AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Your Affiliate Marketing Mentor

Your affiliate marketing mentor is someone who shows up and is committed to helping you succeed with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which the third party (you) gets rewarded financially for referring customers to other people’s products online. If you don’t make a sale, you don’t make any money! It’s therefore a performance related business model.

In the beginning stages of learning affiliate marketing, it can be frustrating when you are carrying a lot of doubt and scepticism. This is where a mentor can help you the most. Working with a mind filled with uncertainty is seldom going to lead you to a thriving online business. That mindset of uncertainty will undoubtedly lead to procrastination and hesitancy. When you’re unsure of your path, the affiliate journey is so much more difficult.

How can you take the risks needed in business to move forwards when you undermine your own confidence by filling your mind with doubt? The same is true of filling your mind with faith and trust. A good mentor will help you to focus on those actions which will help you the most in your affiliate business, and give you the mindsets you need to succeed.

Your Affiliate Marketing Mentor: A Difficult Journey & Mindset

The affiliate journey isn’t an easy one. If you are determined to become successful in affiliate marketing, no one can stop you. But if you are determined to fail, no one can stop you! Your affiliate mindset is therefore your biggest asset or your biggest liability.

Your affiliate marketing mentor can only help you come to certain realisations; they can’t do the work for you. So if you are bringing any attitude with you which might be holding you back you need to adjust it. This is more difficult if you’re unaware of your unconscious biases or beliefs which may be holding you back.

It can be very easy to find information which confirms your existing belief of something. So if you’re looking to confirm to yourself that affiliate marketing does not work, you’ll find that information. If you’re looking to confirm a belief that it does work, you’ll find that information too! Without a strong desire to succeed with an affiliate marketing business, you’re much less likely to do so. If you’re just “giving it a go” and it’s not that important to you, you will probably lack the necessary motivation to overcome all the obstacles which you’ll be presented with.

On the other hand if an affiliate marketing business if your sole focus, and you absolutely must succeed with it, no matter what, you’ll pull out all the stops to make it a reality.

Your Affiliate Marketing Mentor: Get A Mentor

An affiliate marketing mentor can give you more personal tuition and help and support you. But what is better than a single mentor is to have access to others who are on the same journey as you. Access a coaching and mentorship community through this link. Here’s some of what you can access:

A step by step setup of an online business system with products ready to sell
Access to a community of like minded business owners learning affiliate marketing strategies
Coaches and mentors available for 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching/mentoring and regular group webinars
Training and support

What A Mentor Is Not

A mentor is not someone who can build an online business for you. Mentors and coaches can only help you if you’ve already decided to take some serious action with an affiliate business and invest in your growth. With an affiliate mentorship program you can access mentors, tools, software and other affiliates who can help you in a number of ways:

They can hold you accountable – going it alone means exactly that, you don’t get help or support when you’re on your own
Mentors and coaches can help you change your thinking and mindset
You can benefit from systems and software. This makes the setup process much easier and takes out the technical aspect which many struggle with alone.

However what you’ll need to bring is a commitment to building a profitable affiliate business over the long term. Affiliate marketing can be a tough business and it’s not for the faint hearted. Entrepreneurialism isn’t the same as employment where you put in a few hours and get a monthly pay packet. You take a risk in a business. You have to take 100% responsibility for the success or failure of your business. No one else is responsible and a mentor or a coach can only help you – ultimately a businesses success or failure is the responsibility of it’s owner!

Summary

Your affiliate marketing mentor is someone who you can relate to and who relates to you. ideally you will find someone who can help you given your own particular circumstances. Not every mentor is a good fit for everyone and someone who has build a successful affiliate business using one particular strategy may not be a good fit for someone who is using a different one. Ultimately aim to find someone who you think is a good fit for you and the feeling is mutual!

See my page on 1:1 coaching and learn more about getting coaching and mentoring from my recommended program.

Affiliate Marketing Mentoring Program

An affiliate marketing mentoring program can give you the help and support you need to build a profitable online business from scratch. Without support affiliate marketing can be a very frustrating process. Even with help and support building an affiliate business requires a lot of patience and work. But with the right mindsets, tools and direction, it’s a whole lot easier than doing everything by yourself.

An affiliate marketing mentoring program can give you a number of benefits such as:

Help and support – both directional support and support with your focus, clarity and affiliate mindset
Technical support – a support network can allow you to overcome technical difficulties much more quickly
Tools & technology – can help take a lot of the technical side of things out of the equation to let you focus on building your business instead of getting hung up on building websites and the like
Accountability – without being held to account, it can be tough staying focused and moving forwards when things get tough.
Inspiration – A mentoring program can plug you into industry leaders who have already succeeded online; giving you encouragement and inspiration
Access to a community – By surrounding yourself with others on the same journey, you’re giving yourself much greater chance of success as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing Mentoring Program – Who Am I?

I started learning about affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s but it wasn’t until I got the help and support I needed that my affiliate business really took off. Why did I struggle so much? There’s a number of reasons I, and many other affiliates struggle. One of them was that I was jumping from program to program looking for the “easy” path – something I think happens with a lot of affiliate marketers.

me and Jay Kubassek — Here’s me (on the left) with one of my mentors Jay (Jason) Kubassek

Because of this habit, I wandered from one strategy to another without sticking to any particular direction for long enough to gain traction. Before one strategy had the momentum to start working, I abandoned it and joined another course. Affiliate marketing does take time and you need to be patient. You also need to stick to a particular strategy which works for a long period before anything can happen. Because of this, many new affiliates assume that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. It does work, but it just takes time! It doesn’t work immediately without having put a lot of time and effort in.

A mentoring program can give you a better understanding of this and belief in your journey. Without belief and trust that you are on the right path, affiliate marketing is very difficult. When you understand what you need to do, have the trust that it will work, and stick with it no matter what, you’re on the right path! When you’re unsure, it’s much more difficult to work consistently in your business because of the uncertainty.

Affiliate Marketing Mentoring Program

I joined a mentoring program in 2014 which has helped me grow both personally and professionally as an affiliate. You can access here. Some of the key takeaways which I’ve learned most from are mindset related, rather than technical stuff. As an affiliate you are the glass ceiling and limiting factor in your business. So unless you’re growing, you can ultimately hit a problem and not move past it. With a mentor to help you, hold you accountable and encourage you, you’re much more likely to push past this initial phase of difficulty and any internal mindset related limitations.

Another thing I learned after joining a mentorship program was to use membership programs. As an affiliate you only get paid for sales. In the beginning, it can take a while just to make your first sale. When you do it’s a great feeling and achievement. But with one-time sales, you only get paid once. With subscription and membership products, you can get paid time and time again for each referral you make. This can make a huge difference over time and is particularly encouraging if you’re new to affiliate marketing.

High Ticket Products

Another thing I learned was to sell high ticket affiliate products. With a high ticket product you stand to earn a lot more from each sale. This has a double benefit:

You earn larger commissions on each sale – an obvious benefit
It’s much easier to use paid marketing as a strategy

With low value products it’s harder to make a profit while using paid marketing strategies. This can mean you’ll need to focus on a cheap or free marketing strategy to promote your affiliate products. This can take a long time because there’s so much competition for content online. Paid marketing on the other hand is very much faster and much more scalable than content marketing. For low value products though, paid marketing can be out of reach. So high ticket affiliate products are key to building an online business much faster and in a way which is globally scalable.

What Mentorship Gives You

A good mentor who turns up regularly for their students has an immediate effect on your belief that an online business is possible. Before I found this community, I was struggling on my own. When you go it alone as an affiliate it can be very difficult. You don’t have anyone to inspire, educate and hold you accountable. With a program everything is laid out step by step. If you go it alone it can be harder to find a congruent and effective path without veering off route and getting distracted.

A community of other affiliates has helped me to overcome a lot of difficulty too. When I was about to quit, they helped me regain my composure and start again. On your own, there’s no one to help you when things get tough. In fact I found the opposite to be true before I found an online community. Friends and relatives were more likely to get me to quit my online business than to encourage me!

The main things an online business community and mentorship program can give you are:

A step by step system and clear path to take
Support and assistance – both with technical and mindset issues which you will face
Tools and software which make the journey easier
Encouragement and inspiration
Products to sell and a ready made sales funnel

Summary

If you want to build an online business from scratch using the affiliate marketing model, you can access an affiliate marketing mentoring program here. You’ll find all the tools, mentors and coaches you’ll need to build an online business from scratch and without any prior knowledge or training.

An online business takes to build and you shouldn’t expect something for nothing, so this isn’t for everyone. If you’re ready to get started click on the image below:

Best Affiliate Marketing Mentor

The best affiliate marketing mentor is the one who can help you to succeed online. Since every mentor is different, there’s really no such thing as the “best”.

Instead of looking for the “best” mentor, find someone who you can relate to and who relates to you. Look for a mentor who you can speak to one on one. See also 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching.

Affiliate marketing is different for everyone and depending on your own particular circumstances, your path is likely to be very different from someone else’s. Some affiliates will come from a background of sales and from a high income job. Their marketing strategy will therefore be very different to someone who is only working part time and looking for a longer term but cheaper marketing method, such as blogging.

Both these paths are very different and an affiliate mentor who has build an 8 figure business might not be appropriate for your needs if you’re going to build your business in a different way than they have.

Best Affiliate Marketing Mentor: You!

Becoming self reliant is part of the journey of entrepreneurialism and of affiliate marketing. If you’re always looking outside of yourself for answers, you’ll keep deferring responsibility to someone else other than yourself. When you can take full responsibility, you will become a much more resourceful affiliate and learn to solve your own problems by finding the right solutions for you.

That’s not to take away from the usefulness of a mentor. Mentors are great at helping you un-learn bad habits and re-learn new ones which will make you a more resourceful affiliate. A good mentor is an inspiration and helps you with your thinking, planning and goal setting. But ultimately however good a mentor is, they can’t do the work for you. So a good mentor is therefore someone who helps you come to an understanding by helping you change your thinking.

There’s a quote from Jim Rohn: “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got”

Best Affiliate Marketing Mentor: Failure/Experience

Failure in affiliate marketing is the best experience you’ll ever get. You won’t really find truthful answers anywhere else! Mentors and coaches can help you find a direction and change your thinking, but without experience you most likely won’t succeed with affiliate marketing. Experience is something you only get through trial and error with affiliate marketing: (mostly error!).

There’s a saying in affiliate marketing that you should “fail forwards” which means to learn through “failures”! Failures are therefore only stepping stones to success on the path of the affiliate.

Unless you’ve failed many times as an affiliate marketer, you’re not really trying!

Belief

The best affiliate marketing mentor is one who can help you to build belief in yourself and your affiliate path. Belief is a key catalyst to success for affiliates because without it you can easily lose faith and drop out. Over 95% of new affiliates quit so the affiliate marketing success rate is really small. To keep going when so many drop out takes a lot of patience and resilience.

When you don’t have belief in your strategy, it can become impossible to keep going. All action is based on belief. So building your belief up is of key importance because without it you won’t survive as an affiliate.

If you don’t believe a certain course of action will lead to success you won’t take it! You need to keep feeding your own belief as an affiliate and on your own this can be difficult; especially if friends and family are trying to dissuade you from doing it, which is typical unfortunately for affiliates. Join an affiliate community for help and support and to find mentors and coaches. Learn more with this free on-demand video series.

Summary

The best affiliate marketing mentor doesn’t really exist. You’re your own best mentor on the affiliate journey. However, you can benefit hugely from surrounding yourself with coaches, mentors and even other affiliates on the same journey as you. When you’re surrounded by naysayers and distractors, it’s so much more difficult to carve out an affiliate path because you become the average of the people closest to you.

Join an affiliate marketing community, find coaches and mentors and other affiliates just like you. Access a free video series here to learn more.

I also offer 1 to 1 coaching for the right person. You can learn more about my personal coaching here.

Create Niche Websites

Ten years ago you could create niche websites with only a few pages and they would still rank highly on Google. Today it’s a lot more difficult to do this. There’s a lot more competition today and there’s more than 600 million blogs out there in pretty much every topic. Google won’t rank a site immediately either and will often place new websites in what’s known as Google’s sandbox. This is a waiting area for new sites and although Google doesn’t officially recognise the “sandbox”, it exists.

So even if you threw up a website in the hope of ranking it on Google, it might be several months before it ranks. But you can still create niche websites which rank on Google, and the other search engines. It just takes a little more work today than it used to.

Google has updated its algorithms too and consistently does this to give the end user the best experience. Nobody wants to find scrawny, useless, spammy affiliate websites which offer zero value at the top of their search! But if you can keep value in mind when creating niche websites, and focus on quality, they can and do still rank and bring in traffic for free. You can then monetise that traffic and turn it into cash! Here’s how it’s done..

Create Niche Websites: Research

Before you go about creating a niche website it pays to do your research first. Three or five page websites aren’t what they used to be so you’ll need to do better. You’ll need to create some content on your site too to give it the best chance of attaining a ranking for the main keywords you’re targeting.

You can also start with the affiliate product you are promoting, if you choose the affiliate route. You can also monetise with Google Adsense or another advertiser which offers placement ads. See affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense for more on this.

Head over the Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword. That’s a keyword in your niche which you have an interest in or would like to build a site around. You’ll find a tonne of long tail keywords which relate to your main seed keyword. You can then check with Google to find one which is suitable to build a site around. Ideally you want a keyword which gets a good number of monthly visitors and which has little competition in the search results on Google.

Before deciding on a particular keyword to build a site around ask yourself these questions:

Is the keyword a “buyer” keyword? That is, does it have the potential to bring in targeted visitors? (Think about the intent behind a search for this keyword).
Does the keyword have enough search traffic?
Is it too competitive on a simple Google search?
What are your chances of ranking for it?

See also this article for more info on this.

Create Niche Websites: Buy A Domain Name

Next you can head over to namecheap.com and purchase a domain name which contains your selected keywords in it. If the .com isn’t available find one which is. You can add words to the end to make sure you get your main keywords within the domain name. As an example, this website has been built on the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. The domain name affiliatemarketingmentors.com was taken, so I added “online” to the end to make it work! This site now (at the time of writing) ranks for the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors”.

Although “affiliate marketing mentors” only gets a few hundred views every month, it’s enough to gain some free traffic from the search engines. With some extra work blogging, you can increase this number over time.

Build Your Site

Once you have bought your domain name you can build your site. Make sure you install an SEO plugin to help you create content on it. I use Yoast SEO. See also best free Blog plugins for WordPress.

Once your site is up you can use the keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty which match your main keywords. Then write content for each of the keywords which are suitable for your site. This should give you lots of content ideas and this will help you build authority with Google.

Write at least 10 articles on your site and ideally create a few backlinks too. Within a few months you should see your site showing up on the search engines. Google typically will make you wait longer than the rest but if you show up on Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc then you know you’ve cracked it.

The more content you create and of course promote, the better your site will do. Once you have built a niche website once, you should have learned from the experience. You can then go on and build several more.

What To Expect

You can’t expect too much from a niche website straight away and keep in mind that you’ll need to create a lot of content in order to get more traffic. But having your site ranking for its main keywords can give you a huge boost in the beginning. If your main keyword gets 200 monthly hits, and you manage to rank at the top or second on Google, you won’t get all this traffic.

The searches you will get on Google will be divided between the top several sites and any paid results which rank at the top. So for 200 monthly hits for a particular keyword you can only expect about a quarter of this to even find you, assuming you rank at the top. Other hots are shared between the top most highly ranking sites typically. So 200 divided by 4 = 50. 50 hits a month is less than 2 hits a day! So the more search traffic your keyword gets the more traffic you’ll get if you rank your site.

Of course more traffic typically means more competition too so chances are good that with a more competitive keyword you’ll have more work to do to rank your site.

Summary

To create niche websites and get free traffic takes some time and dedication. But with many of these sites you can pick up some fairly easy traffic without paying for advertising. However, your domains all cost money and renewing them costs money too.

So keep in mind that as your niche website collection grows, you’ll be servicing the domain names when they come up for renewal. So it’s worth making them count by doing your research before you start building them. It’s tough when a site doesn’t rank, particularly if you’ve put a lot of effort into it. Don’t despair, just take the knowledge you have learned from one niche site and make the next one even better!

Passive Income Website Ideas

If you’re looking for passive income website ideas, here’s a few which might work for you. Not all of them are completely passive and some will require an investment of time and/or money.

I love the idea of passive income and in the early 2000’s I decided I would attempt to build a passive income online. It was much tougher than I thought. I tried many different tactics some of which worked and many of which didn’t, or were incredibly slow.

Here’s a quick review of what I’ll be covering in this article:

Blogging – a slow but ultimately great long term passive income approach
Affiliate marketing – selling other people’s products is really great because you don’t have to deal with customers or handle products
Selling your own digital products – no product handling, automated delivery
Drop shipping – Similar to affiliate marketing
YouTube – using video blogging or paid marketing
Google Adsense – is just one of the ad platforms you can use to monetise content online
Recurring income affiliate products – selling subscription products is one of the best ways to earn passively online from sales you’ve made previously.
Niche website building – build a niche website which gets free traffic and monetise your site however you like! (This site is a niche website)

Passive Income Website Ideas: Blogging

Blogging is something I did right back when I started learning about earning an income online. You can even blog for free using free blog platforms like Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. I would however recommend building your own website for a couple of reasons. Your own domain and hosting allows you to more easily attract traffic from the search engines for one. Plus having your own site looks much more professional if you’re planning on selling something from it and building some authority.

Blogging can take a long time to come to fruition. At the beginning for me blogging was very frustrating because I kept stopping to look for results. I would write a few posts and sit back waiting for things to “happen”. Big mistake! Blogging is something which works if you do.

But you need to work really hard for a long period of time before your blog starts working for you. Stick at it long enough and your blog can bring in a nice passive income. Use affiliate products to monetise your blog (or advertising) and get an email list to help you.

Passive Income Website Ideas: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is definitely my favourite form of earning an income online. When I was a beginner I tried both Google Adsense for monetising a website and affiliate marketing. While Adsense was more consistent, the amounts I would earn were negligible. But the affiliate sales were much better so I dropped the Google Adsense (advertising banners) and focused only on affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is an easy and passive business model if you can make it work for you. You need to promote other people’s products from your website and you earn commissions when you sell something. The main problem is traffic. Traffic doesn’t just appear on a website once you’ve built it. You need to become an active marketer and promote it somehow. You can do this by blogging, or using some other method:

PPC – (Pay per click) paid marketing (see PPC vs organic marketing)
Social media marketing
Email marketing – see the power of email marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation – useful for niche website building
Link building – a part of SEO
Offline marketing methods – traditional advertising

Passive Income Website Ideas: Your Own Products

You can sell your own products from a website too if you have something to sell. If not use the affiliate marketing model to sell other people’s products. A good product you can create quite easily is a digital ebook which can be sold hands free from your website. See how to sell ebooks on your own website.

You can create a simple ebook quite easily if you know something about a topic. Use a basic word editing software and convert it to a pdf. Then create a Paypal button on your website and redirect customers to your ebook when they complete the purchase.

The whole process can be automated and therefore create a passive means of earning money from your website. As with anything you sell from a website, your main obstacle is again getting people to the site, which requires some marketing; either through content marketing or paid advertising.

Passive Income Website Ideas: Drop Shipping

A drop shipping website is a similar thing to an affiliate website. With affiliate marketing you send customers directly to a sales page of the affiliate product. With drop shipping you collect the orders directly from your site and send products to the customers directly from the distributors.

There’s a little more involved with drop shipping than with affiliate marketing but in both these models you’re effectively a middleman finding customers for someone else’s products and services. Here’s a few drop shipping suppliers:

AliExpress
Alibaba
SaleHoo
Worldwide Brands
Doba
Sunrise Wholesale

A simple way to start drop shipping is to find a supplier like Alibaba or AliExpress. Use an integrated supplier directory in your store’s back end, like DSers . Or you can use print-on-demand service, like Printify. The easiest drop shipping process for Shopify store owners is through DSers.

Passive Income Website Ideas: YouTube

YouTube can be used for website owners to generate traffic or in its own right to earn money passively through their partner program (using ads). There’s a couple of ways you can use YouTube to generate traffic:

Run paid ads on YouTube targeting your customer avatar and bring people to your online store/affiliate website.
Build a portfolio of videos on the platform and aim to attract traffic organically which you can send to your website

The paid marketing option on YouTube is an expensive one so you will need a high ticket sales funnel with a range of large value products to sell if you go the affiliate marketing route. Ideally send traffic directly to a landing page and collect emails to build an email list of subscribers to which you can promote your products.

The cheaper organic option is a little like blogging. It can take several months or even years to gain traction through uploading videos regularly on the platform in order to gain organic traffic to your website.

Passive Income Website Ideas: Google Adsense

Google Adsense is one of many advertising platforms which can allow you to monetise a website with advertising space. It’s easy to create a Google Adsense account and connect it to a website.

Once you are set up, the code on your site will automatically propagate with adverts which match your content topic. So as you attract visitors to your website, they will be likely to click on your ads. When they do, you earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue for each click.

Depending on your topic and the amount of traffic you can attract, Adsense can become quite lucrative. But you’ll need a lot of free traffic which will take time and effort to acquire.

With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s huge competition in most areas and topics. An uncompetitive topic is generally one which is less lucrative than a competitive one, so it’s worth researching your topic before you choose this route.

Recurring Income Affiliate Products: Subscription Products

Recurring income affiliate products are some of the best products to choose if you decide to use affiliate marketing as your choice of website monetisation. With subscription products you can earn a recurring income month in month out from each sale. While most affiliate products only pay you once, a subscription product can give you a regular income. So it doesn’t take many sales for those commissions to add up.

Good affiliate subscription products to promote are those which are very useful such as business tools and software which is needed for online businesses. Of course you also need to learn how to promote your website in order to make sales. But if you choose the affiliate route, subscription items are a good idea when things start working for you.

Niche Website Building: Free Traffic

With a niche website, you build your site around a specific theme or keyword. This website for example has been built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. So it attracts some free traffic from those particular keywords from Google and other search engines. To build a niche website you need to do a little research into your main topic or theme. Once you know your chosen topic for your website, go to Google’s keyword planner and find longer tail keywords which you can build your site around.

Ideally find a keyword which gets monthly searches already but which also isn’t very competitive. With shorter phrase keywords it can be very difficult to rank a website and get free traffic.

But by choosing long tail keywords which have lower SEO difficulty, you can more easily get a top listing for your site on Google and attract traffic to it for free.

Affiliate Marketing Passive Income

To make an affiliate marketing passive income you need to do more than just sell an affiliate product. A single affiliate sale only generates a single commission. The first sale is a great achievement for any affiliate. But to make consistent sales is the ticket to a passive income from affiliate marketing. Of course if you can make one sale, you can make many more. If you can make sales passively, you’ve cracked it. If you can make a passive sale scalable and automatic, that’s even better.

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and some of them are more passive than others. Certain marketing tactics which affiliates use can take years to start generating traction, such as blogging. Other strategies are faster and more scalable, but require more investment. If your goal is to make an affiliate marketing passive income, there’s a few things you should know.

An affiliate marketing passive income is a wonderful thing. It means you can live your life and forget about working for a living. But first you have to make it work. Many affiliates fail and success isn’t a given.

Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: Blogging

With blogging you can make a passive income from affiliate marketing, once you’ve done the work! Blogging can take months or even years though before you see the fruits of your labour. That’s not something every new affiliate is prepared to do. A new blog is unlikely to produce the kind of traffic, leads and sales as one which has been around for many years. So with blogging, although you can earn passively from free traffic, it takes some time and dedication to create the content you’ll need to generate traction.

If you’re not prepared to put at least a year into blogging, it probably isn’t going to work as a passive income source. You’ll need to create and promote a huge amount of content for it to start generating any authority with Google. Without Google, or the help of the search engines, it’ll be much harder to generate traffic in large amounts.

Blogging is a cheap way though to generate an income online passively. If you’re prepared to work at it for a long time with little to show initially, it can work wonders over the longer term.

Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: V’logging

V’logging, like blogging takes some serious commitment. But once you have a heap of videos on YouTube (or TikTok), that content can work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, bringing traffic to your affiliate website passively. YouTube (owned by Google) is the second most popular place online for traffic after Google. Many YouTube videos are also shown in Google’s search results and it’s a good source of traffic for anyone prepared to put the work in. However the platform has become more competitive over the years and there’s many thousands of YouTube’ers competing for views.

Still, YouTube is less competitive than Google, so building a channel might be a good idea if you decide that video is your thing. See also blogging vs vlogging. It can take several months or years to break through and start generating a lot of passive traffic through uploading videos to YouTube simply because it’s a hugely competitive platform. But if you stick with it long enough, you’ll be rewarded with free traffic.

Affiliate Marketing Passive Income: Memberships

Yes membership products are one of the best ways to make a passive income from affiliate marketing. With most affiliate products you only get paid one time. So when you sell one time commission product you need to keep making sales over and over again. With membership products you can earn passively from sales you’ve made already. So it’s obviously a good idea to choose subscription products if you’re an affiliate.

Subscription affiliate programs tend to be those which offer ongoing value to the customer. Things like training programs, software products and business tools often carry a membership fee which can be passed on to the affiliate. One sale can make you a passive income, unlike most affiliate products.

Of course there is attrition and some memberships you sell will be cancelled. But if you choose products which offer the most value, you’re more likely to attract longer term memberships. Business tools are a good example of this because business owners need them in order to run their businesses.

High Ticket & Subscription Products

Unless you have been blogging or v’logging for some time, it’s tough to get traction with an affiliate business organically (with content). The much faster method of selling affiliate products is through paid marketing. However, with low value products, it can be difficult to determine whether a paid advertising campaign is going to work without spending a huge amount of marketing budget on testing ads.

Even with a subscription program, you can spend a lot of budget testing out whether your strategy is going to work; often to no avail. A good solution to this problem is to use a high ticket sales funnel which contains a subscription product within its range.

A range of high value products allows you to earn much larger commissions with high ticket sales. This helps recover your marketing budget much more easily when a sale is made. You can also make residual income on the subscription products within the funnel. It’s much easier to make a profit and use paid marketing with a high ticket product range. Paid marketing is faster to implement with an affiliate business and much more easily scaled than using blogging or other slow content marketing strategies.

Summary

You can make an affiliate marketing passive income through using multiple methods of course too. A blog or YouTube channel will take some time and serious effort to build up organically. But over the longer term this can give you free traffic which means you don’t have to pay for it. Paid traffic is much faster of course and much more scalable. So when you find a winning campaign, you can simply scale up by increasing your marketing budget.

Consider using a high ticket sales funnel and subscription affiliate products too which pay out recurring commissions.

Online Passive Income Streams

There’s several ways you can build online passive income streams. One of the quickest ways to generate a passive income is to buy an affiliate website which makes money already. You can find websites which earn money passively from Flippa.com which is an affiliate website marketplace.

Of course the websites which earn more money are more expensive to buy. The cheaper ones tend to earn very little or nothing! You’ll find a host of digital assets you can purchase on Flippa.com from blogs to online businesses, from apps to e-commerce stores.

Do your due diligence before making a purchase and remember that a website’s income can go down over time, so it pays to research any website you are interested in buying.

Online Passive Income Streams – Blogging

Owning your own blog is another way you can generate a passive income. Bloggers create content on a website and over time they can generate free traffic from social media and the search engines. If you’re on a tight budget, blogging might be the way to go. But with over 600 million bloggers on the internet, you’ll need to have a lot of patience and put the hours in if you want to build a passive income from blogging.

A new blog won’t generate much traffic but longer term bloggers can build a passive income over time by using advertising or affiliate marketing on their blog posts. Using ads on your site generates income from advertising clicks from your visitors. Affiliate marketing is a referral based business in which affiliates make money by product recommendations. See affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.

If you intend to make a passive income from blogging, expect to create a lot content over a long period of time. Only then will you generate enough traffic to make it pay. See also passive income from blogging.

Online Passive Income Streams: Recurring Revenue From Subscription Products

Another way to make a passive income stream online is through the use of recurring income affiliate programs. With a recurring income product you can generate ongoing income from each referral sale you make. You can use multiple different strategies to generate affiliate sales online:

Blogging
PPC – Pay Per Click (Paid marketing)
Email marketing – see the power of email marketing
Social media marketing
V’logging – see blogging vs vlogging

One of the fastest ways to grow a passive income from affiliate marketing is to promote a high ticket sales funnel which has a number of products within it. One of the products should be a subscription product from which you can earn a recurring and passive income.

The advantage of a high ticket product range is that you can more easily tap into paid marketing as a strategy. Paid marketing is much faster than blogging in terms of generating traction from an affiliate business. With lower value affiliate products, it’s much more difficult to make a profit while running paid ads. But with high value items, you can more easily recoup advertising budget and make profit.

Paid marketing is also much more scalable than blogging, for example, or any other slower organic methods.

Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is another online business model whereby you can promote a third party product and become a “middle man” to make a virtually hands off business. Drop shipping is similar to affiliate marketing in that you become a third party referrer of products and services. By finding customers and making sales you can earn money from making sales and then sending products directly from the distributor to the customer.

Drop shipping is slightly more involved than affiliate marketing in that you need to create a platform to make sales, deal with customers and order products as necessary. With affiliate marketing you simply refer customers directly to the product. When a sale is made with affiliate marketing, you’re credited with the sale through your affiliate link. So drop shipping is slightly less passive than affiliate marketing. However you can outsource much of the day to day workings of the business with both models.

Video Blogging

V’logging is another method of generating an online passive income stream. A video blog is another way to generate free traffic from the YouTube or TikTok search engines. Like blogging, expect to build a library of content before you’ll earn anything from v’logging.

To monetise YouTube with affiliate marketing is easier than to join YouTube’s partner program because you’ll need to be well established to do so. You’ll need over 1000 subscribers in order to partner with YouTube and earn through monetising videos with ads.

See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72851?hl=en

Getting traffic for free on YouTube or TikTok can be tough too. Although there’s less competition than on Google in the case of blogging, v’logging can be a long road to a passive income. See blogging vs vlogging for more on this strategy.

Summary

The faster methods of earning a passive income online require a lot more investment. Buy a profitable site from Flippa.com for the least amount of work, just be careful and do your homework beforehand! You can purchase a high ticket sales funnel and promote it with paid marketing. This is one of the best ways to build an online business which is scalable globally from which you can earn passively.

Blogging, v’logging and content creation is more time consuming but if you’re on a budget it might be a good fit. It does take considerable time and effort to build enough content online to start generating a passive income from though. So if you’re going this route choose a topic you’re passionate about so you enjoy the journey! See also best niche to blog about.

Passive Income From Blogging

You can earn a passive income from blogging in a number of ways. However you do it though you’ll need a lot of visitors to your blog. That can take time and some serious effort. So before you set about building a blog, it’s wise to consider your blog topic.

Choosing a topic only for the money may have the opposite effect. If you can’t sustain the necessary effort required to make a blog profitable, all your work will be for nothing! Many blogs are abandoned because their owners lost interest and didn’t fully realise the huge effort required to build a blog that makes money.

Passive Income From Blogging: Competition

There are currently more than 600 million blogs on the internet out of the 1.9 billion websites (and climbing). To make a passive income from blogging, you will be going up against thousands of others in all kinds of niches/topics. If you can’t imagine blogging for several months or years before you start making money from it, it might not be the right path for you. There’s other ways to make money online of course and much faster ways too. (See PPC vs organic marketing).

But blogging is cheap and it can be effective if you are prepared to roll up your sleeves and do the work; even if it takes longer than you might expect. A blog can compound on itself over time, bringing in free traffic, leads and sales and making money passive ultimately. With paid advertising, when you stop paying for it, the traffic stops too!

Monetising A Blog: Main Strategies

If you don’t have your own business or product to sell, you can monetise a blog with a couple of main strategies: affiliate marketing and advertising space. Affiliate marketing is a popular and simple online business model in which you can promote and sell other people’s products online. You don’t have to personally deal with customers, order or deliver products. You simply refer products via your unique affiliate link which is tracked back to you. This makes it a perfect business model to be used by bloggers.

The alternative to affiliate marketing is through placing ads on your content. Google Adsense is one of the main platforms you can use for this. Just sign up and place some code on your blog. The code will create adverts which are suitable and appropriate to your content. When visitors click on your ads, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue.

You can also create your own products to sell of course. The simplest product to create is an ebook. Ebooks can also be used as lead magnets to encourage website visitors to sign up to an email list. Email lists can then be used to sell affiliate products.

Passive Income From Blogging: Choosing A Niche

Since there’s so much competition on Google, you should expect to spend several months or even several years to build up a good amount of traffic from a blog. Of course it will depend on many factors:

Your niche/topic and the relative competition
How often you post content
The length and quality of your blog posts
How well you promote your content

So if you assume that you’ll be creating content for at least several months, it’s well worth considering your blog topic before you start. What do you know about and what’s your passion? Can it be monetised? Ideally choose a topic or area which you have some knowledge or interest in.

When you know about a topic, it’s much easier to create a lot of content on it because it’s a pleasure to write about it. Conversely, choosing a topic you have no interest in just because you think it will make money can be a bad idea. It’s much more difficult sustaining a blogging habit in an area in which you’re unfamiliar. You need to research your content beforehand and it’s less enjoyable to write about. Therefore you’re much more likely to grow tired and quit, probably long before anything happens.

Passive Income From Blogging: Email Marketing

Whichever route you take to monetise your blog, it pays dividends to use an email list. On a blog, many of your visitors will click away after less than a couple of minutes, never to return. Most blog traffic doesn’t return and a huge proportion of visitors will leave in only a few seconds. People’s attention spans are pretty short these days, particularly now they are being bombarded with endless media from all angles.

An email list can help solve this problem because it allows you to capture the email address of your visitors. You can then continue to inform them of your latest blog posts and of course promote affiliate products too. Often people will purchase from an email list long after they have subscribed to it – even years later. This just wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t capture your blog visitors email address.

This is done by offering some kind of legitimate “bribe” such as a free video series or ebook.

Passive Income From Blogging: The Work

If the end goal of blogging is a passive income, you’ll need to attract the attention of the SERPS – the Search Engine Results Pages on Google (and other search engines). Once your content starts getting listed on Google, you should see an uptick in your traffic stats. However, this can take months and initially it can be difficult having faith that this will actually happen. Newer websites don’t get indexed by Google often until they’ve been around for months.

So if you’re throwing up a few articles in expectation of a passive income, sorry to break it to you but this will be very unlikely. More likely is that you will struggle to get any free traffic for a few weeks or months.

To give yourself the best chance you’ll need to create some awesome content which attract the right kind of visitors for your affiliate products. Since so many are doing this, your chances of getting rankings for any of the main keywords in your niche are pretty low.

So you can target long tail keywords which have less SEO competition. This can give you a better chance of ranking, although you’re never guaranteed to rank for any keywords, even if you create an awesome piece of content. So you should also promote your content as much as possible to help grow your readership.

The short version to getting traffic to your blog is:

Create high quality content
Promote it
Rinse and repeat (for as long as it takes)!

Passive Income From Blogging: Other Considerations

To earn a passive income from blogging you’ll first need traffic and a lot of it. In a competitive niche this is going to be much more difficult to obtain than in a less competitive one. However, more competitive niches are typically more easily monetised too. Ideally find a niche which suits your interests so you can continue creating content for a good, long time. If you’re monetising with advertising, the less competitive topics are generally going to pay less to advertise in. So again, less competition means it’s easier to get traffic, but it can be more difficult to monetise.

With affiliate marketing, you need to attract the right kind of traffic too. Not all traffic is buyer traffic so it’s useful to understand your customer avatar and create content they are looking for.

With affiliate products you can increase your opportunity for passive income by promoting products and services which offer a recurring income. Recurring income affiliate programs typically offer more value in the form of software, memberships and programs which give the customer ongoing value. They’re great for affiliates because you can earn a passive income from each and every sale. One off sales aren’t so great because you need to make them continually in order to make it profitable.

Summary

Yes passive income is possible with a blog. But it’s not easy! Expect to work hard at blogging for some time before you can make a good income from it. Ideally choose a topic you love writing about so it doesn’t become a chore. If you enjoy writing and sharing your knowledge, it’s so much easier to sustain your blogging habit for the long term and this will mean you’re much more likely to succeed in making a passive income from it.

Monetising a blog can be done with your own products/business, or you can use advertising or affiliate marketing. For more information on affiliate marketing or starting an online business of your own, access a free video series here.

Blogging Vs Vlogging

Blogging vs vlogging? Both blogging and v’logging (video blogging) are great ways to generate organic traffic for an affiliate business; or any business for that matter. By creating content either through writing or video, anyone can attract website visitors to gain greater exposure. This can drive affiliate sales and/or customers to a business.

Blogging has been around much longer than v’logging of course and blogging became a thing in the early 90’s – see the history of blogging. V’logging became popular after YouTube was founded in February 2005. From 2012 to 2017 the number of YouTube viewers increased at a massive rate, rising from 380 million to over 800 in only a few years.

There are over 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world. Their authors account for over 6 million blog posts daily, or over 2.5 billion annually.

Blogging Vs Vlogging: Which To Choose?

So are you going to become a blogger or a v’logger? Or perhaps both? Blogging is certainly more competitive than v’logging. So you may need to work harder and for longer to attract free traffic from a blog than from a YouTube channel. Videos can be spun out much more quickly than blog posts too. So this is definitely a consideration.

According to Alexa’s traffic ranking Google is the most used search engine followed closely by YouTube in second place. But it’s also much more competitive. More on this here.

YouTube plays a key role in Google search too. Since YouTube is owned by Google many of YouTube’s videos are shown in Google’s search results. The platform you choose might also depend on the kind of visitors who are interested in your business/products too. A recent Austrian survey among teenagers stated that YouTube is their No.1 search engine.

So, if your business sells to a particular age group, it’s well worth doing some research to see which platform is the most relevant for your target audience.

Blogging Vs Blogging: Traffic

If you’re looking to become a blogger or vlogger in order to build an online business, you should expect a lot of work. Other methods of building traffic are far quicker and if you don’t have a lot of patience paid marketing is a much faster and more scalable route. (See PPC vs Organic marketing) But blogging and vlogging can ultimately give you free traffic and therefore a passive income. Just expect to put in the work upfront before you start looking for results.

As a blogger, I can attest to the patience you’ll need to build a lot of free traffic. It’s years not months before you can see a good amount of free visitors. While YouTube and TikTok are less competitive than Google (and therefore blogging), the two platforms are still very highly saturated; particularly YouTube.

Not that long ago you could monetise YouTube quite easily even as a beginner. But now there’s so much competition you’ll need over a thousand subscribers just to be considered for their payment program:

Of course that doesn’t matter if you’re using a video blog for website traffic, and you’re monetising in another way; either for a business or affiliate product.

Leverage Your Interest

Whether you decide to become a blogger or a vlogger or perhaps both, you need to realise that free traffic takes time; so you’ll need to be in it for the long run. If you can’t imaging creating content on a blog, or video blog over months and perhaps years, it might not be the answer.

Ideally if you’re going to create content yourself you should pick a topic you know about and/or have a passion for. If you like to write, choose blogging and if you like creating video use a v’log. But either way, you won’t get much exposure if you give it a few weeks and then quit. Long term bloggers and vloggers are the ones who eventually succeed and get free traffic. There’s just too much competition in both to expect much traffic for a small amount of work.

So the best thing you can do if you’re an affiliate using organic marketing is to pick a topic you care about and love! Stick with it for a long time and create lots of content. Eventually you should see traffic growing and people finding your business. If you start with your passion and focus on creating value and the traffic will come. See also best niche to blog about.

Alternatives To Blogging

If you hate blogging but want to build an online presence, there are alternatives to blogging. Blogging is a good cheap method of building an online presence; but it’s not for everyone.

Some people just don’t like writing or perhaps your topic is not one which lends itself well to blogging regularly. If you’ve made your mind up that blogging isn’t for you, there are options available. Of course a blog can be a low level addition to the other activities you do online to build a business, or to generate traction. So a blog doesn’t have to be the main activity you do. Many bloggers only post once or twice a week. So it’s still worth considering a blog, even if you’re not a big fan.

Over time, blogging can build up and generate a nice passive income if you do it for long enough. But it can take years to build up a blog to a level where you can take you foot off the accelerator pedal; and for many people it’s just way too much work! So, here’s a few alternatives to blogging you can use to generate traction online.

Alternatives To Blogging: PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is one of the best marketing alternatives you can use. With pay per click advertising you can set up an advert targeted towards a specific search, or a certain person. Google’s Adwords program lets you target specific searches on Google which are relevant to your target audience. Compared to blogging, you can instantly turn on an advert you pay for.

Whereas with a blog post, it can take months for it to rank on the search engines and get traction. Plus, it might never rank at all which means you’re only other chance of getting traffic to a blog post is by sharing it yourself and linking back to it, which can be incredibly labour intensive and time consuming; perhaps reasons not to blog!

Paid marketing can be much more easily scaled up too. With a blog, you’ll need to stick at it for months, perhaps even years to see the return on your efforts. With a paid ad, you see immediately if it’s working or not. So you can increase budget on performing ads and decrease budget on those which don’t perform well. Other paid ad platforms:

YouTube
Facebook
Bing
Yahoo
Twitter and other social media platforms
Plus many more

Alternatives To Blogging: Landing Pages

One of the best ways to use a paid marketing campaign is in conjunction with a landing page and follow up with email marketing. You can build an online business without a website or blog and only through using email marketing and landing pages.

A landing page is a specific web page built deliberately with only one aim: to get people to subscribe to your email list. With a blog, visitors can browse around, click through your content and basically have a nosey! But with a landing page there’s only two actions visitors can perform: leave or sign up! This means you can optimise a landing page much more effectively for getting people onto your email list. Then follow up with email marketing messages selling your product or service.

Here’s an example of a landing page:

Once you have optimised a landing page for opt ins, you can increase marketing budget and build an email list of subscribers very quickly using email marketing. See also the power of email marketing.

Alternatives To Blogging: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a good alternative to blogging, although you need a source of leads in order to build a large email list. As mentioned, this can be done with paid marketing, but there are many other ways too. Once you have a source to build your email list, you can steadily increase your marketing efforts to increase the number of leads you attract to a landing page every day.

Once visitors subscribe to your email list, you can follow up with useful information regarding the topic visitors are interested in and sell products related to your topic.

Email marketing works really well because you can build a relationship with your subscribers over an extended period of time. Whereas with a blog, most visitors will only stick around for a few minutes before they leave forever!

As your email list grows you should find you are making more sales if your marketing and messages have a congruent message and your subscribers are well targeted. See also customer avatar worksheet.

V’logging: Video Blogging

V’logging or video blogging is a suitable alternative to blogging if you are more comfortable on video than with writing. YouTube is considerably less competitive than Google search too, so it can be easier to attract an audience through uploading regular visitors to YouTube than articles to a blog.

You will still need to upload videos on a regular basis over a long period of time to build a large audience organically through YouTube though. You can of course run paid advertising with YouTube also, testing and measuring your ads until you find a winning advert.

YouTube is expensive though so you should only do this if you have a high ticket sales funnel and can recoup your advertising budget with a number of high ticket sales or subscription products (which pay recurring commissions). Otherwise you’ll need to go the organic route which can take some considerable time and effort, much like blogging. There’s also TikTok to consider for video blogging.

Social Media Strategies

There’s multiple social media platforms where you can find people who match your target audience. Connect with them somehow and promote your products/service.

One method of doing this is through using Facebook. Facebook has a number of groups within the platform where you can join with others to discuss specific topics. You can use this feature to connect with people and lead them back to your profile where they can find your offer. See also unpaid social media marketing and free Facebook traffic strategies.

There’s many other platforms you can use too such as Quora.com where you can answer questions relating to your topic and lead people directly to your website/offer. See affiliate marketing on Quora and using Quora to drive traffic.

Other Social Media platforms:

Twitter
Linkedin
Facebook
Rumble
TikTok
YouTube
etc.

Summary

Blogging is a long term and slow marketing strategy but it’s cheap, which is perhaps it’s main appeal! Unfortunately it takes a huge amount of blogging to get traction online if you’re considering doing it to build an income. The good thing about blogging is that if you stick with it for long enough, you can earn passively from the work you’ve done previously on a blog. But the long road of blogging isn’t for everyone and not all topics are appropriate for a blog either.

If you want to build an online business faster, you should consider using paid marketing strategies and a high ticket sales funnel with multiple products within it including high valued products and subscription products which pay out recurring income. Learn more about this kind of online business with this video series.