AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Online Royalty Payment: How To Earn One

If you’re wondering how to earn an online royalty payment, listen up! Royalties are typically paid to musicians, actors, writers and other types of performers or creators. As a former professional stuntman, I earn royalties from the film and TV performances I have done in the past.

Some time ago, I wondered how I could earn royalty payments working online, in some way. The answer I discovered is a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates earn commissions through product referrals. As an affiliate, you’re effectively a third party referrer of customers. Affiliate marketers benefit from their content even years after they have created it, effectively making their income similar to royalties.

So what is affiliate marketing, how does it work, and how can you benefit from it and earn from it?

Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate an income online. Affiliates are third party referrers but they can earn an income similar to royalties by selling other people’s products and services online. This website, for example is an affiliate website. If you should buy something from one of my recommendations here, I earn a commission based on the sale.

But there’s many ways you can earn as an affiliate. Here’s a few of the most popular strategies which affiliates use to sell other people’s products online:

Blogging
Email marketing
Paid advertising
Video marketing
Social media platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation

Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing Commissions

Royalties are paid to performers and creators based on work they have done previously. But you can earn commissions in a similar fashion as an affiliate in a number of ways:

Create content which can be monetised with affiliate products – this can be written content (blogging) or video content for example
Build an email list of subscribers and automate the sales process through email marketing using an autoresponder
Sell subscription products (which continue to pay long after the sale)

Blogging, is a good example of how affiliate marketing can earn you a royalty income because once you have created a lot of content, you can get traffic and sales automatically, and for free! With paid marketing, you can pay to get people to a website but you need to keep paying in order to keep generating sales.

Earning On Autopilot – Other Earning Methods

Another way you can effectively earn a royalty income online is through using advertising on your content. Google Adsense pays content creators to place advertising on their content. With each click on an advert, creators get paid a percentage of the advertising fee. With enough content and visitors these small amounts can add up to a nice passive income – much like a royalty.

Content creators use video and blogging to build up a portfolio of online content which can be monetised with Google Adsense or a similar alternative. Over time content can attract the attention of the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo.com etc. When this happens you can have a nice passive income from a blog or video channel on YouTube.

Traffic Creation

With any monetisation strategy online you’ll need traffic; that is visitors. You can build content to attract traffic or you can pay for it. The best way to monetise paid traffic is through an email list. The email list is the number one asset which affiliate marketers should have in order to build a profitable business from the internet.

With a website, most visitors are simply browsing. Seldom does a visitor make a purchase on their first stop on a website. It usually takes several touch points before a website visitor makes a purchase. (This is a good reason to use Google Adsense since clicking an advert is more likely than making a purchase).

But once you get website visitors to sign up to an email list, you can extend the period which which they can make a buying decision. This is great for affiliates who are selling products. It allows them time to build a relationship with their website visitors over the longer term. Often, someone will make a purchase even years after joining an email list. This just isn’t possible directly from a website, because most visitors will leave and never return!

Get Started

If you’re ready to get started as an affiliate marketer, the key sticking point for many new affiliate marketers is generating traffic and choosing the right products. So to be successful as an affiliate you’ll need some help and support.

Access an “all in one” online training tool which gives you a solid step by step process you can follow here.

Breaking Goals Into Small Steps

It’s great having big goals but breaking big goals into small steps is the key to long term success. A big goal can give you vision and focus and the desire to succeed. But small achievable steps are where the “rubber meets the road”. Without action, large goals are just fantasy! A really big goal can inspire you into new action steps, but it’s the steps themselves which will carry you towards your destination.

Without goals you can easily fall into accepting the status quo and living your life as you always have. Life gets boring and drab when you have nothing to shoot for. But equally, a (too) large goal can put you off taking the required action if you don’t know how to proceed to make it a reality. Or, you can choose a goal which you don’t believe you’ll achieve. Whether your goal is too big or small is determined by whether it spurs you into action, or not. A goal which is too small is likely not going to motivate you. Why bother if you don’t care about the outcome? Whereas a too big goal might seem unobtainable, and result in a similar apathy.

So, before you break your big goals into smaller steps, it’s worth getting clearer on what your goals are; whether they properly motivate you and whether you will take consistent action towards them over a long time frame.

Breaking Goals Into Smaller Steps: Choosing Your Goal

The best book I’ve found on goal setting is Stuart Lichtman’s Cybernetic Transposition. In it he shares what he calls his cybernetic transposition three step process. You can get his book here. “Cybernetic” relates to the mind, or brain, and “transposition” relates to transposing something. In the case of goal setting, you’re transposing a memory in order to create a new goal.

But before you get to that stage, Stuart explains why your choosing of a goal is the most important part of the equation. Most people set goals and give up shortly afterwards. That’s often because they have chosen a goal which they don’t believe they can attain, or that they aren’t motivated enough to achieve.

What’s Your Best Goal?

In Stuart’s three step process he guides you through an exercise in which you can tune your goal into one which is super relevant for you. Your goal should score a 10 out of 10 for desirability and a 10 out of 10 for believability. If you don’t really want a goal, you’ll find reasons to quit. Likewise if you don’t believe in your goal, you’ll fail to achieve it!

One of the main problems with goals setting is that we have multiple parts of out mind competing for the outcome they want, instead of our main objective. For example, you choose to lose weight, but you still like pizzas and beer. Despite a strong resolve to lose weight by joining a gym and setting a diet, other competing parts of out mind sabotage our best efforts. Get Stuart’s book here!

Baby Steps

Another great book on this topic is Stephen Guise’s Mini Habits. There’s lot of good books on habits, but I like this one because it’s pretty simple and straight forward. The main theme of the book is to take your goal and break it onto such tiny, easily achievable steps that it would be possible to take a step each day, whatever happens. Even if you’re having a terrible day, suffering from depression, working long hours or whatever, your mini habit should be so infinitesimally small that you can still do it easily.

An example from the book is a daily push up. A push up isn’t hard to do and anyone who is able can make a daily habit out of doing a single push up. It only takes a few seconds to do. You might think, how is a daily push up going to get you to your goals? But use this as an analogy for your own aspirations. How can you take the idea of a daily push up, and use it for your longer term goals?

Power Of Tiny Steps

The push up won’t get you super fit, or get you on some magazine cover, if that’s your goal. However, what it does do is start the ball of momentum rolling in your favour. We are creatures of habit who carry a lot of momentum for the things we are already doing – or not doing. Making a daily habit out of something small is a lot easier than suddenly turning your life around after years of neglect!

Once in the push up position, you’re much more inclined to do two or three push ups, or even more, especially once you have made this part of your daily regimen.

Breaking Goals Into Smaller Steps – Motivation Doesn’t Work

If motivation alone worked we would all be super fit athletes with a million in the bank! We are all motivated to achieve things, get fit and have amazing lives, but it’s the daily habits which matter. It’s not the fantasies which we carry in our minds which we “hope” will happen that carry you towards your goals, it’s the things you do on a regular basis (which are aligned with your goals); your daily habits.

Motivation will get things going, but only so far. Your old habits, conflicting ideas and counter-intentions will limit you. This usually happens to the “New Year New You” crowd after they have signed up for a gym membership in January, only to find they no longer use it in March! Old habits win unless you install some new habits and ideas to help you win the battle!

To get the ball rolling, use Mini or Micro habits to help you overcome the momentum of older habits holding you back.

Big Goal, Tiny Steps

A big goal is really useful if it motivates and inspires you. But if it overwhelms you, you don’t really believe in it, or you don’t truly want it, it won’t help you. So getting clear on your goal is an important first step. But you also need an action plan you can follow so you can make daily progress towards your big goal.

Finding a tiny step gives you something you can actually do. Without something tangible you can take action on, your goal becomes only a fantasy. So instead of getting overwhelmed with the entire list of potential things you can do in the future, (which might carry you forward), focus only on what is immediately achievable right now, today.

A tiny step is much better than an endless wish list which never gains any traction.

Breaking big goals into small steps is one of the best things you can do if you’re looking to build an online income. For more information checkout this free video series.

Accountability In Goal Setting

When you use accountability in goal setting you become more committed to your goals and take them more seriously. Without accountability, it can be easier to let yourself off the hook when things aren’t going well. So if you have a “exit excuse” to completing your goals, you’re giving yourself a way out. Accountability in goal setting is the opposite of an “exit excuse”. With accountability you are taking more responsibility and ownership of your actions to achieve your goals. You’re holding yourself accountable to achieve the results.

To hold yourself accountable for a long term goal, you need to make sure it’s a goal you really want. Otherwise, you won’t maintain the necessary effort to achieve it. Your goal needs to be a 10 out of 10 for desirability but also a 10 out of 10 for your belief that you can achieve it, too. If you don’t really want a goal badly enough, you’ll soon give up. Likewise, if you don’t believe you can achieve it, you are unlikely to sustain the effort required either.

If you have a goal which is a 10/10 for desirability and a 10/10 for belief you can achieve it, congratulations! It’s a goal which is aligned with you very well. But if you’re not quite a 10 on either count, checkout this book by Stuart Lichtman on Cybernetic Transposition. In it, he explains a simple strategy you can use to achieve seemingly impossible goals on your first attempt by focusing in on what you really want.

Accountability In Goal Setting: Why Keeping Quiet Can Be Better For Goals

An accountability “buddy” can help you stay the course for the longer term by holding you accountable to your stated goals and daily steps towards them. Ideally, an accountability buddy should be similarly motivated as you are to achieve some kind of similar goal. Friends and relatives rarely make good accountability buddies and you should be careful as to whom you share your goals and aspirations with.

Although it might seem fruitful to state your goals in order to hold yourself accountable, this can be detrimental.

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”; even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.

NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion”. He recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”.

Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.

Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

Telling Friends & Relatives About Your Goals

Telling friends and relatives about your goals can work both ways depending on their own world view and self image. Of course how you interpret their reaction also plays a part. But in many cases, doing so may be detrimental, especially if they harbour doubt and fear in relation to your plans. If they aren’t similarly motivated as you, you may find they won’t support you and they may even undermine your plans; whether consciously or unconsciously.

Why wouldn’t a friend support you building an online business, for example? Well, should you succeed, it may change the nature and dynamic of your relationship and therefore the status quo. Have you heard the Jim Rohn quote saying that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with? Or that “Birds of a feather flock together”?

People you surround yourself with generally will have similar beliefs, attitudes and outcomes in life as you. So if you’re planning on a different outcome, your regular social circle may not be the ones to turn to.

Accountability Buddies – Find One !

I have an accountability buddy I found through the online business community I promote on this site. You can learn more about it by signing up to my email list. A good accountability buddy is hard to find. They hold you accountable to keep turning up and doing the work needed to attain your goals.

However, you also need to hold yourself to account too. Why would anyone waste their time with someone who isn’t as committed as they are?! It works both ways with an accountability buddy – your buddy needs to get something out of the relationship too, which is why it’s good to find someone who has a similar goal to you.

If you’re looking to build an online business you can join a community of online business owners too which is where I found my buddy!

Access a free video series here to learn more.

Flippa Business For Sale

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:

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

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!

To learn some of the best ways to build an income online, access this free video series.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method

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.

But you can also sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products which pay much larger commissions. These kinds of products give you more leeway to make a profit while using paid marketing tactics.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Target Audience/Customer Avatar

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.

Easiest Affiliate Marketing Method: Products & Passion

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.

high ticket funnel — **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?

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.

digital vs physical affiliate commissions

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.

stuart chart — 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.

Best Products To Sell Internationally

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.

commission structure launch you — 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?

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.

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:

high paying physical products — https://www.hammacher.com/product/flying-hovercraft

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 commissions and 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 And Why Use It?

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:

Benefits Of Long Tail Keywords

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.

How To Promote Affiliate Links

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:

Bitly.com
Tinyurl.com
Sniply.io
Rebrandly.com
Yorelinks.com/

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.

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.