of the most convenient and scalable types of products you can sell online too.
With high ticket digital products and subscription products you can build more a much more scalable business much more quickly due to the larger and recurring commissions you can earn. This makes it much easier to choose paid advertising to attract customers which is faster and more scalable than content marketing.
Access an online business system which uses both high ticket and subscription digital products within its inventory here.
What are the most profitable digital products to sell online? Well, there’s definitely some which pay much more than others. So your selection of product to sell online, is paramount to your success. You’ll need to sell considerably more of a low value product than a high valued one, for example.
But an item’s price isn’t the only consideration when you’re choosing affiliate products to sell online. There’s also a considerable difference in rates of commission, depending on the type of product you choose to sell. Physical products, for example, tend to pay much lower levels of commission than digital products do.
Digital versus Physical affiliate commission rates.
Amazon, for example is one of the first places new affiliate marketers will go to in order to sell something online. But Amazon’s rates are some of the lowest you can earn as a product referrer. Amazon pays from 1%-20% commission rates with most of their products falling in to the 1-10% level. This means for a $100 product sale you might only earn $1! So you’ll need to sell thousands of such a product in order to be profitable. Perhaps that’s why you’re looking to sell digital products and not physical ones?
What Are The Most Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online?
So what are the most profitable products to sell online? Well in terms of commission rates digital products offer you a much larger percentage of the sale than physical products to. With a digital product you can earn from 30%-40% for a sale. So with a digital product worth $100, you can earn $40 – 40 times as much as that of the previous example (for a physical product paying 1% commission)!
Still, some physical products are going to be more profitable because of their price tag. Take a look at this item which you can find on a site called Hammacher Schlemmer:
The flying hovercraft sells for $190,000 and if you can generate an affiliate sale you get 8%. That’s $15,200 in commission! Compare this to a sale of a digital product sold for $100. You’ll need to sell 380 times as many of the digital product in the example above to make the same amount as just one of these! Obviously not everyone is in the market for a flying hovercraft! More people are more likely to buy a cheaper product. But as an affiliate marketer it is often the same or similar amount of work which leads to sales in either case.
What Are The Most Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online: Recurring Income Products
Recurring income affiliate products are also some of the most profitable products to sell online. These are subscription products which customers pay for software or memberships. With a software product you pay ongoing fees to maintain the use of a plugin, or a piece of business software. Aweber is a good example of a business software which can pay out recurring commissions. Aweber is an autoresponder tool which allows online business owners (and affiliates) to collect subscribers to promote their affiliate products to.
Since autoresponders are necessary for business owners, it’s the type of tool which business owners will keep for a lifetime, even with monthly fees attached. So if you refer these kinds of products you can earn monthly commissions over and over again, potentially for the lifetime of a customer. Even though the payments are much smaller than the previous example of a flying hovercraft, they are ongoing and they mount up. With 100 customers paying $20 a month for a recurring commission product, you can make a regular income of $2000 a month passively, once you’ve made those sales.
Digital Training Courses With Recurring Commissions
Some of the best products to sell in terms of profitability offer both high ticket commissionsand recurring commissions. Training and education courses for online business fall into this category. The bigger the problem solved by a particular product, the more someone will pay. With high ticket digital marketing courses, the problem you’re solving is that of income, a pretty large problem.
Here’s a view of some digital marketing courses you can purchase and promote as an affiliate:
Digital training courses offer more personal help and support when launching an online business from scratch. Depending on the product affiliates can earn commissions of up to $4000 on a single sale. Create a free starter account to learn more about these programs: get started here.
Most Profitable Digital Products
While some physical products can offer huge commissions if they are highly priced, most people aren’t in the market for these products. This can make it more difficult to sell them, even if you only need a couple of sales!
Low valued digital products (like you might find on Clickbank) pay larger commissions than physical products but you’ll still only make $40 on most items in Clickbank’s marketplace.
So the most profitable digital products are training and education courses which have high commission rates, offer a high lifetime value to customers and have a larger than average cost. They also carry recurring commissions in addition to having high ticket products within a range of products.
A product range allows you to sell to many more people than you would with only a very high ticket offer (which prices many potential customers out of the market).
To learn more about this product range create a free account here.
What is long tail SEO? Long tail SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) refers to the keywords you target on your website with your content. Most short tail phrases (2-3 words) will have massive competition in the search results pages (SERPS). As such it’s very difficult to create content for them and rank anywhere near the top of the first page of the SERPS. Without a top ranking, it’s difficult to get free traffic to your website.
Long tail SEO is worth doing because it allows you to target longer chains of words with your content. Because there’s so much less competition for long tail keywords, you have a far greater chance of getting found on Google, and getting free traffic.
A quick browse of Google’s keyword planner brings up hundreds of keywords which are being search for. By aiming for the “low hanging fruit”, that is, those keywords with less competition, you can build content which gets traffic for free.
What Is Long Tail SEO And Why Use It?
Long tail keywords are a good source of free traffic if you can build good content for them and get a ranking. Depending on your niche and the keywords you choose, you’ll find it more or less difficult to make this work. If you have just started out and have a new website, it’s going to be more difficult because you won’t have any authority with Google. You’re competing with thousands of other bloggers for visibility on Google; many of whom have been around for years, building content and backlinks.
By going after long strings of keywords instead of short ones, you give yourself a better chance of your content getting found. Here’s a few of the keywords which came up when I searched for ideas for this article:
Although these top keywords have a lot of monthly traffic, I wouldn’t have much chance ranking for them. There’s simply too much competition to make it worth my while. But a further look down the list and you can see some longer tail ideas:
Two of these I already picked out and I have written content for. You can see them below:
There’s a few benefits to creating content in your niche through targeting long tail keywords. Firstly you have more chance of getting found but long tail keywords are also much more targeted. Someone looking for a long tail keyword has a much better idea of what they want. The long tail keywords searches are more specific. If you’re selling something on your website, this means you get a more targeted search query.
This is useful if you’re selling a service or a product because you can find customers more easily. For example, the term affiliate marketing is a very broad term. Someone searching for affiliate marketing might simply want to know what it is. But someone searching for affiliate marketing step by step for beginners is more likely to be looking for some kind of product or training program.
This is great for marketers because it means you not only save money on your marketing budget by getting free traffic, but you also attract very specific search queries which are relevant to your product/service.
Blogging
Blogging using long tail keywords is a great option for marketers therefore because it allows them to create content which can attract an audience. Once this content is created, it can attract buying customers for free; saving you money on paid advertising.
The downside of blogging is that it is time consuming. But you can out source this particular task if you’re not interested in doing it yourself. You can find people to create content for you on websites such as Fiver.com and Upwork.com.
Blogging isn’t an instant win, and depending on how competitive the topic is, you might find you’ll need to create a lot of content just to start generating only a small amount of traffic. But over time this can grow and your efforts will compound over time the more content you have. As you increase the number of blog posts you have, there will come a tipping point. This is where your content starts ranking and people start sharing and linking to your content. At this point, your blog grows organically. More traffic equals more shares and links, which further increase your authority with the search engines.
To get this to happen it’s important to create good quality content which stands the test of time.
So you’ve joined an affiliate program and now you’re wondering how to promote affiliate links? Joining a program and grabbing your affiliate link is the easy part of affiliate marketing. Promoting those links successfully is much more difficult. There’s many ways in which you can promote your links. Here’s just a few of them:
Blogging – Build a website (like this one for example) and create a lot of written content on it to attract an audience. Link to products on banners on your site and throughout your text.
YouTube – many YouTuber’s are affiliates and they either build a channel over time and get traffic organically or pay for advertising to get people to click on their links. Link to affiliate products in your video description.
PPC – One of the most popular ways to get people to click on your links is pay per click advertising. You only pay when someone clicks on your advert. By creating an ad carefully, you can make sure those people are going to be likely buyers.
Social Media – Many affiliates post their links in their social media bio and also link to content in their feeds. My bio has links to my affiliate websites in all of my social media platforms.
Email marketing – is one of the best ways in which you can promote affiliate links. You can get a free autoresponder here and use it to collect emails from social media or from a blog/channel.
How To Promote Affiliate Links – Strategy
But these are all tactics – specific ways in which you can place your links to get people to click on them. As affiliate marketers we also need a strategy! A strategy is different to a tactic because tactics are simply methods of doing something, whereas a strategy is a broader overview. Blogging, for example is a tactic for attracting an audience who you can sell your affiliate products to. But without a blogging strategy, you can easily become discouraged when your products aren’t selling. You can spend months blogging without achieving any sales and this can be discouraging. But if you have a good strategy, success can come a lot quicker.
A good strategy for a blogger is to choose a topic you are interested in and build a niche website to attract a specific type of person. Your target audience is an important thing to understand as an affiliate. Without a clear idea of who it is you’re selling to, it’s going to be very difficult to make those sales. Once you have identified who you are selling to, you can choose a tactic and build a long term strategy for implementing your marketing tactic. To decide on your audience you need to define your customer avatar.
How To Promote Affiliate Links – Social Media
The many social media channels offer a cheap way to promote affiliate links. You can put your link in your bio and set up your profile with a clear call to action. But how many people see it? Probably not many. You also need a strategy for attracting your target audience. Without a strategy, your bio link won’t get many clicks, especially if it’s a long, messy affiliate link. You can quickly shorten a link like this with a link shortener:
Link shorteners are a good idea for a couple of reasons. Firstly they make a long messy affiliate link which looks like this: https://79a24dnc-1d-ds8fm8o3l3wu2h.hop.clickbank.net, into a shorter, more attractive link which looks like this: https://tinyurl.com/49aefe6s.
This is still messy and unattractive though and it’s a good idea to build your own website or buy a domain name which is branded appropriately to your product. For example, my link above is for a fat burning blueprint product on Clickbank. But I could easily buy a domain name (such as easyweightlo55.com) or something and forward my messy link to it. A domain name is much more profession, appealing and immediately tells your visitor what the site is about. See unpaid social media marketing for specific ways to market your link on social media.
Social Media Attracting An Audience
The hardest part of getting people to click on your links is in the attraction of an audience. Pasting links on social media is easy, getting targeted buyers to click on it is another story altogether!
Ideally make a clear call to action on your profile and give your visitors a reason to click – such as offering a free giveaway in exchange for their email address.
Here’s an example of a clear call to action on my Facebook profile.
Once you have set up your profile with a clear call to action to your link, you can go about building an audience. One way of doing this on Facebook is to join groups where your target audience might be hanging out. So if you’re product is a health related one, you might find groups which discuss a similar topic. Join those groups and start interacting with other members. Make a daily habit out of this and persevere with it for several months.
Over time, people will find your Facebook profile and see your offer.
Paid Marketing (PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising)
The fastest way to attract an audience is with paid ads. Facebook lets you set up an advert and show it to an audience of your choosing. Google Adwords is another platform where you can target adverts towards a specific audience. Most of these platforms will not want you linking directly to affiliate products from an advert.
If it’s not allowed, you’ll need to create a website of your own to act as a go-between, in between the advertising platform and the affiliate product. A website like this is often called an authority site because it shows your authority in the area of your chosen topic.
Building an authority site doesn’t have to take very long, if you’re going to be running paid advertising to it and promoting your products from the site. But it’s a good tactic to give something away on your site because you’ll then be able to collect visitors email information and follow up with an email marketing campaign.
Why Use Email Marketing?
If you’re using paid traffic, it’s always good policy to send that traffic to a landing page and not just a normal website. Why use landing pages? A landing page is a page designed specifically with the intention of collecting your visitor’s email address. Whereas on a website, a person can browse around, click on your pages and generally have a look; on a landing page they only have two options. They can either sign up or leave.
With paid traffic you want to collect email subscribers so that you can build a relationship with them over the longer term, through sending email messages. On a website, most people are gone within a few minutes, often only seconds. So it’s wasteful to pay to send people to a website, where they probably won’t buy immediately through your affiliate link.
In fact most people will need several touch points with a product before they buy. This is why email marketing is so effective. With email marketing, the time period with which someone makes a buying decision is vastly extended. People can buy from you from an email list even months or years after they sign up!
Why Customer Avatar Is So Important
Before you start with any promotion method, tactic or strategy, it’s vital you know who your audience is. If you’re promoting a fitness product, such as a weight loss plan for example, you need to understand who will want it and where they are online.
The better you can understand your perfect customer, the better you can target them with your content/adverts and the better you can communicate to their needs, wants and desires through your marketing. Without having done this work, you’re effectively trying to sell to everyone without a marketing strategy or plan. This simply doesn’t work no matter how much you try and how many times you paste your affiliate link everywhere online! Try to sell to everyone and you sell to no one!
It’s easy to forget that the internet places you in connection with a global audience, most of whom don’t care a jot about your affiliate product. But a small segment of the people online will value what you’re selling. If you can place a desirable offer in front of those people, you’ll be a more effective affiliate than if you simply spam your link to everyone! See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Traditional Forms Of Advertising & Tracking
Let’s not forget the traditional forms of advertising too. You can easily place a banner on your wall, promoting your website. Newspapers, magazines, billboards and flyers are traditional marketing methods. As an affiliate marketer you can do anything you want to attract your target audience to your affiliate link.
With traditional advertising of course nobody can click on an affiliate link on a physical banner. But you can send them to your website, if they remember the name of it! So short website names are better for traditional advertising such as a banner alongside a motorway, for example. This website wouldn’t be a good one for a motorway banner!
Whatever you do, it’s worth tracking everything so you know which adverts and campaigns are bringing in customers and which aren’t working.
This is done through tracking and you can create unique landing pages for each campaign so you can filter them out when you build up some data. Or use a tracking code at the end of your website url.
How To Promote Affiliate Links With Blogging
Blogging is a great strategy if you can find a topic you love writing about. You can attract organic traffic which is completely free too. This is done by identifying a niche you’re comfortable creating a lot of content in, and making blogging a daily habit for (ideally) several months at least.
To get free traffic can be quite tricky, according to the competitiveness of your chosen topic. But a clever way to get found more in the search engine results pages (SERPS) is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Shorter tail keyword phrases are usually very difficult to rank on Google (and others) for. So instead look for the longer three or more word phrases which relate to your niche. You can find these using Google’s free keyword research tool the keyword planner.
Keyword research for affiliate marketing is a pretty important topic if you’re an affiliate. Affiliates use keyword research to find out which keywords their potential customers are looking for. Most affiliates will know about Google’s keyword planner. But there’s a number of other tools which you can use to find the kinds of keywords which are suitable for your particular niche:
But all you really need is a basic free tool which gives you the monthly search results of searches people are doing on Google. I use Google’s free keyword planner for this. You can get it here and all you need is a Google Adwords account.
Keyword Research For Affiliate Marketing
The first thing you can do is type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. This will give you a number of other search terms which are currently being looked for on Google. If you’re selling a particular product, you can type that product into the planner too to see what search terms are related to it.
So, for example, one of my main search terms is affiliate marketing. This is what comes up when I type that keyword into the planner:
Let’s say you’re promoting a particular product from Clickbank.com, for instance. Here’s a product I found for back pain:
To promote this product you might want to create a blog about back pain. The first thing you should do is some keyword research so you’ll know what your potential customers are looking for. Here’s a few of the searches which are found using the keyword planner. As an affiliate, you can look for the less competitive keywords which you’ll more easily rank for.
Keyword research For Affiliate Marketing: Target Audience & Long Tail Keywords
There’s two main types of ways you can sell affiliate products. You can either use paid marketing or create content. Keyword research can be used for both to determine who you will be targeting your content or adverts towards. Without keyword research and some work on your customer avatar, it can be hard to determine who you’re selling your products to.
When you get clear on your target audience for affiliate marketing, you’re in a much better place to make sales. If you’re creating content around certain keywords, it’s a good idea to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. The shorter terms you’ll find on the keyword planner have a lot more traffic, but they are also much more difficult to rank for on Google. Longer tail keywords will have much less traffic every month. But a small slice of something is worth much more than a large slice of nothing!
ecommerce sales boom chart
Going after the keyword term term “Affiliate marketing” for example, looks good but you have very little chance of ranking your content for such a competitive keyword. “Step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf” is a much longer term that has less traffic. However, there’s much greater chance of ranking on Google (and other search engines) with a long tail keywords such as this. Finding long tail keywords to rank content for is just one strategy which affiliate can use keyword research for.
Keyword Research And Paid Adverts
You can also use paid adverts as an affiliate and this is a much faster way of obtaining traffic to a website or landing page. Using the keyword planner tool, find keywords in your niche by typing in your product or your niche keywords. Look for those keywords which are most relevant for your product and which ideally have a buyer intent. A buyer intent means the keyword is aligned with something the user wants to buy.
There’s three types of keywords you can use to trigger your adverts:
Broad match – using the keywords without quotation marks or brackets
Phrase match – using “quotes” around the keyword means your ad will only show when those terms are typed in that order together, (but it will show with other words added either side).
Exact match – uses the phrase you choose in {brackets}. This means your ad will only show when those specific words are typed in that order and nothing else.
If you’re running paid ads, it important to only show your adverts to those people who are most likely to buy. A lot of affiliates will also suggest to send paid advertising directly to a landing page too. A landing page is a page specifically designed to take user information so the affiliate can follow up with email messages via an autoresponder.
You can also set negative keywords when planning an advertising campaign. Negative keywords are useful because they can help you avoid triggering your ads when someone is looking for something you don’t offer.
What is user intent keyword research? Anytime someone searches on Google for something, there’s an intention behind what they type into the search bar. if you’re creating content for a particular reason, such as to sell a product or service, you’ll want your visitors to be the right kind of visitor.
We don’t want any old website visitors coming to our website. Most people simply aren’t looking for what we have to sell! Using user intent keyword research can help you better target your website content for the kind of people who want your stuff! An example is someone types “Yoga mat” into the Google browser. There’s a high chance someone is looking to buy a Yoga mat! Their intent is to purchase something. On the other hand let’s say they type in “free Yoga course online”. Their intent is to find a free course and learn some Yoga from home, rather than a local Yoga school.
User Intent Keyword Research
To attract the right kinds of visitors to your website, you’ll want to think about the user intent before creating a tonne of content. If your content is attracting the wrong audience, you’ll waste a heap of time building content than doesn’t convert visitors into customers.
If you’re a blogger, there’s going to be a lot of competition, depending on your niche of course. But there’s going to be competition anyway! To get your content ranking on Google is tough because there’s so much content out there already. One strategy to get more visitors on your website is to find low competition long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. But you also need to choose those keywords which are a good match for your products/service and have buyer intent.
This can be difficult because the long tail keywords aren’t always the best ones for search intent.
User Intent Keyword Research – Keyword Planner
Let’s look at the keyword planner and some keywords in the Yoga niche. Using the example of “Yoga mat” as our main “seed” keyword, here’s some of the ideas which came up:
These are great if you’re running paid ads, but if you’re creating content it’s going to be difficult getting your content noticed; due to the competition. To find longer tail keywords will give you a better chance of ranking on Google, and getting free traffic as a content creator/blogger.
To find longer tail keywords which also have good search intent you need to look at the keywords with less traffic. Click on the Avg. Monthly searches tab to change the search volume. Here’s some examples:
As you can see, this gives us some longer tail phrases which still have buyer intent. “Best non slippery yoga mat” for example might easily be someone looking to buy a Yoga mat, but the phrase is much longer and so you’ll more easily rank content for it.
Why Long Tail Keywords?
Longer tail keywords are good for bloggers because of two things:
They are less competitive so you’re more likely to have a chance to rank for them with your content
They are more specific. “Yoga mat” is very broad. You can waste time or marketing budget trying to sell the wrong kind of mat to someone. Whereas a longer tail phrase shows the person searches knows more clearly what they are wanting.
When you can find longer tail keywords which also have a good buyer intent, it’s worth creating content for the term. If you create content for everything in your niche, you can be spending a lot of time creating content for nothing!
Finding Keywords With Buyer Intent
To find keywords with buying intent you need to think about the search and ask yourself some questions. Does the search have a meaningful outcome? Will the person need to buy something? Does the search imply interest or the will to buy something? Many searches online are simply searches for free information, which can of course lead to a purchase too. But some stand out as a strong intent to buy. Review websites, for example are a great idea if you’re intending on selling something online.
Before someone finds a review website, they have the intent to buy something when they perform a Google search. So if you’re selling a specific product online, writing a review about it can be a good idea and attract the right audience.
A review is often something someone looks for when they are in the last stage of the buying cycle. Before this, they might look for information about a certain product, such as a portable heater. Once they are more ready to buy, they will look for a heater by brand and model. If they find your review, and it’s what they want, they are very likely to buy – using your affiliate link.
Can you really earn money from Clickbank? Yes of course you can! Affiliates use Clickbank.com to earn money from sales they generate. Like any affiliate program, you only get paid when you make a sale through your unique affiliate i.d. If you don’t make the sale, you don’t get paid! This can be a frustrating experience for new affiliates because unless you have successfully made a sale, it can be overwhelming deciding on your marketing strategy and keeping going until it happens. Once you make a sale, you can repeat your success over and over again. But until it happens, it can be daunting deciding on what to do in terms of marketing.
It can take months to generate your first sale, particularly if you’re using cheaper marketing methods. Paid marketing is the fastest way to make affiliate sales, but you can’t simply throw money at the problem. That can get very expensive. If you’re a content creator, it can take a lot longer and many affiliates will quit after months of work and nothing to show for it!
So what’s the answer? You know people are making money from Clickbank, so you just need to learn how to do it yourself.
Earn Money From Clickbank – Choice Of Product
Your choice of product on Clickbank is a big factor in your success. Choose the wrong product and you can struggle. But you also need to choose your marketing method carefully too. How will you promote your Clickbank product? Here’s a few marketing strategies which Clickbank affiliates use:
Banner advertsing – paid banners on specific sites which relate to your products
PPC – pay per click advertising (Bing, Google Adwords, Facebook, etc.)
Blogging or video blogging – using YouTube, your own website or even a free blog platform such as Blogger.com, Hubpages.com or WordPress.com.
Social media marketing – Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube and all the rest offer great opportunities for affiliates to reach their target audience.
Clickbank products can be chosen by niche and by a number of other criteria but many affiliates recommend looking at Clickbank’s gravity. The gravity score is a performance metric which shows how popular products are on Clickbank. You can read more about it here. A high score shows a product is successfully selling whereas a low score might indicate poor performance, or very few sales. However, the metric is weighted towards more recent sales. A high score might indicate that a product is in a very competitive niche. A low score might also mean the product hasn’t been picked up by affiliates yet.
Earn Money From Clickbank – Reviews & Niche Websites
Reviews are a good way to earn money from Clickbank if you can get your review ranking on the search engines, or in front of the right audience. You can use gravity score to choose a product which isn’t too competitive. A high gravity score might indicate that there’s a lot of affiliates promoting that particular product. Look on Google and other search engines for the reviews of the product you wish to promote. If there’s not a lot of competition, your review might stand greater chance of a ranking.
Another strategy to make money from Clickbank is to create a niche website which ranks on the search engines. A niche site is a site carefully built around certain key topics and keywords. With a well chosen keyword you can rank your website more easily. This can help you get your product in front of the right audience if you go about it in the right way. See this article on building a niche website.
Earn Money From Clickbank – Target Audience
A good idea if you want to earn money from Clickbank is to choose a niche which you know something about and are happy creating a lot of content about. A blog, for example can be a good, cheap way of attracting an audience to your Clickbank product. However, blogging is a slow burner and you’ll need a lot of content to start attracting visitors in large numbers. A YouTube channel is another option if you want to become a content creator. Before you do this though, it’s a good idea to choose a product you can get behind and define your niche and target audience.
What is a niche? A niche is simply the defined area or topic with which your website/channel will be about.
What is target audience? Knowing your target audience will help you sell any affiliate product because you’ll be better prepared to find them online. Your target audience will depend on your product and your niche. A target audience is a very specific group of people who are most likely to want your product. By spending some time defining who they are, you are putting yourself in a better place when you try and market your products to them. See customer avatar worksheet for more on this topic.
Subscription Products On Clickbank
If you’re going to promote Clickbank products through paid advertising of some sort, you’ll want to choose higher paying products to cover your ads. Most products are around the $100 level on Clickbank but you can also find products which pay you a recurring commission.
Recurring commission affiliate products give you monthly payouts for each sale you make. This means you can start earning a regular income from sales you generate. This is obviously much better than a “one off” commission from a product referral and it’s far easier to build a real business with affiliate marketing through using subscription affiliate products.
To find recurring commission products on Clickbank you can use a site called CBEngine.com (Clickbank engine). Look on the left hand side for a tab “CB Recurring” (see picture above).
High Ticket Items
It’s also worth mentioning high ticket affiliate products here. Although most products on Clickbank aren’t high ticket, you can find them on other affiliate websites such as Hammacher Schlemmer where you’ll find items such as this:
A high ticket item is worth thousands of sales of a low ticket item. One sale can earn the same as selling thousands of smaller commissions. While you may not think many people spend $2,700,000 online, some do. Although this is an extreme example of a high ticket item, selling higher valued items makes sense if you’re an affiliate; especially if you consider it takes the same amount of work to make a sale of any kind.
