Author: AffiliateMentor

Affiliate Marketing Vs Digital Marketing

Affiliate marketing vs digital marketing – what’s the difference? With affiliate marketing there’s a third party involved who gets paid a commission for a product referral.

Digital marketing is a broader term used by both affiliates and product owners/businesses themselves to promote and sell products online.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Digital Marketing

There’s many forms of digital marketing including strategies such as blogging, paid advertising, email marketing and the like. While affiliates mostly use digital marketing to promote third party products and services, they are not limited to using digital forms of marketing, and they can use any sort of advertising.

Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products and services for a commission based on their sales. Digital marketing is simply an online form of advertising used by individuals and businesses for product/service promotion. Businesses can also use affiliates as part of their promotion strategies too. Since affiliates only get paid for successful sales made, this is a very cost effective form of advertising for businesses and product owners.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Digital Marketing: Types Of Digital Marketing

There’s many ways to market a product. Digital marketing refers to online strategies rather than traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper adverts, banners and flyers. Some forms of digital advertising (digital marketing) are:

  • PPC – pay per click adverts (Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc).
  • Email marketing – email marketing involves collecting email subscribers from a website and sending automated follow up email messages to subscribers
  • Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used for advertising a product/business.
  • SEO – search engine optimisation is typically used for website owners who want to rank their content on the search engines and get free traffic (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc)
  • Niche websites – are built specifically to attract SEO traffic from the SERPS – search engine results pages.
niche blogging

These methods are used by both businesses for their own marketing purposes and by affiliate marketers to generate sales of other people’s products. Affiliates aren’t limited however to only using digital marketing and they can use whatever methods they like to promote and sell other people’s products. Providing they make a sale which goes through their unique identifying affiliate link, they will still earn a commission.

Using Affiliates In Your Marketing Strategy

If you own a business or a product yourself, you can use both digital marketing and affiliates to promote it.

The benefit of using affiliate marketing is that you only pay the affiliate for a successful sale. This means you’re not wasting money on learning advertising strategies if you don’t know what you’re doing!

affiliate marketing vs digital marketing

Since digital marketing can take some time and effort to learn, many product/business owners join an affiliate network and use affiliates to help them make sales.

Some 40% of merchants cited affiliate programs as their top customer acquisition channel and, in a recent survey, nearly 90 percent of advertisers said affiliate programs were important to their overall marketing strategies.

You can see why affiliate marketing is important for product owners. The affiliates assume the risk of figuring out how to make sales using various marketing strategies. For this, they can earn an independent income online and work from anywhere. This is what makes affiliate marketing so appealing for the affiliates themselves.

If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate and earning an income online, access a video series to learn more here.

Popular Marketing Methods

One of the most popular marketing methods is to use an email marketing list. Email marketing is used both by businesses themselves, through an agency or independently, and also by affiliate marketers. The email list is one of the best online marketing methods because it gives the business/owner the ability to collect emails and build a large list of subscribers. This can then be used to deliver valuable content to the subscribers and promote products and services at the same time.

With a list, an affiliate or business can make sales by automating delivery of messages to an ever growing audience.

See the power of email marketing for more on this topic.

Which Keywords Are Best To Target In SEO?

Which keywords are best to target in SEO? SEO is Search Engine Optimisation or the process of optimising your website for traffic; specifically that traffic which comes from the search engines. So if you’re focused on using paid traffic, and not bothered about getting any search engine traffic, SEO won’t have much bearing in your business. But if you want your traffic to come from the search engines, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing everything right to optimise that traffic.

which keywords

One way of optimising search engine traffic is through blogging. Bloggers find content which they can both find free traffic for, and which attracts their target audience. There’s no point in writing content which attracts the wrong audience; since that traffic won’t convert into buying customers. Similarly, some keywords are far too competitive to gain any traction from the search engines for free. So spending too much time creating that content might also be wasteful! So what’s the answer? Find low competition long tail keywords which also attract the right kind of customers.

Which Keywords Are Best To Target In SEO?

The good thing about low competition keywords is that they generally have several keywords in them. Long tail keyword phrases offer better chance of getting a free listing on the first page of Google, and therefore getting free traffic. A long tail keyword has three or more keywords in it. Shorter tail phrases are notoriously harder to rank for simply because there’s so much competition on the search engines for them. So writing content for 2-3 word keywords might not work that well for getting free traffic.

The other main benefit of writing content for long tail phrases in your niche is that those searches are generally much more specific. When someone types a longer tail phrase into Google, they have a much clearer idea of what they’re looking for.

Example

A search for “dunlop sp sport maxx gt runflat” gets 90 searches a month. A search for “car tyre” gets 74,000 monthly searches.

So if you’re selling Dunlop SP Sport Maxx Gt Runflat’s, what would you rather have on your site? The answer is the keyword which relates to that product.

You might say you’d get more traffic from the other basic search for “car tyre”, but you’d be wrong because “car tyre” search results brings up many more thousands of results. Take a look at the number underneath both of these Google search results.

which keywords are best to target in seo
which keywords are best to target in seo

For “car tyre” you see 383,000,000 as the number for the search results. For the “dunlop sp sport maxx gt runflat” you see only 79! Which do you think you are more likely to rank your website for and get found on the search results pages?

Which Keywords Are Best To Target In SEO?

The search intent behind long tail keywords is generally much more specific. While someone who finds your site for “car tyre”, might browse and click away, (not finding what they want), someone searching for and finding “dunlop sp sport maxx gt runflat” is much more likely to buy if you give them exactly that!

When you’re targeting keywords with your content you don’t just want traffic, you want buyer traffic. So by finding low competition keywords which are super relevant to your website, products and/or service, you are providing the best information for those who actually want what you have! If you also target long tail keywords with low SEO competition, you’re going to be doing both at the same time! Win Win!

So how can you do this? Start with your product and work outwards. Type your main keyword, or the name of your product/service into Google’s keyword planner. Look for long tail derivatives which match your criteria:

  • Low competition on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages
  • Targeted towards buyer traffic – super relative to your product/service

How Google Rates Your Website

Google uses thousands of factors to determine how to rank content on the SERPS. Here’s just a few of the main ones:

  • Domain authority
  • Back link profile – how many and where from
  • Your site’s relevancy
  • Social media presence and back links
  • Domain age
  • Interaction of visitors on your content
  • Time of visitors on your site
  • Content

The relevancy of your site for the query is an important factor when it comes to creating content. You don’t just want anyone finding your site, you want super relevant visitors who you can help with your content. What happens if someone finds your site, but you’re not the answer they want? They click away, affecting your potential ranking score with Google. If people who come to your site stay and absorb your content, it’s a great signal to Google that they have sent someone to the right content. Hence they’ll increase your authority for that particular search. If your visitors interact with your site, signing up to your email list or making a purchase, it’s an even better signal.

So while you want more visitors to your website, you also want more of the right visitors too; that means targeted buyer visitors who will become customers.

Google’s Keyword Planner & Target Market

You can find long tail keywords which match your criteria by using your main keyword and typing it into Google’s keyword planner. Look for long tail derivatives which have a good buyer intent behind them and which are suitable and targeted for your business.

One of the quickest ways to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty is to click on the Avg. monthly searches tab at the top of the results when using Google’s keyword planner. Click on the tab until the monthly search volume drops and that will give you the longer term phrases which have lower monthly search volume.

which keywords are best to target in seo

Despite there being lower monthly search for these kinds of keywords, there’s also far less competition in the SERPS. So you’ve much more chance of getting your content ranked and getting found in the results pages.

Summary

So, which keywords are best to target in SEO? While you should have content for your main keywords on your site, you typically won’t rank on Google for them because of the competition. By finding longer tail derivatives of your main keywords, you can find very targeted visitors who are searching for something specific which you can provide.

Long tail keywords which both have low competition in the search results pages and which are super relevant to what you offer are what you should go for! Long tail keywords are generally super targeted too. So by finding those particular “gold nuggets” which give you free targeted traffic, you’re going to find more traffic and more customers.

Keyword Planner Tool SEO

Google’s keyword planner tool is great for SEO if you’re a content creator. You can use the tool to find keywords which you want to target with your content. With the right keywords on your site, and the right content, you can attract the right customers and make more sales.

Google’s keyword planner tool is a free tool too! You just need a Google Adwords account in order to access it. The tool can give you a bunch of ideas which you can create content for. Write some quality content for your chosen keywords and you can also potentially rank your content for free in the search engines.

keyword planner tool seo

You won’t rank your content at the top of Google for every keyword of your choice of course. There’s so many other competing websites and content in pretty much every niche that it would be impossible for everyone to have a top ranking. But you can “cook the books” in your favour by choosing those long tail keywords which have lower competition than the rest.

Keyword Planner Tool SEO

It would be great if you could pick your main keyword, write an article and it magically appear at the top of the search results! But that’s just not going to happen. Most of the shorter keyword phrases (which get the most traffic) are far too competitive for anyone without huge website authority to rank for. Those top places which rank for shorter keyword phrases are very old domain names with many thousands of high authority back links. They have been around for a long time and have huge authority with Google. That’s why they rank top for many shorter keyword phrases.

keyword tool - Google's keyword planner tool

If you’re not one of the those, (and you’re most likely not), you’ll need to work a bit smarter to get your keywords ranking on Google, and the other search engines. There’s no guarantees of a ranking of course, in any case. But by choosing low competition long tail keywords, you’ll have a much better chance of ranking your content in the SERPS (search engine results pages). If not on Google, then you’ve also a chance of ranking on the other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.

This means free traffic if you get there, and that’s worth a lot for most businesses because it means free customers! If you’re going to go for it, be prepared for the long haul. It takes time and some dedication to rank your content, according to your particular niche and the domain authority you already have.

Keyword Planner Tool SEO – Finding Keyword Phrases

The first thing to do is type your main “seed” keyword into the planner. This is the main keyword for your site. The planner will then give you a bunch of derivatives of this main keyword. Some of them with be a couple of words long and others will be several words long. The difference between short tail and long tail keywords is your ability to rank for them and get free traffic!

With a short tail keyword of say 2-3 words, you will have a much harder time getting free traffic from the searches. There’s a lot of competition for these kinds of keywords. But longer term phrases of 4 words and above are easier to rank for. That’s not to say it’s a certainty that you’ll rank for them, but it’s far easier so these are the ones to go for in your content writing strategy.

long tail keywords

To find the long tail keywords, you can scroll down in the monthly search volume tab by clicking on it until the search volume drops. In the image above you can see the tab called “Avg. monthly searches” – (average monthly searches). By clicking on it the numbers will change. You want to find the long tail keywords with less SEO difficulty. These keywords typically have a lower search volume but less competition on the SERPS.

Although you won’t get flooded with visitors overnight using these kinds of keywords, a little of something is worth more than nothing of a lot! A small chance of free search traffic from long tail keywords is better than no chance of free traffic from targeting those keywords where you stand absolutely no chance of ranking!

Keyword Planner Tool SEO – Comparing Search Competition

Once you find a good long tail keyword which you would like to create some content for, you can roughly compare the search competition with a quick Google search. Use a basic Google search and a “phrase match” search (with the phase in quotes) to give you an estimated comparison. Google should show you a number at the top of the page which gives you an idea of the number of web pages which rank for this term.

best keywords for seo

Large numbers mean more competition, smaller numbers mean less! Typically I like to aim for articles with numbers of less than 10 million for a search and less than 10,000 for a phrase match search. This one fits the bill!

which keywords are best for seo

Once You’ve Found Your Keyword

Once you have found a good keyword you can get to work on creating some content around it. A good SEO plugin can help you write your content and optimise it for the search engines. I use Yoast SEO which gives you indicators as to your keyword density in your copy and reminds you to place keywords throughout your article.

You can also check the top ranked article for your target keyword to see what competition is ranked most highly. This can give you an idea about what you’re up against and the quality you need to out perform in order to get a ranking for your article.

Generally speaking the more you write the better, but I try and write at least 1000 words per article.

Once you have done this once, you can keep finding new keywords to create more and more content for. Over time, this will help boost your traffic through SEO, but it’s not some overnight strategy. It takes time to generate traffic like this and you’ll need to promote your content as much as possible to help with this. See also best free blogger plugins for WordPress.

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.