AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

Organic Traffic Strategy

An organic traffic strategy can help you get traffic for free! However, as of Mar 21, 2022, there are currently over 1.93 billion websites online. This means there’s huge competition for traffic. So how can you get a slice of the action for free when there’s so many others doing exactly the same, competing for eyes on their content? On top of that most website visitors are pretty savvy. They aren’t going to hang around for more than a few seconds on a website if they aren’t finding exactly what they’re looking for!

So what’s the answer if you don’t want to pay through the nose for traffic? One of the best answers is through using long tail keywords. There’s a lot of competition online for most keywords, but the long tail keywords are the “low hanging fruit” in the keyword world! So if you can out perform others for the specific keywords which match your topic and have less SEO competition on the search engines, you can rank some content and get free traffic.

The added benefit of long tail keywords is that they are much more specific than their shorter tail counterparts! This means searches are more specific, and those visitors are more targeted!

Organic Traffic Strategy: Long Tail Keywords

To find long tail keywords within your specific area of expertise, you can use Google’s free keyword planner. There’s other keyword tools you can use, but the keyword planner works fine! Just type in your main keywords into the planner and look for the longer tail keywords which come up. Here’s what came up for some longer tail keywords for the topic of weight loss:

To find the long tail keywords you can scroll through the results on the planner or click on the Avg. Monthly Searches tab until the search volume drops.

Long tail keywords have less competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages on Google (and other search engines). This means you have much greater chance of winning a top listing on the first page of the Google results. There’s no guarantees of a top listing of course, but you can give yourself the best possible chance by doing things in a certain way. The first step to this strategy is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

The downside of the long tail keywords is that they tend to have lower search volume. But if you aim to rank for the short term phrases you have almost no chance of getting a top ranking. The long tail keywords give you more chance and a small percentage of something is worth much more than zero of a much larger volume of searches. With short tail keywords, you have a lot more competition and therefore far less chance of getting ranked anywhere neat the first page of the SERPS. See also short tail and long tail keywords.

Organic Traffic Strategy: Checking For Competition

Once you find a suitable keyword phrase which you think looks suitable for your website, check on Google to see the relative competition of the keyword. Do this with a quick search and a phrase search like so:

The number under your search denotes the number of competing webpages for your particular phrase. A larger number obviously means more competition whereas a smaller number means less. As you get used to this strategy you can learn from these numbers what looks like a winner. As a general rule of thumb I like to choose keywords which offer less than 100,000,000 for an open match and less than 20,000 for a phrase match.

You can also browse through the top listings to get an idea of the sites which already rank for those particular keywords. This can help you make a decision as to whether to attempt a piece of content for it. For example, a high authority domain such as Wikipedia at the top might mean that there’s stronger competition than if there’s only a few YouTube videos and Quora listings, for example.

Organic Traffic Strategy: Writing Your Content

Once you find a good keyword which is targeted, long tail and has low competition on Google, it’s time to start writing a piece of content. You can use an SEO plugin to help you write with SEO in mind; however, you should also write for your readers and not simply for the “bots”. If your content is clunky and difficult to read, people will click away quite quickly and this means you’ll get penalised by the search algorithm.

I use Yoast SEO the basic version of which is free. It helps you optimise by putting your keywords within your copy, headings, images and meta data etc. You can also check on Google to see the top ranking article for that particular keyword. That will give you an idea about how difficult it will be to compete with the top listing. While you still may not outrank the top listing, if you write a better piece than the existing one, it will give you greater chance of getting ranked.

Top listings can be there because of the site authority, rather than the quality of the piece of content itself. So a site with thousands of backlinks can still outrank yours, even if you write a better piece of content! Still, don’t let that put you off! The longer your content is, the better chance of ranking it is too. So try and write at least 1000 words, more if you can!

Promoting Your Content

Once you publish your article, your job isn’t yet over! You also need to promote your content to get more eyes on it. If you’ve done a good job writing your article, it should attract backlinks and shares from its readers over time. But you need to get people to see it first! Don’t rely solely on its ranking on the SERPS (search engine results pages) for getting views, work at it with your promotion strategies first.

You can use a couple of plugins to help with this. I use a social media share button plugin and a content syndication tool. Revive Old Posts is a free plugin which lets you automate sharing through social media accounts. You can also use the plugin in conjunction with another tool for more free shares. Checkout my article on this “autopost to social media from WordPress“. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Spend at least as much time on promoting your articles as you do on writing them. I admit at first I was very bad at this but it was to my detriment. Other promotion methods:

Guest posting – on other authority blogs
Back linking – from your own or other people’s websites
Blog commenting – an easy way to build backlinks
Outsource – pay someone else to build backlinks and/or promote your content (See this site)
Deep linking – keyword targeted links within your newer content pointing back to older posts

Summary

This organic traffic strategy is a lot of work and initially this is kinda hard because you don’t see the results immediately. But if you’re consistent with this tactic you can see fantastic results if you stick with it.

SEO – search engine optimisation is a slow strategy of getting traffic to your website for free and there’s no guarantees. But if you work at your content and the promotion of it, you should see some SEO results within a few weeks or months. Your success depends on a number of things including your ability to stay consistent, the competition in your niche and how long you keep it up for.

Here’s a snap shot of how Google rewards bloggers per post. You can see that with 400 blog post you should see an uptick in your traffic. Ideally choose a topic you can write consistently in for several months for the best results.

Affiliate Content Marketing

Affiliate content marketing refers to an affiliate marketing strategy using content as the source. Content marketers use all sorts of content to bring their message to consumers and lead them to their affiliate products.

Blogging, Video blogging (v’logging), infographics, webinars, online reports, pdf downloads and ebooks are all kinds of content which affiliates use to draw customers to their products and services and increase their authority within a certain topic.

Affiliate content marketing is a good way to find customers if you’re on a budget. While paid marketing is a much faster method to build an affiliate business, content marketing is much cheaper. With paid marketing, you can get a lot of traffic quite quickly. But with content marketing it tends to be much slower.

Affiliate Content Marketing: Blogging

Blogging, for example, is a popular method of building content to attract an audience in order to sell affiliate products. With blogging, you can attract an audience from the search engines for free. But this can take some time and considerable effort, and a high ranking on Google isn’t guaranteed.

Bloggers often work hard at promoting their content as well as creating it. Without promoting your content as a content marketer, you’re relying very heavily on your content being indexed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for traffic. This is a very precarious decision because there may be a huge volume of other bloggers within the same topic as yours.

To help boost traffic bloggers also share their content on social media and build connections with other bloggers through back linking to their content. Over time and with persistence, bloggers can eventually earn a passive income from promoting affiliate products through their content.

Affiliate Content Marketing: YouTube

Many affiliate marketers use YouTube to promote their affiliate products through content building. YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the internet after Google (who also owns YouTube). So it’s a good source for traffic if you’re an affiliate marketer.

To get a lot of traffic from YouTube through content marketing alone, you’ll need to build a lot of valuable content by uploading videos on a regular basis for a long period of time. If you do this for long enough, YouTube will reward you with more traffic which can be monetised with either affiliate marketing or through using Adsense.

To get a lot of traffic organically is much more difficult than paying for it of course. So content creators will often have to spend several months creating content on a regular basis to even have a chance of regular traffic.

Online Webinars

Webinars are a good way for affiliate marketers to create content which is useful and which can lead people to their affiliate products. You can also automate webinars and have them working for you without actually showing up in person to each one you do.

affiliate content marketing — Access this webinar event to learn ways to make your first 10K online.

Training & Educational Videos

Videos are good also for offering value through content. They can be delivered via email marketing or directly from a website. While offering value in your content, you are also raising your perceived authority within a specific area of expertise.

Videos are often much better than written content because you can deliver a lot more information with a video. By giving huge value you are building trust with your visitors. Trust is a rare commodity online and research has shown that most consumers need several touch points before they make a buying decision. So selling something directly from a website can be tough.

By delivering content via email marketing, you can more easily overcome this barrier as an affiliate. With email marketing, you can deliver content which is useful while building trust to multiple subscribers simultaneously.

Summary

Affiliate content marketing is typically done through videos or blogging. But there’s many ways affiliates can create value through their content to gain attention of potential customers for their affiliate products. Webinars, videos, blog posts, infographics, ebooks, digital downloads and pdf’s are just a few examples of affiliate content marketing.

Just creating content is only half of the equation though and content marketers need to actively promote their content to get more eyes on it. This is done through many methods including back linking, guest posting, social media sharing, SEO (search engine optimisation), paid marketing and email marketing to name just a few.

Blogging For Profit

Are you thinking about blogging for profit? There’s something quite magical about earning a profit by blogging. You can set your own schedule, write when and where you want, and be your own boss. The earning potential is unlimited too because a blog can reach people internationally and you can sell almost anything from a blog. But despite all the benefits of earning from a blog, there’s also a bunch of drawbacks too!

For starters it’s super competitive and bloggers need a large audience in order to make any money. To build an audience takes a lot of time and effort and many bloggers will quit, even after months (or years) of work! Depending on the topic you choose for blogging, there can be many thousands of other bloggers online competing with the same topic as you! With 600 million blogs in the world in 2022, it is safe to say that the world of blogging has become pretty saturated.

Blogging For Profit – Your “Niche”

It’s not all bad though! But if you’re just getting started with a blog, expect a long journey. Depending on your niche (topic), just getting traffic to your blog can take months of work. Then comes monetising your blog which is usually done in a couple of main ways; either through using adverts or affiliate products.

It’s a good idea to pick a topic for your blog. This is often referred to as a niche. A niche is a specific area of interest which you will cover in your blog. Since blogging for profit can take some serious time and effort, it’s a good idea to choose a niche in which you have an interest or passion. Blogging in an unfamiliar niche can take a lot more effort and is more difficult. You’ll need to research each post you write if you don’t know your topic. In the beginning it can be quite exciting writing blog posts. But after several weeks (or months) you can easily lose your enthusiasm!

This is particularly true if your topic is of no interest to you. So while you also need to think about monetising a blog, you also need to think of the longevity of your blogging habit. Choosing a topic you love, have a passion for or (at the very least) have an interest in is the best idea.

Blogging For Profit: Monetising Your Blog

Monetising your blog can be done even without your own products or service to sell. The two main ways you can monetise a blog simply are advertising or affiliate marketing. With advertising, you can join an advertising platform such as Google Adsense and place ads on your content. When visitors click on your ads, you earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue. Depending on your content, this is usually only a few pence/cents per click. In more competitive topics, you’ll earn a little more per click.

Because the amount is so low, you need a huge volume of traffic to make this strategy pay well. Another way to monetise a blog is through using affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote other people’s products and services through your blog for a share of the profits.

If your topic is a very specific one, you can find affiliate products which are a good match for your choice of topic. When visitors find your content, you can present your affiliate products on your site. If someone buys a product through your affiliate link or banner, you receive a commission based on the sale. There’s many kinds of affiliate products from physical products to digital products and you can choose products in pretty much any area you could blog about.

Blogging For Profit: Traffic & Monetisation

Before setting off with a blog, it’s a good idea to get clear on what your blog will be about and how you’re going to monetise it. You can start a blog without monetising of course, but if your goal is to make profit from a blog, it’s good to lay the groundwork first.

Ideally find a topic to write about which you are passionate about and which you can monetise. While many people say choose a topic you love, you also need to choose a topic which you can monetise. Get these two right and you’re off to a good start.

I ran into problems a few years ago trying to blog about a topic I knew nothing about nor did I care about it: mushroom harvesting! I choose the topic with only financial gain in mind and thought (incorrectly) that just because I could get traffic (I did), then I would make money! Don’t make the same mistake. While traffic is one of the key ingredients to making money from a blog, it’s a mistake to assume traffic means profit! It doesn’t. You also need to drive the right traffic and link your audience to the right products (if you choose the affiliate marketing route).

Blogging For Profit: A Niche Website

With blogging, most of your traffic will be coming from the search algorithms (Google’s mostly). This means you’ll need to out-perform many other bloggers within your niche in order to get traffic. You can also share content on social media, build backlinks and build an email list which you can use for promoting your content (and affiliate products). But ideally, you’ll want search engine traffic because that’s how to get a lot of it!

To get your content found on the search engines, you need to blog consistently for some time. Depending on your niche, this can take several weeks, months or even years before you see a consistent flow of free traffic.

To give yourself a head start with traffic, you can build a niche website around specific keywords so as to rank more highly on Google for those keywords. If you do this right, it can give you a quick boost in traffic soon after your site is up and running.

Building A WordPress Website Around Your Keywords

To find keywords to build a niche website around you can use Google’s free keyword planner tool. This tool can give you ideas for keywords with which to build a site. Ideally you want to find a keyword phrase which fits your topic and which you have a good chance of ranking your site for. You can determine this with some experimentation and by looking on Google for your keywords. See also how to create a niche website for affiliate marketing.

This website has been built around the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors“, for example. As you can see in the above picture, this search term gets a small amount of monthly views and was relatively uncompetitive on Google when I built the site. So it was a good keyword to build the site around.

To learn more about building a keyword targeted website, setting up hosting and purchasing a domain name checkout this article.

This idea can give you a nice boost in traffic in the beginning. However, you can build a site without doing this and focus on blogging alone for your traffic.

Useful Plugins For A WordPress Website

It’s a good idea to get yourself an SEO plugin which will help you write SEO friendly blog posts. SEO, or search engine optimisation is what you need to get good at as a blogger. Yoast SEO is a great free plugin which takes all the hard work out of it for you.

Other plugins can also help you speed up your site, help visitors share your content and link your content automatically to social media sites. All of this helps your SEO over time and gets eyes on your blog posts:

Social Media share buttons
Auto post to social media
Speed up your site (good for SEO)

Checkout other WordPress blog plugins which will help you here.

Blogging & Email Marketing

One of the best ways to monetise a blog is through selling affiliate products from your site. Of course the first issue is to get traffic to your content. But this is an ongoing task which you’ll need to make a habit out of. Once you start seeing traffic, you’ll want to make the most of it and monetise it as quickly as possible. One of the best ways to do this is with an email marketing list. An email list can be built from your blog by offering a freebie giveaway on your site in exchange for your visitor’s email.

Once on your email list, you have much better chance of building a relationship with your subscribers by offering valuable information in your email messages. An email list can connect you back to your blog visitors many times. While on a blog, it can be difficult to get a first time visitor to make a purchase. Visitors tend to want many touch points before making a purchase, which is where an email list comes in.

An email list can compound your blogging efforts much more quickly because you’re able to collect emails and maintain a relationship with your subscribers over the long term. Whereas on a blog, your visitors only stick around for a few minutes before they are gone forever! See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Writing Blog Posts For SEO

Are you planning on writing blog posts for SEO? While blogging can take some time to get traction with, if you focus on SEO posts it can have a dramatic effect over time. What is an SEO post? SEO, as you probably know, means search engine optimisation. If you optimise your posts for the search engines, and choose your blog titles wisely, you can dramatically increase your chances of ranking your content in the search engine results pages – SERPS.

Not every blog post will rank on Google for your chosen keywords but this little strategy has worked for many bloggers. Over time, there is a cumulative effect of writing a lot of posts too. As your content library grows over time you should also pick up some SEO points just because you’ve built a lot of content too. Plus if your content is of high quality, you should also collect backlinks naturally over time, which has an impact on your ranking scores.

Writing Blog Posts For SEO

Before you start writing blog posts for SEO, you should plan what you’re going to write. Specifically you should research which keyword/s to title your blog posts. Start by typing your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look for the title ideas which offer the least competition on the SERPS. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty can take a bit of effort. But once you understand how to do it, you’ll get better over time the more you practice.

To find this article title, I started with the keyword blog post, which led to the title of this article. You can do the same thing with any topic. Just use a keyword in a topic area you want to write about, type it into the keyword planner and have a look at the results. Typically you’ll see the most searched for terms first. These are usually two or three word keywords which have a huge search volume but they also have a lot of competition. These aren’t the terms you’re looking for (Star Wars reference!)!!

Writing Blog Posts For SEO: Find Long Tail Keywords

You can write articles for your main terms to help your SEO. But they will seldom rank on the SERPS because of the competition for those competitive keywords. To find titles which have more chance of ranking, you need to find low competition long tail keywords.

This can be done by clicking on the tab for Avg. monthly Searches at the top of the second column of results in the Keyword Planner. Click on it until you see the search volume drop to 10 monthly searches.

These are the keywords with the lowest monthly search volume which relate to your “seed” keyword. They also typically are longer tail keywords which offer less competition than the rest. Scroll through them to find a suitable keyword phrase which is a good fit for your blog.

Writing Blog Posts For SEO: Why Long Tail Keywords Work

Long tail keywords work for SEO because there’s usually less competition on the SERPS for those particular keywords. So you have a greater chance of ranking your content on Google. However, there’s also a lot less people searching for those terms and you’ll still share the search volume with other top ranking sites; even if your content gets to the very top of Google! Plus if there’s ads running for those keywords you’ll also be sharing the search volume with the top adverts showing on Google too!

That’s a lot of sharing which means with a search volume of only 10 a month, you’ll only get a proportion of that every month at best, if any! So the best is you rank at the top of Google for your chosen keyword. But if it only gets 10 hits a month, you’ll only get a fraction of that! Not much traffic for all your hard work. The more volume of traffic you see on the search tool, the more competitive the keyword generally is. So ideally choose a keyword which suits your needs. I like to pick keywords with at least 30 monthly views as a starting point. But remember your content may not rank at all, which means you also need to be an active promoter of your content too!

Checking Your Keyword On Google

Once you find a suitable keyword for your blog post title, you can check with a simply Google search to see how competitive your keyword phrase is. You can do a couple of searches on Google; one with an open search for your key phrase and the other with a phrase match (in quotes).

This can give you an idea of the competitiveness of your chosen keyword/s. The number you see under the search box on Google on a desk top computer/laptop gives you the number of competing pages/websites for that particular term. A high number means there’s more competition. The more you do of this, the more you’ll get to know what terms are competitive and which terms you have a chance of ranking your content for.

Search Intent & Competition

Once you find a suitable keyword, it’s time to start writing. Keep in mind too that some keyword phrases won’t be suitable for your blog. You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time attracting the wrong kinds of visitors. So it’s a good idea to check the intention behind a search phrase before you go ahead and write your article.

For example, if the keyword contains the word “free”, you may be inadvertently attracting an audience of freebie seekers to your blog. These people will be less likely to purchase something than someone seeking your product or service within the keyword search, for example.

Before you get to work on your blog you can also check on Google which posts are already ranking for your chosen keywords. Have a look at the length and quality of the top ranking post and out do it! Write a longer and more in-depth piece for the best possible outcome.

Writing Your Post

I use an SEO plugin which helps me write SEO friendly articles. This is a good idea if you’re attempting to rank your content on Google, and the other search engines. Yoast SEO is a free plugin which lets you populate your posts with the right amount of keywords and get them in the various fields for optimal SEO benefit.

Generally speaking the more you write the better your posts are. But if you’re just rambling after the first 500 words it’s probably better to stop! I like to aim for at least 1000 words with my blog posts. The longer the better! Write with SEO in mind but write like a human. If your articles aren’t enjoyable to read this will mean less people actually reading your content and that’s a major signal the the search engines to downvote it!

You’re Not Done Yet!

Once you’ve finished your blog post you’re still not done! You need to actively promote it if you want to get the most out of your content. I’ve never been great at promoting my writing so I found a few plugins which can help both in terms of actually optimising for SEO, getting more shares on social media and automatically sharing your blog posts throughout your social media presence. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

One of my faves is Revive Old Posts which lets you automatically syndicate your blogs posts to your social media platforms as you publish them. You can also queue up older posts to by shared on a timer. This is great if you have a lot of content, or are intending on creating a lot of content.

See also autopost to social media from WordPress for a clever hack using the Revive plugin.

Best Keywords For Affiliate Marketing

What are the best keywords for affiliate marketing? The answer to this question will depend on a number of factors:

What affiliate product/s you are promoting?
The marketing strategy you are using – SEO (search engine optimisation), social media or Paid Ads.
Your target audience – who are the people you want to reach with your marketing message?
What platform are you using/where are your audience hanging out? Social media, Google search, YouTube etc?

When you know the answer to the above questions, finding the keywords relevant for your audience, platform and products becomes more clear. The best keywords for affiliate marketing are those which result in sales; not just traffic and not just subscribers. To get sales in affiliate marketing you need to find traffic and send them to your offers. When you make a sale, you should be able to track the sale back to the keywords you have used to generate it.

When you can do this successfully, you’ll know for certain which keywords are the best for your particular campaign. Different campaigns, adverts products and audiences will require different keywords to make them successful.

Best Keywords For Affiliate Marketing: Paid Ads

If you’re using paid adverts and keywords, you will need to determine which keywords are going to work the best by running several ads and looking at your results. Using Google’s Adwords program will allow you to set certain keywords to target your audience with and run ads for those particular keywords. If you’re too specific in your keyword usage too early, you can limit your ability to drive a large number of visitors.

For example, lets say you’re going to send traffic to an offer which is to do with “weight loss”. Head over Google’s free keyword planner and type in “weight loss” into the planner. You’ll see a number of variations of this keyword which you can use in your advertising campaign.

Searching For Keywords

Shorter term keywords with only two or three words in them tend to be fairly vague. If you click on the Avg. monthly searches tab at the top, you’ll see longer term keywords (which get fewer searches). Although you’ll typically get fewer monthly searches for long tail keyword phrases, they are also often more focused. These are good for affiliates because the visitor has a more specific intention behind their search. So if you’re selling a specific product, you are more likely to make sales by targeting those keywords which are more relevant to your item.

If you have a specific affiliate product you are promoting, you can use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords which relate to your product very specifically. These are some of the best ones to target because it means your visitors will have a strong intention to buy. Vague keywords like “weight loss” are much less specific. You can end up spending a lot of money running ads without making any sales if you use them; even if they relate to your product.

Best Keywords For Affiliate Marketing: SEO

SEO (or search engine optimisation) is another affiliate marketing strategy which uses content to find traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc). This article is an example of how to create keyword focused traffic from the search engines. I have specifically targeted this article for its keywords in order to give me a chance of a free listing on the SERPS – search engine results pages.

To use this strategy you need to create content which is targeting specific keywords in your blog posts or videos (if using YouTube). To find those keywords you need to use Google’s keyword tool. Type in your main “seed” keyword which relates most to the affiliate product that you are promoting. Using the weight loss/fitness example again, lets say you’re promoting a “six pack abs” product to help shed belly fat!

Type your keyword into the keyword planner and click on the Avg. Monthly searches tab until you find the longer tail keywords which have less competition. Although this is a competitive topic, to have more chance of ranking your content on the searches for free you’ll need to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. These have less traffic, but typically are easier to rank for than the main keywords in this topic. If you’re building a blog around this topic, finding the long tail keywords for your niche and writing content for them is a good strategy for free traffic.

A similar strategy can be used for YouTube videos and other social media platforms if you want to use social media.

Your Target Audience + Product/s

Your target audience is something you want to get to know very well if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. This is the audience where you’ll find the people who want what you have to sell. The best keywords for affiliate marketing are the ones which define your target audience and allow you to lead them to your products.

Whether you’re using paid marketing or organic marketing, you’ll need to find your target audience by understanding the intent behind their keyword search. Some keyword searches are vague and others are more specific.

As an example, the search for “car tyres” is very vague and leaves a lot of questions open. If you target the keyword car tyres and are only selling a specific tyre, you’ll be wasting a lot of money. On the other hand, if you sell tyres which fit the description of “recommended tires for bmw 328i” and target that particular keyword in your marketing, you’ll be making a lot of sales.

Testing And Measuring

Ultimately you’ll need to determine the best keywords for affiliate marketing through a process of testing and measuring. By running ads using many keywords in your niche, you’ll be able to use the data to determine which keywords give you the best click through rate, cost per click and of course which keywords lead to sales the most.

Some keywords will be more expensive to pay for and/or harder to rank on the search engines. Some keywords will tend to bring in more sales than others, but might cost more. Others will bring in cheaper traffic but might lead to less sales. Only by testing and measuring different advertising campaigns will you ultimately know which keywords work best for you given the product you’re choosing to sell and the marketing strategies you’re going to use.

Affiliate Hacks

Looking for affiliate hacks? While there’s no quick and easy solutions to long term success with affiliate marketing, some little “hacks” can save you some time and effort.

Before I found an online community of mentors and coaches, I struggled with affiliate marketing (access here). I thought that “hacks” could do all the work for me! Sadly hacks can’t build your affiliate business for you. But they can make your life easier. So here’s a few of the hacks I’ve found which I have used to make affiliate marketing that little bit easier.

Affiliate Hacks & Traffic

One of the main problems for affiliate marketers on a budget is getting traffic. When you have money to spend on ads, affiliate marketing can be a whole lot easier. But if you’re trying to do everything on a shoestring budget, it’s a lot more difficult.

When I started learning affiliate marketing I did everything as cheaply as possible. So I learnt a few strategies which helped me to get traffic for free, or very cheaply!

Here’s a little hack which helps me get more traffic out of my blog posts.

The hack is to use a couple of Plugins for a WordPress website which can allow you to automatically syndicate your content when you publish it throughout your social media accounts completely for free. It also lets you syndicate older posts automatically on a timer. It’s called Revive Old Posts and it’s a free plugin. While Revive Old Posts is free, there’s limited usage on the free version. To extend this usage to more social media platforms there’s another little hack you can use.

Affiliate Hacks: If This Then That

IFTTT or If This Then That is a tool which offers social media connectivity. What’s useful about this tool is that you can use it in conjunction with Revive Old Posts to trigger a social share from Twitter.

Since Revive Old Posts has limited functionality with the free version, you can only automate the share of your posts to two social media accounts. But if you use IFTTT as well, you can use many more. Set up Revive Old Posts to send a Tweet to your Twitter account and then set up you IFTTT account to re-share this message and link throughout your other social media accounts. Using this little hack will save you a paid subscription to Revive Old Posts and automate social sharing of your blog posts. You can also share older posts so if you have a lot of older content you can revive it!

Affiliate Hacks & Traffic: A Niche Website

I’m a big fan of niche websites and have built many of them. If you’re not sure what a niche website is, it’s basically a website set up which targets specific keywords with the sole intention to get free traffic from the search engines. Some of my niche websites have been more successful than others, it has to be said. But this is a good strategy if you’re building an affiliate business on a small budget.

A niche website starts with keyword research. I like Google’s free keyword research tool, but there’s lot of others you can use too. To do keyword research for a niche website you need to start with an idea for your site. Ideally pick a topic you like so that you’ll be happy creating lots of content in it. You should also be able to monetise your content somehow, so also choose a topic you can monetise with your affiliate products.

Next type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look at the results. You want to find a keyword which has a good amount of monthly views, but which isn’t too competitive in the search results. Once you find a good keyword, look to purchase a domain name with your keyword in. You can read more about this strategy in this article: how to build a niche website.

Affiliate Hacks: Subscription Products

This bit of knowledge can shave years of struggle from your affiliate efforts. By finding subscription products to promote as an affiliate, you can earn regular income much more quickly. As a beginner, the main struggle for me was in making that first online sale. When it happened, the success was short lived! Before long, I was back looking for another sale.

But with subscription affiliate products, you can earn ongoing income from each sale. Month after month, commissions keep coming in from previous sales. So even if you have a bad couple of months, the previous sales keep those commissions coming in like clockwork!

If you haven’t found a subscription product to sell, you can sign up on this site and find some through the products I promote on my email list. Another hack to find subscription affiliate products on Clickbank is to use CBEngine.com and look for the tab for recurring commissions on the left hand side. Click on it and it will show you all the products on Clickbank which offer recurring commissions.

Find Long Tail Keywords

Another hack I actively use for getting more SEO traffic to my blog posts is to write targeted articles with the keyword as the title. Before starting on an article, I use Google’s keyword planner in the same way as described above for building a niche website. Type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. Then look for long tail derivatives of that keyword which offer low SEO difficulty and are easer to rank for.

In the niche of affiliate marketing most keywords are pretty competitive. But there’s thousands of other topics you can create content for if you’re selling affiliate products. In each niche, there will always be long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You just need to get creative in finding them. When you do, write really good, long posts and out perform the existing content which currently ranks. I use an SEO plugin to help me write my posts (Yoast SEO).

Here’s a quick way to find long tail keywords using Google’s keyword planner. Once you type in your main keyword, you’ll be presented with the most popular searches for keywords within that particular niche. Click on the “Avg. Monthly Searches” box at the top of the column until you see the numbers drop.

This should give you the long tail keywords which have lower competition in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Although there’s far fewer searches for most of these keywords, there’s also a lot less competition. So if you’re going after free traffic this little hack can help a lot. You can also search for things such as pdf, download, cheatsheet, workshop, webinar and other such terms to find those little gold nuggets for which you can rank content for.

High Ticket Products

High ticket products are typically those which offer commissions of $500 and upwards. Before finding out about high ticket products I was frantically trying many methods to sell books from Amazon! Books! What a fool I was!

I still recommend books from Amazon if I think they would be helpful of course, but for the sale of a book I make only pennies/cents! It’s hardly worth the effort. But the sale of a high ticket product can make you thousands – often with the same work involved as with the book from Amazon! See also high ticket affiliate marketing products.

high ticket affiliate marketing — Access this video series here and learn about high ticket products.

Affiliate Toolkit

In this “affiliate toolkit” I’m going to include some of the tools which have helped me to earn an income online. When I found affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s I struggled for a long time. I tried to do everything on my own and for free! It wasn’t a great plan for success in hindsight and I was fortunate enough to find an online community of affiliates and coaches who helped me to succeed.

But many affiliates aren’t so lucky. There’s a lot of struggles to be overcome before you make that first online sale. It’s no wonder that there’s such a high drop out rate among affiliate marketers. The success rate of affiliates is a measly 5% according to the latest statistics. This means 95% of new affiliate marketers will fail and drop out! That’s a huge amount. I don’t want that for you – I want you to keep at it and succeed. These tools should help!

Affiliate Toolkit – Training, Education & Product Suite

You can’t build a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage and likewise with your affiliate business. Without a solid understanding of what you’re doing, you’re likely to fail. Success in affiliate marketing is therefore build on your education. I ran into affiliate marketing hoping to “make it” quickly. I was in for a big shock! Make it a priority to get the best education, help and support and you’re setting yourself apart from the 95%.

In 2014 I found this online business community and coaching program. It has helped me immensely with coaches, mentors and other community members holding me accountable and helping me to stay motivated. Make no mistake, building an affiliate business is a massive undertaking and you’ll need all the help you can get! Access here.

Affiliate Toolkit – Email Autoresponder

I struggled along for a few years without getting an email autoresponder. My main strategy was organic traffic and building niche websites. It took a lot of hard work to build sites and get even only a tiny amount of traffic. The traffic seldom turned into sales and I was frustrated for a long time!

You can avoid a lot of these problems simply by getting an email autoresponder. An email autoresponder makes your life as an affiliate a whole lot easier. It lets you collect email subscribers and build a list while communicating with your subscribers. Over a longer period of time, an email list can grow into one of your best assets as an affiliate and it gives you more control over your traffic.

Paid traffic is expensive and organic traffic is difficult and time consuming. What ties them together is an email list which can be used in combination with either paid or organic traffic to make that traffic work harder for you!

When you have a list of subscribers you can build more trust and communicate your message over a longer period of time. Get free access to an email autoresponder here.

Affiliate Toolkit – Mindset

Your mindset as an affiliate is one of your greatest assets or your biggest liabilities! I didn’t understand how important mindset was when I started as an affiliate. Most affiliates quit because the outcome doesn’t meet their expectations immediately! The affiliates who persevere and ultimately create a lot of freedom in their lives are the ones who learn from these setbacks instead of throwing in the towel.

When you’re at rock bottom, that’s where the learning really starts! With the right mindset, setbacks are learning opportunities and failures and stepping stones to success! One of the best resources I found for mindset development is a book by a guy called Stuart Lichtman.

Stuart Lichtman was an MIT professor who created what he called the cybernetic transposition technique. The short version is that this allows you to align all parts of the brain to accomplish a seemingly impossible goal. The main problem with goals is that competing parts of yourself get in the way and stop your from achieving them. With Stuart’s cybernetic transposition three step process, you learn to become super focused on the outcome you want to achieve. Access the book here.

Landing Pages

One of the best tools you can use as an affiliate is a landing page builder. I’ve already mentioned the power of email marketing. With email marketing you can grow your list and sell affiliate products by building trust and delivering value in your email messages. Since most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website, you need several touch points in order to make a sale online.

To get people on your email list you need to send targeted traffic to either a website or a landing page. A landing page is far better, particularly if you’re using paid marketing because you can convert a greater percentage of visitors into subscribers than you ever could from a website.

Why? Simply because on a website someone has a lot more options. You can browse around, click on a number of web pages and generally have a good look. But on a landing page you can’t. You can only do two things on a landing page: sign up, or leave!

Landing page software lets you build an email list incredibly quickly in conjunction with paid marketing. You can optimise your landing pages for conversions and even cross test between similar designs and layouts to find your best performing one. Access a landing page software here.

Summary

So those are my top recommended tools for affiliate marketers who are getting started online. Here’s a quick recap of the best tools you can find for online success:

Training, Tools, Help & Support and a product “suite” – Access here.
An email autoresponder – access for free here.
Goal setting and mindset – Access here.
Landing page software – Access here.

Depending on your affiliate marketing plans and goals, you may not need all of these tools. If you’re a blogger, or looking for free and cheap marketing strategies, you might not need the landing page builder. As a priority I’d recommend getting help and support and a step by step setup procedure which you can access here.