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.
Facing Clickbank problems? Whether you’re using Clickbank or any of the other affiliate programs out there, you’ll no doubt face certain problems which every affiliate will need to overcome to become successful. Clickbank is no different and despite the higher levels of commission you can earn from selling digital products (compared to physical), you still need to actually sell them to make any money!
What Clickbank problems are you facing? One of the biggest problems for affiliates is traffic.
Clickbank Problems – Traffic
Traffic is undoubtably one of the biggest problems which affiliate marketers will face. Without it, your affiliate business is dead in the water. Even with traffic, if that traffic doesn’t convert into paying customers, you’re still going to struggle! So what’s the best way to attract hungry buyers for your affiliate products?
While some affiliates will create content, this can be a long and difficult road, especially if you choose a popular product and there’s a lot of competition. Blogging is a solid cheap strategy for attracting an audience but what if there’s thousands of bloggers in the same niche as you, even selling the exact same product as you? If so, it can take months or years to gain traction from a blog.
Without a blog, you can use video blogging. YouTube is a popular alternative to a blog and there’s far less competition on YouTube than there is on Google search. Alternatively use paid advertising and drive traffic to a landing page where you can convert traffic into leads. On an email list, you have a much longer time period to interact with potential customers, build trust and make the sale. See also know, like trust funnel.
Whether you use paid ads, content marketing or social media to find customers for your Clickbank products, you need to get something right to avoid problems. That is to understand who your perfect customer is – your customer avatar.
Clickbank Problems – Customer Avatar
Yes, your customer avatar is the small cross section of the online marketplace who are most likely to want, need and love what you have to offer. If you get to learn more about this person (or type of person), you’ll save yourself a heap of problems, headaches and despair!
Once you understand the people you can serve best with your products, you’ll waste less time sending the wrong kind of people to your website/landing page. As a beginner affiliate I made this mistake too – the mistake of trying to sell to everyone! An expression in marketing is: “Try and sell everyone and you sell (to) no one”.
It’s easy to forget that with affiliate marketing you can attract a global audience – most of which don’t give a hoot about what you’re selling! To find those people who do care, and want what you’re offering, you need to get to know your target audience.
What’s your ideal customer like? Where do they live? How old are they? Where do they hang out online and what kinds of questions do they ask? What kind of content do they consume? It’s worth spending some time learning the answers to these questions. It will shave a lot of frustration and struggle off your affiliate journey. You can’t hit a target you haven’t got – which is why many affiliate struggle to sell online.
Competition
The cost of advertising with many of the online platforms is steadily rising as more and more people become affiliates. If you choose a competitive niche to build an affiliate business in, there’s a lot of competition for content but also ad cost rises too! So what’s the solution? Well one solution is to find a niche which is less competitive.
Although a lot of “guru’s” advise to choose Clickbank products with a high gravity, this may also mean there’s a lot of competition too. So choosing Clickbank items with lower gravity, (but which are still selling), is a good idea in some cases.
If you’re creating content as an affiliate, it’s worth checking out the content you’ll find on Google for the products you’re promoting. Reviews, for example, are popular among Clickbank affiliates because they are a simple way to promote any product. But if there’s already thousands of reviews on Google for your chosen product, you can struggle to get your content found. What’s the answer? Choose a topic you love creating content around and a product which will be around for some time. It can take months to build a niche website which gets traffic and if your product vanishes overnight that’s a lot of hard work wasted!
Making Sales, Recurring & High Ticket Items
Even if you get traffic to your affiliate products you can still struggle making sales. Some products sell better than others so it’s worth being prudent when choosing products whether you’re using Clickbank or not.
Certain products will pay out recurring income if they carry subscription charges. This gives you an obvious head start as an affiliate because it gives you a more reliable income more quickly. However, there’s a downside in that subscriptions require a high quality product otherwise customers won’t maintain them. Some good subscription affiliate programs are software products and memberships which offer training and education for online businesses, for example. See also subscription affiliate programs.
A $100 product form Clickbank will give you a commission of $30-$40 depending on the rate. To replace an income you’ll need to sell a lot of these products on a regular basis. But if you use high ticket affiliate products, a single sale will pay you the same as several low value products.
Anybody can build an automated money making system with only a few tools:
An affiliate product – someone else’s product/s which you can promote online
An email marketing tool – known as an autoresponder which collects email addresses and sends out email automatically
A marketing platform – which finds perfect customers for your product/s through paid ads.
There’s other ways to sell affiliate products online too, but this is the simplest way to build an automated money making system, which you can use to make money in your sleep! There’s other ways of product promotion, such as using banners on websites, for example, and there’s other ways of getting people in front of your products, for example blogging. However the fastest and most reliable way to build a money making system is with only three tools: an affiliate product, an email marketing tool (autoresponder) and a marketing platform which uses paid ads.
Automated Money Making System – Products
You can of course sell your own business or product/s if you have one to sell. But for most people the best way to monetise a system is with other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products and services online for a share of the profit. Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote products for a commission.
Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs online and attracts thousands of affiliates who promote the many products from the site. But there’s many other types of affiliate program too and you don’t have to just choose Amazon. In fact, Amazon’s affiliate commissions are pretty low in comparison to many other affiliate programs.
Digital products pay far more than physical products typically. So if you’re considering building an affiliate business it’s worth understanding the different levels of commissions you can earn from product promotion. Physical products typically pay the least: usually between 5% and 10% of the sale value. Digital products on the other hand pay much more – 30%-40% in most cases, sometimes even more. Then there’s high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products to consider. These are especially useful if you’re going to use paid marketing in your automated money making system. Since paid marketing can get expensive, you’ll want the highest possible return on your investment possible.
Automated Money Making System: Email Marketing
While you can sell affiliate products directly from a website, most people won’t buy from a website, especially on their first visit. Customers on average will need to interact with a business several times before they make a buying decision. This creates a problem for many website based businesses. How do you get more customers to your website and how do you build more trust? The answer is with email marketing. In fact, you can make many more sales if you skip the website altogether and simply send customers to your email marketing campaign.
What advantage does email marketing have over a simple website? On a website a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes. This means you have only that time to sell them something! But once you have someone on your email list, you can send them automated messages over a much longer timeframe. Often email subscribers will purchase something from you even months or years after joining your list.
The email messages you send out are an opportunity to build trust, offer value and help your subscribers get to know like and trust you.
A Marketing Platform
A marketing platform allows you to send qualified and interested potential customers into a lead nurture funnel – (your email marketing campaign). This can be done using any of the many paid marketing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Adwords, Bing etc. Most advertising platforms allow marketers to target a specific cross section of their audience so that they can place ads in front of people who match their customer avatar.
For example, if you’re selling a Yoga related affiliate product, you might want to target the search term “Yoga” in your adverts. Since the people looking for information on Yoga are likely to fall within the realms of your perfect target audience. Some marketing platforms will allow you to also narrow down your target marketing by other criteria such as age, location, interests and even by their income bracket.
Once you have identified your target audience and set up an advert, you can send visitors to a landing page where you collect their email address. Why use landing pages?
A landing page is a simple one page website which gives visitors only two choices: sign up or leave. On a website, like this one, there’s much more choice. As such, it means your visitors are less likely to opt in to your email campaign if you use a standard website. So, it makes sense to encourage your visitors to opt in and you can do this by optimising your landing pages for the best performance. This is done through cross testing different pages against each other to see which performs the best.
Other Marketing & Monetisation Methods
While paid marketing can be expensive, it’s the fastest way to build an automated money making system using email marketing and affiliate products. A paid marketing platform gives you traffic immediately, whereas other methods of traffic generation are much slower and less scalable. Blogging, for example is a very slow way to generate interest in your affiliate products. With blogging you can build a similar system but without paying for advertising.
Over time if you persevere with blogging, (or another content marketing tactic), you can build a passive income through organic traffic. However, this will take some time and effort and depending on the topic of your content it can be competitive.
Video content is another way you can generate traffic online. Upload videos on a regular basis to YouTube or TikTok. Over time your channel will pull in visitors which you can send to your affiliate products. Or you can monetise in another way with Google Adsense for example. Adsense lets you monetise content on a website, or a video channel and you get paid for each click of an advert from your visitors. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.
Summary
To build an automated money making system is possible with only three things:
If you’re serious about building a profitable online business using this strategy, you’ll need training, help and support and the right products in your sales funnel. Access a free video series here to learn more about the different types of affiliate products you can use.
How easy is it to start blogging to earn money online? Blogging can be one of the simplest ways to earn online. But it can also be a huge challenge. With over 600 million bloggers in the world in 2022, there’s huge competition. If you’re choosing a very popular topic too, it can be very difficult to get heard through all the noise.
But if you can make blogging pay, it has some huge benefits. You can generate a passive income, you can escape the 9 to 5 and you can work from anywhere globally. So the question is do you want that badly enough?!
Many bloggers blog because they enjoy their topic too, not for an income. But if you can find a topic you love and you can generate an income from it too, it’s a win win! In fact this is the best way to approach a blog.
Without being in it for a good amount of time, it’s much more difficult to break through and get the necessary engagement and exposure to succeed financially. But if you choose a topic you aren’t passionate about, how long do you think you’ll keep it up for?!
So, one of the best decisions you can make when contemplating building a blog is what topic/niche it will be about.
Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Choosing Your Niche
Your niche is your topic and this choice will affect how much you enjoy blogging and how engaged your readers are. Choose a topic you’re less than thrilled. about and before long, blogging will become a drag, draining your enthusiasm and bringing you down! You can’t sustain a blog for long if you don’t choose your topic well.
I chose a topic I wasn’t at all interested in! Within a few months I was completely burned out. The site soon dropped off the search engine results pages (SERPS) and I let it go! Don’t make the same mistake. Choose a topic you are genuinely interested in and you’ll be able to out-perform other bloggers in the same niche because you’ll be more passionate about it!
It’s a little trite to just say “do something you love”! This needs to be balanced with a viable niche which can be easily monetised. I chose a niche in mushroom harvesting. This niche was both of little interest to me and difficult to monetise! In a popular niche, such as money making online, there’s a huge amount of competition. So you’ll need to blog over months or even years before you gain traction. So even though this niche is easily monetised with affiliate products and ads, you’ll have your work cut out making it work. Conversely if you choose a niche which nobody cares about or which can’t be monetised with affiliate products, you’ll struggle to make it pay.
The answer is to find something you’re genuinely interested in, and find affiliate products you believe in, which align with your topic.
Start Blogging To Earn Money: Micro Niche
Sorry to say but blogging is a slow process. Even if you work really hard it will take a long time to make it pay! That’s because there’s so much competition. Ultimately bloggers want free traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.). Once they get free traffic, things can change quite dramatically. But getting this traffic is tough because there’s so many others doing exactly the same as you. The key to speed up this process is dig into your niche and find a niche within your niche which is more specific.
An example of a niche within a niche is “chair yoga for seniors”! Yoga is a hugely popular niche in which there’s many blogs. So if you started a blog on Yoga, it will likely take a huge amount of time and effort to get any traction. But if you dig deeper, and find a more specific topic, which has a smaller more niche audience, you’ll find far fewer competing websites.
Your site will stand out because you’re a specialist. This makes the journey a whole lot quicker. In a popular niche it can take years of blogging before you get the traffic you want. In a less competitive niche (a sub-niche) you might do it in a few months. See also best micro niche for blogging.
Start Blogging To Earn Money: Monetisation
Of course you can blog in any topic you choose but the longer you can sustain your blogging habit, the better your chances are to outperform the competition. That’s why choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy writing about is paramount. If you hate every minute of blogging, you’re not going to sustain it for years are you!?
To earn from blogging you can monetise in a couple of main ways. You can make your own products to sell, or sell your own service/business if you have one. But if not don’t worry because you can join an affiliate program and promote other people’s products from your blog.
There’s affiliate products in almost any area you can think of. Just have a look on Amazon, or Clickbank.com for ideas of products you can sell from a blog. You can also monetise a blog with advertising too. Adsense is the most popular platform where content creators can go to place ads on their content. You get paid when your visitors click on your ads and only in tiny amounts. So you’ll need a lot of free traffic if you’re going to monetise with adverts. That’s why affiliate marketing is a good choice because you can make more money from blogging with less traffic.
Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Free Blog Platforms
There’s several free blogging platforms where you can get your start as a blogger and I started with Hubpages.com and Blogger.com. However, it’s far better to own the website you are blogging on for a few reasons:
Your site has more authority with your visitors – they perceive you as more of an authority that they would on a free blog platform.
Search engines see you as a greater authority and therefore ranks you better with your own website
There’s more control with your own site – you choose what to put up there and you’re less restricted by rules, terms and conditions – which can limit your choice of affiliate products and links etc.
Here’s a few other free blog platforms where you can get your start if you don’t have the cash to start your own site:
You can buy a domain name of your own from many places but I use namecheap.com. A domain name gives your own website character and credibility. You can also target specific keywords within your domain name which can give you a head start in terms of traffic generation. See my article on this topic “how to build a niche website“.
Once you’ve bought a domain name you’ll need to host it with a hosting provider. I use Hostgator which provides cheap hosting and lets you install your site through their user interface.
Once you’ve bought your domain name, I recommed to use WordPress which you can install through the Hostgator interface. WordPress is one of the easiest interfaces you can use and gives you complete control over your site. You can also install a number of plugins to WordPress very easily and for free. Checkout my blog post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.
Writing Your First Blog
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and blogging is exactly the same! I recommend a plugin called Yoast SEO which allows you to optimise your blog posts for the search engines. This means you’ll get more ranking status with Google and other search engines should your post come up against similar blog posts, which it surely will!
Most blog posts won’t rank however, particularly in the early stages of being a blogger. This makes it hard to get regular traffic to your site. To get around this problem, you can target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Finding the keywords which have the least competition on Google can give you a chance at free traffic with a new site. Over time, as you create more and more content, your site authority will grow and you should start getting more traffic.
But this can be a long and arduous task which is why if you don’t enjoy the journey it’s all the more difficult to sustain over the longer term. To get more traffic more quickly, share all your posts on social media frequently, write often and use social share plugins. See the best free blog plugin for WordPress for some other recommended plugins which will make your blogging journey smoother!
Summary
Can you really start blogging to earn money online? Starting blogging is very different to earning money from blogging. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’re competing with a huge number of others for attention. So if you’re going to become a blogger, it’s wise to do your homework before you start. The best thing you can do is to spend some time deciding on your blog topic. In a very competitive topic, you’ll struggle to get your content seen. But, choose a topic which people are uninterested in and you’ll struggle to get visitors for the opposite reasons.
It can take months or even years for bloggers to get enough traffic to their blogs to make any money. Here’s a few tips to get ahead of the rest:
Find a topic/niche you are passionate about and could continue writing about for months or years
Make sure you check how you’re going to monetise your topic before you start. Some niches are harder to monetise than others
Build an email list from your blog – use an enticing call to action and promote your affiliate products to your list automatically. Access a free autoresponder software here.
Join an online business community for help and support: learn more here.
The know like trust funnel refers to a marketing funnel where you build trust with your potential customers. Most people don’t just buy the first time they come to a website or join an email list. In fact there’s often a number of touch points before a customer will buy from a website or email marketing list.
This shouldn’t be surprising because there’s so many websites (and marketers) out there that customers are spoiled for choice. Why should they buy from you, a faceless affiliate/marketer?
funnel
Many marketers/affiliates make the mistake of just trying to get more traffic and subscribers. They then fire countless emails to their list to get people to buy from them. Unfortunately this tactic is shortsighted, especially given the number of marketers out there. Emails are quickly seen as spamunless you are delivering value in your marketing messages.
Value driven messages will set you apart from other marketers and help you to build trust with your subscribers. When they get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy a product you recommend, because you’ve proved you are trust-worthy and are genuinely trying to help them, not just sell to them!
Know Like Trust Funnel
I made this mistake too as an newbie affiliate. I figured that I just had to send people to my offer, and keep reminding them of it for them to buy. But unless you are genuinely trying to help people, subscribers will see through it, click away and unsubscribe. I’ve been on many email lists too, and the ones which say only “Click here and buy this amazing product” are very short lived.
Unless those kinds of emails are proceeded by a lot of value driven content, I won’t even open them, and nor will your subscribers! To build trust can take some time, so you need to be patient. When I shifted from trying to “get” to giving more value to customers, my sales went up. Not because I was promoting anything different, but because I was changing my focus from getting to giving.
There’s a law of reciprocity in sales which is attested to in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. If you’re a marketer it’s well worth a read.
Once you start giving to your email subscribers instead of trying to get them to buy, the law kicks in. They will get to know, like and trust you if you have their best interests at heart and genuinely demonstrate this by helping them, with or without their custom!
Freebies, Help and Value
Some of the things you can offer to your email subscribers:
Free webinars
PDF downloads
Guides, ebooks and recommendations
and of course finally affiliate products
But if you lead with your sale, some subscribers will smell a rat! “This guy just wants my money”. “Every email he asks for the sale”! That’s not delivering value and sooner or later they will get the measure of you and stop opening your messages. But if you’ve spend several weeks delivering highly useful information, guess who’s going to open your email when you send it?
You stand out among the others when you start delivering value in your email marketing campaigns. Plus, it’s genuinely more satisfying feeling like you’re helping people rather than just spamming them!
The know, like trust principle is fundamental in marketing and sales. People buy (into) people, they don’t just buy products. If you can be someone of value, people will be much more likely to buy something recommended by you, especially if you’ve already helped them out massively through your emails.
Know, Like Trust Factor – Mike Massie
I joined an email list of a guy called Mike Massie, you probably haven’t heard of him unless you own a martial arts school. Well, some years ago I had a struggling Kung Fu School and looked online for help when I found Mike. I didn’t want to buy anything, I just wanted some free advice. Here’s Mike’s freebie which I found online:
So I signed up to Mike’s email list and he proceeded to email me a tonne of helpful advice. After several months of using Mike’s (free) advice, I bought his book! I would probably never have bought his book unless he had built that trust with me through giving me a tonne of value. I got to know, like and trust him! He had been so helpful, and given so much that I almost considered it rude not to buy from him! The law of reciprocity had truly kicked in! Mike’s was the perfect example of the know like trust funnel!
Know Like Trust
As an affiliate marketer or business owner it’s easy to think of just getting people on our list and then sending them to a product/service. But if we can also help our subscribers with information, advice and give them something which is of value to them, we are much more likely to build trust with them.
Once you have done this through your email marketing strategy, it means your subscribers are more likely to become your fans who seek out your information and look for your emails. When this happens, they are much more likely to trust your recommendations when it comes to the products you’re promoting.
But if you only send them to products, without also giving value, you’re going to appear less trustworthy! Your intent is clear, you are trying only to “get”, to sell! This can put people off when there’s a tonne of other similar marketers just like you. To shine out, begin by treating your subscribers as you would a friend or family member. Give them help and advice with the intention of helping first. When you build trust and get subscribers to know, like and trust you, they will be more likely to buy from you, knowing your intention is good!
Do you want to escape 9 to 5, create more financial and time freedom, and live anywhere? To really escape 9 to 5 you need to create multiple income sources which don’t take up all your time. With a job, you’re always trading time for money. So no matter how well paid a job is, you’re always going to need to keep turning up in order to keep getting paid.
An online business is different in than you can sell products instead of your time. You can use systems and automation to sell products globally, even while you’re not working. This is one way you can escape the 9 to 5. Anyone can use a clever business model called affiliate marketing to do this and you don’t need any products of your own to earn online. Access an online community here to get started.
Escape 9 To 5 – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model whereby third parties promote other people’s products online for a share of the profit. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once you have joined, you can promote products from Amazon and earn commissions from the sales you make. While Amazon doesn’t pay huge commissions, it’s program has thousands of products you can choose from and it’s one of the most popular affiliate programs online.
There’s other types of products too which you can sell as an affiliate. Digital products pay much more than physical products in terms of commission. So with a digital sale you can make much more than through selling a product from Amazon. You can also sell high ticket affiliate products which pay much larger amounts. By using high ticket and subscription affiliate products, affiliates can build a passive income much more quickly and easily than they would through selling only products from Amazon, for example.
How Long Will It Take?
To escape a 9 to 5 job, you need to replace your income. To do so with an affiliate business is possible, but it will take some time and investment. Depending on the business model you use, and your marketing methods it can take several months or several years to build up your income to match that of your job.
However, once you’re making consistently with affiliate marketing, you can maintain this income without trading your time. In addition to this affiliate marketing is scalable. This means once you’re profitable, you can easily scale up simply by spending more on advertising and reaching more people with your products.
There’s several ways in which affiliates sell products online and some are more scalable than others. Here’s a few methods commonly used by affiliates:
PPC – pay per click advertising – using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post
Video blogging – video bloggers upload content regularly to YouTube or TikTok channels to find people to put their products in front of
SEO – search engine optimisation is often used by bloggers to optimise their content and get found for free on the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. )
Other Ways To Escape 9 To 5
There’s other ways to escape 9 to 5 of course. You can move to a cheaper country, buy property to rent out, or find your dream job! But if you want to build an online business using the affiliate marketing (or another model), it’s one of the most accessible routes to entrepreneurship. Here’s a few other online business models you can use:
A shopify store – selling either affiliate products or using drop shipping
Google Adsense – an advertising platform which allows content builders to monetise with adverts
Import export businesses – create a website to sell and import in bulk
Direct selling – directly sell from a wholesalers and send products directly to the customer (drop shipping)
Print on demand – sell t-shirts and clothing with your own designs
Royalty income – use photographic stock websites to upload your photos or upload designs and images you own to sites such as Redbubble.com
Looking for a Clickbank mentor? While affiliate marketing on Clickbank can seem like an easy option for income, most newbies in the industry will find the opposite. Many “gurus” will exaggerate the ease with which affiliates can earn an income from Clickbank.
You get started with a lot of enthusiasm, looking for someone to follow. But when things don’t work out straight away you can find yourself asking whether affiliate marketing actually works! It does work, of course, but it isn’t as easy as some will make out. In fact, affiliate marketing can be infuriating!
You can spend a lot of unfruitful hours with affiliate marketing and still get nowhere. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially if you’re on your own, or only with pre-recorded videos to direct you.
So what’s the answer? The answer is to find a community of other affiliates who can help and assist you. If you only want to dabble in affiliate marketing, you’ll only earn a tiny amount. But if you’re serious about affiliate marketing you need to treat it like a serious business. When you do this you can make some serious money from it.
Clickbank Mentor – My Story
I started affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. After struggling with various online earning strategies including Forex marketing, buying and selling and selling my own ebooks, I discovered affiliate marketing. I made my first online sale after jumping from course to course and trying a lot of different techniques. It was a monumental moment and I knew affiliate marketing was the key to a passive income.
However there were a lot of problems and for each sale I made, I worked for many weeks, sometimes even months! Sometimes I thought about giving up too. I tried multiple courses and strategies but eventually found an online community which helped me take affiliate marketing seriously and get traction. You can access the free video series which let me to the group.
There’s a couple of things I learned which weren’t helping me. Maybe you’re doing the same? One of them was I was struggling getting traffic to my offers because of the strategy I was using; organic (free) marketing. I figured I couldn’t afford paid marketing, but I was wrong. If you promote high ticket affiliate programs you can earn much more which covers an advertising budget.
With subscription affiliate products you can earn ongoing commissions for each sale you make. These two things hand in hand completely changed the game for me as an affiliate marketer.
Clickbank Mentor – Why Be An Affiliate?
I wanted success fast and because of this, (and doing everything on the cheap), I was cutting too many corners. I didn’t understand how to sell online. I didn’t understand who I was selling to nor did I understand why I was promoting certain products. Getting clear on these topics can give you more clarity and they will help you build an affiliate business which has greater longivity.
Knowing who you are selling to is one of the best things you can understand. Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will be super grateful to you for the referral.
Choosing products and services which you believe in gives you a certain authority which you wouldn’t have if you were only looking for the end goal of making money. Of course we all need money to live, but feeling good about being an affiliate will place you in a different category to most other affiliates who are only trying to get sales.
Aligning yourself with products and services which share your values means you’re going to be better at promoting those products because you genuinely believe in them, and they have helped you. Selling something you don’t care about is much less satisfying and has a much shorter shelf life! Plus your disinterest in the product will likely hold you back and make you less interested in your business. This will also come across in your marketing efforts and how you feel about your business; and of course how you feel about yourself.
Marketing Methods
With high ticket and subscription products to sell, it’s much easier to use paid marketing to make sales. With low value products it’s much more of a struggle making a profit if you’re using paid marketing. So many affiliates, like I did as a beginner, will focus solely on using free marketing methods, or very cheap ones.
When I started out as an affiliate I tried to do everything for free. I built websites and tried to get the free traffic. This is a very difficult way to sell affiliate products because there’s so much competition; particularly in a competitive niche. If you’re a beginner, you don’t have any content, you don’t have an email list, and you’re unsure how everything works. So you’re at a huge disadvantage to those longer term affiliates who have built huge email list, have lots of experience (and data) and have grasped how to make sales already.
Coupled with uncertainty and lack of experience, this can make the journey incredibly difficult and frustrating. You need a mentor to guide you in this stage. A mentor can hold you accountable and give you belief and trust in what you’re doing. Without a guide, it’s so much easier to drop out, particularly when well meaning friends and family are sceptical.
Access a community here and get the help and support you need to excel with an affiliate marketing business.
I hope you have found this Clickbank Mentor article helpful? Please let me know in the comments.
A freedom lifestyle business gives you time, money and geographical freedom. But how realistic is it to build a profitable online business, ditch the day job, and start living your dream life?
After reading Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week, I became inspired to find a method of building a lifestyle business which would give me complete freedom – both financially and of time.
While working on an eBay business I realised that all my time was being sucked away and it wasn’t giving me the freedom I had hoped for. I was posting items, dealing with customers and spending all my time finding products to sell. I knew there had to be another business model, which would give me more freedom. So I ditched the eBay business and started trying to sell my own ebooks online.
An ebook had originally put me on to the idea of the eBay business. But I realised that if I could sell an ebook, it would be an automated sale. I could create the book once, and sell it over and over again online. This, I thought, would give me complete time and financial freedom.
Freedom Lifestyle Business..Failures
Sadly, my idea didn’t work according to plan. I built the website, the ebook and even created a payment page using Paypal. It was all set up to start taking money, delivering my ebook and it was all hands free! The only problem was nobody knew of my ebook! I couldn’t get any traffic to my website, so I put myself on a marketing course to learn how to get website traffic with the intention of selling my ebook.
But I discovered a different (and better) business model instead. This business model is called affiliate marketing and it allows anyone to earn money from the internet through referring customers to other people’s products. While my ebook was up for sale at $10, I could sell a $100 affiliate product and earn $40 per sale. So I ditched my ebook idea and started learning affiliate marketing instead.
Freedom Lifestyle Business
I tried a few other ideas before finding affiliate marketing such as Google Adsense (advertising on content), Forex marketing, buying and selling on eBay and of course the ebook idea. But affiliate marketing seemed the best and after one or two sales the income outweighed the tiny amounts I was earning through Adsense. I knew affiliate marketing was the freedom lifestyle business I was looking for! So I got to work, learning how to build affiliate websites and advertise them through paid ads, blogging and anything I could do from my laptop!
After a lot of problems and sporadic results at best I almost quit several times. But my life was such that I was constantly struggling with low paid jobs, low self esteem and troubling debts. I tried a number of courses which promised me an easy ride, but none of them delivered on their promises!
But I had made a few sales online and I knew I just needed some bigger success and I could quit the day jobs.
Freedom Lifestyle Business – A Chance Meeting
In 2014 I found a mentor and joined his community. Here I found help and support and real world people. This was unheard of before and the coaches I had previously found were nowhere to be found when I needed help the most. I desperately wanted success with an online type of business, I just didn’t know what I was doing and I was really struggling. I had paid for numerous courses at this stage and was sceptical and fearful I would be joining a scam, or that it wouldn’t help me. But I found I was able to join webinars and seminars and even live events in London and nearer where I lived in the UK.
Within my first few months I was able to make my first high ticket digital sale online. It was a real break though. With high ticket affiliate products you can make much larger commissions per sale.
Instead of trying to sell thousands of products to make a few dollars on each, sell one or two high ticket items and make the same amount. Because I didn’t know this previously, I felt I had wasted so much time trying to sell low value affiliate products. Still, the perseverance had paid off and I am glad I didn’t quit like so many do.
Lessons Learned
A freedom lifestyle business was what I wanted. But when I started out I had no idea what to sell or how to do it. Today, experience has taught me a few key things which you may not already know:
To use an existing business model and just learn how to market it.
To choose high ticket affiliate products to sell – more income for the same amount of work
Using subscription affiliate products gives you a recurring income from each sale you make
Choose a product “suite” rather than just selling stand alone products. A product suite is a range of products offering high ticket, subscription, low ticket and mid ticket items.
A lifestyle business is with the grasp of anyone with the drive and commitment to see it through. You don’t need your own products to sell or any previous experience. But you do need a string desire to succeed in this space. There’s plenty of competition online and it’s not cheap advertising. This means you can spend a lot of time and money and still get it wrong. This is why so many affiliates quit and give up on the dream of a freedom lifestyle business which can give them total autonomy, financial and geographical freedom.
Mindset
Most people who start businesses fail within their first three years and with affiliate marketing it’s no different. Around 95% of affiliates give up and drop out of the business which means to succeed with a lifestyle business model you need to put yourself in the 5% camp who never quits!
Having the right mindset about building an online business helps and most people simply aren’t equipped with the business building mindset required to get profitable. Even with the tools, mentors and coaches behind you, it’s a tough journey and you should expect some times to be tough, like with anything worthwhile.
But with the right direction, business model, coaches and mindset you have a much greater chance of succeeding with an online business and building a freedom lifestyle business.
Employee Vs Entrepreneurial Mindsets
As an employee for much of my life I brought some of the wrong kinds of mindsets to my online business. There’s a whole bunch of new mindsets, attitudes and behaviours I had to learn in order to build profitable online business.
Trading time for money in a job is very different to building an online business for many reasons. In a job, you only work the hours you work. The rest of the time is yours. But in a business, unless you get your business profitable, you don’t get paid. It’s absolutely your responsibility whether you get paid or not with an online business because you’re the one who benefits.
Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business, you don’t get paid unless you make sales. Although this can be daunting, it also means there’s no limit to what you can earn. Plus you can detach your time from your income, by selling products automatically as an affiliate. With a job, you always have to sell your time.
This is why I believe affiliate marketing is the best business model if you’re looking for more time and financial freedom.
If you’re ready to get started with your own online business you can do so here.
