Author: AffiliateMentor

Gay Hendricks Upper Limit

I’ve recently been re-reading Gay Hendricks Upper Limit book “The Big Leap” which discusses the glass ceiling we carry in our lives. All of us have an inner thermostat which tells us how much money, love, happiness or joy we can experience in life. When we have success in one area of life, another problem crops up in another area! If you’re ever experienced this problem chances are good they are an upper limit paradigm; a belief which holds you back from more happiness, joy or success.

The upper limit problem is mostly created by inner fears which can hold you in your existing comfort zone and paradigm. I’ve definitely experienced this in building the online business and after reading Hendrick’s book realised it was an upper limit problem.

upper limit problem

Gay Hendricks Upper Limit – Upper Limit & Online Business

I’ve been working online for several years and have experienced a lot of frustration in that time. In the early years getting traffic was a problem. Then it was making sales, then consistent sales, then scaling up. But one of the largest problems I’ve found has been hiding in my own mind. Gay Hendricks Upper Limit book The Big Leap has helped me unlock the issue. After reading it I immediately turned up my advertising budget! I realised it was an upper limit problem in my business – fear of losing money!

But it’s also a fear of success. If I was successful in business what then? My whole identity of a struggling affiliate would be lost! The purpose of my life has been found in struggle and strain. Without it, what would I do. I realised that my purpose was tied to the struggle! So I feared success as much as I feared failure. I feared losing myself and my identity.

Gay Hendricks upper limit problem

Gay Hendricks Upper Limit – The Elastic Band

After re-reading the book again this time, I got clearer on how the upper limit problem was affecting my business. I looked to the pattern of behaviour I was repeating over and over. My initial venture into the online business world was through different tactics. I started out with Forex marketing and eBay and eventually I found affiliate marketing. I struggled for a long time with affiliate marketing, repeating behaviour which was tied up to my lack mentality.

Because I had very little money, I did everything for free. This is a long, slow process of creating content and attempting to get it found. From the content I sold affiliate products. Once I made a sale, I would get very excited and have a burst of energy. I would create loads more content in the hope that another sale would come. Then just crickets! Nothing happened. So I would stop. This pattern of sporadic action was to follow me on my online journey for a long time. Even with different marketing strategies including paid marketing.

gay hendricks upper limit

My best commission of several thousand pounds came after a spirt of paid marketing. I had run up my credit card to thousands of pounds also and the commission I received only just covered the bill! How interesting! I paid off my credit card in full that month but the stress of it all was a lot to bare so I fell back to my previous blogging activities, instead of trying again with paid marketing – which clearly worked!

Looking back now this was clearly an upper limit problem. The status quo became more important to me until I got frustrated with my comfort zone and another spirt of energy would ensue.

Blogging & Online Success

My old content would occasionally give me a sale here and there. Each time it did, I became more confident that affiliate marketing could actually work for me. So I would start blogging again. When I had been blogging for several weeks in a row and nothing happened, I would stop, procrastinate and wonder whether I should be doing something else.

A month would pass of me just procrastinating. Then another sale would come in from my blog posts! Damn, if only I can maintained consistency with my blogging, and not stopped then I would be getting many more sales dropping in!

Buy The Big Leap on Amazon here.

I realised my patterns were based on my belief about whether what I was doing would actually work! Both my paid marketing and blogging efforts were entirely based on sales, not belief! No wonder my actions were so sporadic and my results were so intermittent.

I realised I needed consistency, and set about being consistent in both paid marketing and blogging.

Summary

If you’re struggling in your affiliate business could it be you have an upper limit problem? The best way to solve an upper limit problem is by shining the light of your consciousness on it, and making it conscious! You can’t solve the problem when you don’t know it exists! Likely the problem will surface in some problem in your life whether it’s success, money, relationship or love related.

See also affiliate mindset and affiliate psychology.

Best Method To Make Money Online

What is the best method to make money online? Since there are so many methods this is kind of a subjective question. For some it’s one method and for others another method is more suitable.

Forex marketing works for some. But you’ll need a lot of patience and available funds for your trading bank. Blogging works for some but not others. With blogging you’ll need to be persistent and patient and have a topic which you can write a lot of content about. Then there’s drop shipping and affiliate marketing; both models where you can earn by being a third party referrer for products/services online.

best method to make money online

You can earn from online content through using video too. Upload videos to YouTube and join their partner program. Bloggers can earn through using ads too, although they’ll need a huge volume of traffic to make it pay, and a lot of creativity and persistence to make it work. Having tried several methods of earning online over several years, one method stood out to me from the first few years I spent attempting to make money online.

Best Method To Make Money Online: Affiliate Marketing

Yes it’s affiliate marketing! Surprise surprise! This site is after all an affiliate site and I earn my revenue through affiliate products and services I recommend on this and other websites. Not everyone will agree with this opinion however and really it’s whichever method you can get to work for you.

But despite spending years trying out other strategies including Forex marketing, Google Adsense, buying and selling, blogging, niche website building and the rest, the best successes I had were with affiliate marketing. I was making peanuts from Adsense but an early affiliate sale brought in more than I would make in a whole month of advertising revenue on my websites. So I decided quite early to pursue affiliate marketing.

To me affiliate marketing seemed very neat. After years of filling my house up with stuff to sell on eBay, I wanted rid of it all! I wanted my laptop and that’s it! With affiliate marketing you don’t need to hoard goods, deal with customers or even own your own products. You simply learn marketing method whereby you can refer customers to products and services online. If you’re successful, your strategy works. If you’re unsuccessful, you need to find a new strategy, not quit!

This is a major caveat to earning online however you do it. None of the aforementioned tactics will magically put money in your bank account. You need to apply yourself and figure out how to make any strategy work for you!

Best Method To Make Money Online: Why Affiliate Marketing?

With any online earning strategy you need to spend some time figuring out how to make it work. This applies to freelancing, Forex marketing, Google Adsense, blogging, affiliate marketing or whatever! Despite my cheery outlook of affiliate marketing it wasn’t always easy for me as an affiliate. I struggled for a long time before making a consistent income from it.

Over the years I realised I could have shortened my journey considerably if I had found and taken the advice of a mentor! In the early years of my affiliate journey I bought a couple of courses and spent heaps of time and effort following the advice of the “gurus” dutifully. Guess what, most of that advice didn’t work! I build hundreds of websites which were “supposed” to simply float to the top of Google and make me money quickly and easily. They didn’t! Most of them failed completely!

But eventually I would have a small success and make a sale here and there. It was only for tiny amounts initially, but through perseverance and finding a better way of doing things it eventually came in bigger amounts.

Types Of Affiliate Product

There’s various types of affiliate products you can promote and various ways you can promote them. Just because one strategy hasn’t worked for someone (or one particular product) doesn’t mean they should “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and discard affiliate marketing altogether.

Quite the opposite, they have gained some knowledge which is incredibly valuable just by trying something. The affiliates who make it work for them keep going. Most newbie affiliates will quit only after a short amount of time. But this time isn’t long enough! Affiliate marketing works, but it takes a few months at least to find your feet.

best method to make money online

The type of affiliate product you choose to promote and the way in which you promote them is a major key to success. When I started out affiliate marketing, I promoted low value products from a website, hoping to get a visitor for free who would immediately purchase my product directly from the website. I now can see how naive I was! But for the new affiliate, there’s a lot of information they don’t know, which can result in a long, disappointing journey!

I did get free traffic to my websites but it wasn’t nearly enough traffic. And since most website visitors will take several touch points of a product to make a buying decision, I failed miserably at getting them to buy from me.

Use A List, Pay For Traffic, Scale Up

I wasn’t using an email list, I wasn’t paying for traffic, I wasn’t using the right products. All tragic errors which cost me a lot of time and effort (and pain). Learn from my mistakes:

  • Build an email list – an email list puts you in control of your traffic and lets you communicate with a growing number of subscribers simultaneously and over a long period of time
  • Get help – I joined an online program which put me in touch with mentors and coaches. I have an accountability “buddy” and many coaches/mentors who have helped me.
  • Use paid marketing – paid marketing is fast and scalable. If it doesn’t work, turn it off, when it works scale up! With content marketing, there’s a whole lot of work involved. It can take months. With paid marketing, it’s fast and you can go big very quickly!
  • Use high ticket and subscription products – I wasted years selling low value products from the likes of Amazon and Clickbank. With high ticket and recurring income products you can earn a stable income quite quickly.
  • Don’t quit – most affiliates will quit. Use small term “failures” as experiences to learn from and spring boards to your online success. Learn from your online experiences and “fail forwards” to get more of them until you hit a winner!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for several years before eventually bursting through the soil. After it does it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.

Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese bamboo tree in that there’s a gestation period of learning and growing your online business. Initially this can be frustrating and it seems slow as though nothing will happen.

chinese bamboo

But if you use the right methods and strategies, you can grow an affiliate marketing business very quickly once you have put the right foundations in.

Remember this analogy when it seems as though nothing is working. When you break through with an affiliate business, you can generate sales in your sleep from the work you’ve already done!

How To Monetise A Website

Wondering how to monetise a website? There’s a few ways you can make money from a website. Many business owners use a website to attract more customers to their business. Or, if you have a product of your own to sell, you can sell more of it from a website.

But what if you don’t have a product or a business to sell? That’s ok too because you can sell other people’s products from a website, a business known as affiliate marketing. You can also sell advertising space from a website using many programs which offer the ability to place ads.

how to monetise a website

Once your website is doing well you can also offer other marketers advertising space on your site too. You can offer up sponsored posts to other content marketers who are looking for exposure and backlinks.

You can even place an e-commerce store on your website which sells products through drop shipping (similar to affiliate marketing). Depending on your traffic flow and the type of website you have and your topic, you can earn a fair amount from any of these strategies.

How To Monetise A Website – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways website owners make money from their content. With affiliate marketing, websites can earn through referrals. So by placing a banner advert on your site, you can refer customers to other people’s products and services. When you make a sale through your unique referral link, you earn a percentage of the revenue from the sale. Affiliate links can be placed in the copy too linking people to relevant products according to your content (and visitors).

how to monetise a website

With affiliate marketing you’ll need to find products and services which are suitable for your audience. So if your website is about SCUBA diving for example, you can promote SCUBA diving gear from it. So long as you offer something relevant to the content, you can be on to a winner with affiliate marketing.

Affiliates also use email marketing to get people to make purchases from an email list. On a website, a visitor often will leave within a few minutes. If you can get their email address, you can follow up with them via email. This gives you a greater chance of making money from your visitors over the longer term. See also the power of email marketing.

How To Monetise A Website: Google Adsense

Google’s Adsense program is one of the most popular ways you can monetise a website with advertising. By joining the program and placing some code on your website, you can instantly have advertising revenue from clicks on those ads made by your visitors. You only get a small revenue from each advertising click though; so you’ll need a lot of traffic to make even a small regular amount from using ads.

Google adsense

Adsense can be used in combination with other revenue generating methods through, such as affiliate marketing. There’s also other similar platforms to Google Adsense which operate a similar methodology. Here’s a few competitors to Google’s Adsense program:

  1. Media.net
  2. PropellerAds
  3. Amazon Native Shopping Ads
  4. Adversal
  5. Sovrn //Commerce (Formerly VigLink)
  6. Skimlinks

How To Monetise A Website: Sell Ad Space Directly To Marketers

This is perhaps a little more tricky than simply placing Google Adsense on your site and waiting for the money to come in. But if you’re a more established website, you can earn more from this strategy than using third party platforms such as Adsense.

When selling space directly, publishers promote a retailer’s product or service on their site so they stand to receive 100 percent of the advertising revenue. You can also set your own pricing and remain in control over decisions on how to charge buyers and which payment method is most desirable.

How do you find people who would like to advertise on your website? First, create an “Advertise here” landing page with your terms and conditions. You can also check similar blogs in your niche and see what brands sponsor those platforms. Contact those brands directly and offer a partnership on your terms. You may also check the forums or chatrooms where website publishers share details and provide useful tips on how to advertise directly.

Although this may be more work than using a platform such as Adsense, it can potentially be a lot more lucrative too, if you’re prepared to do the heavy lifting upfront.

Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are articles that a blogger or website owner is paid to publish on their own sites by companies, businesses, and brands related to that site’s niche or topic.

A good source of sponsors for beginners to build up a portfolio and some experience is local businesses. Identify businesses in your niche who are located near you.

how to monetise a website

Once you have some experience under your belt, look at partnering with marketing and PR agencies. Once you have formed a good relationship with one or two of them and have provided a top notch service, you should get more work from them in the future.

You can also use sponsorship market sites such as:

These companies are basically “middlemen” who provide the companies who want more publicity if you want to solely focus on writing the content rather than scouring for sponsors yourself.

Ecommerce Stores

A website can be monetised quite easily with an e-commerce store too. Shopify is a good place to start if you want to create a simple plug-and-play e-commerce store which either works with affiliate marketing or drop shipping. You can even use API plugins which connect your store directly to the distributor so that when a purchase is made, the order is automatically started from the wholesalers.

See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.

An e-commerce store may or may not be suitable depending on your website traffic. Ideally choose a monetisation strategy which suits your audience.

how to monetise a website

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped

“I hate my job and feel trapped”! Does this sound like you? What can you do if you’re in this situation? Know that you are not alone and many people feel this way about their job. Whether it’s your finances, commute, your boss or fellow employees who are the problem, there is a solution!

If you’re seriously stressed out it might be worth seeking medical advice from a professional. You might even get some time off. Look for other opportunities within your company or organisation too, as there may be opportunities for a sideways move.

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped: Get Out Of Debt

There’s other things you can do too such as taking charge of your finances. If you’ve been in this situation for a while, you may have fallen into some bad habits and accrued some debt.

The cycle of debt will keep you stuck, so that’s one of the first things you can address when you’re ready to take some positive action. Checkout StepChange.org the debt charity who can help you consolidate debt and get out of it.

While this may not be the whole of the problem, once you take charge of one aspect of your life it will often empower you to feel better about yourself and take more control of other parts of your situation too!

If you’re in debt you might have fallen into a pattern of spending money to blow of steam, which further entrenches you in your job and financial difficulties. So just getting to grips with this one thing can have a knock on effect.

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped: Reduce The Stress

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped

When you’re stuck in a job you hate it can become all consuming. To escape this state of being, try and block time doing things you want, rather than thinking about work. Spend time with people who help. Make time for small actions which can accumulate to bring about changes. One of these might be to start looking at other work you can apply for. Although when you’re consumed by a job, there’s very little time, making just an hour a day for a job search can alleviate some of the stress, knowing there is a potential way out and through taking some positive action.

Talk to friends or family and share the burden if you can. Sometimes just talking about it can help. When you’re caught up in your own thoughts it makes matters worse. Consider talking to a counsellor if it seems appropriate. Set some more boundaries at the workplace if you can. Say “no” more! Create some space for “you” time and meditation.

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped: Take Some Exercise

Exercise has been proven to be more effective than the most powerful drugs for your state of mind and mental health. If you’re spending time only worrying and stressing, you have a build up of chemicals which are’t doing you any good. Join an exercise class or gym and take up some regular exercise which will help you reduce your stress levels and blow off steam.

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped

Plan A Financial Backup

Planning your finances better can give you a buffer of cash if worst comes to worst and you feel you have to pull the plug on your job. Without a back up of cash flow, leaving a job can be more stressful than staying in it!

One way to do this is to notice your spending. Take a notepad and record everything you spend money on on a daily basis for a week. You should notice some areas where you can cut back.

I Hate My Job And Feel Trapped

Small changes to your daily habits can save you thousands over a year, and this can give you a buffer. When you have a buffer of cash you can survive on you’ll be more empowered to leave a job, or even stay knowing you’re building an escape plan and the end is in sight.

Set Up An Automated Savings Account

With savings you have something to fall back on and something to invest in opportunities which can help you escape the 9 to 5 – such as an online business venture.

Saving money you have got used to spending can be a challenge. Instead of trying to do it manually, set up an automated payment into a savings account which is hard to get to, so you’re not tempted to spend it. It might only be a little amount at first, but make it a regular automated payment for every pay day.

Your payment should go out like a bill does, so you forget about it. This is your escape money or “F”*%k you” money! The more you have in your F”*%k You account, the freer you are! You can use this money when you say “F*&k You” to your boss!!

Start A Side Hustle

There’s many ways to build a side hustle alongside your job. See extra income ideas from home for a few ideas or learn more about starting an online business here.

While it takes some time and investment for most side hustles to build up, doing something will make you feel better about your situation and give you some hope. Don’t quit your job straight away as you’ll need the income to help you build up your side hustle.

start an online business

Summary

While you may not be in the best state of mind to take a lot of action, taking small steps in the right direction is a good place to start. Create a buffer zone from work and reduce the stressors in any way you can.

Spend a little time every day working on an escape plan and organising your finances better so that you’re in a better position to leave when the time comes and you have a buffer of cash. Start looking for other positions you would like to apply for, even if it’s only an hour a day at first.

Use your lunch hour to start looking for alternatives and approach work colleagues if appropriate to ask about other work within your organisation.

Taking some positive action in any of these areas should help you feel more empowered about your situation. Leaving a job without a back up plan might be more stressful in the long run, so it’s worth planning the escape. But only you know your limits!

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links

What is the best way to promote affiliate links? Since there’s many ways to promote affiliate links, the best way is the one which works for you! Depending on your products and marketing strategy, one way might work better than another. For example, if you’re using paid marketing and selling digital products, your best bet is likely to be by building an email list. Then, promote your affiliate products by placing links in outgoing emails.

best way to promote affiliate links

This is definitely one of the best ways to promote affiliate links because it’s a scaleable strategy and you can build an email list very quickly with a good marketing budget. However, what if your strategy is through blogging, or content marketing and you’re promoting products from Amazon? A list isn’t going to be as appropriate if you’re sending traffic to physical products and have a number of affiliate items on your website. So in this situation, a different approach might work better. Banner placement and links within your text might be better with a review website, for example.

So before throwing your affiliate links everywhere you can you need to think about your products and how you attract your target audience. This should prepare you better to understand the needs of your customers and how it’s best to market to them.

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Target Audience

The best way to promote affiliate links is with a congruent message and to a very targeted audience. Without this, whatever marketing strategy you use can fall on deaf ears. But once you understand who it is you are serving with your marketing messages, you can get very focused on delivering your affiliate products to the right people. This can dramatically effect your affiliate business if you do it right.

target

Who is your target audience and how do you attract them? Your target audience are those people who absolutely want the products you have for sale. No convincing, no selling, just connecting the right people to the right products. When you attract the right audience, your affiliate links will lead customers to products automatically.

A good example of finding a good target audience is with product reviews. With a product review, you attract people who are already in the buyer mindset, credit card out looking for some final bit of information before making a purchase. They find your review which leads them to the product after reading it. This is an example of knowing your target audience and providing some information to them connecting them with a product. So whether your affiliate link is a banner, and email or a contextual link, the audience is the main factor!

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Free Traffic

Promoting affiliate links for free is another one of the best ways to promote them. While this can be a little tricky, once you have free traffic, it’s well worth all the work you have done to make it happen. You can get free traffic to your affiliate links in a number of ways:

  • Using social media
  • creating content on a blog
  • Building content on a YouTube (or TikTok) channel
niche blogging

Free traffic takes time and can be unreliable too. But if you’re a content creator it’s one of the best ways to sell affiliate products. Even though a blog takes a huge amount of time and effort to gain traction with, once it’s running, you can make affiliate sales for free! One way of doing this is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you’re successful, you can rank your content and get free traffic from the search engines.

This strategy is not easy and not for the faint of heart. But if you’re in it for the long run, it can be a joy when those affiliate commissions start dropping in! Place links in your copy for a blog or under your videos if using YouTube.

Best Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Paid Traffic & Email Marketing

aweber

By far one of the fastest and most reliable ways to promote affiliate links is through using paid traffic and sending visitors to a landing page where you can collect their email addresses. While this can take some initial set up to work, it’s far faster and more scalable than by using SEO (search engine optimisation) and content creation. This is particularly good for business tools and digital products which take more trust to sell online. With an email list, you can follow up with your subscribers with more content which provides value and builds trust.

Most people don’t buy immediately from a website on their first visit. It often takes several “touch points” for a visitor to build some trust with a product/website. An email list does this because you can continue following up with marketing messages long after someone has left a website. Whereas on a website, you only have one change of making the sale if the visitor leaves.

However, you can also use retargeting to follow your website visitors around the internet with another marketing message!

Retargeting

Retargeting is a very effective marketing tool for affiliates. It is paid advertising which is done once someone has already interacted with your online business in some way. So if someone has landed on your website already, you can place adverts in front of them which show up on other websites.

Re-targeting is a good way to re-engage with potential customers. Since someone has already shown an internet in your website, it means they are highly targeted and a potential customer for your business.

Retargeting is pretty cheap too and you can retarget visitors who bounce off your website quite cheaply. Send them back to your website or to a separate landing page where you can collect their emails for an email marketing campaign. Place links in your email messages.

Summary

There’s many ways to promote affiliate links and your tactic will depend on the type of products you promote and your marketing method. Here’s a few strategies you can use:

  • Bloggers place links in their content
  • Email marketing – place links in email messages
  • YouTube/video marketing – place links under uploaded videos
  • Social media – place links in your profile

However, it’s worth getting to know and understand the type of visitors you want to attract. Knowing your target audience lets you better understand their needs and find the people who are most suitable for your products/service. See also the easiest way to promote affiliate links.

Why Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

Why do you need a website for affiliate marketing? While technically you can still do affiliate marketing without a website, a website is definitely a good idea. If you don’t own a website and still want to do affiliate marketing you’re definitely making your life more difficult! Why wouldn’t you use every tool at your disposal to make an affiliate business work? Whatever your strategy to sell affiliate products a website will help you to attract targeted visitors. If you’re trying another strategy such as using free blog platforms, or social media, you’re leaving money on the table.

why do you need a website for affiliate marketing

With a website, you can build free traffic or pay for targeted website visitors who you can convert into email subscribers. This is one of the best ways to do affiliate marketing. You can also technically collect email subscribers without a website, although you’ll need a landing page software of some kind to do this effectively. This is arguably also a website though, but it’s the best way to do affiliate marketing if you’re determined not to have a website.

Still, I would say a website is worth its weight in gold once it is working for you and especially if you have created some free traffic to it!

Why Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

A website is your digital property which shows your potential customers you mean business and are serious. Pasting your affiliate link hither and thither only shows everyone that you’re not serious! Having a real website shows some authority and that you’ve made some effort! This in turn will be much more likely to win you some customers compared to a long messy affiliate link pasted on your social media profile!

why do you need a website for affiliate marketing

A website can be used to attract customers for free too! While free blogging platforms can do the same, they don’t carry as much authority. The search engines and customers will see a website in a better light, and this build more trust.

Trust is pretty important when you’re buying something online and a website is much more effective at doing this than other free marketing methods you can use. So a major reason you need a website for affiliate marketing is your personal authority.

Traffic

A website is a tool for acquiring traffic and without traffic you won’t succeed with selling affiliate products. While you can use other strategies to attract traffic, a website is one of the best ways to consolidate your “stamp” of authority and send potential customers.

You can use a website to attract traffic in a couple of main ways:

  • Building content through blogging and attracting free traffic from the search engines
  • Sending paid traffic to it

Both of these strategies can be used in conjunction with email marketing, depending on the products you are selling. With email marketing, you send customers to a freebie giveaway and collect their email details in exchange for your free gift. Email marketing is a good tactic to use particularly for digital products because it can take more explaining and trust building on order to sell them. Whereas with physical products the product is more obvious to a potential customer. But whichever product you sell, and email list can help you build trust and a relationship with potential customers over the longer term. Whereas on a website, a visitor often will only stick around for a few minutes before they are gone forever!

why do you need a website for affiliate marketing

Summary

Why do you need a website to do affiliate marketing? While you can become an affiliate without a website, many affiliate programs require you to have a professional website and often a certain amount of traffic and/or email leads too. Even if you find a program which doesn’t require this, a website is a huge advantage.

It can be used to help potential customers with enquires and questions. It can show you are an authority in your niche. Mostly though an affiliate website is used to attract visitors and turn those visitors into customers. This can be done through organic search or paid traffic and through social media.

Without a website as an affiliate you’re giving yourself a serious disadvantage. why would you want to do that? Better to take all the tools and techniques you can use at your disposal to make your affiliate business work. Affiliate marketing is hard enough without giving yourself a disadvantage!

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing?

There’s many ways to earn online so why choose affiliate marketing? Before I chose affiliate marketing as my main tactic for earning online, I tried a few other strategies. One of them was blogging and monetising with Google Adsense. It took a huge amount of effort and time to only pay a tiny amount with this strategy. My first affiliate sale paid about the same as a month of earnings from Adsense! Of course at the time I only had a small amount of website traffic, and Adsense can work well. But in my experience affiliate marketing was much better.

why choose affiliate marketing

Another strategy I tried was Forex marketing. With Forex you make money on small shifts of the Foreign Exchange market to make money. I studied it for a couple of years but came to the conclusion that I didn’t have the funds to do it since it requires a trading “bank”. To trade effectively you need to spend only a small amount of your capital on any one trade. So you’ll need a bit of capital just to get started.

I also tried eBay and you can read about my strategy here. I used to buy and sell products from eBay and make money on the difference. But it was a time heavy business and I wasn’t making enough income from it, despite how hard I worked. Once I discovered affiliate marketing it made more sense. Affiliate marketing can be tough too but your work compounds over time, meaning you can make sales in your sleep for the work you’ve done previously. While this doesn’t happen immediately, if you understand this idea it can be great motivation to keep going!

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models you can choose in order to make money online. To make a commission, you need to learn a strategy for selling a product online. You don’t need your own products and you don’t need to be a sales person to become successful as an affiliate. Websites can do the selling for you and once you understand a strategy to attracting website traffic, you can effectively sell other people’s products on complete autopilot.

There’s several main strategies which affiliate marketers use:

  • Content creation – blogging and video blogging
  • Social media -both paid and unpaid social media marketing strategies can be used.
  • SEO – search engine optimisation is used by bloggers and content creators to optimise content and get free traffic from the search engines.
  • Paid marketing – paid platforms such as Google’s Adwords, Facebook and YouTube can be very effective for finding your target audience to sell products to.
  • Email marketing – is one of the best ways to build an affiliate business through lead generation and promoting affiliate products to your email list.

Because there’s so many different ways to do affiliate marketing, and you can sell so many different products, it’s a pretty versatile business which anyone can use.

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing – Methods Of Marketing

The type of marketing method you choose as an affiliate will often be determined by the products you choose to sell and the time and money you have available throughout the day. If you’re working full time in a job, you can still do affiliate marketing as a side hustle. If, on the other hand you have a lot of time available, you can also do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget.

Generally speaking if you have a lot of time but not much to invest, you should become a content creator. If you have money to invest but not much time, you can spend money on advertising.

niche blogging

Products too will have a bearing on how you promote an affiliate business. With low value products such as you’d find on Amazon, you’ll need a cheaper marketing method in order to make a consistent profit. With a high ticket sales funnel, it’s easier to use paid marketing and come out on top.

Paid marketing is a much faster and more scalable way to make money from affiliate marketing. But, you’ll need to spend some time and some money just to get things working. This is often where people will drop out. Content marketing is cheap but it takes much longer to get traction as an affiliate if all your traffic is free and comes from organic search.

Summary

There’s a few alternatives to affiliate marketing but affiliate marketing offers one of the simplest models for earning online. You can sell pretty much anything online as an affiliate, so long as a product has an affiliate program. Plus you can use many different tactics to sell affiliate products:

  • Blogging
  • Video blogging
  • PPC – pay per click advertising
  • Social media
  • Email marketing

Certain affiliate products pay much more than others so you should think about the products you choose to promote carefully. Subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate products are the best payers for affiliates. But there’s also a lot of choice of physical products you can sell too from affiliate programs such as Amazon. See also Amazon affiliate commission.

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep

Are you looking for side hustles that make money while you sleep? In Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad he recommends earning from four different income strategies:

  • Employment – your job, in which you get paid for trading time for money
  • Self Employment – A job you own – (still trading time, but on your own terms)
  • Business – your side hustle/own business
  • Investment – money which makes more money, passively

Most people are a long way from being able to live off their investments unless they’ve spent a long time building them up. But if you’re an employee without another form of income, what’s the answer to make an income which works even when you don’t? The fastest and cheapest way is with some kind of online business which takes advantage of the ability to sell products 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, even while you sleep!

Does it cost to start an online business which makes money while you sleep, and can anyone do it?

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep

One of the best ways to make money while you sleep is with an investment property. You can simply charge rent and get paid for letting out your house. Plus, you can grow your investment’s value over time as the value of your property rises.

But if you’re unable to purchase a property there’s other cheaper methods of earning money while you sleep which can be found online.

Here’s a few business models which allow you to do this which are relatively simple to start:

  • Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products online and automate the process. See what is affiliate marketing.
  • Drop shipping – similar to affiliate marketing, uses other people’s products and business model. See drop shipping vs affiliate marketing.
  • Adsense – Adsense is Google’s payment platform for bloggers who earn a passive revenue stream through content creation. See Adsense vs affiliate marketing.
  • Sell your own digital products – selling an ebook from your website is one of the simplest methods of making a passive income online. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.
  • Print on demand – sell t-shirt prints from a website and automate the process of print and delivery. See 10 best print on demand companies.
  • Shopify – Shopify stores let you sell products and services via a third party app and earn commissions based on sales you generate. See shopify.com
  • Self publishing – Amazon self publishing lets you create books for free which can be published on demand when people purchase online.
  • Photography – Upload your photos to a photographic site and earn royalty income: e.g.Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, iStock Photo
  • Images and logos – use clothing websites to upload your designs, get paid for purchases on a royalty basis. e.g. Redbubble.com

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the easier online business models from which you can earn a passive income. With affiliate marketing you simply send people to other people’s products and services online. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. The key to becoming successful with affiliate marketing is your marketing method. There’s many methods with which you can market affiliate products:

  • Blogging – is slow but can ultimately give you a passive income from work you’ve done
  • Paid marketing – paid marketing is faster and much more scalable
  • Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used to sell affiliate products.
  • YouTube – video marketing is a popular way to generate affiliate sales.
  • Email marketing – is one of the most powerful ways to sell products online on complete autopilot – see the power of email marketing.
side hustles that make money while you sleep

You can also choose to sell subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. With business tools and membership products, customers can remain loyal to such services for decades. If you are the referral partner who recommended the product, you’ll earn a regular income for life from each sale you generate.

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is another similar business model in which you refer customers to someone else’s product. You are basically the “middle man” as with affiliate marketing, except that with drop shipping you play a more active role in dealing with customers and taking orders.

You then assign an order to a particular customer and have the item shipped to them directly from the distributor. Since this is a global operation and there’s plenty of scope to outsource the daily activities with drop shipping, it lends itself to a very scalable business model which can pay you in your sleep!

See also affiliate marketing vs, drop shipping and the best drop shipping companies.

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Adsense

Another side hustle that has a huge potential to make money while you sleep is Google Adsense. With Google Adsense you place adverts on your website and earn revenue from ad clicks made by your visitors. Although your ad clicks will only pay tiny amounts, once you start getting a lot of traffic to your content, this is passive income.

adsense

You can also monetise free platforms using Adsense or a similar alternative:

  • YouTube
  • Hubpages.com
  • Blogger.com
  • WordPress.com

To make ads work in creating a passive income, you’ll need a lot of content and to rank your content on the search engines for free traffic. This is a commitment over the longer term to achieve, but worth it if you like creating content.

Your Own Products – Digital or Physical

You can of course sell your own products from a website and automate this process. If you’re selling physical products, you’ll need to be a little more involved because you’ll need to send out the product to customers as they make a purchase (or pay someone else to do it). But with digital products you create, you can automate the process of delivery.

One of the simplest products to create is your own ebook. So if you have some knowledge of some kind, consider writing a short ebook and promoting it on your website. See how to sell ebooks on your own website for more on this.

You’ll still need to attract an audience to a website in order to sell your own ebook. This can be done through paying for advertising (costly) or through blogging which is much cheaper but more time consuming. I would recommend learning affiliate marketing if you are thinking of doing this because you’ll need to learn the skill of attracting an audience either way, and you can potentially earn a lot more from selling other people’s products. You can of course do both!

Print On Demand – Upload Designs & Automate Sales

A print on demand business can let you automate the sale of t-shirts and other clothing which has your designs on them.

Print-on-demand (or POD) companies are businesses that provide a complete e-commerce fulfilment solution—this includes sourcing and storing products, printing products and packaging materials, and shipping orders to customers. 

See this article for more on print on demand companies and how it works.

Print on demand is a type of drop shipping. All you need to do is create eye-catching designs, configure your products, and sell them online. A print-on-demand company will take care of the rest!

Shopify Stores

Shopify stores are tailored online stores which you can use to generate sales and earn money from selling pretty much anything online.

It’s an all in one e-commerce solution for anyone wanting to start an online business. By creating a basic website which showcases a number of products (or a single product), you can connect third party apps which automatically generate orders with wholesalers.

Your job then is to send targeted visitors to your store to start generating sales and earning commissions. If you can make it work, you’ll have generated a passive income and you’ll be able to make money while you sleep! Here’s a few Shopify e-commerce stores to ignite your imagination.

Self Publishing Using Amazon

You can self publish a book on Amazon at zero cost and earn from the Kindle Direct Publishing fund (KDP Select) and/or from sales of your books. You’ll need to upload and format your book but that’s about it!

Anyone can do this from anywhere in the world and make money from their writing. Of course you will need to sell your book in order to make this pay, and this can take a bit of marketing.

See Amazon Direct Publishing here.

Photography Royalties

If you’re a keen photographer, consider uploading your work to a number of photo stock royalty sites which pay you when people download your images. Although you’ll need a lot of images on any given site to make a good income from, if you’re a photographer this can make a good second or even main income with enough photographs.

A few photo stock sites are:

Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, iStock Photo

Images, Designs & Logos

Redbubble.com is a clothing company which pays royalties to designers who upload their images to the site. When something sells with our image on it, you earn a passive income. Although a single sale won’t make you much, the more images and designs you upload, the greater your chances of making a sale. You can also promote your own t-shirt designs using this type of company, making commissions on the shirts you sell.

Here’s a few other companies which offer the same or similar service as Redbubble.com:

  • Spreadshirt
  • DesignHill
  • Printful
  • Threadless
  • Cafepress
  • BlueCotton
  • TeeSpring
  • Zazzle
  • Society 6

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce?

How long does it take to make money with e-commerce? There’s many different e-commerce businesses you can use to make money online. Whether you have a Shopify store, a drop shipping business or an affiliate business, your main focus will be on acquiring customers.

Your ability to do this will largely be responsible for how well your business goes and how long it takes to build. How you go about it will depend on the money you have already invested and have to invest. If you’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on building a brand based website, you’ll have a lot more catching up to do than someone who’s only invested $80 on a Shopify store. So when you’re starting out, it’s wise to be careful with your spending. If you have money to invest in marketing, it may be more prudent to acquire the skills of a professional marketer since many new businesses spend a huge amount on their marketing to no avail.

Or, if you’re determined to become a “solo-preneur” at least get some training so you can follow the advice of the experts. How long it takes to start breaking even and running into profit will depend on a number of things. Generally speaking if you’re not at least breaking even within a year of being in business, you should try something different. That doesn’t mean quit, it just means try a different marketing method, product or approach.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-Commerce?

Your marketing method is key to making money with pretty much any business model you choose. So whatever business you decide on, you’ll need to promote it in order to make any sales at all. Depending on your situation, you may be in a position to run a daily marketing budget. The more you have to spend the faster you can build your business to be profitable. That doesn’t mean it will be profitable! Far from it.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce?

Many new businesses go under because the owner has no experience of marketing and spends a tonne of marketing budget without earning a single customer. Initially then you’ll need to test and measure a marketing strategy until you find one which works for you. This costs money and so you need to be prudent with your marketing budget. Test with a small budget initially and only increase your marketing budget once you hot on a advert which works.

If you’re on a very low budget, you’ll need to work much harder to gain traction with an e-commerce business. Blogging, video blogging or any kind of content creation is a supremely slow strategy for marketing but it can and does work over time. But you’ll need to put the work in and keep putting it in. With blogging or vlogging, you can spend months or years creating enough content to get the required traction you need to build a business. (See blogging vs vlogging).

Making Money With E-Commerce: Save Time, Get Educated

Needless to say e-commerce is not for the faint of heart. If you’re not prepared to take some risks with your time and/or capital, it’s probably not for you! One of the main problems new e-commerce growth is distraction. Owners jump around from one “shiny object” to another, forever looking for the magic pill which will take their business to a new level. But there’s so many platforms you can advertise on that this is a bad strategy. Instead, focus on a single strategy you can get very good at over time.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce?

Once you have your e-commerce store or affiliate website set up, you need to focus on a marketing method which drives traffic to that store. This should be carefully understood so as not to waste time or money.

Learn about your customer avatar so you understand the pains and problems of your ideal customer. When you understand your customer better than they understand themselves, you’re in a much better position to clearly communicate to their needs. Unless you do this you can easily fall into the trap of trying to sell to everyone; and not everyone is interested in your e-commerce store! You can waste a huge amount of time trying to bring the wrong customers to a store. Learning about your target market will save you heaps of time.

Your digital marketing education is the “bedrock” from which you can build a sustainable and profitable online business. Without it, it’s very likely your e-commerce business will fail!

Within A Year You Should Be At Break Even

Within a year of business you should be at break even, if not in profit. If you’re not, you’re doing something wrong and should get help and/or change direction. Of course this is different if you can can only give a few hours a week to your business. Or, perhaps you’re taking the much longer route of blogging or building content? Or perhaps you only have a tiny budget, which means it will take much longer too.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce?

Whatever your strategy you should become a master of it.

Blogging can be a waste of time if you’re not doing it right. Paid ads can be the same if you don’t know what you’re doing too. There’s just no guarantees with an online business and the potential high reward or e-commerce means high risk too!

If you’re using paid marketing to drive traffic to your e-commerce you can be in profit within a few months with a large enough budget. But if you’re a content marketing, it will take much longer – years. Blogging as a strategy is a slow one but ultimately it can give you a passive income if you go about it right and create enough content. But will you be able to stick at your strategy for that long? Ideally choose a strategy which suits your personality and budget. But if you’re not prepared to keep creating content for at least a year, blogging probably isn’t for you!

Summary

How Long Does It Take To Make Money With E-commerce? Everyone’s experience is different when it comes to building an online business. For some, it’s a few months and for others it’s years. Your marketing budget and method is probably the biggest factor at play when you want a timescale for success online. Those who achieve it more quickly tend to use paid marketing which is much faster and more scalable. But if you’re on a tight budget and need traffic for free, expect a much longer journey.

Think about your business model and how you attract customers. To get more business means getting your marketing message in front of more of the right kinds of people. Paid marketing is the fastest way to do this but there are other ways too. They just tend to be much slower and far less scalable.

See also fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.

How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business?

How long does it take to grow an online business? Of course this depends on a lot of things. It depends on the type of business, how many hours you put in and how you advertise your business. There’s many kinds of online business too. There’s affiliate marketing and there’s drop shipping. You can own an e-commerce store or build a blog website. So depending on the particular business you choose, it can vary across the board.

how long does it take to grow an online business

Just with the affiliate business model alone there’s many opportunities to sell different things. You can sell physical products from websites like Amazon, for example. Or, you can sell digital products which typically pay larger commissions per sale. There are many affiliate marketing business models which you can use; physical products, digital products, subscription products and high ticket products.

The business model you choose will have a large bearing on how long it takes and how successful you are. One of the main problems for online businesses is creating a regular flow of new customers, regardless of the business model you choose.

How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business? Traffic

With an online business you need to focus on creating value and acquiring new customers. An affiliate business is one of the simplest business models you can use. With affiliate marketing you simply send customers to the products they want. When you make a sale, you earn a commission based on the sale. There’s many ways you can attract customers online:

  • Blogging – creating lots of content on a website can allow you to attract website traffic for free
  • Paid advertising – is far quicker than blogging but obviously more expensive
  • Lead generation – list building is done from a website and affiliate products can be sold to a growing list of subscribers through email marketing. See the power of email marketing.
  • Social media – there’s many paid and unpaid social media marketing methods you can adopt to build a business online.
niche blogging

Each different method of attracting website visitors and customers will vary. So the time it takes to build an online business will vary according to the strategy you adopt. With paid marketing methods and through building an email list, you’ll get much faster results typically than with a slower method such as blogging.

With blogging you can build a business over several years but with PPC (pay per click) advertising and with an email list it can be done much more quickly – within a matter of months with a large enough marketing budget.

How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business – Products

The product/s you choose to sell also has a huge bearing on the time it will take to start generating income from an online business. With low value affiliate products you can only make tiny commissions when you make a sale. This limits your potential marketing strategies to those which are very cheap or free. If you want to build an online business faster with paid marketing, you need a good high ticket offering in order to cover marketing costs and make a good profit.

how long does it take to grow an online business

For example, YouTube and Facebook offer two of the best marketing platforms for online business owners. They allow you to get very specific in your targeting of customers since they gather so much data. To use them can be expensive, particularly if you intend on driving a large volume of traffic to build a business quickly. With a low value offering in your product inventory, it is much more difficult making a profit while using such platforms. But if you choose a high ticket sales funnel to promote, you’ll have a number of “aces” up your sleeve which allow you to build an online business much more quickly:

  • A high ticket product – typically one which pays out a commission of over $500 per sale
  • Subscription affiliate products within your product range. A subscription product pays out recurring commissions to give you a monthly income quickly.
  • A product range and a built in sales team – can help you as an affiliate because your customers are automatically offered higher ticket offerings once they make a purchase.

With a product range which includes subscription products and high ticket products, you can grow your business much faster by reinvesting profits back into your marketing campaign. See also how to scale affiliate marketing.

How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business: Learning Curve

There’s also a learning curve involved in building an online business. This can take some people longer than others. If you have come from a background in sales or marketing, it can serve you in learning the ropes of an online business. Of course you don’t need experience to start an online business and anyone can do it.

how long does it take to grow an online business

With a pre made business system much of the technical aspect of setting up your business systems is done for you. Access a course here. But there’s still work involved and depending on quickly you can go through the training, this can take weeks or months. If you have a lot of free time, you can complete much of the training quite quickly. But if you are working full time and only have a few hours to spare each day, it will likely take longer to go through and digest the training materials and get your business up and running.

Setting up the sales funnel is quite a quick process which can be done within a week or two. But learning how to advertise your business and then successfully doing so will take much longer. Depending on your methods of advertising, it can be weeks, months or years before you get traction. See also the fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.

Mindset: The All Important Ingredient

Your mindset is ultimately a vital ingredient to building a successful online business too. Without being too negative, not every online business becomes a success! Many affiliates drop out and only around 5% actually go on to create businesses which produce a profit. See affiliate marketing success rate.

henry ford

With that in mind you need to know how to develop your mindset to give yourself the best chance of success. See affiliate marketing mindset. If you’re a “dabbler”, you have much less chance of success than someone with a “do or die” mentality. So before you begin the online business journey it’s worth asking yourself whether your intention is to succeed “no matter what” or whether you’re of the mindset of just “giving it a go”. If it’s the latter, you are more likely to find yourself in the 95% camp of affiliates who fail!

Summary

So how long does it take to grow an online business? As you can see there’s many variables which makes it almost impossible to answer this question definitively. If you have a large marketing budget and purchase a high ticket sales funnel, you can build an online business in much less time than with a slower marketing strategy such as blogging, and a low ticket offering. By using high ticket products, a range of products and subscription products, you can give yourself a much better chance of success.

It’s also much better to join a community which can help you with mindset, goal setting and accountability too. Access a video series to learn more here.