What’s the best blog niche for affiliate marketing? Well since there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet today, this means there’s some serious competition, whatever your niche is!
Still, some niches are far more competitive than others. The goal of many bloggers is to rank their content and get free traffic. But this has become more and more difficult as the number of bloggers continues to rise. You can of course still earn from a blog, even without a ranking on Google. With plugins, social media shares and an email list, you can collect a following even without your content appearing on Google!
Initially this will take some time of course and ultimately you will want to get some traffic from multiple sources:
Social media accounts – where you share your content
Email marketing – build an email list
Push engage – send old visitors alerts of new content
When you rely on Google, you’re building your blogging career on very unstable ground, but ideally you will get some free traffic from Google too and other search engines as you persevere. The longer you’re in the game, the better your chances are of collecting more followers and getting your content found. So, what ultimately is the best blog niche for affiliate marketing?
Best Blog Niche For Affiliate Marketing?
Some people will tell you to go after a topic you love. That way, you’ll enjoy blogging and therefore you’re much more likely to sustain the necessary effort to make your blogging profitable. While this is true, if you want to monetise your blog, you also need to find a topic which is profitable too, assuming you want to profit from blogging.
Ideally, find a niche which lets you work at a topic you at least enjoy writing about. There’s nothing worse than failing with a blog in a topic you don’t give a damn about! I tried this and it was utterly demoralising! My topic was Mushroom harvesting – which I knew nothing of nor cared about. Needless to say, it didn’t work and I gave up on the site after several months of hard work (in the wrong direction).
The “right” direction is one in which you can sustain forever! How much more difficult is it for your competition (in your niche) if you’re absolutely devoted to churning out content on a daily basis forever!? In the mushroom harvesting niche, there were so many more people who were passionate about mushroom harvesting than me – all of them in fact! They’re still blogging and creating videos today, when I gave up several years ago (in that topic).
Best Blog Niche For Affiliate Marketing
Some of the best topics available for affiliates are often the ones cited by the “experts”:
Money making online
Wealth generation and investments
Technology and electronics
Pets and Hobbies
Home and Garden
Dating and relationships.
But while these topics are generally thought of at the “top” money generating niches for affiliates, they are also the most competitive niches for blogging in. So if you’re considering building a blog, expect to be working hard for several months at least, if not years before your blogging becomes profitable. Take a look at the picture below which shows blog post activity compared to organic (free) traffic:
As you can see, you need to be thinking of generating several hundred blog posts to start seeing an uptick in traffic. With 600 million blogs on the internet (and climbing), you can expect this to become even more tricky as time goes on.
Think Long Term & Choose A Topic You Can Sustain
Blogging should be a passion and not a chore! While it seems like a nice idea earning passively from a blog, for most this doesn’t happen. Most bloggers will abandon their blogging when they see how much work is involved. If their sole interest is in generation money from their blog, they are more likely to quit when things don’t work out. But if there’s a bigger reason for blogging, such as sharing your passion, genuinely helping others or connecting to people for some higher purpose, you’re more likely to stay the course.
Simon Sinek explains this idea in depth in his book Start With Why. He shows how the better prepared and often least well financed can surpass those with more money but a smaller “why”. Your reason for building a blog in the first place therefore becomes the bedrock of your potential. With a strong enough reason a “why” can overcome any “how”.
If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going. – Stuart Ross
Despite the competition in affiliate marketing, because there’s so many affiliate marketing niches there’s always room for new affiliates. What is an affiliate marketing niche? An affiliate “niche” is a specific topic or group of topics in which the affiliate builds their business.
For example, this website is based around the “make money online” niche. More specifically it’s the “affiliate marketing” niche, which could be said to be a niche within a niche! There’s many affiliate marketing niches and here’s a few of the most popular niches which many affiliates will gravitate towards:
Making money online
Health and fitness
Wealth generation, investing and finance
Pets and hobbies
Dating and relationships
Gadgets and technology
Home and garden
Within each niche are also several sub-niches. So for example in the niche of dating and relationships you might find niches such as:
Confidence with men/women
Dating advice for seniors
Communication tips in your marriage
etc
Affiliate Marketing Niches: Benefits Of A Sub-Niche
There’s several benefits of building a business around a sub-niche in affiliate marketing. For starters some niche topics are super competitive. So if you’re running advertising in them, you’ll be paying a lot for ad clicks. If you are trying to build a niche website for them, there will be a tonne of competition on Google, so it’s harder to get any traction.
In a sub niche though, advertising will be less costly because there’s fewer people competing for advertising space. Likewise, there’s fewer websites competing on Google for organic space in a sub niche. So whether you are thinking of building an affiliate business with paid marketing, or through content creation, your niche is an important factor to consider.
A sub-niche too is more specific and attracts a very specific type of visitor. This can be beneficial if you’re selling a particular type of affiliate product. For example if you have a Yoga course for seniors, the broader “Yoga” niche may attract the wrong kinds of visitors. Whereas “Yoga for seniors” as a niche will attract more people who are a likely fit for your target audience, assuming you’re promoting a “Yoga for seniors” course.
Affiliate Marketing Niches: Choosing A Niche
It’s a good idea to choose a niche which you have an interest in because it can take some time before you gain traction, depending on your marketing strategy of course. If you’re going to build content in your niche, expect to work at it for some time, uploading content on a regular basis. Depending on the relative competition of your niche, it can take several months before you start seeing the outcome you are looking for, with content generation.
With paid marketing of course it’s much faster. But you still need to maintain the work long enough to start generating regular sales. In a niche you are fanatical about, this is so much easier! At the very least, choose a topic you want to learn about so you can maintain this interest for the longer term.
I made a big mistake choosing a niche I wasn’t interested in several years ago. I chose to build a website around the topic of harvesting mushrooms! It was a low competition niche I thought I could rank a niche website for. It did rank at the top of Google for its main keywords: When To Harvest Mushrooms! However, each piece I wrote on the blog needed thorough research, so it took a long time. After six month of writing, I had had enough! I didn’t even have an interest in this topic, and only pursued it for the money. It turned out that it was also a difficult niche to monetise, with little to offer in terms of affiliate products.
It’s very difficult to sustain the necessary work required to profit from affiliate marketing niche if you have no interest in it! Choose something you love and it’s a pleasure doing the work!
Evergreen Niches
An “evergreen” niche is a niche which is profitable all year round. My mushroom harvesting niche wasn’t evergreen and only got the bulk of its traffic in mushroom harvesting season. even then, I couldn’t monetise it well because there weren’t a lot of affiliate products in the niche which would sell. An evergreen niche is one which gets traffic all year round. So it’s a good idea to avoid niches which are seasonal.
The niches mentioned at the start of this article are all evergreen, and building a niche can mean you get paid all year round as an affiliate, if you’re successful:
Making money online
Health and fitness
Wealth generation, investing and finance
Pets and hobbies
Dating and relationships
Gadgets and technology
Home and garden
If you have a unique interest of some kind, it can give you the edge in building a niche website, or offering something of value to your followers. So it’s worth investigating whether your niche is easily monetised with products you value and which sell.
In this online business pdf article, I’m going to share some of the insights I’ve learned over the last few years building an online business. Anyone can build an online business without any experience or even any products to sell. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing allows you to sell other people’s products and earn commissions from their sale.
To do this you only need to join an affiliate program and promote your affiliate link. The link is tracked back to you and you earn a commission for sales you have generated. Affiliates are therefore third party referrers of other people’s products. They get paid on a performance basis when they successfully refer customers to products online.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models, but it’s not without its problems. Many affiliates will struggle because they don’t get the training and support they need to become successful. I was the same and spent years finding out the hard way! Don’t make the same mistake, invest in your education and put yourself years ahead of the competition!
Online Business PDF – Why Affiliate Marketing?
Before finding affiliate marketing I tried various other online business models but affiliate marketing quickly proved itself to be a winner. With affiliate marketing you can sell pretty much anything online, so long as it has an affiliate program. So when you understand how to sell online, you can use that skill to continue to sell more and more products, all on virtual autopilot.
The skill is of course marketing and marketing using online advertising tactics is the skill you need. With an affiliate marketing businesses, you can focus solely on marketing because you can use pre-existing businesses which already exist.
That makes building a profitable online business a much simpler task than if you were to build your own products, infrastructure and customer service operation. As an affiliate you don’t need to deal with customers or product manufacture or delivery. You simply learn marketing and send targeted visitors to other people’s products.
Online Business PDF – Types Of Products
There’s many products and services you can promote online as an affiliate marketer. Many affiliates start out with Amazon, since it’s one of the most popular places to make purchases online. However, Amazon’s commission rates aren’t the best and despite some other incentives, there are better products to promote than those on Amazon. Amazon pays its affiliates between 1% and 20% commission, although most products will fall into the category of paying between 3% and 10% commission.
Amazon mostly sells physical products which pay less because there’s more cost involved in their manufacture and delivery. But with digital products there’s no delivery costs involved and as such product owners can pay affiliates larger levels of commission. Delivery of digital products can be directly over the internet as a digital download or access to a website or training course, for example. Digital products will tend to pay from 30%-40% commissions on sales you can generate as an affiliate.
High Ticket Products
High ticket products are also a way for affiliates to earn larger commissions than though selling low value physical products. A low value physical products you sell on Amazon, for example, might only pay you 3%. If the product sells for $100, you only earn $3 on each sales you generate. This means you need to make a lot of sales in order to build a profitable online business from selling those kinds of products. But with high ticket products, whether physical or digital, you can generate much larger commissions from each sale. Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product you can sell as an affiliate:
A Submarine!
This five person Exploration Submarine sells for $2,700,000! As an affiliate for the product you can earn 8% commission if you refer a sale. While most people aren’t shopping for such an expensive item, some people are. So if you’re going to learn the skills to become an affiliate, it’s worth considering which products will be more lucrative. To put this in context, in order to earn the same amount from a $100 item on Amazon which pays the same percentage (8%), you would need to sell 27,000 of the smaller item to make the same commission ($216,000) as just one sale of the submarine!
Granted though, it is more difficult to sell a submarine than a $100 item on Amazon, but it’s not 27,000 times as difficult! Once you learn how to sell online, often it is the same work you do for a sale in either case.
Recurring Income Products
Subscription affiliate products are also worth considering if you’re going to build an online business using affiliate marketing. These types of products are things like memberships and software products which require an ongoing fee. They also pay recurring commissions to affiliates which means you can create a sustainable income with fewer sales, much like with high ticket products.
Business tools and education products are good products you can sell which pay recurring commissions for subscriptions; particularly if they are hugely valuable. For example Aweber is an email autoresponder which is used by affiliate marketers.
Should an affiliate purchase the tool from you and subsequently build a profitable online business, they will maintain their subscription for years, or even a lifetime! This means as the referring affiliate you can benefit from a lifetime of recurring payments for having made the recommendation.
Online Business PDF – Ways To Sell Affiliate Products
Most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers to which they can recommend their products (using Aweber, or a similar email marketing tool). With an email list, you can recommend products and services to a growing list of people who are interested in reading about what you have to sell. There are many ways in which you can build an email list but the main two strategies are using either content marketing or paid advertising, (or a combination of the two).
This article about online business pdf for example is a piece of content which is used to attract a specific audience (target audience). If someone purchases a product which I recommend on my site, or through my email list, I earn a commission based on the sale.
Content marketing involves building content such as this blog post, or uploading videos to a site such as YouTube or TikTok, for example. Over time, as your content grows, you gain more traffic from your content. Some of these visitors will sign up to your email list if you use an opt in form on your website.
Paid marketing is however a much faster way to generate traction with an online business. With paid marketing, you run ads and send people directly to a landing page, or a sales page. Paid advertising can be run almost immediately whereas it can take much longer for content to get the same amount of traction.
In this make money online PDF I’m going to discuss one of the most popular online earning methods: affiliate marketing! With affiliate marketing you don’t need any products of your own to sell because you can use other people’s products and services.
Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model where third party “affiliates” refer customers to products online via their affiliate link. When someone makes a purchase through a unique affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission based on the sale. There’s no product fulfilment needed because the product owner handles product delivery and deals with the customer.
That makes affiliate marketing one of the easiest online business models you can learn. However, to make money online with affiliate marketing, you’ll need to learn a method of product promotion to promote your affiliate link. This is often the sticking point for new affiliates and so it deserves some attention because it’s often the main reason why 95% of affiliates quit!
However, before we get to promotion methods of affiliate marketing, it’s also worth discussing the different products affiliate marketers can choose from.
Make Money Online PDF: Products
There’s thousands of affiliate programs available to choose from but one of the most popular programs is Amazon’s partner program which anyone can join to promote any of the thousands of products on the site.
You can also find both physical and digital products on various affiliate platforms such as Clickbank.com, JVZoo, CJ Affiliate Network (Commission Junction) and eBay’s partner program. A quick search online for “affiliate program” and almost any keyword will bring up programs in almost any category you can think of!
So if you have an existing website, it’s easy to join a program which offers a suitable product based on your individual topic/niche. However, different products will pay different levels of commission so it’s useful to know this before starting out with affiliate marketing. Physical products tend to pay the least in terms of commission percentages. Amazon, for example will generally pay between 3-10% commission on products you sell.
Digital products can pay a lot more in terms of percentages. Typically a digital product will pay between 30-40% commission. You can also promote high ticket products which are a good idea because they carry a larger price tag and therefore pay a much larger commission per sale. The sale of a single high ticket product can give you the same amount as hundreds or even thousands of lower value product sales.
Here’s an example of a high ticket product you can sell as an affiliate to earn 8% commission.
The sale of just one of these would earn you a commission of $31,600. To earn this much with a low valued product from Amazon at $100 for example, you would need to sell tens of thousands of products. You can also sell subscription products as an affiliate which can pay you a recurring income.
Blogging & other content creation: pdfs, ebooks, video blogging etc.
Email marketing – collecting email subscribers from a website/landing page
PPC – pay per click advertising, platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, Facebook etc offer paid marketing platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation – free traffic from the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.
As mentioned, your marketing strategy is pretty important and has a huge impact on your affiliate business. Unless you get it right, you can easily struggle making sales with this business model so it’s worth investing in this skill if you want to be successful as an affiliate.
Some strategies are faster and more scalable than others too. Blogging, for example is generally thought of as a slower method of traffic generation, although you can ultimately earn a passive income once you have built a lot of content. Paid marketing strategies are much faster and more scalable. Once you have success with a paid marketing strategy, you can simply leave it running, generating traffic and sales and quickly scale it up to a larger audience.
Mindsets Of Successful Affiliates
Not all affiliate marketers are successful it has to be said and around 95% of new affiliates will quit. So it’s important to realise that if you’re starting off down the affiliate marketing journey, you’ll need to be prepared. Knowing some of the things in this article will help you but it’s also wise to get help from the outset from people who have already succeeded with affiliate marketing. Access the free video workshops and an online coaching and mentorship program here.
There’s one thing which successful affiliates all have in common: they don’t quit! Quitting is the only way to guarantee failure in affiliate marketing. So if you decide not to quit, whatever happens, you’re ultimately guaranteed to have more success than the average person – unless you die first!
If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going, no matter what happens. Successful affiliates have a strong reason to keep going when other quit. They use setbacks as learning experiences rather than reasons to stop!
Although this make money online pdf has focused on affiliate marketing, there’s other ways you can earn online. However, there’s a few benefits which affiliate marketing has over other online earning methods:
It’s a simple business model which anyone can do regardless of experience
You don’t need your own products
It’s relatively cheap to get started
You only need a laptop and internet connection
You can work from anywhere
Choose your own hours and working pattern
Work alongside a job while you build your income up
Selling products can be automated and scaled up globally
It can give you passive income, financial independence & freedom
It can give you geographical freedom – work from anywhere
Because affiliate marketing lets you earn by selling products online, instead of selling your time (as in a job), you can detach your working hours from your income and make money in your sleep on complete autopilot!
Wondering how to be successful in affiliate marketing? Not every affiliate is successful and there’s a huge drop out rate in the industry. Around 5% of affiliates continue and make a success out of the business. So why the large failure rate? Why do so many affiliates drop out and how can you become one of the 5% who sticks it out?
Well for starters sticking it out is a major key to success in affiliate marketing. All affiliates will have problems and some use these problems as an excuse to quit! Successful affiliates use problems to better understand the business, and they eventually overcome them.
Depending on your approach to affiliate marketing and the methods of promotion you choose, it can take several months or even years before you’re profitable. Like with any business, success often depends on going the extra mile and continuing on when everyone else gives up!
How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing? Have a Big “Why?”
Having a big enough “WHY?” will help you overcome almost any HOW?!
“If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going.” – Stuart Ross
Your “why?” is your reason to learn affiliate marketing in the first place. So whether it’s so you can leave a job, build a side income or work from home, it needs to be strong enough to overcome the difficulties you’ll definitely experience on your affiliate journey.
Most new affiliates experience some kind of difficulty and so in order to be successful as an affiliate, you need to persevere for much longer than the average person will.
How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing: Baby Steps
To build a large and profitable affiliate business from scratch is a serious undertaking. It’s a long journey and one which doesn’t happen overnight. Taking small daily “baby” steps towards your goal is a much easier way to approach such an undertaking.
If you look at the top of the mountain, it’s easy to become demoralised and lose your enthusiasm. When you lose your faith, you give up! So fuelling your belief and enthusiasm is key to the longevity of your levels of endurance.
A small step every day is better than sporadic leaps forwards.
Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing: Get Help From Others
Affiliate marketing is difficult and much more difficult if you try and go it alone. You can get led down all kinds of rabbit holes and completely lose your way. There’s many mental and practical traps which will leave you lost and directionless:
Shiny object syndrome – always looking for the “easier” methods and shortcuts and jumping from one “shiny object” to another.
Being a busy fool – a “busy fool” is someone who wastes their time online on unproductive activities. At first, an online business is quite exciting until you realise you only get paid relative to your performance.
Not understanding your target audience – trying to sell everyone online is a surefire way to not sell anything. Get to know who your target audience is first before looking for ways to sell
Selling the wrong products – low value products will only pay tiny commissions. Using higher paying products allows you to earn more from fewer sales
Choosing the wrong marketing method – some strategies will take months or years to gain traction, while others are more instant
Expectations – if your expectations of what an affiliate business can deliver are too high, you’ll likely become disappointed at a small hurdle and quit too soon
Get help from an online coaching and mentoring program here.
Love The Journey
The affiliate marketing journey is a long one which is paved with many problems and adversities! Unless you have a growth mindset which is focused on empowering yourselffrom this journey, you’ll likely decide that it’s way too hard! Although money is generally the main goal from an affiliate marketing business, the self improvement aspect of it is arguably the more important part!
Align yourself with your products and promotion methods and enjoy the journey. This should mean you can sustain longer periods of focus and intention in your affiliate business.
Once you find your path, you’ll stick to it much longer if you actually enjoy what you’re doing. For this reason it’s worth spending some time considering your values and deciding on the route which you’re best suited to. Depending on your financial situation and how much time you can give to your business, you might choose from several marketing methods to promote any product which you feel aligned with.
When you love the journey, you’re much more likely to stick it out. If you hate it, on the other hand, you’re more likely to quit.
Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products online. Anyone can learn how to become an affiliate and get paid for product referrals. Affiliates use all kinds of tactics and strategies to get their products in front of buying customers through their affiliate links. When someone buys something through an affiliate link, the referrer is credited for the sale. They will usually get paid a percentage of the sale value, according to the terms of the affiliate program.
Many affiliates will start out using Amazon’s affiliate program. Once you join, you get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can get your unique identifying link, or affiliate link. You can promote any of the thousands of products from the site once you have joined.
Selling Other People’s Products Online – Products
Despite Amazon being so popular with new affiliates, it’s not the best paying affiliate program you can use for product referrals. Amazon’s commission structure runs from 1% to 20% with most products falling into the 3-10% commission range.
So, if you promote (and sell) an affiliate product worth around $100, you can earn as little as $3 per sale. This means you need to make many sales in order to make a good income from your affiliate marketing business.
On the other hand, a product sale can be worth much more if you choose to promote high ticket affiliate products or subscription affiliate products. Even digital products will pay more per sale than most physical products (typically 30-40%). So you should choose your products wisely before rushing into affiliate marketing.
An example of a high ticket affiliate product. As an affiliate you can earn 8% commission by selling The Helicycle!
Subscription products are good for affiliates because they can earn ongoing commissions from each sale they make. So with what is often the same amount of work, you can earn substantially more just by choosing the right products to promote.
Selling Other People’s Products Online – Promotion Methods
There’s many ways in which affiliates promote other people’s products online to earn commissions. Here’s a few of the most common methods:
Blogging and content – this article is an example of a blog post
Video content – Many affiliates upload videos to YouTube or TikTok to generate website traffic either through paid marketing or organically
Social media – there’s many social media sites you can use to generate traction for an affiliate business by finding suitable people for your products
Email marketing – most successful affiliates will have an email list where they can contact their subscribers “en-mass” on a regular basis
Paid marketing – Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest and most scalable methods used by affiliates
Landing pages – many affiliates build landing pages to collect subscribers by offering a giveaway offer
SEO – search engine optimisation is used to generate traffic from the search engines and is used with content generation (e.g. blogging/video blogging)
Not all affiliates use the same methods (or products) to build their online businesses. Some will build a shop and direct website traffic to Amazon products. Others will build an email list and sell digital products. However, whatever your method you won’t get far with affiliate marketing without traffic (website visitors). So every affiliate needs to learn a strategy whereby they can attract their target audience in order to sell products to the most appropriate visitors they can find!
Selling Other People’s Products Online: Target Audience
The target audience is a particularly important thing to understand for affiliates because they can place their marketing message in front of a global online audience -i.e. everyone! Most people don’t want whatever it is you have to sell. But a small sub-section of global online traffic will be interested in buying your product/s. That is the target audience for your particular product. By getting to know your “perfect” customer, or customer avatar, you’re much better prepared for success as an affiliate.
You can define your target audience by their online browsing characteristics, their age, location, interests etc. Basically, the more you understand your customer avatar, they more focused you can be on targeting them specifically with your marketing messages. You are also better able to communicate in an effective way with people you know and understand.
Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Google Ads can all be used with very specific targeting, so as to place your ads in front of the right kind of visitors according to keywords, location, age, interests and a number of other demographics according to the product you are selling.
Competition & Training
Selling other people’s products online should be fairly straight forward. However there’s many other affiliates who are building websites and running advertising and this means there’s a lot of competition for advertising space online. Therefore many affiliates will struggle finding customers for their products and give up too early! The best thing you can do if you want to be successful as an affiliate is invest in learning the skills you will need to actually sell your products: marketing!
The route you take with your marketing will often depend on your marketing budget, choice of products and the available time you have every day to work on your business. Affiliate marketing gives you a lot of flexibility and you can build an affiliate business around an existing job.
Lead gen affiliate marketing is an abbreviation of lead generation affiliate marketing. What is lead generation in affiliate marketing? Lead generation for affiliate marketing typically refers to the collection of email details of online visitors. To attract an audience towards a lead generation page, (or landing page), the affiliate uses some form of marketing. So in order to generate leads for affiliate marketing you will need to have already attracted an audience. This might be from using any number of marketing methods:
Blogging or video blogging (organic content creation)
SEO – search engine optimisation
Paid marketing – PPC or pay per click direct response advertising
Lead generation is simple with Aweber and you can access for free!
Lead gen in affiliate marketing is often done from either a website, like this one, or a specific landing page. The advantage of using a purpose built landing page is that there are fewer options for visitors on a landing page than there are on a website. On a website, there’s many options for visitors to consider. Visitors can browse around and click through many pages on a website. On a landing page there are only two options: subscribe or leave. This means the affiliate can more easily optimise the marketing and landing page for lead generation.
Lead Gen Affiliate Marketing: The Landing Page & Driving Traffic
A landing page is a simple form with a go-to message, encouraging visitors to opt in to an email list for more information. Here’s an example of a landing page I recently created on one of my websites:
Marketing through video is useful because you can convey a lot of information in a short video. Whereas with written word, it can be more difficult to explain the same message. Some research suggests that over 80% of what we communicate is non-verbal, so you can understand why video marketing is so important for affiliates.
Customer Avatar & Targeting
Before a marketing strategy and message can be built upon, affiliates should get to know who it is that they are aiming their advertising at. When you understand this very well, your marketing is going to be much more effective. By getting to know your target audience for affiliate marketing, you can more easily place your messages in front of the right kinds of people and speak to them more personally about their particular problem. There’s millions of people on the internet. Targeting everyone with your marketing will likely lead to not selling anything! Sell to everyone and you sell to no one. Why? Because not everyone wants the remedy for corns on their feet, or to build an online business.
As an affiliate, getting to understand your customer avatar is an important factor in audience targeting.
Marketers understand this and so instead of sending their advertising out to everyone on the internet, they target specific people who meet certain requirements. They first get to understand their customer avatar and know who they can serve the most with their products or services. The “customer avatar” is the “perfect customer”.
Certain people will gravitate towards certain products more than others. A DIY store might cater to mostly people who are over 30, for example. So trying to sell to people in their 20’s will likely waste a lot of advertising budget for a DIY store.
Why Use Lead Generation For Affiliate Marketing?
Why use lead generation for affiliate marketing then? Why not sell directly from a website? On a website, a visitor can browse around and look at whatever they want. But they usually only stick around for a few minutes, before they leave forever! Since most website visitors won’t take any action, and research shows that most online customers will need 6-8 touch points before making a purchase, it’s a good idea to collect their details. This is often done on a website with some free giveaway offer, if it’s not done on a landing page. Once the affiliate has collected the email address of their visitor, they can follow up with email messages over a much longer period of time.
Affiliates can keep in touch with potential customers once they have their details. On a website, they only have a few minutes to “close the sale”. But with email marketing, affiliates can send out emails weeks, months and even years after the visitor has signed up to the affiliate’s email list. Traffic is also hard to come by and you need to either earn traffic through content creation or pay for it. But with email marketing, you can compile a list of interested subscribers who you can then send directly to your offers and products. The ability to control your traffic is worth a lot. Plus, you can build trust with your subscribers over a longer time period. This is something you can’t do on a website.
Other Ways To Collect Leads
There’s multiple ways in which affiliates collect leads to build their email list and you can do this from a website or landing page. This website blog is a source of traffic and leads for me. As you can see, there’s a couple of options to sign up on the website. Pop ups and drop down banners are a good way to engage with your website visitors. Although annoying, they work and let people know what you are offering!
Many affiliates will use landing page software too which lets them more easily cross test their landing pages to help optimise their opt in rates. See also free leads for affiliate marketing for more on this topic.
Looking for a high profit business low investment opportunity? One of the best business models you can use is the affiliate marketing business model. Affiliates join programs and promote other people’s products online. Anyone can use the model to earn money from the sale of other people’s products and services world-wide. Due to the automation and scale you can use with affiliate marketing it offers potentially unlimited profit while at the same time it’s also a very low investment opportunity.
Amazon, for instance is one of the most popular affiliate platforms. Anyone can join Amazon’s partner program, get an affiliate link and promote it to earn money. They can even do this absolutely free. The most important tools for affiliate marketing is a laptop and internet connection, which many people already have. Besides that investment the best investment you can make with affiliate marketing is in your training. It’s definitely worth paying for some training with affiliate marketing and properly educating yourself because around 95% of affiliates don’t succeed! This, in part, is due to the low barriers to entry and the fact that pretty much anyone can “give it a go”!
High Profit Business Low Investment: What Do Affiliates Do?
There’s many ways to promote affiliate products online and many different products you can choose from. Your choice of promotion method and products (more on this later) plays an important part in whether you’re successful or not! The main promotion methods which affiliates use to promote products online are:
Content creation: blogging, video blogging, etc.
PPC – pay per click direct marketing, using ad platforms such as Google Adwords
To grow and scale an affiliate business quickly, you should focus your attention on the most scalable marketing strategy: paid marketing. With paid marketing, once you’re in profit, you can simply turn up the marketing budget to sell more products. The skill therefore is testing and measuring ads to find a profitable one. This can take some time. A slower less scaleable marketing strategy (but cheaper) is to create content through blogging or creating videos, for example.
High Profit Business Low Investment: Products
There’s many different types of products you can promote as an affiliate too! Some products pay much more than others and some even pay recurring income. The highest paying products (high ticket products) are well worth focusing your time on because one sale can pay as much as selling hundreds (or even thousands) of lower valued products. This means you can profit from fewer sales, if you choose the right products.
Subscription affiliate products carry ongoing membership fees and many of these offer ongoing recurring commissions for affiliates. These are obviously a good idea too, because they help affiliates build a consistent income from sales much more quickly.
Top affiliates think big and focus on finding products which are super valuable and offer both high ticket commissions and recurring commissions. A valuable product will be potentially used for the lifetime of the customer, so if they carry a recurring commission, this is obviously very good for the referrers of these products. Products such as business tools and software for online businesses are incredibly valuable because they help people to earn a living. Once someone is profitable using these tools, they are more likely to maintain their memberships.
A good example of such a tool is Aweber, which is an email autoresponder used by affiliate marketers and many other businesses. It lets affiliates build a huge list of subscribers and promote their affiliate products simultaneously to thousands of people at once. Using paid marketing and an email autoresponder in conjunction with each other is one of the best ways to build a lucrative online business. If you also choose high ticket product range, which includes the use of subscription products, you’re giving yourself the best change for success! See best products to sell as an affiliate.
Summary
A high profit business low investment opportunity might be any kind of e-commerce business. However, affiliate marketing is one of the most potentially profitable and easiest business models to use for anyone entering the space with no previous experience. That’s not to say affiliate marketing is easy, but the barrier to entry makes it affordable for most people. If you treat it seriously, as a serious business, affiliate marketing can be very lucrative, even for little investment and training.
Still, you should expect to work for several months building your business before you can expect a return, according to your products, marketing budget and time invested. For more information, checkout this free video series.
Can you really get free leads for affiliate marketing? There’s two main ways to get leads as an affiliate. You can either pay for leads or earn them! To get a lead you need an email autoresponder which allows you to collect email subscribers from a website or web page. You can get one for free here.
If you don’t have a website, it’s well worth building a website which you own. If you want free leads, it’s worth looking at my article on how to build a niche website. A niche website can help you attract traffic for free. Traffic is the most important element of attracting free leads. Without traffic you won’t attract any leads.
Free Website/Landing Page
If you want a free website to use for leads, you can use Weebly.com. Weebly lets you build a simple website for free and place a lead capture form on it. However, a Weebly website address looks less professional than your own domain name, so it’s worth getting your own domain and hosting if you’re serious about free leads.
Inside Weebly.com, grab your form code from Aweber and use the Embed Code module to place on your new website. Publish, and hey presto you have a landing page!
If you’re using Weebly, for a free site, I would suggest to at least buy a domain name which you can point to your Weebly website. That way, as you use the methods described in this article, you’ll look more attractive to your prospective visitors. Still, many people use Weebly to great effect and you don’t have to spend anything!
You can also use Aweber to create a landing page too, although your link will often look long and messy so it’s worth purchasing a domain name to forward to it to make it look more professional.
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Capture Form
Your lead capture form is an important part of this process and that’s the page visitors will see when they come to your page to enter their details. Your page should communicate your most important message in simple terms and focus on the benefits rather than the features of whatever you’re offering. Here’s a lead capture form I have used to collect emails:
The features of your offering might be interesting for you (the affiliate) but mostly won’t be of interest to your would-be subscribers! If they are going to hand over their email address and give you their trust, you need to focus on WIIFM: What’s In It For Me – or for them, (your visitors)! Therefore your landing page should have a clear benefit driven call to action. It’s worth doing some research on this topic because a good landing page will convert many more visitors into subscribers than a bad one! See also why use landing pages.
The best way to find your best performing landing page is to run paid marketing to one and test it for yourself. Cross test different landing pages using differing images, titles, colours and forms etc. But of course this involves spending money and this article is about free leads for affiliate marketing. There’s also software you can purchase which will help you determine the best performing landing page for your target audience.
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Blogging
You can get free leads for affiliate marketing through blogging. However, don’t expect much too quickly. It can take months of blogging before you “break through” and start seeing organic traffic coming to your blog. Even then, much of your traffic won’t convert into subscribers. A very small percentage of your traffic will likely convert into leads. For more about blogging checkout my article niche blogging for profit.
To convert traffic from a blog into leads you can use lead capture forms and pop ups, which you can find on Aweber. Pop ups are good for collecting leads because they ensure everyone who lands on your website sees your offer. You have probably been annoyed by the popup on this website already!? Even though I hate popups too, they are a great way to collect leads for free from a website.
Pop Ups, drop downs and standard opt in forms are all useful to collect leads and the more options you have on your site, the more chances a visitor will opt in. Another good plugin I use for opt ins is called Icegram (By Icegram). It’s a free plugin for WordPress and offers multiple op in offers for websites. I use Icegram opt ins on this website and you’ve probably seen the drop down webinar offer I use for free opt ins?
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Ebooks & Pdf’s
Ebooks are a great lead magnet for affiliates. Your ebook should lead the right kind of people into your email list. Ideally create an ebook which matches your affiliate products in some way. Once you have created your ebook, set up your landing page or website to showcase it to all visitors. I have used multiple ebooks to get many leads. Once you have created an ebook, you can also build content around your landing page to attract traffic organically. Pdf’s are also a great thing to offer on your website because they typically have much lower competition on the search engines.
Here’s an ebook I offer which has helped me get thousands of leads for free just by putting it on my blog:
Free Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Traffic
So we have so far mentioned landing pages, popups and just touched on blogging. The key ingredient in getting free leads for affiliate marketing is getting your offer in front of people who are interested in it! Firstly you should get to know your customer avatar. This is an important step and can save you heaps of time and frustration if you do this. Do yourself a favour and checkout the article on target audience for affiliate marketing and the customer avatar worksheet pdf. Understanding who it is who will want what you have got will save you a lot of time and wasted effort.
There’s a few ways to generate traffic to your website or landing page for free. Blogging, YouTube videos, social media websites etc are all platforms where you can find your target audience from. To get free leads you need to trade time focusing on activities which bring people to your landing page/website. Unfortunately this takes time and effort, but your efforts will compound if you stick with it for long enough! Here’s a few basic free strategies you can use to drive traffic to your website or landing page:
Blogging
Quora.com
Facebook
YouTube
SEO – Search engine optimisation
Blogging
Blogging, as mentioned is a long term and slow strategy. But you can get some great results with it if you get clear on who you’re targeting with your posts. I love blogging and have made it a focus on my free lead generation strategy. But it did take some time before results started to come in regularly, so you need a long term approach. the best way to stick at it for long enough to matter is to choose a topic you’re interested in, or passionate about. Ideally both! If you can’t imagine writing blog posts about your topic for at least a few months, it’s probably not the topic for you!
To find suitable blog posts for my potential leads I use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. By typing in your main keywords you can find the “low hanging fruit” of keywords which offer much less competition on the search engines. If you do your homework, these little “gems’ can give you free rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. When you get free listings you get free traffic. Checkout my article on this strategy here. Blogging is a huge topic and you can do a lot with the content you have created too:
Link building
Sharing on social media sites
SEO – search engine optimisation
Posting on question and answer websites
Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer website that allows anyone to answer questions in their field of expertise. For affiliates this means you can attract free traffic and send that traffic to your landing page or website. You can set up you bio on Quora in such a way as to draw people to your landing page, where you can collect their email address. Here’s what my bio looks like on Quora.com:
Again, as previously mentioned, your CTA (call to action) needs to be focused on the benefits of your offer.
Once you have set up your bio, you need to attract traffic to it! You can do this by getting active on the platform and answering questions which are associated with problems your customer avatar might be having.
As you answer questions, you can also link your answers to relevant content you have created on a website. This gives you two possible opportunities of attracting leads: from your website and from your bio. The more questions you answer in your niche, the more people will see your bio and links. You can’t however directly link to affiliate products in your answers. If you do, you’ll likely have your answers deleted. See also affiliate marketing on Quora for more on this strategy.
Facebook
Facebook is another platform which can be used to attract traffic to your landing page/website. You can set up your Facebook profile to showcase your offer. Here’s what mine looks like:
Once you have set up your bio, you need to attract the kind of people who will be likely to have an interest in your offer. Again, check back to your customer avatar worksheet pdf to learn about who your “perfect customers” are! Where do they hang out on Facebook? Facebook has a number of groups you can join where you can find new people and interact with them around specific topics. So for example if you’re promoting some kind of fitness product, you might start looking for weight loss groups, or fitness groups of some kind.
Ask to join the groups by filling out any questions and agreeing to the spam terms etc. Once you join a group you can interact with other group members around certain topics of interest. Don’t spam groups with your affiliate links or websites! This will likely get you banned! Instead, interact with people naturally and get involved in the conversation. Make a habit of this and spend some time every day in the groups. Over time, people will naturally look at your profile and see your offer. See also unpaid social media marketing.
YouTube: Organic Marketing
You can also use YouTube for marketing your content organically. This is done in much the same way as blogging, only with video. research your keywords first and find longer tail keywords for your video titles which have less competition. YouTube is pretty competitive too and you’ll need to upload videos regularly for some considerable time to generate free traffic from the platform. But once you do you can send traffic to your landing page or website by linking to it on each of your videos.
Again the best topic to choose is one in which you have an interest or passion and one which you can maintain your enthusiasm in over the longer term.
Summary
Obviously there’s a few strategies you can use here and you can’t do them all at once in any great depth. You will probably gravitate towards a particular strategy and if so that’s where you should aim to focus your time. These strategies won’t give you tonnes of leads overnight.
They only work over time and you’ll likely see sporadic results at first, which should compound over time. Pick a strategy you like and stick to it for several weeks, working on it every day. Depending on your affiliate niche, the time it takes will vary. Make sure you do the work on your landing page and make your offer desirable, otherwise you’ll find it more difficult getting leads.
Spend some time learning about your customer avatar and the type of person you want to attract. I’ve had some great results using these techniques but if you don’t put in the work you can’t expect to get the results! Paid marketing is of course much faster and more scaleable. So if you don’t have the patience for these kinds of strategies you should look at some cheap methods using paid marketing. Retargeting organic traffic is quite cheap and you can also use Google’s dynamic ads which works well in combination with blogging and organic marketing.
Welcome to the 15 day challenge affiliate marketing step by step foundation process. In this challenge you will be working through a free video series and then accessing an affiliate platform where you’ll complete a number of training videos. Let’s have a look at the first step of the challenge!
15 Day Challenge Affiliate Marketing: Step 1
To get started on this affiliate marketing challenge, you first need to sign up to the free video series. This is so you can start working through the videos. Click on the image below to do this and complete step 1:
Once you’ve filled out the form and entered your name an email address, head over to your inbox and check for the message you’ve been sent. You may need to look in your promotions tab and/or spam filters to find the message.
15 Day Affiliate Marketing Challenge: Step 2
Once you find the email in your inbox, have a read through and click on the link in it. This will take you through to your first training video:
This first video is 30 minutes long and completes day 1 of the 15 day affiliate marketing challenge! If you’ve not done this yet, click here to access the course.
15 Day Affiliate Marketing Challenge: Day 2
On day 2 you should find another email in your inbox which will arrive at around the same time as you signed up for the first video. Check your inbox and spam filters if you can’t find the email. Once you’ve found it, click on the link in the email and play the video:
This video is 43 minutes long and will give you an overview of the different affiliate business models you can use. For example, by choosing to sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products you can considerably improve your results as an affiliate, even with the same amount of effort as you would need selling low value products.
15 Day Affiliate Marketing Challenge: Day 3
On day 3 check your inbox again and you should find the third video in the series. Workshop 3 covers sourcing and selling physical products online.
This video is 36 minutes and will explain some of the ways you can earn from the internet without investment using existing products. By choosing products and services around an interest or hobby you might have, you can even earn doing something you’re passionate about.
15 Day Affiliate Marketing Challenge: Day 4
Day 4 : guess what!? Check your inbox for the next email in the series which will lead you to video 4:
This video is 30 minutes long. Here you will learn more about Stuart’s online community The Modern Wealthy. Once you have completed the video click on the button underneath it and start your journey! If you haven’t started yet, you can sign up for the videos here.
15 Day Affiliate Marketing Challenge: Day 5
It’s day 5 of the 15 day affiliate marketing challenge! Today is the day to sign up to The Modern Wealthy affiliate portal and work through the training videos and action steps. You can do that by clicking here or on the image below:
This will take you to a sign up page (See below) where you can access a free account and start learning about how you can grow a profitable online business from scratch.
Day 6
Once inside the platform you will find a number of action steps to work through. Here’s some of what’s included:
The step for day 6 is to make a start on the steps which you’ll see in your dashboard once you’re inside. Step 1 is to download and read the ebook.
Day 7-15: Join The Modern Wealthy Facebook Group & Work Through Remaining Steps
Click on the link in your platform for step 2 and this will take you to The Modern Wealthy Facebook group. Inside the group you’ll be able to interact with other members and introduce yourself.
Follow the steps until you have completed all the modules. In step 4 you can schedule a free call with a consultant. They will help you decide on a further route if appropriate to help you get started with your online business needs.
Complete the bonuses and begin the best live blueprint to complete the challenge! Finished? Congratulations, give yourself a pat on the back for following through and staying the course! Not started yet? Shame on you, go back to step 1 and join the free video series here or access the portal here !
