AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

Passive Income Sources Online

Looking for passive income sources online? Passive income is definitely the best kind of income and however well a job might pay, there’s always a limit on what you can earn because there’s only a certain amount of hours in the day. But through selling products and services online you can use automation and the ability to sell globally to build a passive and a scalable income which isn’t related to trading your time for money.

So in this post I’m going to share some of the best ideas I’ve found for creating a passive income online.

Passive Income Sources Online #1: Affiliate Marketing

Even without any experience or products of your own to sell, anyone can use a clever online business model known as affiliate marketing to create a passive income through selling other people’s products. With a normal job your sell time for money. Although you get paid regularly, you also need to show up regularly. When you stop showing up you stop getting paid.

Affiliate marketing is different.

Although initially there’s a lot of work to be done, if you stick with it for long enough, your systems and automation will allow you to make sales in your sleep, even after you stop working. Even a small passive income is worth working really hard for because when you can generate a passive income from selling a product/service online you can repeat it, automate it and scale it!

Passive Income Sources Online #2: Google Adsense

Google Adsense is another way you can generate a passive income source online. With Google Adsense you can place adverts on your content and get paid when visitors click on your ads. Content creators include bloggers, website owners, YouTuber’s and other social media influencers.

With enough traffic to your website or video channel, you can monetise clicks through advertising. Earn per click and build up your content over time.

Blogging is one of the simplest ways to generate content online and earn passively through advertising. See also Google Adsense alternatives.

#3: Subscription Products

Even without a subscription product of your own, you can choose to promote affiliate subscription products with a variety of online marketing methods. Subscriptions are a great way to earn a passive income because a single sale gives you a monthly recurring passive income. With multiple sales you can build up a nice recurring income which compounds over time.

Subscription products which are good are business tools and software products. Business tools are particularly good because online business owners need those kinds of products in order to build their businesses.

Once you’ve sold a subscription product to someone who is building a lucrative business with it, they are pretty much assured to keep using that product – potentially for life! If you’ve sold it to them this means you can earn lifetime commissions from the referral!

Passive Income Sources Online #4: Blogging

Yes blogging is a good passive income source for many who have created lots of online content. This blog post is an example of a piece of content I use to drive traffic to this website. Bloggers write content about a particular topic on a website. Over time if they are successful, they will start to get natural (organic) traffic coming to their content.

This happens through blog post promotion, SEO (search engine optimisation) and link building. Typically blogging will take a few months at least before you will see traction in terms of traffic (visitors). Once you start seeing regular visitors to a blog you can monetise it using either affiliate products, advertising or a combination of the two.

Passive Income Sources Online #5 YouTube

YouTuber’s can use a couple of methods of building a passive income online. They can either use paid marketing to place their marketing messages in front of potential customers and sell affiliate products, or they can build up a library of videos and draw in traffic organically through the YouTube search engine. YouTuber’s can also attract free traffic from Google too, who now owns YouTube.

youtube - building a youtube channel — Checkout my YouTube channel here.

YouTube also has a partner program whereby you can earn directly from the platform from advertising clicks, placed on your videos. With enough videos and followers you can turn your YouTube channel into a profitable online business.

Passive Income Sources Online #7: Redbubble

Redbubble is an online clothing and creatives store which allows people to upload their individual designs and benefit from sales made using their logos or images. Making things like shirts, stickers, phone cases, and pillows, Redbubble is hugely popular.

To make Redbubble profitable you need to upload new logos and images which you have ownership rights to on a regular basis. I uploaded a couple of images to the site and occasionally make a sale out of the blue. It’s usually only a couple of dollars but if design is your thing there’s no reason you couldn’t turn this into a very lucrative business.

You can also start your own shop on Redbubble too.

Sales are generated by the website on your behalf, so there’s no customer service or fulfilment needed from you; much like with affiliate marketing.

#8: Photographs

There’s a variety of photography websites which allow you to upload your images and benefit from any purchases made. So if you’re a keen photographer, or would like to be, this is a way to make it profitable and make a passive income from your work.

Here’s a few of the sites which offer the ability to make royalty income from photographic images and/or videos:

Getty Images
Vecteezy
Depositphotos
Dreamstime
iStock
Westend61
Stocksy
Shutterstock

Passive Income Website

Wouldn’t it be great to have a passive income website? Having money coming in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on complete autopilot? Far from fantasy, this is a reality for more and more people every day. So how can you own a passive income website? Well there’s a few ways you can earn passively from a website. The fastest way is to simply buy one. Affiliate websites can be bought directly from a site called Flippa.com.

The most profitable sites of course are also the most expensive. Checkout this one selling for $85k! The net listed profit for this site is $3,733 per month – nice! Imagine nearly $4k coming in every single month on complete autopilot!

But what if, like most people you don’t have a spare $85k in your back pocket!? You can of course find cheaper websites to buy and there are other ways to generate an income from a website passively. You can do it for much less if you’re prepared to put in some work.

Passive Income Website: Start An Online Business As An Affiliate

Affiliates can use plug and play software to help them build fully made websites with pre-populated affiliate banners, links and all the bells and whistles. You can set up your own online business website complete with products to sell and all the training you need to make it profitable. Get started here.

Building an online business from scratch is easier than ever and far cheaper than buying an existing online business. To make your online business profitable, you need to setup your website initially in combination with an email marketing tool.

You’ll be able to follow a step by step process to do this using the above free account. You’ll also benefit from using existing affiliate products which pay high ticket commissions, recurring commissions as well as regular “one time” commissions. This is a major key to making your income passive. Particularly through using subscription products you can build a passive income through recurring income affiliate programs.

Passive Income Website: The 6 Figure Funnel

The 6 figure funnel refers to the product range you can sell from your website. With most affiliate businesses you only earn a “one time” commission through selling products from your website. But with a 6 figure affiliate sales funnel, you benefit from high ticket sales, subscription products and recurring commissions.

With such a business model, it’s far easier to become profitable through using paid advertising. This means you can more easily create a large business through running and scaling paid advertising.

Passive Income Website: Blogging

Another way to create a passive income website is through blogging. Blogging is a slow strategy compared to the previous example and far less scalable. However, there’s power in a blog if you are able to choose a topic you can sustain over the longer term. Blogging can produce a nice passive income through building content in your chosen niche and compounding your efforts over time. Although it’s a commitment to build a blog, it is another way of generating passive income online through a website.

When using blogging, it can take several months or even longer to generate traction, depending on your chosen niche and the relative competition. But over time if you stick at it, you can generate free traffic from the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. This means you can monetise it quite well using either affiliate products or using advertising (e.g. Google Adsense). With subscription affiliate products up your sleeve, you can compound your efforts by generating passive income from recurring commissions too!

Blogging is no doubt a longer term strategy than purchasing a site from Flippa.com, or building an online business using paid marketing. But it’s also a much cheaper option too.

Recap

To recap I’ve mentioned three ways in which you can generate a passive income by using websites:

Buy an existing website which is already making money (Flippa.com). This of course is the most expensive option, particularly if you want a top earning site. Cheaper sites are available too but you should do you due diligence before committing to buy something you don’t know much about!
Build an online business from scratch – using high ticket products, plug and play software and subscription products in your sales funnel is one of the best ways you can build an online business quickly and start earning a passive income from the tools and automation available online. This is the next best thing to a top site and much less costly. Plus you’ll be learning valuable life skills if you choose this path, such as marketing. Access the free account here.
Another option is through blogging. Bloggers find a niche in which they have an interest or passion and continue to create highly useful content in it. Blogging is super cheap but slow. You’ll need to pick a good topic which you can sustain your interest in over the longer term. This ultimately can give you free traffic which can be monetised with affiliate products and advertising (Google Adsense, for example).

Digital Marketing Passive Income

Looking to make a digital marketing passive income? Anyone can use digital marketing in order to generate an income online. With automation and through the selling of other people’s products, you can also make this passive.

Today more than ever people are waking up to the potential of online digital marketing and the ability to earn online on complete automation. But how does this work and what does it take to make it a reality?

Firstly, one of the best ways to turn digital marketing into cash is with a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products using various online digital marketing techniques. They are effectively third party referrers – middle men (or women!), who refer customers to products and services online.

To make a digital marketing passive income a reality, you need to join an affiliate program and learn how to sell online.

Digital Marketing Passive Income: Income Sources

You can also make an income from other strategies of course. Google Adsense allows content publishers to place advertising on their content. When visitors click on the ads, the publishers earn a commission. With enough traffic to a website this can bring home a nice tidy passive income.

However, getting traffic to a website to monetise with Google Adsense needs to be done very cheaply, because you only earn tiny amounts for each click. Since this takes a lot of time and commitment building content, I’m going to suggest that affiliate marketing is a better way to do things.

With affiliate marketing you can still build content to attract visitors. But you stand to make considerably larger chunks of income because you can sell products and earn from your referrals. You can of course use both methods, subsidising the income from affiliate sales with a trickle income from Google Adsense or similar program. See also best Google Adsense alternatives and Adsense vs affiliate marketing.

Digital Marketing Passive Income: Products

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products you can find online to promote as an affiliate. Amazon, for example, is a popular affiliate portal where hundreds of thousands of affiliates promote the products on the site. However, Amazon doesn’t offer the best commission levels and typically only pays between 3%-10% on sales generated on its product range. Amazon does give you a lot of choice however of the products you promote.

You can also choose to promote digital products which typically pay between 30% and 40% commission to referrals. There’s also subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products, both are worth considering if you’re looking to make an income online. With a subscription affiliate product you can earn ongoing passive income from previous sales. High ticket products pay much larger commissions than the standard priced products you might find on Amazon, for example.

Promotion Methods

There’s also several ways you can promote affiliate products. The fastest method is with paid marketing. Once you learn how to run a paid ad campaign and become profitable, you can scale it up by increasing your budget. With affiliate products there’s no need to personally handle products yourself, or deal with customers. This means you can focus on learning the marketing skill. Since this can be automated and scaled up globally, it’s one of the best opportunities to create a passive income from anywhere globally!

Most top affiliates also use an email marketing autoresponder. Autoresponders help online marketers collect email subscribers and automate delivery of follow up messages. With a large list of subscribers, and through using recurring income affiliate products, you can more easily build a passive income online through product referrals.

Another method of generating traction online is through content generation. This blog is an example of content generation. Although this takes longer than through using paid marketing, there’s a residual effect of building a lot of content. Over time, your efforts compound and you can earn a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Content marketers use websites, blogs, video and other forms of content to attract an audience. They then monetise their content with affiliate products or advertising, or both! For this to work can take several months of building content before the results can been seen. With paid marketing you can see almost immediately whether a campaign is working or not. Plus paid marketing is very scalable whereas content marketing is more difficult to scale up.

Fastest Methods

The fastest method of creating a passive income from digital marketing is through using paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel. With a high ticket sales funnel you can sell high valued products and earn larger commissions from their sale. If you combine high ticket products which are also digital products, your commissions are much higher than with low valued physical products. You can also benefit from subscription products within your sales funnel which pay out recurring income commissions.

To learn more and get started access a free video series here.

Solopreneur Business

Are you looking for a solopreneur business opportunity? According to Merriam-Webster, a solopreneur is “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise without the help of a partner.” It’s basically a solo entrepreneur. A solopreneur works independently and doesn’t hire employees or other team members.

One of the best ways to become a “solopreneur” is with a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, the affiliate promotes other people’s products and services for a share of the sale value. Affiliates use online resources and technology to make sales online. Anyone can become an affiliate simply by joining an affiliate program and promoting their unique affiliate link. When someone buys something through your affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission.

Because the internet is global, this gives the affiliate the opportunity to sell products and services globally from anywhere in the world. They only need to learn the skills of selling online. Once they figure this out, they can build 6, 7, and even 8 figure businesses from anywhere! They can do this without needing any products or services of their own to sell.

Solopreneur Business: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates use many different marketing tactics to place their products in front of customers. Here’s just some of the tactics which affiliate use:

Content marketing – such as blogging and video. Bloggers and “v’loggers” generate content to draw people towards their affiliate offers.
PPC – pay per click marketing is a fast and scaleable strategy used by affiliates to place adverts in front of potential buyers.
Social media – affiliates use social media platforms to find potential customers using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube etc.
SEO – search engine optimisation is used by content creators to help gain more traction through organic search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.
Email marketing – most top affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they promote their products to. With a large enough list a single email can sell many items for an affiliate.

Not all affiliates use the same strategies to promote their affiliate products online. Some use content and others use paid marketing. Paid marketing is much faster and more scalable, but content marketing is far cheaper.

Solopreneur Business: Types Of Products

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose to promote as an affiliate marketer. Amazon has an affiliate program and anyone can promote their products for a share of the profit. Amazon pays typically between 3% and 10% commission on product promotion.

Digital products typically pay much more; between 30% and 40% in most cases, sometimes more. There’s also subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions to affiliates and high ticket affiliate marketing products which pay much larger than average commissions.

Here’s an example of a high ticket product which affiliates can promote to earn a large commission. Although most people aren’t in the market for a submarine, some people clearly are! So if you can sell one of these you can make an 8% commission on $300,000! That’s $24,000!

Get Started

You can get started today with your own online business from scratch. Access the free video series below to learn more.

Digital Business For Sale

If you’re looking for a digital business for sale, you can start one here. Learn more with the free video series.

A digital business system can give you products, software and training so that you can start an online business without any products of your own, experience or technical skills. There’s several ways you can build an online business and depending on your preference you could decide to build any one of several business models:

An affiliate marketing business – selling other people’s products
A drop shipping business – distributing products directly to customers through your website
Print on demand – direct selling of your customised printed logos or images to customers
Import Export business – wholesale purchases distributed individually through your website

Digital Business For Sale – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular digital business models because it allows anyone to set up and sell other people’s products with the minimum of fuss. Using a step by step online business system, you can set up a digital storefront (website), an email marketing list, landing pages and a marketing strategy from your laptop.

All of these systems can be automated, which means a digital business can be easily scaled. With digital products, as a third party referrer, or affiliate, you can earn from 30-40% commissions on any products you sell. With physical products, like you would find on Amazon, for example, the level of commission is much lower. Amazon pays between 3% and 10% for most of their product referrals.

Marketing Methods

If you want a digital business which requires no work, expect to pay a lot for it on sites such as Flippa.com. Flippa.com sells affiliates websites and e-commerce websites. To start your own digital business from scratch will require more work, but costs much less. Once you have set up your digital business using the step by step process, you’ll need to choose a marketing strategy. Marketing is perhaps the most important part of business. Without marketing, all the shiny websites, sales funnels and products are useless! You can think of marketing for your business like the heart for your body! Without it, there’s no life in a business.

There’s several ways to market an online digital business and once you have completed the video series you can access training, help and support to learn which strategy is best for you. Here’s a few marketing strategies you can choose to build an online digital business with:

PPC – pay per click is one of the most popular marketing methods. You pay for ads to show to your target audience. When they click, you pay to send them from an advert to your website.
Content marketing – blogging and video are two popular methods of generating website traffic for free through content marketing. This article is an example of a blog post. This type of marketing can attract traffic for free, but takes longer than PPC.
Social Media – you can use paid and unpaid social media marketing to attract people to your online business. Again, the free methods are generally much slower, but can build (organic) passive traffic over time.

Why Start A Digital Business?

Over the last few years there has been a clear shift to the online world. Traditional businesses can’t compete with price, choice or convenience which is offered from shopping online; whether for products or services, information or training.

Traditional bricks and mortar businesses are struggling, particularly over lockdowns in recent years. Businesses that thrive in recession are the go-to businesses of the future; they are digital businesses. So if you’re thinking of building a more sustainable future start a digital business.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

More than ever people are looking for businesses that thrive in recession. With big tech layoffs, AI and automation taking over many sectors of employment and rising costs of living it’s easy to see why.

A recent Gallop poll showed that people are dissatisfied in their jobs, too. So even without threat to employment, people are looking elsewhere for their own well being and happiness. According to the poll only 15% of workers are engaged at work. This means that 85% are unhappy in their jobs or with their bosses.

So what is the answer for broken workers and broken systems that no longer support long term job security? Perhaps it’s businesses that thrive in recession; online businesses to be more specific.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

Traditional jobs are in decline, so even if you like your job you may soon be given the push; particularly if your job can be replaced with automation or moved online.

The chart below shows e-commerce business versus traditional store sales. As you can see, there’s a massive increase in e-commerce sales and a steady decline in traditional sales.

This is only set to continue and speed up especially over recent years of lockdowns and pandemic responses. Many traditional stores are closing or have closed already.

ecommerce sales — Source: https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-ecommerce-sales

Businesses That Thrive In Recession

Whenever there’s a recession there’s a shift from the traditional economy to the digital economy. This is all the more apparent today (in 2022). So if you’re looking for a recession proof business, your best bet is to look online for some kind of digital business.

There’s many online business models which you can use to generate an income from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. Print on demand, e-commerce stores, affiliate businesses and drop shipping businesses are just a few of the possibilities. Since more people are shopping online, it makes sense to provide some kind of service online to future proof an income source.

Businesses That Thrive In Recession: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models. In affiliate marketing, products can be sold online by third party referring “affiliates”. The affiliate receives a commission based on referral sales they make. Because you don’t need any products of your own to become an affiliate, it makes it one of the most accessible business models available. Plus you can become an affiliate for pretty much any product you can find online; providing you can find an affiliate program connected with the product.

Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. By joining an affiliate program and promoting your unique affiliate link, your sales are tracked back to you and you are rewarded for the referral. You don’t have to personally handle products or services yourself and therefore your only concern is whatever marketing strategy you use to connect customers to products through your unique identifying link (affiliate link).

This can be done is several ways such as blogging, video, using paid advertising platforms or social media. See also affiliate marketing promotion methods.

Best Affiliate Businesses To Choose

There’s huge choice in affiliate marketing products and services. The success you have is dependent on a number of factors including your promotion methods and the products/services you choose to promote. Some of the best products to promote are business tools and services which help affiliates themselves.

For example, Aweber is a business tool used by affiliates to build email lists. From their lists they can promote their products. An email autoresponder is one of the best tools you can invest in when building an online business.

Therefore it makes sense to promote it because it’s highly sought after and highly valuable. Products such as autoresponders also give affiliates a recurring income when they generate a sale because software products charge a recurring fee and many of them pay affiliates recurring commissions.

High Ticket Affiliate Products

High ticket affiliate marketing products are also a good idea if you decide to sell other people’s products online. Most affiliate products you might find on Amazon, for example, are valued at below $100. As such you’ll only earn between 1-10% of that as a referral partner. This means you’ll need to sell a lot of products in order to make your online business profitable.

However, with high ticket products you stand to make a much larger commission on each sale. Take this flying hovercraft for example which sells for $190,000! As an affiliate for this product you could earn 8% of this if you refer a sale! That’s $15,200 in commission for a single sale. While most people can’t afford this kind of purchase, especially during a recession, people do buy such items.

Business training courses, tools and software are good things to sell during a recession because more people are looking for a means to make a living online. This makes an online business one of the best recession proof businesses you can invest in.

Access a free video series to learn more about how to start a recession proof business from scratch.

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Wondering how to sell other people’s products online? Anyone can do this by joining an affiliate program and promoting their products/service through their unique identifying link, or affiliate link. Affiliates get paid from product referrals; it’s one of the most popular and simplest ways to make money online.

Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. When you join Amazon’s affiliate program you get access to a dashboard on Amazon’s website. It’s here where you can find your unique affiliate link dashboard and start promoting your link to generate sales. Amazon isn’t the only company you can partner with to promote products. You’ll find affiliate programs for almost any product you can imagine. A website called Hammacher Schlemmer lets you promote products which are valued far higher than most products you will find on Amazon. Here’s an example of a product you can promote; the amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft!

On this particular item you can earn 8% of the sale value. That’s $24,000! So by choosing high ticket affiliate products you stand to earn a lot more per sale than from promoting low valued products like you might find on Amazon.

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Of course joining an affiliate program and getting your affiliate link is only the beginning. If you really want to earn from selling online, you’ll need to learn the strategies for selling online. There’s several ways in which you can promote your affiliate link to make money. These can be divided into two main categories; paid marketing and unpaid marketing. Free marketing requires a lot more work than paid marketing of course. This piece of content is an example of a free marketing strategy (blogging), which although is free takes time to create.

Paid marketing is a much faster method of making sales online but the catch is that it costs money! Here’s a few of the main strategies which affiliate marketers use to generate sales through their affiliate links:

Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Content generation – creating written, video some other type of content (e.g. charts, maps, images, presentations, webinars, diagrams, pictograms, screenshots, gifs, memes, comics, infographics etc.
Email marketing – many affiliates build email lists of subscribers and promote their links to their subscribers.
PPC – Pay Per Click advertising is a fast and scalable strategy used by affiliates
Viral marketing – using posts and content which get rapidly shared on social media

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Depending on the product you choose and your particular circumstances, preference and abilities, you might choose any one of the above methods, or choose a combination of more than one. Your choice might also depend on the particular affiliate products you choose to promote.

For example, if you’re promoting low value products from Amazon, it will be much more difficult to make your business profitable using paid marketing. But if you choose high ticket affiliate products, paid marketing would be a more viable choice, because your return on investment will be much more (covering the cost of advertising).

One of the most popular methods of advertising affiliate products is through an email marketing list. With an email list, you use some form of marketing to send targeted visitors to a landing page. Here you collect their email address and follow up with some useful information which they have subscribed to receive. You can also promote your products to your subscribers (through your affiliate links).

Email List Vs Website

While you can also sell affiliate products directly from a website, very few visitors will actually buy from a website on their first visit. Most website owners therefore have learned to offer a “freebie” giveaway on their websites in order to encourage people to sign up to an email list.

Once a website visitors signs up to your email list from your website, you have a greater opportunity to build a longer term relationship with them and sell your affiliate products. On a website, on the other hand, they only have a few minutes to make a buying decision. Most website visitors will leave without having taken any action.

With an email marketing list, you can email your subscribers over a much longer period. Often people will sign up to my list from my website and make a purchase months (or even years) after they subscribe! This just isn’t possible on a website and most visitors will leave after only a few minutes, never to return!

Selling Through Blogging

Although blogging is a slower way to generate traction online, it’s a popular method because it’s super low cost! Bloggers create a lot of content on their websites to attract the attention of search traffic. Search traffic is the traffic which comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and the like. When someone types a keyword into the search bar on Google, they are delivered a number of website pages in the results (SERPS – search engine results pages).

The goal of a blogger is to rank their content on the SERPS so that they get free traffic to their website and make affiliate sales – either directly from website banners or through their email list.

Blogging is a slow strategy but if you find a topic you enjoy writing about it can be very lucrative. Plus, if you stick with it for long enough it can give you a passive income, potentially for years! However, in most affiliate topics there’s a lot of competition. So it’s important to choose wisely because you’ll likely be blogging for a long time before you break through and start seeing a large volume of free traffic.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising on the other hand is much faster. You can pay for visitors who are using search engines for their queries and place ads in front of the people you want to attract. You can also use YouTube, Facebook or one of the many other social media platforms to pay for traffic. Paid traffic can be turned on almost instantly, whereas traffic from blogging can take months, or even years to get in volume.

Paid traffic is also much more scalable than content marketing. So once you find a winning advert which generates profit, you can simply turn up the daily budget to make more sales. However there is an interim period where affiliates will need to test and measure different adverts (at their own expense). Most adverts won’t lead immediately to profit and to find which adverts are profitable can take some experimentation.

Pay per click advertising allows you to try out different ads to see what works and what doesn’t. When you find a winning ad, you can simply leave it running and create many more; scaling up the good ones and cancelling the ones which perform poorly.

If you’re interested in getting started with your own online business, access a free video series through this link.