AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep

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

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

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

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

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep

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

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

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

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

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Affiliate Marketing

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

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

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

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Drop Shipping

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

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

Side Hustles That Make Money While You Sleep – Adsense

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

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

YouTube
Hubpages.com
Blogger.com
WordPress.com

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

Your Own Products – Digital or Physical

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

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

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

Print On Demand – Upload Designs & Automate Sales

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

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

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

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

Shopify Stores

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

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

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

Self Publishing Using Amazon

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

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

See Amazon Direct Publishing here.

Photography Royalties

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

A few photo stock sites are:

Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, iStock Photo

Images, Designs & Logos

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

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

Spreadshirt
DesignHill
Printful
Threadless
Cafepress
BlueCotton
TeeSpring
Zazzle
Society 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within A Year You Should Be At Break Even

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

Whatever your strategy you should become a master of it.

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

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

Summary

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

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

How Long Does It Take To Grow An Online Business?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mindset: The All Important Ingredient

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

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

Summary

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

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

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.