AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Average Affiliate Conversion Rate

The average affiliate conversion rate will vary from product to product and affiliate to affiliate. Different affiliates promote products in different ways, leading to a different experience. However, an average affiliate conversion rate would probably fall between 0.5% and 1% meaning that over with 1000 website hits you make 5- 10 sales.

Conversion rate = sales ÷ visitors

You might be using website visitors in your numbers or you could also use your email opt in numbers. Generally speaking your email list should give you a better conversion rate because you have much longer to sell something to each subscriber. On a website, visitors come and go within a few minutes. But once on your email list you can put your products in front of your subscribers time and time again. Email subscribers can make a purchase even years after subscribing to your list.

That’s why one of the best things you can do to improve your conversion rate is to get an email list and start collecting subscribers. You can access one for free here.

Average Affiliate Conversion Rate

But what else can you do to increase conversions? Traditional sales people would go door to door selling their wares. More doors meant more sales. But clever sales people knew that if they could increase their conversion rate, they could earn more from fewer door knocks! The same applies to affiliate marketers. Some affiliates will get thousands of visitors to a website, but their sales will be much lower than average. Others might have far fewer visitors but a much larger conversion rate.

So if you’ve been focusing on getting a tonne more visitors to your website, this might help shift your viewpoint. More visitors doesn’t necessarily equal more sales. To get more sales out of fewer visitors, you need to do a few things well.

Average Affiliate Conversion Rate: Target Audience

To help you improve your affiliate marketing conversion rate, it’s a very good idea to learn about your target audience. Your “target audience” is the small sub section of the people on the internet who are most likely to buy from you. There’s a saying in sales that if you try and sell to everyone, you sell to no-one. This phrase is never more true than it is for affiliates. With affiliate marketing you have the whole world to aim at with your marketing. 99.99% of those people don’t give a hoot about what you’re selling! You need to figure out who the 0.001% of the market is so you can talk directly to them!

When you understand the people you are talking to, it’s much easier to speak to their needs, gain their trust, and place your marketing in front of the right people. When you know where your target audience lives, how old they are, what they read and what they watch, you’re much closer to understanding their needs and meeting them with a possible solution (your products!).

Average Affiliate Conversion Rate: Congruence

What does it mean to be congruent in your marketing message? If a person clicks off your website to your affiliate product, they expect the message on your website to relate to the product you’re offering. So, for example let’s say you have a website which discusses nutritional foods to do with losing weight. Your product should be aligned with your website’s content.

average affiliate marketing conversion rate

If it isn’t, you’ve going to be very unlikely to make any sales. So if your product is about building abdominal muscles, but your website is about losing weight there might be a disconnect between the two. Although these topics are of a similar nature, you need to make sure your content is aligned with your product. Otherwise, people won’t connect to it.

People looking to lose weight might not actually care about building six pack abs, for example!

Customer Journey

The customer journey is equally if not more important than having congruence in your messaging. If for example you send website visitors to a landing page, but the page looks nothing like your advert, or conveys a different message, they may click away because they assumed a mistake has been made.

This is all about the customer journey from your content to the final product. Ideally you should use the same messaging and similar images and colouring in order to connect your different pieces of marketing together.

If something is off, or disjointed, many visitors will click away, reducing your conversion rate. A good conversion rate (from advert to landing page) can be up to 40%. This means 40% of people landing on the page convert into email subscribers.

Many factors affect the conversion rate of a landing page including marketing message, colours, titles, images, page load speed etc.

Product/s

If you have successfully defined your target audience as an affiliate, it is much easier to make sales because you understand who you are talking to. You can present your products to them in a more congruent way which meets their needs and which talks to their problems/pains.

However, if your product is not good, then there’s a problem! Not all products are created equal and some are better than others. So if you’re having problems selling, make sure you actually believe in what you are selling. If you don’t, chances are you are subtly communicating this in your marketing (subconsciously).

Think of the sales person standing on your doorstep trying to convince you to buy something you don’t need or want, when they don’t even believe in their product! As an affiliate, despite the power of automation and online selling, we can still send out conflicting messages if we aren’t truly aligned with what we are doing!

A good product will convert at much higher rates (to the right audience) than a bad product!

Average Affiliate Commission Rate

The average affiliate commission rate is between 5% and 30%. Physical products typically pay lower levels of commission than digital products. Amazon, for example pays typically between 3% and 10% to affiliates for referrals. This will vary depending on the product category. With digital product sales, affiliates can earn from 30%-40% and even more in some cases.

Digital products have fewer costs involved in the delivery and manufacturing process and can therefore reward affiliates more, since the affiliates take on the costs of advertising.

digital vs physical affiliate commissions

Average Affiliate Commission Rate: Subscriptions

One of the best ways to earn as an affiliate is through the sale of subscription products. With subscription affiliate products, affiliates can earn ongoing recurring commissions from products they sell. This can make a huge difference to earnings as an affiliate. Most affiliate products only pay you a “one off” commission, meaning you need to sell products over and over in order to keep making the commissions.

Subscription products offer ongoing value to customers. An example is an autoresponder. Autoresponders are used by online business owners to collect emails and deliver messages to promote their products. Because an autoresponder is a vital part of an online business, once they have been purchased customers often maintain their memberships/subscriptions for years. If you refer this kind of product it means you continue to earn from it as long as your referral maintains their subscription.

Average Affiliate Commission Rate: High Ticket Products

High ticket affiliate products pay much larger than average commissions because they carry a larger price tag. There’s both digital and physical high ticket items you can promote as an affiliate. Have a look at this item The Flying Hovercraft! It sells for $190,000 and Hammacher Schlemmer offers 8% commission to affiliates.

That’s a massive $15,200 in commission if you can make a sale. Many affiliates will presume that nobody buys such an item, but some people do. A single sale of a high ticket item like this is worth thousands of sales of a low value item. So even though fewer people buy large value items like this, it can be worth considering high ticket items.

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Commissions

You might assume that most people won’t buy a high ticket item but some high ticket items sell really well; particularly if they offer huge value. For example, business training courses and 1:1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring courses are hugely popular. This is because a product which can be life changing, such as a business training course, is worth a lot.

With high ticket items, you only need a few sales to earn the same commission as you would with selling thousands of products sold from Amazon, for example.

Let’s take a typical product from Amazon like this one:

Given a 4% commission rate on this item you would only earn £2.20 (around $2.65) per sale! But with a $2497 business bundle you would earn $500, at (10% commission), or $1000 (at 20%).

Learn more about these business bundles here.

Because Amazon only pays tiny commissions, you’ll need to sell thousands of items from Amazon in order to earn the same commission as just one high ticket sale.

By choosing both subscription products and high ticket items, you give yourself a better chance of succeeding with an affiliate marketing business.

Affiliate Marketing With No Audience

Most new affiliates will start affiliate marketing with no audience. But without any customers you’re not going to sell any affiliate products! One of the first things to learn as an affiliate therefore is how to find customers by placing your marketing message in front of an audience.

It would be great if you started with a massive following. Many YouTube’er, for example, have tens of thousands of followers. If they uploaded a video recommending a product, they could easily start making sales pretty quickly. But for most this isn’t the case. So if you’re starting from scratch without any clue about how to find customers for your products, here’s a few ideas.

Affiliate Marketing With No Audience

To sell affiliate products online can be a tricky thing. But it’s all the more tricky if you haven’t defined your target audience. Target audience in affiliate marketing is pretty important if you want to be successful. You literally have millions of people you can show your products to with all the tools at your disposal as an affiliate. But 99.9% of them won’t be the least bit interested if you’re offering! You need to find the 0.1% who are! The small slice of the market who are interested in your affiliate products is your target audience. By understanding this concept you will have placed yourself apart from many affiliates who will struggle.

To understand your target audience will take you massively forwards and it will save you a load of headaches! How do you define your target audience? Depending on your products, your “perfect” customer will have certain interests and hobbies. So if you’re promoting a Yoga product, for example, you might find them looking at online health and fitness content. As you get clearer on who is likely to be most interested in what you have to offer, you can “zone” on on certain marketing techniques to help them solve their problems – with your product. See also the customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you define your particular type of customer.

Affiliate Marketing With No Audience: Finding Customers

Initially it can take some time to find customers for your affiliate products, particularly if you have no existing audience. But that’s common for new affiliates and everyone has to start from somewhere. Many affiliates will run paid advertising to attract an audience and you can get traffic (visitors) very quickly with the paid route. Others might create content through blogging or video. There’s also several methods of marketing on social media platforms, both paid and unpaid social media marketing exist.

One of the best ways to build an audience is through list building and most affiliates will have an email list of some kind. An email list gives you an audience very quickly, depending on how you build it up of course. Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an email list and you can do this by sending targeted visitors to a landing page and collecting email addresses.

Here’s an example of a landing page:

From a landing page, affiliates build an audience of subscribers. With a large enough list, they can sell products and services on complete autopilot, if they get their targeting right and have a good offer to sell.

Blogging To Find An Audience

One popular method of building an audience for affiliates is blogging. Blogging isn’t as fast or as scalable as paid marketing, but it’s cheap and you can blog from anywhere. It can however take months to build an audience through blogging, but once you have established a lot of content, your audience can find you through multiple blog posts you have written.

Depending on your niche, there may be more or less competition. In a very competitive niche it will take longer to establish website traffic as a blogger. Ideally choose a topic which you’re interested and passionate about. When you’re interested in your topic, you can sustain your efforts for much longer and this will give you more opportunity for success.

Marketing Is Key

Joining an affiliate program and getting your affiliate link is the easiest part of doing affiliate marketing. What is more difficult is building an audience and building trust and respect with them. When your audience gets to know, like and trust you, they will be much more likely to buy from you. When you build an audience of raving fans, you’ll be in a good position to make sales!

To get good at marketing should be the main focus for affiliates. Without marketing they won’t sell products and they won’t make any money. As a beginner, this can be a frustrating time. When your email list is only small, you won’t get massive results and you’re a beginner. But as your experience grows and your audience grows, you should find it becomes easier to make sales online.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Freedom Of Time And Money

To have freedom of time and money is pretty precious. Without money, time is spent with worry and uncertainty. But if you’re trapped in a career or job which takes your peace of mind, it can be the same! So even with money problems solved, many people find themselves in the same mental anguish, if they hate their job.

So what’s the answer? How can you have freedom of time and money, without compromising peace of mind? For most the answer is to find something they are passionate about and would do anyway, even if money wasn’t involved.

But the answer also lies in looking at the the way we work – trading time for money. If you’re working in a job which pays you for the hours you work, you’re trading your time for money. A better way of earning money which sets you free is to sell products instead. Anyone can do this with a clever business model called affiliate marketing, even with no products to sell of their own! What’s even better about this way of working is that you can automate the process which can give you your life back and allow you to create more freedom of time and money.

Freedom Of Time And Money – Why Affiliate Marketing?

So why is affiliate marketing the best solution to creating freedom of time and money? Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models which anyone can use. By promoting other people’s products and services online, affiliates earn a percentage of whatever they sell. Because this process can be automated, affiliates can effectively earn through automation.

There’s no need for dealing with customers or handling products either with affiliate marketing. Simply refer online sales and earn commissions from the referrals. This very simple business model makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular ways to earn online. However, affiliate marketing isn’t easy. It’s no quick solution to paying the bills every month.

But once you have made your first sale online, you can make many more. Over time and with patience, anyone can build an affiliate business from scratch from anywhere, even with no skills or experience.

This way of earning is much better than the time for money deal which most have accepted as “reality”.

Freedom Of Time And Money: Subscription Products

Subscription products can be sold too by affiliates and this is a major key to long term success with affiliate marketing. If you sell a single product which pays a “one time” commission, you only get paid once. But if you promote a subscription affiliate product which pays recurring commissions, you can get a lifetime income from each sale.

A recurring income which comes in month after month can completely set you free both in terms of time and money. It doesn’t rely on you turning up to a place of work each day and trading your time.

An example of a subscription product is a software product such as Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder service used by online business owners. Because they are so useful for businesses, both online and offline, autoresponders become a cornerstone of a businesses operations. This means the business person will maintain their subscription of the service, often for a lifetime! If you have referred the sale, this means you’ll make an income from that referral on a monthly basis for as long as your customer maintains their subscription.

Become An Affiliate

As you can see there’s huge power in the model of selling products and services online. It allows you to detach yourself from the time for money trap!

The only question then is “how do I sell online”?

There’s many ways to sell products and services online as an affiliate marketer. Some affiliates are bloggers (like me) and find customers through creating written content. Others use paid marketing and build huge email lists which they use to promote products and services.

An email list can be built up to have tens of thousands of subscribers. This is hugely valuable when you consider that many of your subscribers can purchase something from you on complete autopilot.

If you’re ready to get started with your affiliate marketing journey, access a free video series here to learn more.

Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

Do you need a website for affiliate marketing? While the answer is technically no, you don’t, a website is a good idea for a number of reasons. Without a website, you can join any affiliate program, get your affiliate link, and paste it around the internet on your social media platforms. Post it on your bio, post in in your feed of any number of social media platforms. Once you’ve grown tired of doing that, you might decide you need to do something else, because it might not be working.

A long affiliate link isn’t that attractive, and although you can shorten it using any of the link shortening services, it’s still a meaningless link unless you build some context around it (such as a website). A website gives you some kind of authority and it’s a meaningful way in which to create some context around your affiliate links, and help you audience make a decision about something.

Websites offer a cheap method of marketing too. Without a website you’re going to need to do a lot more work or pay for your marketing, which can get expensive.

Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

Even if you decide to use paid advertising as an affiliate, some platforms will insist you have an “authority site” of your own.

An authority site shows that you’re not just sending paid ads to another company, as affiliates tend to do. It shows you have some kind of meaningful role (authority) in your own right. Google has an advertising policy about “bridging” which means sending traffic directly to an affiliate offer. This can make it difficult to get your start as an affiliate without a website of your own.

Many affiliates will use landing pages rather than a website and you can even join programs which give you the tools and software to set everything up using a simple step by step – join a program here.

Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

This website is used to bridge the gap between a customer and a product and I use blogging as a means of marketing. Without a website, you can still do this using a free blogging platform such as Hubpages.com or Blogger.com. There’s several other ways you can market affiliate products on the internet. So if you don’t want a website there’s always a way. Checkout these 22 ways to promote affiliate products online.

Still, a website will give you a cheap method of marketing online, where it’s becoming all the more crowded and difficult to stand out. why give yourself a disadvantage when you should be using all the tools at your disposal to create your success? After all affiliate marketing isn’t easy and around 95% of affiliates fail.

Without A Website Strategies & Tactics?

Without a website there’s several strategies you can employ as an affiliate marketer. You can use free blogging platforms as mentioned such as blogger.com or Hubpages.com. I first started out using blogging platforms which were completely free. However there’s some downsides to these platforms. They don’t give you the same authority as you would get from your own website and you’re bound to their rules. This can mean you’re not allowed to post affiliate links on some platforms. Your visibility is more limited than it would from your own blog as search engines don’t index free blog platforms as well as they would your own site.

Video Blogging

Another strategy you can use is with a video platform such as YouTube or TikTok. One of our community members went viral using TikTok doing a funny video and sold thousands of products from it through their affiliate link. Or use a social media platform to build trust and post your links. There’s various ways you can do this; checkout my post on unpaid social media marketing.

Twitter

One strategy is to use Twitter to post tweets regularly on your subject. Connect with people who are interested in your topic and use your profile to post your affiliate link. If you’re going without a website and only have your affiliate link, it’s a good idea to forward it to a website domain, just for the added context and authority it gives you. A long messy link looks less enticing than a clear website link which gives your product more context and authority. See also how to promote affiliate links without a website.

Summary

While you technically can do affiliate marketing without a website, if you’re serious it’s definitely a good idea to get a website. Websites can of course be used in different ways too and not all websites perform the same function. This site, for example is used for blogging whereas another site I own I use with paid marketing. A blog website is a good cheap way to generate free traffic, but it takes some time and commitment in order to build it up.

Another way to use a website for affiliate marketing is through building an authority site used in conjunction with a paid marketing platform such as Google Ads, YouTube or Facebook. Send targeted traffic directly to a website to sell your product or collect email subscribers.

Depending on your products and services, a direct link website (to the affiliate product) may be more appropriate. Building an email list is very useful because it allows you to build relationships over time. Selling directly from a link is hard. But building relationships helps build trust. Research shows that most online purchases have been the result of several touch points. See also how many touch points before a sale.

Help With Affiliate Marketing

Getting help with affiliate marketing might be the best investment you can make. After all, an affiliate business can give you total time, financial and geographical freedom. Imagine automating a globally based business in which you can sell products and services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s no need to deal with customers, own any products yourself or handle products personally. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly desirable business to have, if you can make it work!

That’s a big “if” too, because around 95% of affiliates don’t make it work. Maybe you’ve been struggling too? So if you think you have what it takes to be in the 5% who stick at it when others drop out, you will be well advised to get help with your affiliate marketing business. Back in 2014 I found a community of mentors and coaches who helped me as a struggling affiliate. You can gain access here.

Help With Affiliate Marketing: Mindset & Clarity

Most affiliates will fail for a number of reasons. It may be lack of education, vision, clarity or focus. But the main reason is that most affiliates will simply give up before they gain the necessary understanding of the business they are in. Giving up is easy! Sticking at something and learning why you’re failing is much harder!

Affiliate marketing is a very easy business to get involved with and there’s a huge number of people who become affiliate marketers. Joining an affiliate program is relatively simple and straight forward. You can learn affiliate marketing from anywhere, too; all you need is a laptop and internet connection. But making affiliate marketing profitable is another story altogether.

The main thing holding you back from the profitable affiliate business you desire is ignorance! With the right mindset, you can replace this with knowledge and awareness. Once you’ve done this, nothing will stop you from wanting to grow. A growth mindset will replace fear, procrastination, doubt and uncertainty. With the right mindset, you will still fail, but you will see those failings as “learnings” instead.

Help With Affiliate Marketing: My Story

When I began doing affiliate marketing I tried all sorts of strategies. But I was broke, so everything I did was on the cheap. I bought courses on the cheap, and did my “marketing” on the cheap. The problem with this approach is twofold. I was holding myself back because I had a poverty mindset but also I didn’t get the help and support I really needed to make my affiliate marketing business successful. Free marketing methods are also slow and difficult. I built various websites and attempted to get the to rank on Google, with much disappointment.

When I did finally made an affiliate sale, it was for peanuts because I was selling items from eBay and Amazon which paid tiny commissions. All of this was difficult and agonising!

After joining an online community (join here), I found other people who were building online businesses too, and coaches and mentors who helped me. I also learned to use subscription affiliate products and sell high ticket affiliate products. This was a total game changer for me and I was able to sell a high ticket product within a few months.

The high ticket items also meant I could run paid marketing and get traction much more quickly. With a high ticket sale, you can build a larger marketing budget and scale more quickly.

Focus, Clarity, Vision, Mission & Purpose

For a long time before this I lacked focus and clarity. I would jump from one course to another, looking always for a quick win, rather than building a solid foundation. A good foundation I learned, is having clarity around why you’re doing affiliate marketing at all. Without this understanding, you can easily become lost trying to make the sale, but without offering any value in the marketplace. A persons income relates directly to their value in the marketplace.

If you’re very “me” centric, you’ll only focus on what you want from affiliate marketing – the commissions. But if you can align your values with your business, and focus on what you can do to help others, you’ll find purpose in your work. With a greater purpose in your affiliate business, you’ll be much more likely to sustain your efforts over the longer term. You’ll know your “why” for building your business, you’ll have aligned your mission, vision and purpose for building it.

“With a big enough why you can overcome any how” – James Clear Atomic Habits.

If you’re just “flogging stuff on the internet”, it’s not hugely inspiring. But if you’re inspired to do your work, there’ll be a much greater drive, purpose and ambition behind it.

Help With Affiliate Marketing; Let Me Help You

I do recommend this program, which has helped me with my affiliate marketing business, but I also offer personal 1 to 1 coaching for certain people. You can learn more about my coaching here.

Clickbank Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Looking for Clickbank affiliate marketing for beginners? Clickbank is a digital product marketplace where many new affiliates gravitate. Many newbie affiliates also get their start with Amazon too, which allows anyone to promote their products for a commission based on referrals they make.

The benefit of Clickbank is that affiliates can earn considerably more per sale with digital products in comparison with physical products you would find on Amazon, for example.

Physical products typically pay between 5-10% commissions to affiliates whereas digital products pay much more; often between 30-40%. This means if you can sell a product as an affiliate you can earn more from fewer sales by simply choosing to promote products which are digital.

Clickbank Affiliate Marketing For Beginners: Benefits & Drawbacks

There’s more than the commission rate though that’s of benefit with using Clickbank.com. There’s also a huge variety of products which you can choose from as a Clickbank account holder. So Clickbank can be particularly useful if you have an existing website which attracts an audience. You can simply join Clickbank, find a product which is related to your niche and place a banner on your website. Within only a small amount of work you could have monetised an existing website, without having to produce any product or service of your own!

The downside to all this choice of products is that there’s a lot of products which don’t sell on Clickbank too. To help you differentiate between the wheat and the chaff, Clickbank provide a number of information points about products on the site. The main one you need to understand is “Gravity” score.

clickbank affiliate marketing for beginners

Gravity score is a performance metric which shows sales momentum. Over a 12-week rolling period, the ClickBank Gravity Score calculates how many unique affiliates are making commissions on an offer, with a higher emphasis on more recent product sales.

A high Gravity indicates therefore that a product is selling well. However, if you’re a new affiliate you also need to consider that there’s likely more competition from other affiliates with this particular offer. So if you’re promoting via organic search results, for example, you might find it much more difficult to get your content found.

Clickbank For Beginners: Subscription Products

You can also find many subscription products on Clickbank. You can find these using a tool: CBEngine.com.

Subscription affiliate programs pay out recurring commissions so even with fewer sales you can earn a greater income. Something else to consider are high ticket affiliate marketing products. Most products on Clickbank will be largely low and mid ticket items. With a high ticket affiliate product you can earn much larger commissions per sale. Typically a high ticket affiliate product will pay out $500+ on any sales you generate.

Choosing A Clickbank Offer

Ideally with affiliate marketing you should promote products and offers which you naturally gravitate towards yourself and purchase yourself. Having an interest in what products you promote is going to mean your marketing efforts are much more congruent and aligned with you and your product. This gives you more integrity as an affiliate marketer.

If you’re totally disinterested in your product, it’s going to be much more difficult trying to sell them, since you wouldn’t buy them yourself! As an affiliate you can choose pretty much any product to sell you want. But as there’s many other affiliates promoting those same products, choosing something you’re aligned with will help you stand out in the marketplace.

It’s natural for new affiliates to pick products which have a high gravity. But those products may be doing well because they have been picked up with super affiliates who have a large audience. As a newbie, it’s really worth considering your topic/product and how you relate to it; rather than just focusing on what it can get for you.

When you believe in what you’re promoting, there’s far more longevity in your affiliate marketing business. When around 95% of affiliates quit, it’s well worth spending time to understand your motivations and build your affiliate business around your values. Access a free video series here to learn more about the different types of affiliate products you can promote.

Micro Niche Affiliate Marketing

What is micro niche affiliate marketing? A micro niche is a niche within a niche. Affiliates might choose a micro niche because they are far less competitive than most general niches.

In a competitive niche, it’s difficult to rank content organically through search. Affiliate marketing, for example, is a hugely competitive niche. If you want to build an affiliate marketing website (with affiliate marketing as the topic) and rank it on the results pages, expect a very long journey, due to the huge competition.

If you’re going to use paid marketing, rather than content marketing, you can expect a competitive niche to be pretty expensive. Again, the competition in a popular niche drives up the price of advertising.

A micro niche offers cheaper advertising and fewer competing websites. So whether you’re going to build content for free search traffic, or pay for it, a micro niche site might be the answer.

Micro Niche Affiliate Marketing: Finding A Niche Within A Niche

If you already have an idea about what niche you want to get into, you can delve down into a micro niche through using Google’s free keyword planner tool. Start by typing your main keyword into the planner and look at what comes up in the results.

Taking the example of affiliate marketing again, we can plug the term into the planner and look through results until our “micro” niche comes up! Here’s some of the searches which came up for this particular topic:

The term “affiliate marketing” gets a whopping 673,000 searches every month, according to Google’s keyword planner. But if you’re competing for the term on Google organic search results your chances of getting a first page listing are super low, because of the huge competition. Have a look at the number of competing pages for the term on Google for a phrase match: 57,700,000

checking search results for competing pages and competition

If you look down at the list of search terms on the image above, you’ll see another search term for “affiliate marketing for beginners” which gets 12,100 searches a month, according to the planner. A quick phrase match search on Google shows that there’s far less competition for this term:

So “affiliate marketing for beginners” could be considered a niche within the niche of “affiliate marketing”; although this is still a competitive topic.

Micro Niche Affiliate Marketing: Delving Deeper

If you build a website around the topic “affiliate marketing for beginners” you’d still have your work cut out getting free traffic. If you were paying for advertising it’s still going to be pricy getting traffic. However, you can delver even deeper into your particular topic by looking at the search terms with fewer results. You can do this by scrolling through the results pages using the Google keyword planner.

Here’s another term I found by scrolling through the search results for “affiliate marketing” using the keyword planner. Affiliate marketing for dummies gets 1600 monthly searches, according to the planner.

A quick phrase search on Google shows this term to be much less competitive to the previous idea of “affiliate marketing for beginners”.

Copyright issues aside, which may be a thing considering the “For Dummies” series of books, this illustrates how you can find less competitive and less expensive affiliate niches, which give you more chance of success.

Choosing Your Niche

If you’re choosing a niche to build a blog around, choosing something you will love to write about gives you a much better chance of success. Since most niches are pretty competitive, even in a micro niche you can still find huge competition. So if writing/blogging is your thing, find a topic with which you have some kind of affinity. That way you’ll continue on long after most other affiliates have quit, and this gives you a huge edge.

Of course you should also choose a niche which can be monetised and which gets enough of an interest to bother with. If the keyword planner shows your topic to be of little interest, no amount of hard work will matter! If you’re paying for advertising to get website visitors, make sure you can afford to run ads and compete against others doing the same.

You can easily run ads for long periods without making profit if you don’t already have data on which advertising campaigns work, and which don’t. See also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.

Recurring Income Ideas

Are you looking for recurring income ideas? Recurring income is great because it means you don’t have to actively work for it, trading your time for money. Most people are trapped trading time for money in their job. But a recurring income comes in day and night whether you turn up for work or not!

A recurring income may not always be a match for a full time job, but it’s completely hands off. Once you have built a single recurring income source you can build many more, too. Some recurring income ideas can be grown over time or scaled up to a global audience when using the internet to sell products.

Recurring Income Ideas: Sell An Ebook

I love the idea of a recurring income and in the early 2000’s I became dedicated to learning how to earn a passive income from the internet. After a short lived attempt at earning an income from eBay, I turned my attention to selling my own ebook. I had bought an ebook myself which taught me how to buy and sell on eBay, but it was the very ebook idea which jumped out at me as being a great way to earn on autopilot.

Anyone can create an ebook and sell it from a website. You can too! All you need to do is write it, and put in in a pdf format. Then set up the necessary pages on your site to deliver the ebook once someone buys it. You can even use Paypal to take the money automatically and delver the book to your customer! See this article for more on selling ebooks from a website.

The beauty about selling an ebook is that you only write the ebook once. You can then sell it time and time again from a website.

Recurring Income Ideas: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model which anyone can use. Much like the ebook idea, affiliate marketing can allow anyone to earn from selling from a website. But affiliate marketing is better in some ways than using your own ebook because you can use existing products and services which have already been created.

Amazon, for example is a popular way for people to earn from product referrals. Simply join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any of the thousands of products and services from a website. With Amazon, however, you only earn tiny commissions for referrals. There are other affiliate products however which pay a lot more for customer referrals.

Digital products, for example pay a lot more in commissions. A typical digital product will pay 30-40% commission, compared to 3-10% for a referral of an Amazon product.

Recurring Income Ideas: Sell Memberships

You may have noticed the rising trend for companies to ask for a subscription for their service? Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple and many newer digital companies charge a monthly recurring membership to their customers. Subscription products are great when you have multiple memberships paying fees every single month. But how can the average person benefit from memberships?

Well, if you don’t have a product or service you can sell yourself, you can learn to promote affiliate products which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate products are typically those which offer a lot of value such as software products or educational products.

While it is a skill to sell online, once you’ve learned how to sell a single membership product once, you can use that same skill to sell again and again. With subscription affiliate programs you can earn a recurring income from each product referral you make.

(You can access a training resource to learn affiliate marketing on this site. Just sign up for the free videos to learn more and get access).

Recurring Income Ideas: Blogging

You may have noticed I like blogging! This article is the 600th post on this website! Bloggers can earn passively by creating a lot of content and monetising that content with either their own products/service, affiliate products or advertising. To maintain a good habit of blogging is a bit of a commitment and not for everyone. But if you have a passion or interest in a certain topic, it might be a solution for creating a recurring income from the internet.

There’s an estimated 600 million bloggers on the internet which means there’s competition in pretty much every single niche. However some niches/topics are less competitive than others so if you have a particular interest, you can monetise it by writing about it on a blog. Over time, you should pick up organic traffic from the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

You can then advertise using Google Adsense on your website, or sell affiliate products which are suitable for your niche. Both of these can bring in a passive income over time if you’re prepared to do the work upfront.

Royalty Income From Photographs

You can earn a royalty/passive income from uploading photographs too. Upload your photos to a photographic site such as these:

Of course there’s a lot of people doing this and many images are free from sites like these too. But if you upload a lot of images over a long period of time, this can ultimately bring in a nice passive income from people buying your photographs.

Recurring Income From Designs & Logos

If you have a talent for designs and logos, why not get creative and upload multiple images to a site such as Redbubble.com. Redbubble.com sells t-shirts, clothes and other memorabilia which have your logos on them. When they do, you earn a percentage of the sale. Again, like with the stock photograph websites, you’ll need a lot of logos uploaded to make a reasonable income from this. But you can upload one a day for several months and soon you should have a nice passive income.

I uploaded a design to Redbubble several years ago and occasionally get a payment when someone buys a t-shirt or hoodie!

Rent Out A Property/Room or Air B&B

Letting out a property is a simple and reliable way to make a recurring income if you own a place, or if you have the means to purchase a house or a flat. But you can also rent out a spare room in a house too.

AirBnB.com lets you reach a huge audience and rent out space, whether a room or entire house.

One strategy is to buy a house which can be divided into two. Rent out one side of the house and live in the other. The rental pays your mortgage!

Can you think of any other ways you can earn a recurring income? Please let me know in the comments!

Automated Sales Online

It is possible to make automated sales online even without any products of your own to sell. This can be done with a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, “affiliates” promote and sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. Because they don’t have to handle products or deal with customers, affiliates can focus on advertising the products through their affiliate links, to generate sales.

This process can be completely automated, and scaled up to a global audience.

Automated Sales Online

So how can you benefit from automated sales online? Anyone can learn the strategies which affiliates use to generate an income through selling other people’s products on the internet.

There’s thousands of products you can choose from and many ways to promote them using automation. Whatever your background, or choice of product, you can promote them through various tactics and strategies:

Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post. By creating content and getting people to visit it, you can put affiliate products and/or adverts in front of them to generate income.
PPC – pay per click advertising is the fastest way to generate website visitors who can be turned into online sales
Email marketing – most affiliates will have an email list. This allows them to communicate via email to subscribers in bulk and promote affiliate products to them.
Social media marketing – you can use both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods to generate online sales.
SEO – search engine optimisation is use by bloggers and content creators to attract website visitors from the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

Automated Sales Online: Types Of Affiliate Products

There’s thousands of products you can sell online as an affiliate marketer. The best products to sell as an affiliate are those which are most valuable and pay the best rates of commission. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. However, Amazon pays quite low levels of commission; generally from 3-10% on product referrals. Although there’s a lot of products to choose from Amazon, the levels of commission are pretty low. Digital products are good for affiliates because the levels of commission are much higher – typically from 30-40%.

Subscription affiliate products are much more worthwhile than “one off” sales because they allow affiliates to earn on a recurring basis for each referral they make. So a sale can give you a monthly commission rather than a one off payment.

High ticket affiliate products are also worth considering if you’re looking to make automated sales online. A high ticket product will typically pay out a commission of at least $500. When it’s often the same amount of work involved in making a sale, it’s worth choosing high valued products if you’re going to become a referrer.

Building An Email List

Most top affiliate marketers will build an email list of subscribers and promote their products to their list. Building a list can be done using many different marketing techniques but the fastest way is through using paid marketing. To build an email list, you can send targeted visitors to a landing page where you offer something of value to your visitors.

By testing different landing pages against each other (cross testing), you can find out which ones perform the best. Once you have learned how to find the right visitors and to optimise for performance, you can scale up your marketing efforts quickly when using paid marketing. Simply increase your daily budget.

Over time as you collect more email subscribers and sell your affiliate products, you will find building an email list is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products. See also email marketing for affiliate marketers.

Get Started

If you’re ready to get started with building an online business and making automated sales online, you can access a free video series here to learn more.