AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Plug and Play Startup

A plug and play startup has everything you need to build a successful online business from scratch. With a plug and play startup, you already have a business model, products, sales funnels, easy setup website and the resources you need to do everything technically in your business.

You can access such a system here where you’ll learn everything you need to know to start your online business.

With the affiliate marketing business model, you essentially become a third party referrer of someone else’s product/s. When you generate a sale through your marketing, you earn a commission based on the sale you make. So with a plug and play business model you only need promote your website or landing page. As you gain experience and gather leads through your automated sales funnel, you can earn revenue through sales you make.

Why Use A Plug And Play Startup?

Unless you already have a business/product to promote online, you’ll need to provide some kind of value to your customers. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products or services because you can promote other people’s products and services online.

There’s millions of affiliate products you can promote as a third party referrer to earn commissions based on the sale. But there’s also a lot of competition online too so selling affiliate products isn’t always easy! When certain affiliate programs only offer as low as 1% commission, you need to choose wisely!

A good plug and play business model will have multiple income streams from which you can earn revenue:

Entry level product – a base level product most people can afford
Subscription product – pays you a recurring income from sales you have generated.
Medium level offering – a higher priced offering which delivers greater value
High ticket offering – a high ticket product which delivers the most value

With such a high ticket sales funnel you can earn substantially more revenue from each customer you refer. Whereas with most affiliate products you only earn for an individual sale.

Plug and Play Startup: The Right Products & Services Solve Big Problems

Two of the biggest problems in today’s society are job dissatisfaction and the cost of living. Consider the reason you are reading this article, for example.

“It’s been dubbed the Great Resignation, and with 4.3 million people quitting their jobs in May, the number of resignations is still virtually unchanged from last year.” – Fortune.com

People are seeking better and more enjoyable ways to work. They want more choice and freedom. With the cost of living rising, people need multiple sources of income just to survive, so they are looking for second and third sources of income.

Online startups can be the answer to both these problems. Online business training and education programs are therefore one of the best business models to use as an affiliate (third party referrer) in today’s climate.

Is Affiliate Marketing The Answer?

Affiliate marketing is a business model which rewards third parties for referring online sales. But the choice of product and of marketing tactics and strategies is pretty vast. Since the entry level requirements are very low for affiliates, there’s a super high drop out rate of around 95%. See also affiliate marketing success rate.

Pretty much anyone can become an affiliate marketer by signing up to a program such as Amazon’s and getting their unique referral link. The main difficulty affiliates face is marketing their products in the face of growing online competition. If you choose to sell cheaper products you’ll need to sell in bulk and be faced with huge competition.

But by choosing a plug and play business model, you can benefit from higher ticket commissions and recurring commissions from subscriptions. This means also that your choice of marketing method is larger. You can much more easily make a profit with such a business model when using paid ads. Whereas if you’re selling low value products using paid ads, the potential for profit is much less.

Summary

Access a plug and play start up here which gives you everything you need to build a profitable business online. Once you have set up your sales funnel and marketing systems you’ll also be able to access personal training and support according to your requirements.

With a range of products you can promote through an automated sales funnel, your main focus on building your business is marketing. You can access video recordings, live webinars and personal one on one coaching through this program, depending on the level of support you require.

How To Make Money By Promoting Other People’s Products Online

Wondering how to make money by promoting other people’s products online? A business model known as affiliate marketing lets you do just that! The affiliate refers customers to a product/service through their unique identifying link, or “affiliate link”. When a customer makes an online purchase, the sale is tracked back to the affiliate and they receive a commission based on the sale.

Affiliates are third party referrers and don’t need to own or even purchase the products themselves. They simply join an affiliate program which has the product they want to promote. Then they promote their affiliate link online through using various strategies.

There’s many ways to do this including strategies such as:

blogging,
video blogging,
paid marketing,
email marketing,
SEO (search engine optimisation) and
social media marketing strategies.

Not all affiliates use the same methods of promotion and there’s thousands of products to choose from.

How To Make Money By Promoting Other People’s Products Online

What’s great about affiliate marketing is that it can be done around an existing job and your income can build up over time. It offers one of the most flexible ways of working and you can work from anywhere globally providing you have a laptop and internet connection.

Affiliate marketing is performance based however. So on the other hand you can work really hard and still not get paid if you don’t make any sales! Once you get affiliate marketing working for you though, you can earn passively from it from the systems and content you have built.

Affiliate marketing is an appealing sounding proposition for anyone who is fed up of working in a job and wants more time and financial freedom. But not everyone makes affiliate marketing work for them and there’s a high drop out rate in affiliate marketing.

One of the best known affiliate programs is Amazon. Anyone can join Amazon’s partner program, get an affiliate link and start promoting any of the thousands of products on the site.

How To Make Money By Promoting Other People’s Products Online: Product Promotion

Most affiliates will struggle initially if they haven’t had any training. (Access a free video training series here). The biggest challenge for new affiliates is putting a marketing message in front of the right people who will go on to purchase through their affiliate link.

To consistently make sales is the next hurdle for affiliates who have started generating sales. The next step is scaling an affiliate business to reach more and more people with your products and services.

Depending on your business model, the products you promote, available time and marketing budget, you might take one of several options to build an affiliate business online.

The main two marketing strategies are paid marketing and free strategies or content marketing. Paid marketing methods are much faster and more scalable. Whereas free methods typically take much longer, involve more work and are less scalable. However, with free marketing strategies which involve content marketing you can benefit from passive income from previous content you’ve created.

If you have a lot of time, content marketing might be more suitable. But if you have less available time, paid marketing might be more suitable.

Marketing Strategies

One of the most popular methods of building a large affiliate business is through email marketing. With email marketing, affiliates collect emails from a website or landing page by offering something for free to subscribers. They then send out regular messages to their subscribers promoting affiliate products. With a small list, you might think that affiliate marketing does not work. But with a huge list of subscribers, and by providing genuine value in your messages and building trust, you can sell thousands of products to subscribers on your email list.

how to make money by promoting other people's products online

Email marketing is a versatile form of online advertising which can be used in conjunction with both paid and free marketing methods.

With paid marketing, you can direct website traffic in a number of ways using a number of marketing platforms. YouTube, Facebook and Google Adwords are just some of the most popular marketing platforms you can use as an affiliate. With Adwords (Google Ads), you can target specific online search terms which relate to the products you are selling. Send targeted traffic to a website or landing page and collect subscribers information via email.

Blogging is another popular affiliate marketing strategy which is cheap to do but will typically take several months or even years to come to fruition, depending on the topic you choose, and the relative competition.

Summary

There’s many ways you can sell other people’s products online using a wide range of products and services and multiple marketing methods are available for their promotion.

Depending on your choice of affiliate business models and marketing methods, it can take several months or even years to get traction in an affiliate marketing business. Around 95% of affiliates quit so it’s a good idea to get training and support if you are serious about building an online business that generates an income.

Affiliate Marketing From Your Phone

Can you do affiliate marketing from your phone? While it’s definitely preferable to work as an affiliate from a laptop or computer, there are some aspects you can do from a mobile phone.

But when it comes to creating landing pages or websites, it’s going to be very tricky trying to do this from a mobile. Even signing up to an affiliate program using a mobile can get fiddly. That’s not to say it’s impossible. But if you’re really serious about doing affiliate marketing properly, you should ideally use a laptop or computer.

That being said, I do use my mobile for some aspects of building my affiliate business. However, that’s after much of the hard work has already been done. Things such as website creation, joining affiliate programs and watching training videos are more difficult to do on a mobile. Plus, mobiles tend to offer less functionality on some websites than on a laptop.

So what aspects can be done on a mobile, and what’s completely out of the question?

Affiliate Marketing From Your Phone

To get started with affiliate marketing you’ll need to join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Once you have it, you can paste it in your social media profiles, and use various strategies to drive targeted traffic to it. Depending on the strategy you choose, this can be more or less difficult using a mobile phone. For example, I use Quora.com to answer specific questions on my mobile phone when I’m away from the computer. I link back to my blog posts on this site. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.com.

Here’s the link on my Quora.com bio profile: https://escape9tofive.com

While the answering of questions can be done on a mobile phone, it’s more constrictive doing so. It’s much easier and quicker to answer 20 or so questions a day using Quora.com on a laptop keyboard than using my I-phone. But I still do it for convenience when I don’t want to be on the laptop.

I can do this partly because I’ve also built a lot of content on this website too. I simply wouldn’t have been able to write these blog posts from a mobile phone – it’s far too fiddly. However, you can also use Quora without linking out. Just use your affiliate link in your Quora’s bio, and lead people to it by answering relevant questions in your niche.

Affiliate Marketing On Your Phone – Facebook

Another platform which can be used for affiliate marketing is Facebook. Many Facebook users put their affiliate links on their main profile page. Then they find traffic by looking for groups in their niche and interact with people in the groups. Over time, people will find your profile and naturally browse through it if they are interested in what you have to offer. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Here’s my current Facebook profile which is setup to attract people to a website: https://escape9tofive.com

This little strategy can work wonders if you get clear on your profile messaging; find a targeted audience in various Facebook groups, and use your mobile to interact with other members in the group, leading them back to your profile.

Again setting up your Facebook profile to showcase your affiliate link and marketing message is much easier on a laptop. With a mobile phone your profile settings options are more difficult to access and change.

Affiliate Marketing On Your Phone – Adwords

Google Adwords have an app which you can access on a mobile phone. I have the app too but only really use it to check on ad performance. I wouldn’t use the app itself from a phone to set up an advertising campaign because it’s far too fiddly and there’s less functionality on the mobile app.

So if you’re considering running an paid advertising campaign, I would definitely recommend doing so from a laptop first, and using your mobile phone only as a reference point.

Summary

There’s many aspects of affiliate marketing which you can do on your phone, however, there’s things you simply can’t do on your phone properly. Things like setting up landing pages, using drag and drop software on websites and building advertising campaigns will be incredibly awkward on a mobile. Going through training modules on a phone too will brings problems with it, or downloading files.

If you’re determined to work solely on a mobile phone, no one can stop you! But you’re doing yourself a massive disservice if you limit yourself to using only a mobile. One of the main prerequisites for building an online business is a laptop and internet connection. So if you don’t have both of these you’re already making life harder! Affiliate marketing is tough anyway, so why make your life more difficult?

The same is true of a website. While you can do affiliate marketing without a website, the reason to build a website is to make things easier.

No Laptop Solutions

Once you have your affiliate link you can advertise in a variety of ways as an affiliate. If you can’t access a laptop your best bet is to find a method of advertising your link which doesn’t require much technical setup, or keyboard time.

There’s a couple of methods which I’ve mentioned in this article already which are suitable, using Facebook or Quora.com. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Your main task as an affiliate is to join an affiliate program, and get your affiliate link. Then, put that link in front of the right targeted audience who will want to buy it.

To get more help and training access this free video series.

How To Monetise A Blog

Wondering how to monetise a blog? There’s several ways you can make money from a blog. So if you have a blog already or are just thinking about starting a blog, this post is for you!

Blogging is a hugely popular way to build an online presence, but with over 6 million blogs on the internet, it’s also hugely competitive. So getting people to visit your blog is problem number one. Once you’ve managed to build a good number of daily visitors to your blog, then comes the question of monetisation.

There’s many pros and cons of blogging. One of the pros is that it’s super cheap and you can blog from anywhere. One of the cons is that it’s super competitive and you not only need to find visitors for your blog, but also turn those visitors into cash in some way. Here’s some of the ways you can do it.

How To Monetise A Blog: Google Adsense

There’s many alternatives to Google Adsense, but it’s the favourite when it comes to putting ads on blogs. With Google Adsense, anyone with a website or blog can join and place ads on their site. When people click on those adverts, you make a percentage of the advertising revenue.

Although the percentage of revenue you receive is only small, by getting a lot of advert clicks, you can make a passive income from a blog. This can be grown over time by getting more traffic to your blog.

The money you make from each advertising click on your site depends on the topic of your blog. In a highly competitive topic, there’s more people bidding against each other for advertising clicks. Hence, in a competitive topic, you’ll earn more money from each click. However, if a topic is more competitive, it’s usually also much more difficult to get free traffic for that particular topic, too. With Google Adsense you’ll need free traffic because it’s not worth paying for ads when you only make a tiny amount from your visitors.

How To Monetise A Blog: Affiliate Marketing

Another popular method to monetise a blog is with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model where anyone can refer website visitors to products and services online. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from online too, so whatever topic your blog covers, there’s usually something appropriate which you can sell from it.

Amazon is one of the first stop shops for affiliate marketers because there’s such a huge array of products which you can choose from. Clickbank is another popular “bank” for affiliate products which are digital. With digital products you can generally earn a larger percentage of the sale than with physical products.

If you’re going to monetise a blog with affiliate products, you need to find products which relate to the interests of your audience. A bad match between topic and products mean you’ll be unlikely to sell anything. Affiliates with a blog usually also offer an opt in offer on their site with some free information. Visitors can then join their email list and be updated regularly about affiliate products which they sell. This is a good idea because it helps the sales process by getting an email autoresponder. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

How To Monetise A Blog: Leverage Your Blog To Become A Freelancer

Once you have some content on your blog, you can present yourself as a freelance writer in your specific topic. Depending on your niche, and the businesses who are looking for freelancers, this can be quite lucrative.

Sites such as Upwork, Fiverr and SEOclerks tend to be where many freelancers hang out. But you can also search for other freelancers in your area on Linkedin to validate your niche topic.

You’ll need to find gigs yourself so it’s a good idea to establish your authority first before reaching out. Do this by creating a lot of content on your site and perhaps reach out to do some guest posts on other authority websites.

To find potential opportunities you can do a simple Google search for niche businesses in your area who might want the services of a freelancer. Type “your niche blog” into Google and approach businesses directly through their website.

Sell Your Own eBook

Yes eBooks are a great way to monetise a blog. It’s relatively simple to create an ebook and sell it on your website. Use your existing expertise to offer something of value to your visitors. You can even use existing content to create an ebook which you can sell. Ideally build an email list from your blog and use your marketing messages to promote your ebook.

Ebooks are also great lead magnets if you choose to use affiliate marketing with your blog. A lead magnet is something you use to encourage website visitors to sign up to your email newsletter.

Sell A Course

Many bloggers have a huge amount of knowledge and expertise which they can turn into courses of their own. You can ask your email subscribers what they would want from a course or come up with ideas based on your content. It’s not super difficult to create a course which you can sell. You can even upload a video series or training videos and have it hosted on your site. There’s lot of software and plugins which can help you create a course on your blog.

If you’re not up to creating your own course you can sell someone else’s as an affiliate marketer. Here’s an online course I promote which helps people build online businesses.

See also subscription affiliate programs which are a useful way to monetise a website and earn recurring income from memberships.

Writing SEO Articles

Writing SEO articles is a whole lot easier if you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. The plugin reminds you to place your keywords in your titles, description, images and throughout your copy. SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. To optimise your content for the search engines doesn’t always mean you’ll get a top listing on Google though, although that would be nice!

It may be very difficult to get a top placed listing on the first page of Google. This will depend on your topic and the keywords you choose for your article’s title. It also depends on the competition for your chosen keyword. If there’s a huge volume of competing websites for the term, your chances of a top listing will diminish. So how can you give yourself a better chance of free traffic through SEO?

Writing SEO Articles

Writing SEO articles won’t guarantee you a top listing. There’s just too much competition for everyone to rank on top! Of course if your content is better than the competition, you’ll rank higher, right? Well not always no. Some websites have hundreds of thousands of backlinks and huge authority. Even with content which is inferior to your own, they will outrank you!

To give yourself a better chance of ranking your content, you could spend thousands on an SEO company, building backlinks and creating content to maximise your domain’s authority. But it would still take ages to outperform the top ranking sites. But there’s a cheaper and easier solution. It’s to use the “low hanging fruit”.

The “low hanging fruit” are the long tail keywords with lower SEO difficulty. Long tail keywords typically contain three or more words and have fewer competing websites for those particular terms. The shorter phrases of 2-3 terms are usually more competitive.

Writing SEO Articles – Find Long Tail Keywords First

I use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Start with your main keyword and scroll through the results on the planner. You can also click on the tab marked “Avg monthly searches” until the search volume drops. When you see fewer monthly searches for terms in your niche, you’ll probably also notice that those are the longer tail keywords which have less competition on Google.

While you may want more traffic to your site, going after the keywords with a huge search volume will seldom have the results you desire. These keywords are super competitive and so chances are super slim you’ll get any traffic from the search engines. But if you target the log hanging fruit your chances of ranking are much higher and this gives you more opportunity to get the free traffic using Search Engine Optimisation.

Found A Keyword

Once you’ve found a keyword which is suitable, you can check on Google to see what the difficulty is like. Type your keyword into the search bar and look for a number at the top of the screen. This should give you an idea of the relative competition.

Also type the same term in with quotes around it to give you an idea of the phrase match competition.

Using Yoast SEO

Once you have found a good keyword which you think you have a chance of ranking for, you can start writing. To optimise for keywords I use Yoast SEO which is a free plugin for WordPress. If you don’t have WordPress, you can optimise your posts by using your main keywords in your:

Titles
Image alt attributes
Meta description
SEO title
Meta Description
Throughout your copy

A plugin makes this job much easier and gives you a number of other benefits such as data on keyword use.

You can also use deep linking within newer content you post to link back to your older content using keywords in the links. This tells the search engines what keywords are most relevant for your content and which terms you want to rank it for.

Other SEO Factors At Play

By targeting long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you are giving yourself a better chance of obtaining a high ranking on Google (or other search engines). Of course you’ve never guaranteed a top listing. By writing lengthy posts and linking back to them from other sites and your own, you’re also giving yourself the best chance to get rewarded for your SEO.

There’s many factors at play when it comes to SEO:

Domain age
Site authority with Google
Back link profile – number of links, age and where they come from
Social media presence
Visitor’s interaction on your content
Click away rate
Plus many more
The volume of content on your site

To give your content the best possible chance, aim to outdo other content you find ranking on or near the top of the search listings. Offer more value and write longer posts. The long term effect of having super high quality content on your site is that other people will share and link to it naturally over time. This in turn will boost your rankings and SEO score.

SEO is a long term thing so start with writing high quality content and the best possible posts you can. As your content grows over time, you should also see an uptick in traffic as you pass the 400 posts mark.

How Many Blogs Should You Post A Month?

How many blogs should you post a month? Generally speaking the more blogs you post the better it is for the SEO (search engine optimisation) of your site. But that’s not the full story though because it also depends on the quality and readability of your posts. Bad quality content can do more harm than good for your site. So freelancers peanuts to write as many articles as possible will seldom have the effort desired. If readers bounce from content it is a sure fire signal to search engines that the content is bad!

The best advice then is to write as often as possible while maintaining a high standard. For some this might be three or four times a week but if you can do more then you should. The key is to remain consistent with blogging, whether that’s once a week or several times a week. Google rewards consistency over time, so it’s a good idea to install a good blogging habit which you can maintain. If you’re going to struggle maintaining writing a post every day, cut back and choose a level which is sustainable for you over the longer term.

As a minimum, many say blogging 2 to 4 times per week is a good standard to increase the traction from SEO on your site.

How Many Blogs Should You Post A Month – Promotion

Blogging alone might also not produce the results you desire either. If you’re blogging in a particularly competitive area, it’s going to take longer to get traction from the search engines. But you can give your content more chance by promoting it yourself, which you should definitely do. There’s many ways you can promote your blog posts. Here’s a few strategies:

Share on social media profiles manually
You can get plugins to help you with this too such as social share icons placed on your site
Revive Old Posts is a social share plugin which shares your new and old content automatically throughout social media sites.
Guest blogging – write content for other bloggers in exchange for links back to your site
Blog commenting – another form of link building which helps both immediate traffic and SEO
Push engage is a plugin which lets you offer visitors the option to “opt in” to notifications of your newer blog posts as your publish them
Email marketing – offer an option on your blog to sign up for email notifications which can be used to lead people back to newer content
PPC – pay per click advertising can be used to help you get more readers, which will naturally lead to more shares and links, particularly if your content is share-worthy. Dynamic ads are good for bloggers and can be used to find targeted searches.

How Long Before I Get Free Traffic?

The number of blogs you publish in any given month is just one indication to Google as to the authority of your site. There’s many other signals too which it uses to determine how (and if) to rank your content on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages:

Backlinks – how many you have from other sites in your niche, their quality and authority and the “natural-ness” of your link profile.
Time spent on site – the interaction of your visitors tells Google a lot about how your content is received.
Length of blog posts and SEO – generally the longer your posts are the better. Use an SEO plugin to help you write them for the best results (e.g. Yoast SEO)
Website authority – determined by many factors including domain age, backlinks, content, etc.
Number and quality of posts and consistency of content

How Many Blogs Should You Post A Month? — You should see an “uptick” in traffic from Google after creating 400 posts

Summary

Generally speaking the more blogs you post the better, although you should aim to keep the quality of your content high. If posting too often means you lose the quality, you should choose a strategy which lets you do both. Ideally start with a single post a week and aim to gradually increase the frequency over time. Once you’re comfortable with blogging as a habit, you’ll get better at it and be able to create more content while maintaining the quality.

If you’re planning on paying a freelancer to write blog posts for you for next to nothing, just remember you get what you pay for! Search engines can determine whether people are reading and digesting your content. So if your content is bad, they will know and your results will be reflected in this.

Ideally start blogging at a rate which is manageable for you and sustainable over the longer term. Your results will depend not only on the amount of content you create, but also the quality and your ability to promote it successfully.

How To Get Into Affiliate Marketing

Are you wondering how to get into affiliate marketing? Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote their affiliate link for free. Amazon, for instance, has an affiliate program you can join here to promote any product from the site.

There’s other affiliate programs available too and if you have an existing website, it’s worth looking for affiliate programs which would be a good fit for your topic. So if you have a Yoga website, for example, look on Google for “Yoga affiliate programs”. There’s affiliate programs in almost any topic you can imagine too. So a Google search will bring up a program which might be suitable to join. It doesn’t matter which country you are in either. Affiliate programs are available globally.

Many affiliates prefer to promote digital products over physical products and although physical products sell well, the levels of commission tend to be smaller than with digital products. See affiliate marketing commission rates. You can find digital products on sites such as Clickbank, JVzoo, Rakuten Marketing, CJ Affiliate Network (Commission Junction), Affiliate.com and many more.

How To Get Into Affiliate Marketing: The Small Print

The easy part of affiliate marketing is joining an affiliate program and getting your unique identifying link. Once you have your affiliate link, you can promote it to drive sales online. There’s many ways in which affiliate marketers promote their affiliate links but here’s some of the most popular ones:

PPC – (Pay per click advertising) using paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Email marketing – most top affiliates build a list of subscribers and promote their products through email marketing messages. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Content creation – blogging and video blogging are popular ways to get your affiliate links in front of potential customers.
SEO – (search engine optimisation) is what bloggers and content creators use to optimise their content for the search engines to get found on Google.
Social media channels – there’s a huge potential to find your customers on social media, both with free and paid for methods. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Joining an affiliate program is one thing, but successful promotion of your affiliate link is where most affiliates will struggle. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products. So it’s worth getting help and training when it comes to choosing a promotion method for your affiliate link. Access a training course here.

How To Get Into Affiliate Marketing: Why 95% Of Affiliates Quit

Yes, 95% of affiliate quit affiliate marketing largely because they see no results for the work they do. But that’s often because they are unsure of their direction and therefore lose momentum by jumping around from one strategy to another. Different marketing strategies will also have different timescales too. Blogging, for example is a slow strategy to attract an audience for affiliate marketing. It can take months of regular work through blogging to even gain a small following, depending on your topic.

A faster method of marketing is through using PPC or pay per click advertising. With pay per click, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. This is also known as direct response marketing. With direct response, you can measure the cost of your advert compared to the number of sales you make to determine whether an advert is performing or not. When you hit upon a winning advert, you can simply increase your budget to make more sales. This takes some time and effort to get right of course, which is where many affiliates drop out.

With content marketing it’s much more difficult to scale up your affiliate business to a larger audience quickly. A single blog post won’t attract much attention online. But once you’ve built and shared 100 or 1000 blog posts, you should see organic traffic coming to your site and sales dropping in for free. This of course takes much longer than PPC advertising, and you’ll need to be very patient. Again, affiliates drop out after doing some work, but not seeing much in the way of sales.

As you can see, the longer term affiliates will have greater success because they stick out the tough months when nothing is happening so they can see the fruits of their labour. When affiliate marketing is working, it can give you a nice passive income. But in the beginning, it can seem like there’s a lot to do with little reward.

Summary

Anyone can join an affiliate program for free by signing up. This lets you refer customers to products for a commission based on sales you generate. There’s many affiliate programs in thousands of topics which you can find with a simple search on the internet. Amazon, and eBay are two popular ones you can use to sell physical products. However, physical products pay much less than digital products which you can find on Clickbank and alternatives to Clickbank which offer digital affiliate products.

The hard part of affiliate marketing isn’t the joining of an affiliate program. Most programs are easy to join, although some will ask for your marketing method and your number of followers and website details, etc. Some affiliate programs can be a little more picky than others as to who they allow to promote their offers.

The biggest part of being an affiliate is finding a strategy you can use to successfully market your products and services online. Your particular interests, abilities, situation and circumstance will determine which strategy is appropriate to meet your needs.

You can access an online training and education resource for becoming an affiliate which has everything you need here.

Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing

Generally speaking the free traffic methods for affiliate marketing take much longer than the paid ones. Paid traffic is fast and you can turn it on almost instantly. You can also quickly see whether a campaign is working quickly with paid traffic, and scale it up when it is!

But you can also burn through a lot of cash very quickly too and if you don’t hit upon a winning campaign, you can’t scale anyway! If you don’t have money to test and measure marketing campaigns with, what options are there as an affiliate? There are various free traffic methods for affiliate marketing, so if you’re not up to using paid marketing this one’s for you!

Most of the free affiliate strategies I know take a little time and patience. By a little I mean a lot! But when they start working you’re making 100% profit on your sales. Plus if you strike upon a free marketing strategy which works, you can get focused in on it and rinse and repeat.

Here’s a few of my faves!

Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

Yes blogging. Despite blogging taking a lot of time and effort, it does work if you stick with it for long enough. If you’ve only just started blogging it can be a little frustrating not seeing much for your efforts. But over time your efforts can compound to create a nice regular income.

When I started blogging I was super enthusiastic. A little time after that, I was disappointed, then depressed! After throwing in the towel after several months of blogging, a sale would pop into my inbox. “Aha” I thought, it worked! So I would start blogging again after having dropped it for a good several months. If only I had have kept up my blogging habit consistently, I would be swimming in sales!

If you’re consistent with blogging, not much happens for a while, and then everything happens! So although blogging can be tough, if you stick with it for long enough, it pays out. But you need to find a topic you enjoy writing about otherwise you’ll probably burn out long before you start seeing those sales drop in!

It’s best to have your own website if you’re a blogger but the cost of this is tiny. There’s also free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. But your own site is much better for SEO – search engine optimisation. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

There’s many things to do once you have an established blog to promote your content. See writing blog posts for SEO.

Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: A Niche Website

A niche website is one of the best super cheap ways to get traffic to affiliate products. Although you will need your own domain name and hosting, the cost is pretty negligible. You can purchase a domain name for less than $5 and a hosting is less than $5 a month with this hosting provider. One of the benefits of a niche website is traffic. A niche website is built specifically around your keywords so as to rank on the search engines for a certain term.

By choosing carefully, you can potentially rank a specific term if you find one which is relatively uncompetitive and you’re able to purchase a keyword domain name. This site, for example has been built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors to give it a better chance of ranking for that particular term.

You can also build more and more content once you have built a niche website, but initially it can help you find traffic quickly. See also how to build a niche website.

There’s lots of strategies and tactics which can help you rank your site, gain more visitors and promote your content with a niche website. One of them is to find long tail keywords with less competition than others and write keyword focused articles on your site.

Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: Social Media (Quora.com)

Quora.com is a question and answer website where members post questions which can be answered by experts in their field. With affiliate marketing, you’re not allowed to directly post affiliate links on Quora.com but you can post relevant links in your answers if they are helpful and appropriate to the questions.

By using your own content which you build a website/blog, you can link back to it leading people to your site. As you do this regularly over time, you’ll build up a backlog of answered questions. This becomes a sort of “digital asset”, leading people to your website. Over time traffic numbers increase as your content grows in size.

It’s a great strategy which you can use for free to build up traffic to your own website, while helping people with a problem at the same time.

Free Traffic Methods For Affiliate Marketing: Facebook

On Facebook you can find people who are suitable for your affiliate products through joining groups. There’s thousand of groups on Facebook so initially you should define who your target audience is by getting to understand your customer avatar.

Once you know who to target, you can find appropriate groups where they hang out and join them. Interact with people in those groups and build connections over time. Don’t spam the groups with affiliate links though. You’ll likely get banned! Instead, just genuinely offer to help with questions and queries. Over time, other group members will see you and naturally browse through your Facebook profile.

This is where you can promote your affiliate products – on your Profile. You need to set up your profile so that a visitor can quickly see what you’re offering. You’re allowed to post links to websites and images which relate to your affiliate offering on your profile. Here’s what’s at the top of my Facebook profile:

Again this strategy takes a little time and effort and you need to stay consistent and interact on a regular basis with your target audience. Make a point out of spending an hour or two a day over several weeks if you want to see some results from it. Make sure your profile is nice and easy to read and clearly shows your affiliate offer immediately when people check on it.

You can also add your affiliate links on many other social media platforms too and find similar strategies to target your audience through messaging and posting. See also unpaid social media marketing.

YouTube

YouTube offers another great way of building connections with users of the platform. To use YouTube for free successfully will take some time and it’s a similar strategy to blogging. By uploading videos in your niche on a regular basis, and targeting specific keywords, you can build an organic following through YouTube.

YouTube is the second most used platform on the internet and has a huge amount of potential traffic you can tap into. There’s slightly less competition on YouTube than Google too which potentially means it’s a better/easier strategy than blogging. However to get traffic organically is a tough nut to crack. You need to be uploading videos on a daily basis for a good, long while. It might be weeks, months or years depending on the relative competition in your niche.

Summary

There’s just a few of the main free traffic methods for affiliate marketing. There’s many other I mention in this article too: 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

With most of the free strategies you’re going to need to stick with them for some time before you see the results. This can be tough, especially if you’re unsure whether you’re doing it right or not!

It’s a good idea if you’re a beginner affiliate to join some kind of training program which gives you some one on one coaching, which you can do by starting here and accessing a free video series.

How Long Does It Take To Rank For A Keyword?

How long does it take to rank for a keyword on Google? There’s no short answer to this question unfortunately because there’s so many factors at play. It can be a matter of weeks or it could take several months to rank a keyword targeted article on Google. Or, you might not rank at all if Google doesn’t recognise your site as an authority and/or there’s a lot of competition. In general though, it’s going to take between 3-6 months if you have a good piece of content and there’s little competition.

If you’re building a niche website around a specific keyword then you may rank sooner. Niche websites can rank for certain keywords quite quickly if there’s very little competition. This can happen within a few weeks. But for content on a blog it will often be longer and take several months.

Google’s SEO algorithm uses several factors to determine whether a site is worthy of a first page or first place listing. Here’s just a few of them:

Your website’s authority
Domain age – how old is your site
Backlinks – how many, where from and which pages to?
Content on your site & site architecture
Interlinking from other pages on your site
Visitor interaction on your website – how long do they stay, where do they go etc.
Backlink profile – how long has it taken? Is the linking organic?
Competition will play a huge factor and a hugely competitive keyword is much more difficult to rank for

How Long Does It Take To Rank For A Keyword?

To rank for a keyword on Google, it’s a good idea to focus on finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. The more difficult keywords are usually those which have huge competition on Google. Shorter tail phrases are more in demand and as such you’ll find thousands of competing websites for those particular phrases. Long tail keywords are better if you want free traffic because there’s generally a lot less competition for them.

However, whether your site ranks for them will depend on how you are perceived by Google (and your website visitors). If there’s a lot of competition for a particular keyword, it’s harder for people to find your content and therefore more difficult for Google to rate your site; because it has less data available to make a decision.

A sparsely populated website with only one or two articles will hardly compete with a high authority domain name with tens of thousands of back links. So that’s another consideration. If you want to rank more articles and get more authority, you need more content and more authority backlinks, which can take some time in itself.

Best Way To Rank Content

The best way to rank a piece of content is to start out with some keyword research and find a keyword which is both targeted and has little competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

Use an SEO plugin to help you write your content with the search engines in mind, but write for people. Ultimately it’s going to be the interaction of people on your site which Google uses as an indicator of your content. You can’t “trick” the “bots” into compliance – they’re too clever! So you need to write for people and for the search engine bots too!

Look on Google for the existing top ranked piece of content before you start out and write something which is much better. Write a longer piece which covers the topic in more detail.

Once you’re finished and have published your article, don’t just wait for Google to rank it. Promote it throughout your social media presence and build back links to it. Use social media share buttons and syndication plugins to help automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Use deep linking to link newer content to your keyword targeted articles using the keywords in your copy.

Build your authority at the same time by creating new content regularly building your SEO knowledge and seeking backlinks from other authority websites in your niche.

Quora Affiliate Marketing

Quora and affiliate marketing can go hand in hand. However, if you’re an affiliate marketer intending to use the platform for product promotion, it’s worth reading Quora’s terms and conditions.

You can’t directly post affiliate links on answers (or questions) on the platform. Doing so will likely get your answers/questions deleted. You also risk losing your account, particularly if you repeatedly post your links.

There’s a way around this though. You are allowed to post links to relevant content which helps you answer questions more thoroughly. So, if you have an affiliate website, you can create content on your site which directly answers certain questions. Then find the answers on Quora.com which you can answer with your content.

Don’t just post your link though. You also need to answer the question and provide some real value on the site. Just posting links to your affiliate content will likely get your answers collapsed and you also risk a ban.

Affiliate Marketing Quora: Spam Policy

Here’s Quora’s spam policy:

“Spam negatively impacts interaction on the platform, reduces trust, and inhibits authentic engagement. The following are not allowed:

Selling illegal products, services, or technology such as escort services, prostitution, or illegal drugs.
Selling weapons or controlled substances.
Promoting illegal streaming links or websites, get-rich-quick schemes, miraculous improvements such as rapid weight loss programs, scams like advance-fee scams, unofficial password or account recovery services, or hacking services.
Coordinated inauthentic activity such as vote manipulation.
Posting deceptive or malicious links on Quora, including ones that mimic Quora UI that direct users to unexpected websites.
Posting the same content repeatedly, or sending the same messages repeatedly.
Doing any of the following for the purpose of driving traffic to an external site or for monetary gain:
- Posting irrelevant answers or comments.
- Editing existing questions to include links or irrelevant information.

If it’s determined that an account is violating our spam policy, this may result in one or more of the following actions:

Deletion of content posted by the account
Edit-blocking of the account to prevent further posts
Banning the account

Subsequent violations will be treated more seriously than the first one. Multiple concurrent violations will be treated more seriously than one violation.

You can see this policy on Quora’s site here.

Affiliate Marketing Quora: Affiliates

If you’re an ethical affiliate marketer promoting your products through using Quora’s Q & A platform, the policies which are most relevant to you are most likely to be these:

Promoting illegal streaming links or websites, get-rich-quick schemes, miraculous improvements such as rapid weight loss programs, scams like advance-fee scams, unofficial password or account recovery services, or hacking services.
Posting the same content repeatedly, or sending the same messages repeatedly.

If you’re selling a specific product or service as an affiliate it is likely to fall into a specific category. For me, it’s affiliate marketing related information which I share. So some of my shares could be deemed to be “posting the same content repeatedly”.

I’ve had a few answers collapsed through posting links to my content in answers on Quora, but I haven’t yet been banned (fingers crossed!). I have also created a lot of content on this site (check out my blog posts here). So by being diverse in the answers you choose and linking to a lot of different content, you can get around this.

Also you should aim to write long and high quality answers. If you only write a sentence for your answer, followed by a link to your site, Quora will likely see this as spamming and collapse your answers. Or if you only paste links in your answers, without answering on the site, it’s much more likely you answers won’t be allowed.

Even if the affiliate program/product you promote is legitimate, Quora might deem it to be spammy, particularly if you’re promoting in a spammy way. So make sure your site has the disclaimers on it and is up to spec with latest GDPR compliance. This generally means having a cookie notice, disclaimer and privacy policy pages set up on your website.

Affiliate Marketing Quora: Appealing A Decision

Once you start posting answers on Quora and linking to your content (when appropriate), you will probably get a collapsed answer at some point. You can appeal this decision and successfully overturn a decision in some cases.

When Quora notification pops up on your feed declining one of your answers, or to your email inbox, you will be given an appeal link. Click on the link and fill out a form to appeal. It’s well worth doing this, particularly if you feel your answer was valuable and the link was a valuable addition to answering the question more fully.

This can happen for a number of reasons but often it’s just a “bot” making this decision. So you can get answers uncollapsed through the appeal process.

While this process can be tiresome, particularly when it happens a lot, it’s worth appealing to get your answers reinstated.

What To Expect

While this strategy is free, it’s also time consuming and frustrating at times. However, if you can make a habit out of this strategy it can give you a nice source of traffic, leads and sales.

Just don’t expect too much to magically happen after only posting a few answers. You’ll need a lot of content on the site to drive a lot of traffic. Many of Quora’s readers would rather stay on the site itself, rather than click off to your website to read your post. So most of the people who find your answers won’t click through to your website. But some will. So it’s a numbers game, the more questions you can answer, and the more relevant content you can link to your questions, the more people will find your website and content.

Some people will read your answers but not check your link. Some will also look at your profile so it’s worth linking your bio up to your affiliate site too.