AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which third party referrers earn commissions by recommending other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and using their unique identifying link (affiliate link) to promote products and services online.

Amazon, for example has one of the most popular affiliate programs. Anyone can join the program to promote any of the many products on Amazon’s website. Once you have joined, you get access to your partner program portal where you can find your affiliate link. An affiliate link is basically a unique identifying link which tracks sales back to the person who has referred the sale.

Affiliate marketing is becoming a very popular model for earning an income online because you don’t need any experience to start and you don’t need any products or services of your own to sell.

There’s also more people shopping online than ever before and the traditional economy is being replaced by the digital economy as more people using the internet rather than visiting physical stores.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

Once an affiliate has joined an affiliate program, they can promote a product through their affiliate link. This can be done in many ways but most affiliates will choose an online promotion method to get people to click on their link. They can of course advertise in any way they want, including off-line traditional advertising methods. Here’s a few of the most popular affiliate marketing strategies:

Blogging – Creating written content online is a cheap and effective way to put your products in front of a targeted audience
Email marketing – affiliates build huge email lists by giving something away in exchange for a visitor’s email on a website.
PPC – pay per click marketing is one of the most popular methods of building an email list or simply driving traffic to affiliate offers
Social media – many affiliates leverage their social media account to get people to their products.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing, it can take some time to get off the ground and make your first sale. Long term affiliates who have been at it for several years have often built huge followings and can therefore sell many products quite easily; particularly if they have a huge email list of subscribers.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work? Types Of Products

There’s many types of affiliate products available to sell and although many new affiliates start out with Amazon, there’s many other platforms you can join. Clickbank.com for example is another popular platform for beginner affiliates and they can choose from thousands of digital products from the site. Although digital products can be more tricky to sell than physical products, they pay larger commissions for referrers. Typically a physical product will pay between 5-10% commission, whereas a digital product will pay more like 30-40% commission.

If you’re considering becoming an affiliate, it’s also worth considering high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate programs. A “high ticket” product carries a much larger price tag and therefore will pay out much larger commissions to an affiliate when they make a sale. Most high ticket items will pay out $500 or more in commissions whereas low value products will often pay out less than $40 per sale you make.

Subscription products are things such as memberships and software products. These are beneficial for affiliates who promote them because they can earn ongoing commissions from each sale they generate. While most affiliate products only pay you once, subscription affiliate programs pay you a recurring income. So if you choose to promote them, you can more easily obtain a regular source of income once you have learned how to sell.

Content Creation Vs. Paid Advertising

Most affiliate marketers will choose between two categories of advertising: paid marketing or content creation. They can of course do a bit of both too! Paid marketing is often used to either build an email list from a landing page or website, or send traffic directly to affiliate offers. While paid marketing is more expensive than content creation, it offers a much faster way of getting traction with an affiliate business. Paid marketing is also much more scalable than content generation because once a winning ad has been set up, you can leave it running and scale up quickly just by increasing your advertising budget. See also how to scale affiliate marketing.

Content marketing, while cheaper, is a much slower form of marketing. Content creators will use blogging, video content or some other form of content to draw an audience towards their affiliate products. They often spend several months building content which attracts free traffic via the search engines. Search engines such as Google reward content creators with free traffic. But it can be competitive and depending on your particular topic/niche, this can take some time and effort.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties refer people to products and services online. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer by joining an affiliate program, getting their affiliate link, and learning how to sell products through their link.

The hard part of affiliate marketing is attracting enough of the right kind of people to your affiliate link in order to make regular sales.

Once you understand how to do this, you can repeat it, automate the process and scale up to an ever growing global audience. This can mean potentially unlimited earnings can be made from affiliate marketing.

However, this outcome isn’t typical and around 95% of affiliates will quit. The top 5% are the ones who go on to create a “lifestyle business” giving them financial and geographical freedom.

If you’re ready to start your own affiliate business, access this free video series to learn more.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing

Are you wondering how to succeed in affiliate marketing? Perhaps you’re struggling to make any sales? As a beginner you are besieged by different marketers all trying to sell you something. You probably have signed up to many email lists? Do you have constant conflicting information landing in your inbox? This can be overwhelming and very difficult to navigate.

The beginning phase of affiliate marketing is complicated by the various messages you will get from the many affiliates out there. Getting a clear idea of what you are doing is therefore the best thing you can do to get a good foundation for success. It is therefore information that is king as a beginner affiliate. The wrong information can send you down a rabbit hole for many months, getting you nowhere!

A solid and realistic expectation is another important issue. If your expectations are too high, you’ll likely quit when things don’t go as expected. If they are too low, you likely won’t even start! Managing your expectations and following a solid route in affiliate marketing are two of the most important factors. These are of course mental issues rather than practical considerations. But unless you get your head right, you’re more likely to fail as an affiliate like the 95% of those who attempt it.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Why Many Fail

When you understand that around 95% of affiliate marketers quit, you will know that it takes more than most are capable of to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Just knowing this prepares you and should give you an idea that affiliate marketing is not at all easy! But why do so many quit? Affiliate marketing is an incredibly easy business to get into. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection to become an affiliate. Join any of the many affiliate partner programs out there and wham, you’re an affiliate.

That hard part of affiliate marketing isn’t joining a program, although some programs can give you a challenge; particularly if they require you to have a large following or a huge email list etc. But most programs only require you to fill out a form to become an affiliate. You get your affiliate link and hey presto, you’re ready to go! But the next step is the difficult one; promoting your affiliate link and successfully making a sale!

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and most affiliates will focus on promoting their affiliate link online, although you can use any form of advertising as an affiliate – online or offline. The most popular methods involve either content creation (like this article), or paid advertising; using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube etc.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Knowing Your Audience

Most new affiliates don’t bother to understand their target audience. They run off in high spirits, thinking that spamming their links everywhere will result in many sales. Sadly this don’t normally happen. What happens instead is that they don’t make any sales at all, and wonder why. That’s around the time most will pack up their bags and declare that “affiliate marketing does not work“!

The reason they fail isn’t that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. It’s more that they don’t yet understand affiliate marketing. If only it were so easy, more people would be flocking to it in ever greater numbers!

Target Audience

target market in affiliate marketing — Your target audience in affiliate marketing is the small sub-section of the online marketplace which is best suited for your particular products or service

When you better understand your target audience, you are better able to place your link in front of them in a meaningful way. An example of this might be a product review. A review is where I made my first online sale. Review websites work well for affiliates because they attract an audience who is in the last step of the buying cycle. They are looking for a review because they are wanting to make a purchase. They only want some small insight to know whether the product will fit their requirements. Then they make a purchase – hopefully through your affiliate link.

Once you better understand your target audience and get to know your “perfect” customer avatar, you are better able to focus on a marketing method which attracts them to your affiliate products.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Product Choice

Your product choice has a lot to do in whether you are successful as an affiliate. Some products are better than others and if you rush into affiliate marketing and pick a random product to promote, chances are good that you’ll struggle. A good product sells itself and a bad product will never sell, however good a marketer you are! Some products pay much more than others too. Take Amazon for an example which typically pays out around 5-10% commission on products, (although it’s commission structure runs from 1% to 20%). Digital products pay much more – from 30-40% in many cases.

Certain products will pay high ticket commissions and then there are those which pay out recurring commissions. If you can make a sale as an affiliate, it’s worth focusing on those products which will pay out the most; since often the same effort is required in either case.

Marketing Strategy, Method & Marketing Budget

Your marketing strategy and method are arguably the most important factors in whether you’re going to be successful as an affiliate. Choose the wrong marketing strategy, (or give up too soon), and you will struggle. Most affiliates who quit haven’t necessarily chosen the wrong marketing method – more likely they have simply given up too soon.

Since affiliate marketing is a numbers game, the more people you put your products in front of the more will buy. While there’s an obvious targeting alignment issue to deal with, it’s also about getting more eyes on your affiliate link as well as the right kind of people.

A cheaper strategy such as blogging will likely take much longer than a fast method such as paid marketing to attract a large audience. So whatever method you choose for getting people to your affiliate products, you need to consider the appropriate timescale for doing it successfully. A blog will take many months or even years to gain traction with, depending on your topic; while a large marketing budget can see you selling products very quickly with the right message and targeting.

Fail Forwards (Failures Are Stepping Stones)

There’s a saying within the affiliate marketing space as “fail forwards” which simply means you learn from your failures. If you’re too scared to fail, perhaps affiliate marketing isn’t for you. Failures aren’t really failures either. When a small child falls over while learning to walk, they never give up saying “well, walking just isn’t for me”! They keep getting back up and trying again. With affiliate marketing you need this same philosophy. Each small failure is a stepping stone in which you can learn something to make you a better affiliate.

With a small list of subscribers, you might get really upset that you aren’t making any sales. But consider this “phase” the same as a child learning to walk. Most affiliates will quit long before they get even 1000 subscribers on their email list. Affiliate success is there for those who refuse to quit whatever happens and continue on, learning from the problems and difficulties they face.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

If you’re still wondering how to succeed with affiliate marketing, consider this analogy. A good analogy I like for affiliate marketing is the Chinese bamboo tree. A Chinese bamboo tree has a gestation period where nothing breaks the surface of the soil for 4-5 years. During this time, if you didn’t know the nature of the tree, you might assume that it has died! But if you continue watering it and feeding it, after the gestation period the tree can grow to be 90 feet tall in just five weeks time!

Like the Chinese bamboo, affiliate marketing has a gestation period where you struggle and learn. But once you understand it better and get things running in your affiliate business, you can see very quick gains if you’re prepared to go through the difficulties in the beginning.

Access a free video series here to get help and support and get started with your affiliate business today.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing

It is possible to completely autopilot affiliate marketing which is a good reason to become an affiliate. With the affiliate marketing business model, third parties refer customers to products online. They don’t need to personally own the products themselves or even deal with customers.

The systems and processes of selling online can be automated completely. Although some affiliate strategies are faster and more effective than others, there’s several ways you can do this as an affiliate:

Blogging – A digital “asset” can be built which grows in size over time. Ultimately online content can sell your products for you.
PPC – Pay per click marketing can be used to send customers directly to affiliate products or to a landing page where an email list can be built.
Email marketing – Email marketing is a very effective way in which affiliates sell their products on autopilot. The bigger the list, the more you can sell.
Social media – Many automated processes can be used through social media marketing too, both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.
SEO – search engine optimisation can be used to generate traffic to affiliate offers.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Methods

To become an affiliate marketer you only need to join an affiliate program. You’ll then get access to your unique affiliate link. This link is your referral link which is tracked back to you when a sale is made. The next step is to learn how to promote your affiliate link.

There’s many ways to do this and your strategy will depend on your circumstances and marketing budget. For example, if you’re working in a busy job, you might choose to run paid advertising to build your business. If you aren’t tied to a full time job, you can use your time to build a digital “asset”. You might choose blogging or video blogging, for example.

Your affiliate marketing business model has some say in your marketing methods too. If you are selling low value affiliate products from Amazon, for example, this can limit your ability to run paid advertising. But if you have a high paying program with recurring income, you are much more able to profit with paid ads.

The method you choose to promote your affiliate products will determine the timescale with which you’re likely to create an autopilot affiliate marketing business. Paid marketing is faster, but obviously more expensive. It’s also more scalable than content creation, which can take a lot longer.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing: Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best resources you can use as an affiliate marketer to automate your business. Whether you use paid marketing or content creation to build an affiliate business, email marketing can help you. Email marketing is a strategy in which affiliates collect emails from a website or landing page.

aweber - automating an affiliate business

By offering some kind of free giveaway to visitors, affiliates can collect emails and build a list of subscribers. On this website for example, I give away a free video series to subscribers. They join my list to access the free videos and I follow up with useful emails which help subscribers with a specific problem: (making money online). I also promote affiliate products which I’ve found helpful to me and earn a commission when someone buys something from my list.

The email list is such a powerful tool for a couple of main reasons:

It gives you more time to communicate with your subscribers than you could possible do from a website alone.
You can built trust by offering value, entertainment and insight.
Statistics show that most online customers will need several touch points before they make a purchase. This is more possible with a list than a website.
You can control your flow of traffic better when you own the list. Otherwise you rely on SEO, link building and/or paid traffic for potential customers. Either way it costs either time or money, or both. A list puts you in control of your traffic.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Fast & Slow

The fastest way to make with affiliate marketing is through using a high ticket sales funnel and running paid advertising. To qualify for the highest levels of commission with a high ticket sales funnel you will usually need to invest in the products yourself. Then there’s an investment in learning marketing, which can take some time. So this method of building an affiliate business might suit someone who wants to escape their 9 to 5 job/career.

autopilot affiliate marketing sales funnel

This method of building an affiliate business is fast and scalable, but still not without a fair amount of sacrifice. Many affiliates quit because they don’t realise the time and commitment they need to invest upfront, before they can benefit from the commissions! With high ticket products and subscription products you can earn more than average on sales you generate and recurring income from subscriptions.

A slower but cheaper method of building an online income from affiliate marketing is through content creation. Blogging, for example is a much longer term strategy which can take weeks, months or even years of work before you start generating a passive income from it. However, once you have built the content you can continue to earn from it potentially for years afterwards. So depending on your situation and available time, you should choose wisely! Of course you can do a bit of both paid marketing and content creation. See also 22 ways of promoting affiliate products for some other methods.

Summary

Anyone can build an autopilot affiliate marketing income by selling other people’s products and services online. To do so isn’t easy and it will take some serious commitment however.

By choosing the right products and services to promote, and finding a marketing strategy which suits you, you are giving yourself the best chance of success.

Access a training program here to get started with your affiliate business today!

Automated Income Online

Can you really make an automated income online which can replace an existing job or career? One of the best ways to do this is through using a business model known as affiliate marketing. By selling other people’s products and services online, anyone can earn an income on complete autopilot. Online purchases are dramatically overtaking the traditional economy and this trend has been given a massive boost over the last couple of years.

Affiliates are third party referrers who get paid commissions for product referrals online. They don’t own the products and services themselves but can make an income through recommending them.

Anyone can become an affiliate and one of the most popular affiliate websites is Amazon, which offers thousands of products you can refer for a percentage of the sale value.

Automated Income Online: Affiliate Marketing

To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program. Once inside an affiliate program you will be able to access a unique identifying link. You use your link to promote the product through. When someone makes a purchase through your identifying link (affiliate link) you are credited with the sale and earn a commission.

There’s many ways in which affiliates can promote their link. Whether they are successful or not depends on how they promote their products and the products they choose to promote. Not all affiliate programs are equal of course and some pay more than others. With Amazon, the commission levels range from 1% all the way up to 20% depending on the category of item you choose to promote. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commissions.

There’s other kinds of products you can promote as an affiliate too, and you don’t need to choose physical products. There’s thousands of digital products which affiliates will promote too. These typically pay much more; often from 20-40% commission on certain items. You can find a lot of digital products on the site Clickbank.com.

Automated Income Online: Product Promotion

Not all affiliate marketers are successful at generating an automated income online though. Something like 95% of new affiliates will quit so that statistic shows that affiliate marketing isn’t easy! With more people becoming affiliates all the time, there’s growing competition. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet; to give some perspective of just one marketing strategy which affiliates use. Within the next few years this number will be significantly higher!

Not all affiliates use blogging as their strategy though and there’s many ways to promote affiliate products. Here’s just a few of the strategies which affiliates use to sell their products online:

PPC – pay per click (paid marketing)
YouTube
TikTok
Social media
Email marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation

Because there’s a huge range of products to sell as an affiliate, you can promote a wide variety of products in almost any area. Some topics are obviously more competitive than others and these tend to be the most lucrative niches.

Automated Income Online: Best Tactics

The best tactics to make an automated income online are those which can be scaled up to a large global audience very quickly and run on virtual autopilot continuously. One of the best ways to do this is to choose to promote a high ticket sales funnel which contains multiple earning methods:

One time sales – only pay you once for a sale but are an important part of a good sales funnel
Subscription affiliate products – pay you over and over again for each individual sale. They are typically memberships and software type products
High ticket affiliate products – are those which pay much more than average and offer huge value to the customer. A good example is a personal training program which offers one to one tuition.

Here’s a video course run by a personal mentor of mine who explains the different types of products you can sell as an affiliate:

online autopilot income — OT = “one time”, S = Subscription, HT = High ticket affiliate product. Access video training here.

Using Scalable & Fast Marketing Strategies

The slow route to build an affiliate business is through creating a lot of content, or content marketing. With content marketing, you can build up your “portfolio” of content on a blog or YouTube channel, for example. Over time, the search engines should index your content and you will get found in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Although this is a notoriously slow method of going about selling online, you can benefit from passive income over time once you have built a lot of content. That content can keep working for you for years (or decades) after you’ve put the work in initially.

So although there’s a lot of work to do initially, this can pay off if you put the time in.

A much faster method of building an automated income online is through using a high ticket sales funnel and a paid marketing strategy. With a high ticket funnel, you can benefit from multiple products and recurring income affiliate products.

Initially with paid marketing you should tread with caution. You’ll be testing and measuring your advertising campaigns to find those which consistently produce a profit. This requires a bit of patience initially but ultimately this is a much faster way to build an automated income online. Once you know what you are doing, you can cut the ad campaigns which don’t work while scaling up those which are profitable. This can mean you can build a huge online business very quickly and benefit from the automation of selling products online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

Access this free video series to learn more and get started.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF

In this “all about affiliate marketing pdf“, I’m going to share some of the best insights I’ve come to understand in the last 10 plus years as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is a business first and foremost. Understanding that it’s a business, and not some magic bullet or get rich quick scheme is one of the best things to know first! When you understand this, you’re less likely to kid yourself and you’re not going to expect more in return that you’re putting out in effort!

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties share their affiliate links online in some way (generally online). When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. In many ways it’s like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Except with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend shows up and pays for a meal.

There’s many ways affiliates can promote their products online and there’s many products to choose from. Your choice of product and your ability to promote it are the two main reasons for success or failure as an affiliate. With a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing it’s reasonable to say that most people won’t become successful affiliates. When you understand why there’s a 95% drop out rate in the industry, you’re far better prepared than most for success.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Products

Before you set out on your affiliate marketing journey, you need to choose a product to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate programs out there, so which products do you choose to sell? Some people say choose products you have already bought yourself. That way you can genuinely talk about them and promote them authentically. If you haven’t bought a product yourself, how could you genuinely recommend them?

Many affiliates start out with a program they know about, such as Amazon. Amazon is one of the best known and most widely used affiliate programs out there and there’s a huge amount of products you can promote from the site. But Amazon’s commission rates are some of the lowest in the industry varying from just 1% commission on some of its products. See Amazon affiliate commission rates.

Clickbank.com is another favourite affiliate resource for new affiliates. With digital products there’s a better commission structure typically. Digital products often pay out from 20-50% commission in some cases. This is much higher than most physical products you can choose from. There’s also high ticket affiliate products you can promote. These pay out much larger commissions than average. Subscription affiliate programs too are worth knowing about. With a subscription product you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales you’ve made. This can make a dramatic difference in your bottom line as an affiliate quite quickly.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods

There’s many different ways to promote affiliate products and you can use both online and offline methods. Most affiliates will concentrate on the online methods but you can use any form of advertising available to you. One of the best forms of online advertising is one which can be quickly scaled up to a larger audience.

It’s easy to get into trouble as a new affiliate, believing you can throw some content out there and get some fast results (with a strategy such as blogging, for example). But with over 600 million blogs on the internet today, and growing fast, it’s incredibly difficult to compete. So it’s well worth educating yourself before you jump right in because otherwise it’s very easy to waste time and get nowhere – even with a lot of activity.

Promotion

Here’s a few of the most popular promotion methods which affiliates use to put their products in front of an audience:

PPC – pay per click marketing or direct marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Google Adwords or YouTube let marketers pay to place their ads in front of a targeted audience who are most likely to want their products.
Organic traffic through SEO (e.g. blogging/Video blogging)- methods such as content creation, blogging or video content can be used to attract search traffic from Google, Bing , YouTube and other search and social media platforms.
Social media – some affiliates focus solely on social media accounts to find potential customers for their affiliate products
Email marketing – most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and communicate their marketing message to their list. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods & Timescale

Many new affiliates choose a promotion method and run into problems when nothing happens! For example, blogging is a popular method of building an affiliate business but it takes a long time to reap the benefits from it. A blog might take several months or even years to come to fruition and start generating regular sales. But blogging is super cheap and even free to do, so it suits a lot of people who are trying to make money online. Because of this there’s a huge amount of competition for blogging. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

PPC Vs Organic Marketing

PPC or pay per click advertising is much, much faster. You can see the results of a pay per click campaign the same day as starting it! However, it costs money to run paid advertising campaigns with PPC, so it doesn’t suit everyone. Plus, many of your campaigns won’t work immediately either, so you can spend a lot of money just finding a winning advert. Many new affiliates will test multiple ads and give up before they find a winning one which returns a regular profit!

The good thing about running paid ad campaigns is that when you find a profitable campaign, you can keep running it and even scale it up, adding more funds to find more buyers. See also how to scale affiliate marketing. This is the fastest way to build an affiliate business but it also comes with some inherent potential problems. If your affiliate product is a low valued one, it’s much harder to profit while running paid ads. The margin for error is much smaller than if you have a high ticket sales funnel with multiple high value products in it. Using the highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commission will give you a much higher return on investment when running paid ads. So it’s advisable to do that instead of choosing low value physical products which can hardly recover your ad spend!

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience as an affiliate is one of the most important factors for success. Unless you can consistently place your products and services in front of buying customers, you won’t make it as an affiliate. The best way to do this is to learn about your audience. The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They are those people who will not only buy from you, but love what you do, what you stand for and become life long customers who buy again and again.

To determine who your customer avatar is, you can look at your existing customers and the people who you can help the most with your products/services. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf. These are some of the things you should know about your customers before running a marketing campaign:

How old they are
Where do they hang out online
What are their values
Where do they live
What are their needs
How can you serve them

The better you understand your customer avatar, the better able you are to place your marketing in front of them, but also communicate in a way that is meaningful to them; talking directly to their needs, pains, desires and aspirations. Understanding their audience is one of the most overlooked factors for beginner affiliates so this is worth spending some time on if you’re serious about being successful.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Customer Journey

The “customer journey” is another important element of understanding affiliate marketing. After you place your advertising material in front of your customer avatar, you want to encourage them to take a specific action, (on your website, for example).

For many affiliates this action is to sign up to their email marketing list. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to buy something which the affiliate is promoting. After that time the visitor leaves the site, usually never to return. But if you can capture the email address of a website visitor, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign over many more days, weeks and even months and years.

Research shows that most online visitors don’t become customers on their first visit to a website. In fact a visitor needs multiple “touch points” before they become a customer and makes a purchase. This is difficult to achieve from a website (or an advert) alone, and so most affiliates will build an email list to help with this.

“The Flow”

The “flow” from one piece of marketing material to another should keep your visitor engaged with a congruent theme. Too much disparity between your information will result in a disconnect where the visitor feels like the messages don’t match up. They click away and you’ve lost a subscriber, or a customer! Maintaining a congruent theme or idea allows the customer journey to follow through from one piece of marketing to another. The flow from an advert, to a landing page to your email follow up messages to the product is known as the customer journey; it’s the journey the customer takes to arrive at the end product. When you get this nice and smooth, you can consistently attract the right customers to your products.

Should one piece not fit with another, you may find your conversion rates are suffering. This might be because of a disconnect which needs to be fixed before you can maximise your marketing efficiency. See also affiliate marketing journey.

Email Marketing

It’s well worth using email marketing, whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate. With a website most of your visitors will leave without taking any action at all. But an email list can help you build a long term relationship with your website visitors if you can get them to sign up to your email list.

To build an email list you need an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders allow you to collect emails from a website and send automated messages to your subscribers. From a list, you can deliver value to your subscribers and help them with a specific problem. Over time (and after having helped your subscribers with a problem), you can build trust. Once people trust you online, you’ll have a much easier time trying to sell them products and services (if you’re genuinely helping them)!

Attraction Marketing

There’s tens of thousands of affiliate marketers online, many of whom are competing for the same space as you. To shine out you need to be better than most of them. You can do this by being of value and focusing on genuinely helping people rather than simply trying to sell them!

Many new affiliate marketers just try and sell and nobody wants to be sold! People are much more likely not to buy from pushy sales people, especially when they can find out more information for free from the internet.

To shine out online you need to be an affiliate who is value driven. By offering value you can build trust, instead of pushing people to products they don’t necessarily want or need.

Find products which offer the best value and which genuinely help people with their needs. A favourite example of a value driven affiliate website is the site Moneysavingexpert.com which was created by Martin Lewis. The site is an affiliate website, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s focused on providing huge value to its visitors and genuinely helps them with problems of finance, mortgages, bills, energy use, credit cards and debt.

Everything changed for me as an affiliate when I switched from trying to “get” to genuinely helping my readers/audience.

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

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online

What are the best ways to make passive income online? Making income passively can be done by creating automated online systems and strategies which sell other people’s products. One of the best ways to make passive income online is through the selling of other people’s products and services. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and you don’t need to deal with customers directly. You get paid by referring people to products online. There’s a few ways of doing this so that you can ultimately earn a passive income from your efforts:

Content creation – sell products through your online content
Email marketing – build an email list of subscribers and sell products to them
Automated websites – build niche websites which attract traffic naturally through SEO – search engine optimisation
PPC – paid marketing strategies can drive online traffic very quickly. Once you learn how to do this profitably, you can set it and forget it!

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online: Content Creation

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet today in 2022. This number is growing fast too because blogging is a simple way that anyone can earn an income through product referrals. Blogging is a long term solution to a passive income though and you’ll need a lot of content (and patience) to make money passively from a blog.

But it can be done and that’s what is so attractive about it! As your content grows and you start attracting an ever larger audience, you can send your visitors to relevant products and earn commissions from their sale. Blogging isn’t the only content creation method either. Many affiliate marketers use video to promote their products too. Content creation is therefore a fairly versatile way to make a passive income online.

You attract an audience through your content and promote relevant products to them. With enough content this can happen passively over time. Still, it takes a lot of effort to build a passive income using this method. Depending on the topic of your content, and the relative competition, this can take weeks, months or even years. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a favourite marketing strategy for most online marketers. It allows a marketer to build an email list of subscribers and promote products and services to them over a long period of time. On a website, a visitor only has a short period of time to make a buying decision. But once on an email list, this time period is dramatically extended.

Marketers can sell products to their email list even years after a subscriber has joined it.

An email autoresponder for affiliate marketing is a very effective marketing strategy and it’s also compatible with multiple different marketing strategies such as organic and PPC (pay per click) advertising.

So if you’re considering building an online income, you should definitely get an autoresponder.

Best Way To Earn Passive Income Online: Automated Websites

Websites can be used to promote and sell other people’s products to allow the owner to earn passively from them. There’s two main categories when it comes to generating traffic to a website and earning from it. You can either build a niche website which generates traffic organically, through creating content. Or you can run paid marketing towards a website and collect email subscribers/sell directly from your site.

To build a niche website which gets organic traffic for free will take a little more effort.

PPC – Pay Per Click (Paid Advertising)

If you’re running paid advertising, you can create a simple Google/Facebook compliant website and run visitors to it very quickly. Although this is more expensive, it’s much easier to scale a paid marketing campaign than it is to scale an organic one. See also paid vs organic traffic generation and scaling an affiliate business.

With a good affiliate business model, you can earn passively from subscription and high ticket products.

Subscription affiliate products in particular are useful for generating a passive income. With a subscription product you earn a passive income from each individual sale so long as your customer maintains their membership. Subscriptions and high ticket product funnels are the best to use if you want to build an online business quickly, and benefit from recurring commissions.

Why Use Landing Pages?

Why use landing pages? What is a landing page? A landing page is a web page which is specifically designed for a single purpose. Landing pages are used to get a visitor to perform a specific action, such as making a purchase or signing up to an email list.

On a website, a visitor can have a look around, click on many pages and generally look around. But on a landing page there is no navigation option. You can’t browse the website further and you have only two options: perform an action or leave.

Most landing pages are designed to collect an email subscriber but there are also landing pages which link to products sales pages too, or checkout carts. So a landing page is useful to marketers because it helps force a specific action.

Why Use Landing Pages: Conversions

A landing page will convert a visitor into a subscriber much more effectively than a website ever will. On a website, you can offer a very attractive opt in offer to your visitors. But because there is so much more to distract your visitors, the opt in rate of your form will likely be very low.

On a landing page, you only have two options as a visitor. You either sign up to the offer by inputting your name and email address, or you leave the site. This is much better for the marketer because they can measure the opt in rate and cross test similar landing pages to optimise for optimal performance.

Ultimately a landing page can convert 40% and above (of visitors to email subscribers) if it is well optimised. Whereas a normal website will likely only bring in a few percent of it’s visitors to your email list.

Landing pages can easily be copied too and this means you can run two different landing pages side by side to see which one performs the best. This is known as cross testing.

Why Use Landing Pages: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tactic used by online marketers to collect emails from a landing page and follow up with an email marketing campaign. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to look around and make a buying decision.

Research shows that most people need several contact points or touch points before they will buy something online. On a website, you only have a tiny window of opportunity to lead your visitor to a product to make a sale. Most won’t buy. But once you capture their email address, you can follow up with more messages and build a longer term relationship with them. This also gives you many more touch points to connect with your potential customers.

Email marketing works and most online business owners use it. To get leads more efficiently you need to use landing pages to help build your email list of subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.

Efficiency

The cost of advertising online is steadily rising as more as more marketers join the party! If you can’t afford to pay for your marketing, you’ll need to build a lot of content and earn traffic organically. Either way, marketing is an expensive or time consuming option. If you intend on building an income from it, you will want to make the most of your time and/or marketing budget.

Landing pages can help you turn traffic into email subscribers which can extend the effectiveness of either your organic marketing approach or your paid advertising.

Instead of running adverts sending people directly to products, you send them to a landing page instead. On the page you can encourage your visitors to sign up to your email list. This is done by offering a hugely valuable offer which is aligned with the needs/interests of your visitors.

Once on your email list, you have a lot more time to build trust and help your subscribers. This ultimately makes your advertising more cost effective because you are able to convert more visitors into customers.

Squeeze Pages

Landing pages are also known as squeeze pages because they “squeeze” visitors into giving their email address. This will only happen of course if you give them something valuable in return.

Often squeeze pages will offer downloadable guides, ebooks or a video series detailing some kind of interest. Squeeze pages can be used in any niche. By creating some automated value driven giveaway, you can encourage your visitors to enter their details for access. See also ebook lead magnet. A lead “magnet” is often what is referred to as the giveaway item.

Whatever you give away from a landing page or “squeeze page” should align somehow with the interests of your visitors and the products you are promoting to your email list. See also customer avatar worksheet and how to know your target market.

How Much Can I Earn From Blogging?

How much can I earn from blogging? While the potential earnings from blogging is unlimited, this isn’t the experience of most bloggers!

In the beginning you shouldn’t expect too much from blogging, because it will take some considerable time and effort to build up a readership to your blog posts. Your ability to attract an audience will be limited by:

How often you post new content
Your existing content
The quality of your content
Your SEO strategy (Search engine optimisation)
Your backlink profile – how many you have, where they are from and how natural it appears
Your ability and strategy of sharing and promoting your own content
How well your content is received by your readers
Your website authority
Your domain age

This list isn’t exhaustive either and Google (and other search engines) use a number of criteria to determine your authority and ranking on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

To get traction with blogging you need to stick with it for some time. Depending on the topic/niche you choose this could be weeks, months or even years! Since many would-be bloggers will quit during this interim phase, it’s worth planning ahead so it doesn’t happen to you!

How Much Can I Earn From Blogging?

Long term bloggers earn the most and this can be into the tens of thousands of dollars every single month. But that’s not typical and most new bloggers will need to spend a lot of time and effort just to start generating an income from a blog. Initially this will come in dribs and drabs depending on your monetisation methods. Over time, as your blog becomes more established and if you implement certain strategies, this can grow very quickly.

To get off on the right foot as a blogger, you need to understand something very important. That is, money is a by-product of value delivery. Without providing some value to your readers, you’ll struggle to make any money blogging. So as much as it’s desirable to earn money passively from blogging, you will be better off putting value before the money. Otherwise you’re likely to end up very disappointed by your monetary results!

It’s estimated that there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’ve got a lot of competition! To sustain the necessary effort needed to become financially successful as a blogger, you need to put in a lot of work upfront. Most people won’t be able to keep up this amount of effort without seeing a financial reward.

Often the most successful blogs were not started with financial incentive in mind. They were started as hobbies, passions or interests and many bloggers blog because they love it, not because they want money for it!

To give yourself the best chance at earning from blogging, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you have a passion for. That way you can sustain your interest in blogging over a much longer timespan.

How Much Can I Earn From Blogging: Monetising Your Blog

There’s a few ways you can monetise a blog. Two of the most popular methods are:

Advertising – e.g. Google Adsense
Affiliate Marketing – selling other people’s products from your blog

With Google Adsense you can place adverts on your content and earn a revenue share from clicks on your ads. Each click is generally worth only a tiny amount, according to your blog topic. So you’ll need thousands of clicks just to make a small income using this method. With a large enough following though and lots of content, this can ultimately give you a passive income which is potentially unlimited. As a new blogger though, getting enough traffic just to see a regular income can be tough.

With affiliate marketing, you sell other people’s products from your blog for a revenue share. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can use to make money from a blog but you need to align your product offering with your content. Otherwise your visitors won’t be interested in what you have to sell. You can also sell products from an email list which you can build from a blog. Email marketing can be used with both affiliate marketing and with Google Adsense (to bring people back to your content).

The benefit of affiliate marketing is you can earn more substantial amounts if you sell something from a blog than you would from an advert click. You can also sell subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products which pay you recurring commissions and pay out much larger amounts than average (respectively).

Timeline Of Blog Earnings

As a new blogger, expect a few months of drought before you can earn any money from your blog. This of course will depend on many factors the main ones being niche/topic, traffic and monetisation method.

During this time you should aim to create a lot of content and promote it as much as possible. Over time, as your content grows you should find some of it being liked, shared and linked to. This will help compound your efforts and more and more of your content should begin to get found and your Google rankings improve.

Over time there will be a “spike” in your traffic as this happens. Google rewards bloggers who are consistent and who create high value content which is liked by its readers. At around 400 blog posts or thereabouts you will see an uptick in traffic, if you’re done everything right.

Depending on your monetisation methods, and your blog topic, it can take weeks or months, or even years to start generating just a few hundred dollars a mont. But over time, you should find this grows exponentially. If you promote subscription affiliate products and high ticket products from your site, steady income can come a lot faster.

High Traffic Keywords With Low Competition

If you can find high traffic keywords with low competition, you can rank for them on the search engines and get free traffic. That’s pretty cool if you can make it work. But how is this possible? Surely the high volume keywords are far more over subscribed than the low volume ones?

While this is true, there’s a grey area where some longer tail keywords still get a good monthly search volume. Because they are longer tail keywords, there’s less competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages. So, how do we go about finding these golden nuggets so we can create content for them and get free traffic? Here’s a few ideas I’ve found useful.

High Traffic Keywords With Low Competition – Keyword Planner

While there’s many keyword planners available now I still use Google’s keyword planner which is a free tool. It shows the searches on Google which relate to any keyword you care to type into the planner. So for my topic of affiliate marketing, I would start out with typing “affiliate marketing” into the planner for keyword ideas.

Here’s what the results at the top of the page look like:

high traffic keywords with low competition

Just look at the monthly search volume for the term “affiliate marketing”! It read 673,000 monthly searches for this term. Wouldn’t it be great to rank your website for this term? Your site would get thousands of hits overnight! Sadly this is near impossible to do because heading over to Google you will find the search competition is extremely high.

Even a phrase match (in quotes) of the term brings back a number of websites/pages ranking for the term as over 50 million! So your chances of writing a piece of content for affiliate marketing and ranking are frankly nill!

High Traffic Keywords With Low Competition: Using Google’s Keyword Planner

If we click on the Avg. monthly searches tab at the top of the columns in the keyword planner, we will see the longer tail and more obscure search terms which get fewer searches every month. But we don’t want to create content for these terms either. Even with a top ranking for “clickbank alternatives 2020” for example, we only get a share of the 10 (or less) monthly searches for this term every month.

Plus, does this term even relate to your website and the items you are selling? If not, it’s hardly worth the effort of creating some content for it is it?

High Traffic Keywords With Low Competition – What’s The Answer?

So what’s the answer? The answer lies somewhere in-between the super high traffic volume keywords and the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty which don’t really warrant building content for. We also want to create content for the kinds of searches which bring buyers to our websites. To do this we need keywords which match the following criteria:

Have a good monthly search volume which is worth our time
Have low competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages to give us a chance of ranking our content
Have a buyer intent or at least the potential of a buying customer

To find these gems takes a little ingenuity. Here’s a few examples of how you can find them:

Look for your main keyword with the term “Pdf” attached to it
Find other related terms such as free downloads, ebooks, blueprints, toolkits etc. think of other terms you can find.
Look for keywords which are obscure and that many bloggers/content creators will miss/not look for

Here’s an example using the same keyword phrase of “affiliate marketing” but attaching pdf to it in the search tool.

Trading Off Search Competition For Search Volume

Of course the phrase affiliate marketing pdf doesn’t get as many monthly searches as the original term which was 673,000 a month. However, there’s considerably less content ranking in the SERPS for the pdf version and you’re much more likely to rank of it if you create a good, solid piece of content for it.

Here’s another example using the term “lucrative” which many content creators might miss out on.

Here’s another idea using the term “lucrative” which may apply to the affiliate marketing niche more than others of course:

Browse Through The Search Results

Another strategy is to browse through the search pages looking for keywords which have your minimum monthly search criteria.

We know the shorter tail keywords are too difficult to rank for, so we can start at the bottom (with low search volume) and work through the results looking for keywords which get at least 50 monthly searches, or even 100. Compare your results with a Google search to check on the relative competitiveness of the terms.

Generally speaking the fewer monthly searches for a term, the less competition you’ll find on Google search results. The more traffic a term gets, the more competition. But you can find some gems which have a good amount of monthly traffic but also have low competition using this strategy.

Look for the long tail keywords which are the most obscure and which are relevant to your particular niche. You can then create some high value content for your term, and potentially rank on Google. Don’t forget, even if you don’t obtain a high Google listing, you still might rank your content on other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.

Best Strategy For Free Traffic

It is possible to find high traffic keywords with low competition. However, most of the high traffic keywords have already been capitalised on by website owners, bloggers and affiliate marketers. The high volume traffic keywords are typically much more difficult to rank for and the low volume traffic keywords are typically not worth working for!

So a good strategy is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty which also offer some search traffic you can attain. This might be less traffic than you want, but by creating multiple pieces of high quality content, you can skim a lot of traffic overall using this strategy.

Also

Keep in mind that you want to focus on traffic that converts, so you also need to be mindful as to the search intent behind a particular keyword phrase before you spend a lot of time on it. You’ll also be sharing the monthly search traffic with the top few listings even with a top listing on Google!

So even a 100 monthly search traffic volume will look a lot less when you finally get traffic from the term since it’s shared out with other top listings and any paid ads which are running for the keyword. You essentially only get about a third of the traffic when all said and done! So if the keyword shows 100 monthly search volume, and you rank your site at the top, you’ll probably only get 33 hits on a monthly basis at the most!

position top of google — Top position only gets 33% of traffic according to study: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2013/06/20/no-1-position-in-google-gets-33-of-search-traffic-study/

However, if you write good content and your content stands the test of time, you can capitalise on search terms which grow in numbers over time. This is also a good reminder that going after search terms which only get 10 searches a month may indeed be a waste of your time! 10 searches a month divided by three gives you only 3.3 hits a month even if you get first place!

Clickbank Tools

Are you looking for Clickbank tools? Clickbank has a specific page for tools for affiliates which you can find here. But there’s a number of other tools which you might find helpful as an affiliate marketer using Clickbank. See also affiliate toolkit for some of the best tools for affiliates.

If you haven’t already done so I’d definitely recommend getting yourself an email autoresponder which you can do so for free here.

An email autoresponder is an essential piece of kit for any affiliate marketer. It lets you make more from your promotion methods by allowing you to collect subscribers via email and keep in touch with them through automated messages.

Most affiliates soon realise that traffic is the most difficult or expensive part of their job, or both. With an email autoresponder, you can collect subscribers and keep in touch with them. This puts you in charge of your traffic. Without one, you will constantly need to keep up with either paying for marketing or working really hard building content. Get Aweber for free here.

Clickbank Tools – Landing Page Software

One of the best tools you can have as an affiliate is a landing page software such as Leadpages or Convertree. Both Lead Pages and Convertree offer super fast landing pages which can be cross tested for optimal conversions and configured with whatever product you’re promoting.

Why use landing pages? If you’re building an email list you can send traffic to a landing page and “convert” a visitor to your website into an email subscriber. Lead Pages and Convertree just let you do it much better by letting you understand how well your landing pages perform against each other.

Landing page software is well worth the investment too because of the speed. Many would-be subscribers will leave a website due to load speed. With a super fast landing page software you can optimise for performance so you lose less subscribers and maximise your advertising potential.

Clickbank Tools: Content Creators

If you’re a content creator using Clickbank, you can benefit from an SEO tool called Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is a free plugin used by bloggers to optimise their content for the search engines.

Yoast lets you easily optimise your blog content by using a specific keyword for your post. You can then add title tags, image alt tags and use that particular keyword throughout your content. The plugin makes the process of SEO super easy and you’ll wonder why you did without it! Access here. The paid version of the plugin has greater functionality but I’ve managed for a long time with the free version. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for a few useful plugins.

Data & SEO Tool

Another great tool you can use if you’re an affiliate promoting Clickbank products is SEM Rush.

SEM Rush is a data tool which can help you learn more about your content and how to best optimise it for SEO – search engine optimisation. You can also use the tool to “spy” on your competitors and see which content of yours needs attention for the best outcome with the smallest efforts!

SEM rush - affiliate marketing data tool

Get A free trial of SEM Rush here.

If you’re a fan of Clickbank you might also want to checkout alternatives to Clickbank and what is better than Clickbank.

Mindset & Psychology Tools

One of the best tools I’ve found online for the purposes of helping with goal setting, vision and mindset has been a book I found called How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast by Stuart Lichtman.

This book is now my number one “go to” book recommendation for all affiliates. It covers the subject of cybernetic transposition. This is a concept developed by Lichman.

“Cybernetic Transposition is the… technique I developed and perfected, and which companies paid me $25,000 a day to teach their employees.” – Stuart Lichtman

Cybernetics is the science of how electronic machines and human brains work. Transposition means to move one part to another.

The subject of affiliate psychology is probably one of the most overlooked areas for affiliates to their cost. I also recommend getting a copy of Gay Hendricks The Upper Limit.