AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Clickbank Alternatives

Not happy with Clickbank and looking for Clickbank alternatives? There’s many other places where affiliates can find good digital products. Clickbank isn’t the only place for them. Even though Clickbank has a huge array of digital information products and courses, there’s other places you can find those kinds of products too.

Digital products are great for affiliates because of the levels of commissions they can earn from them. Physical products tend to pay far lower rates of commission. Look at Amazon for example. Amazon pays between 1% and 20% commissions on its product range which is far less than what most Clickbank products pay.

Still, it can be easier to sell physical products than digital products so Amazon is definitely worth a look. You can join their partner program here.

Clickbank Alternatives: JVZoo

But if you’re dead set on finding another place for digital and information products JVZoo might be worth a look. JVZoo focuses on digital information products, similar to what you might find on Clickbank.

JVZoo offers make money online and online business products whereas Clickbank has a larger library of info products in multiple areas and topics. If you’ve already build content around a Clickbank product, you might be able to find a similar product on JVZoo.

You can also activate an instant payout feature on JVZoo; although this depends on the product vendor and whether they have activated this feature or not. Payout methods of JVZoo are Paypal, BlueSnap, Authorize.net, Zift, Stripe, Check, and Direct Deposit.

Clickbank Alternatives: Commission Junction (CJ)

CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) has been around since 1998 and offers affiliate programs for software, retail and other products. The company was founded in Santa Barbara, California. Although it doesn’t have as many products as Clickbank, it offers more exclusive brands.

A lot of major brands have programs on CJ, including technology brands like Apple or Verizon, and retailers like Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, and Lowes. With CJ you will need to apply to each offer you choose to promote which can be a little frustrating if you’re not used to it. Whereas on Clickbank you only need setup an account once.

CJ affiliate pays out via Check and Direct Deposit and is international.

Clickbank Alternatives: ShareASale

ShareASale is a large affiliate site focusing on physical products. It covers a lot of niches, including home & garden products, fashion wear, green appliances, and business equipment. Represented brands include the NBA Store, WP Engine, and Viator.

ShareASale has been listed in some places as the largest network the world for affiliates. Though some non-network competitors (including Amazon) do more affiliate business. Despite its size, it can still be more selective than ClickBank with its affiliates.

Payout methods include Check, Wire and ACH Direct Deposit.

Clickbank Alternatives: eBay Partner Network

The eBay Partner Network is another potential alternative to using Clickbank products. You’ll need a website which has a lot of traffic already to join their affiliate program. eBay pays for clicks and offers CPC commissions so this may or may not be suitable for you.

eBay is a trusted brand and many people already have accounts on the site, so if you have traffic it’s easy to simply send it over. Unlike Clickbank eBay offers physical products, rather than digital.

Payment methods are Check or ACH Direct Deposit.

Rakuten Marketing

Rakuten Marketing is an affiliate network focused on physical product offers, including high fashion, jewellery, and accessories.

This network is more difficult to join as an affiliate than others and you’ll need a website and traffic to be considered. The signup process for the network is longer and more involved than most. Even after joining the site, you’ll need to apply to each separate offer individually. So if you’re a beginner affiliate, this isn’t a good place to start.

Rakuten has worked with many huge organisations and brands including the American Heart Association, Papa Johns, Ray-Ban, and Vans.

Payment methods include Check, Direct Deposit and PayPal.

Amazon

Amazon is a huge marketplace which has a lot of trust with customers. This makes it a good place to use as an affiliate who wants to promote physical products.

However, the platform can indiscriminately ban your account for no reason, and change terms and conditions without warning. Commissions are famously low and range from as little as 1% depending on the category you promote in. See Amazon affiliate commission rate.

Payout methods are Check or ACH Direct Deposit.

PeerFly

Peerfly is an affiliate network offering products including fashion, health, and eCommerce.

Most offers on Peerfly are CPA (cost per action), but you can also work out CPS (cost per sale) deals and revenue shares with some advertisers. You can also find CPL (cost per lead) offers on the site. Clickbank definitely has more products to offer than Peerfly and the application process is more thorough on Peerfly too. This means for new affiliates it might not be the best option.

Payment methods are Check, PayPal, Wire, Payoneer and ACH.

Earn Commissions Online

You can earn commissions online even without a product of your own to sell. It’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, third party referrers send customers to the product/service and get paid a slice of the profit. When a sale is made it is tracked back to the affiliate who referred the customer.

Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to make sales online:

PPC advertising – pay per click
Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Email marketing – sending automated email messages using an autoresponder.
Social media platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building for website authority
Niche website building
Other content creation -e.g. ebooks and infographics

Earn Commissions Online Selling Other People’s Products

To make your first sale online can be a bit of a challenge. Initially you’ll need to get some training and set up a website and/or sales funnel. A sales funnel is a system whereby the affiliate can send qualified subscribers into an email marketing campaign. The subscriber is then sent a series of automated messages which lead to affiliate products.

This whole system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. This means affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and ultimately give you a passive income.

There’s other ways of doing affiliate marketing too though. You don’t necessarily need a sales funnel. Some affiliates build blog websites and refer traffic directly to the affiliate products from there. But an email list is recommended because it gives you more control over the traffic you generate. Some affiliate marketing tactics are much faster than others.

For example, PPC – pay per click marketing is very fast, but more expensive than blogging, which is a very slow method of marketing. However, in the long run and with enough content, blogging can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Your Lifestyle

Your lifestyle may determine the route you take as an affiliate marketer. If you’re time rich, but don’t have much budget for marketing, you might choose a longer term route which meets your needs better. Blogging might fit in this scenario, or video blogging (v’logging).

If you’re busy in a full time job and don’t have much time, you would be better off using paid marketing to get traction more quickly and automate the process. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content creation. Plus it is much faster too. However, be prepared to spend money initially while you’re learning the skills.

On the whole a good rule of thumb is that if you’re busy, use paid ads. If you’re broke, hustle; meaning create content and build up a “digital asset” over the longer term. Once you have built a large blog presence online (or a bunch of videos), you can send the traffic you generate to a relevant product/service which is suitable for your audience.

Target Audience & Affiliate Marketing

Your target audience is an important part of marketing as an affiliate. Knowing who is going to be most interested in the product/service you’re promoting is vital if you want to attract the right audience and sell your product/s. If you attract an audience which isn’t a good fit for your chosen product, you’ll struggle to sell anything.

So whether you are promoting affiliate products through blogging or paid ads, it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you want to attract with your marketing. If you’re selling a Yoga course, for example, you don’t want your content to be about flower arranging! The content you create should be aligned with the product/s you are selling.

See how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet.

Earn Commissions Online: The Right Products

Your choice of product to sell is pretty important to if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Some products are better than others and some pay much more than others too. For example, Amazon has an affiliate program and you can sell pretty much anything from the site for a commission.

However, the commission rates are pretty low and range typically between 5% and 11%. Digital products pay much more: usually around 30%-40% commissions. Then there’s subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Subscription products are good because they pay recurring commissions and a high ticket product usually pays over $500 in commission for a single sale. So you don’t need to sell as many of them in order to become profitable.

Earn Commissions Online: Why Most Fail

Not everyone who attempts to earn commissions online is successful. In fact there’s a huge number of affiliates who quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a number of reasons:

There’s a very low barrier to entry: nearly anyone can “give it a go”
People quit too easily
People think affiliate marketing is easy
It requires a different mindset than most people have (see growth mindset and affiliate marketing)

Serious about building an income online? Access a free video series to learn more and get started.

Developing Entrepreneurial Mindset

It’s not easy developing entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs take risks and do things most people aren’t prepared to do. They see failures only as stepping stones to success. An entrepreneurial mindset is one which looks for opportunity for making money in the service of others.

Where most would quit, entrepreneurs tend to have a strong desire to accomplish something meaningful. A good example of the entrepreneurial spirit is James Dyson, best known as the inventor of the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, or “Dyson”.

After five years and over 5000 prototypes, Dyson launched the “G-Force” cleaner in 1983. But no manufacturer or distributor would handle his product in the UK, due to the valuable market in replacement dust bags. At this point many would have quit. But Dyson launched it in Japan through catalogue sales. It won the 1991 International Design Fair Prize in Japan.

After his invention was rejected by the major manufacturers, Dyson set up his own manufacturing company, Dyson Ltd.

Dyson’s breakthrough in the UK market came more than ten years after the initial idea.

Developing Entrepreneurial Mindset

There are five dimensions in a mindset: self-efficacy, locus of control, beliefs about our capabilities, motivation, and level of resilience. Here’s some of the main aspects of those which fall into the entrepreneurial bracket:

Self Efficacy – Self efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation. As Henry Ford once said “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right”.
An internal locus of control – high achievers put themselves in the driving seat of life. They take responsibility for their lives. By contrast, those with an external locus of control look to blame others. They tend to believe in fate, luck and that others are in control, not themselves.
Growth Mindset – Entrepreneurs have a growth mindset. They believe they can grow and change as necessary to create the outcomes they want. A fixed mindset is the belief that things are “set”; that your capabilities are inherent and can’t be changed. Neuroscience research attests to the growth mindset concept, that we can change, i.e. thinking and intelligence are not set in stone.
Intrinsic motivation – Intrinsic motivation is doing something for it’s own sake, rather than for the sake of reward. Those with intrinsic motivation have higher levels of engagement and psychological well being. Introducing an extrinsic reward undermines intrinsic motivation.
Resilience – entrepreneurs tend to have high levels of resilience and can therefore overcome difficulties more easily. Where others would likely quit, the entrepreneur persists. This can be due to a positive outlook and optimistic view, rather than a pessimistic one.

Mindset Habits Of Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs tend to have goals. They also continue to update and expand on their goals to maintain their focus over the longer term. Without a meaningful goal, it can be much more difficult to sustain a particular path over the longer term.

Learning to control your state of mind is a useful entrepreneurial skill too. This can be especially useful when facing adversity.

Time management is a skill which is useful to entrepreneurs too. You can’t really control time; only the activities you choose to do within a certain time period.

Entrepreneurs are good at seeing the bigger picture of what they want to create. This might mean creating long term plans for a decade and then focusing on the monthly, weekly and daily habits which support that outcome.

For more on goal setting see this article.

Entrepreneurs are aware of their speech. What you say is often the best indicator of how you think. So be careful of your thinking when alone, and your speaking when with others.

Successful entrepreneurs spend time with other entrepreneurial types. They know that they become the average of the people they surround themselves with.

Simple Home Based Business Ideas

Are you looking for simple home based business ideas? There’s many things you can do from home to bring in an extra income. Some of them take more time and others take more investment.

I first started looking to the internet as a means to make an income in the early 2000’s. I was trying to sell my own ebook from a website but was struggling to get traffic. So I put myself on a marketing course and discovered an online business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers make money by promoting and selling other people’s products and services online. When they make a sale through their unique affiliate link, they earn a commission. See what is affiliate marketing for more on this.

There’s many ways affiliates promote products and services on. On my quest to make a living from the internet I also discovered several other strategies to make money from home.

Simple Home Based Business Ideas: eBay

I was selling my stuff on eBay when it began back in 1995. It’s still a great place to sell your wares and even make an income. There’s a few strategies you can use with eBay:

Buy wholesale from Alibaba.com or similar wholesalers and sell items individually from a buy it now listing
Find misspelled items on the site and re-list with better listings (and correct spelling) – see this article
Buy from junk shops, car boot sales, antique fairs and charity shops and re-sell on eBay
Find local items which are collection only and re-sell with postage as an option
Buy items which need mending and repair, fix them and re-sell

Simple Home Based Business Ideas: Affiliate Marketing

Blogging
Video creation – YouTube/TikTok
Paid advertising
List building using email marketing
Social media marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation
niche website building

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to build a regular and even passive income from the internet:

Affiliates can even advertise offline if they choose, they only need to send people to products and services which will sell. Then they can earn a commission based from the sales they generate. Learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Simple Home Based Business Ideas: Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool which anyone can use to generate a free listing for a home based business. This can be a good thing if you have some service or skill to offer. I actually used this little idea and set myself up as a handyman in my local area. But you could use it with any service you can think of offering:

Music lessons
After school classes for students
DIY/ home help/handyman
Foreign language lessons
Computer skills for the elderly
etc

It’s relatively simple to create a free business listing and you only need to verify you’re operating from a physical place/house to get up and running. Checkout Google My Business here to create a free listing.

Publish On Demand

Amazon offers a publish on demand printing service for book publishers. It’s relatively easy to self publish using their site too. So if you’ve ever thought about writing a book, or have some specific knowledge of some sort, why not upload your written book to Amazon and earn from it?

You can access Amazon’s self publishing service here.

You can also sell your book directly from a website when you have created something too. I use an ebook I had published as a lead magnet for my online business. Check it out below:

Ebooks

Ebooks can be sold directly from a website or uploaded to Amazon’s self publishing site. You can use ebooks in multiple ways to earn some extra cash but they’re particularly useful as lead magnets in conjunction with an email list and affiliate products.

A lead magnet is a free digital offering or legitimate bribe of some sort which is used to encourage website visitors to opt in to an email list. An email list is useful for marketing purposes and often used by affiliates to promote and sell their products.

Here’s another ebook I published which is used to build an email list of subscribers from my website:

Email Marketing

One of the best “from home” business ideas is email marketing. With an email autoresponder anyone can build a list of subscribers and either promote their own services or affiliate products.

As your list grows you can send automated messages out to a growing number of subscribers. You can even promote an autoresponder software yourself to your email list and earn a subscription income from any sales you make.

You can access a free email autoresponder here and start building your list.

Blogging

Blogging is a strategy often used by affiliate marketers but you can also monetise a blog without becoming an affiliate. Bloggers also make money through their writing by advertising on their content using Google Adsense. Adsense lets content marketers place advertising on their site and earn from clicks. When you have a lot of content and drive a lot of traffic from a blog, you can even earn a passive income through blogging.

You can also monetise video in a similar way although there are strict criteria to follow on YouTube if you want to do this.

There’s also a load of free blog platforms you can use to do this so you don’t even need your own website to get started. Hubpages.com and Blogger.com are two such platforms which allow free blogging.

Low Maintenance Business Ideas

Looking for low maintenance business ideas? A low maintenance business requires the minimum of input to generate income. While some of these ideas require investment, not all do. Some can be run from home from a laptop, which makes them really good for anyone. In general, the more you can invest in a business, the less you need to do. If you’re on a tight budget you can expect to need to put in more work to generate traction.

Some businesses ideas here will take some work just to get them earning. Blogging for example is a great low maintenance business idea once it is working. But initially you’ll need to put in the work upfront to reap the rewards later.

Once you have an established blog, you can earn passively from it. Conversely, property management is a good low maintenance business but requires upfront investment of at least a deposit for a buy to let property. An alternative is a REIT – Real Estate Investment Trust which allows you to invest in property in smaller amounts without the hassle of owning a property and renting it out yourself.

So here’s a few low maintenance business ideas for your portfolio!

Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a good low cost business which can allow anyone to earn online from the sale of other people’s products and services. Like with most low maintenance businesses, there’s some upfront cost and work to be done. Depending on your budget and available time, you can take the faster route of using a high ticket sales funnel (and paid marketing) or going a longer cheaper route of doing content creation.

Blogging is an example of content creation and it can take months or years of work to build up enough content to start earning passively. The quicker route is to use paid marketing and build an email list; them promote a high ticket product range through your email marketing list. Since this can all be automated, it can produce a nice little earner once you put the work in upfront.

Affiliates are basically “middlemen” for products and services online. You can learn more about affiliate marketing with this free video series.

Low Maintenance Business Ideas: eBay

eBay is another great place for business ideas. One low maintenance idea using eBay is to buy a popular product wholesale and create a single listing to sell it in your country.

Once you’ve done the legwork you only need post a few items each day as you sell your items. You can buy wholesale goods from a site called Alibaba.com and make a profit on the difference according to the price you sell at. This does require some upfront costs. You’re taking a risk on what you buy so it’s worth doing your homework before you choose a product to sell.

Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Content Marketing/Blogging

While blogging has already had a mention in the affiliate marketing category, you can also use a blog to make money in other ways too. One such tactic is to use Google’s Adsense program to place adverts on your content.

With a lot of content on a blog, or video platform, you can generate income from advertising clicks from your visitors. This does take some time and dedication in the first instance, but it’s a low cost way of building a digital asset from which you can make a passive income over time.

YouTube is another place where you can build such an asset. Expect to upload regularly for several months to achieve a regular income from this strategy.

Low Maintenance Business Ideas: Quora.com

Quora.com is a question and answer website where contributors can earn a passive income from their content generation. While the amounts are typically very low, as you build content over time you can generate a passive income from what you have done previously. Quora.com has a couple of ways you can make money:

Through answering questions and monetising your content
By posting questions yourself and earning from advertising clicks on the answers
Using Quora in combination with an affiliate website – using Quora to drive traffic

There’s a lot of competition on Quora though. So you’ll need to own a lot of content to make this work and produce a passive income. But you can spend a small amount of time on it daily and over time it will add up.

Vending Machines

I’ve always fancied a vending machine business because it always seemed like the perfect “hands off” business. Then I discovered affiliate marketing, which I think is much better! But still a vending machine business is pretty hands off. All you need to do is find somewhere for your vending machine to go in order to attract customers.

You also need to buy the vending machine in the first place, so there’s some investment in this business. Servicing your machine, maintenance and re-stocking the machine are all costs to consider. But ultimately you’ve got a business which requires a small amount of work and a large potential gain, particularly if you invest in many machines.

You can find vending machines on eBay.

Buy To Let Property

Buy to let property is of course a great business to get into if you can stump up the deposit for a property. Owning a property is great because you can earn from the increasing value of the property and from renting it out. Even if you don’t buy for long term investment, you can pay a interest only mortgage and make money on the difference by renting it out. As your portfolio increases so does your income.

There’s the risk of tenants not paying and moving out and all the hassle of buying and doing up a house though. An alternative is the REIT – Real Estate Investment Trust. This is where you invest in a company which owns property without owning the property yourself. If you don’t like the thought of moaning tenants and constant upkeep of a property, checkout REITS instead.

Purpose Of A Blog For Business

What’s the purpose of a blog for business? The purpose of a blog is to attract people to a website. From there visitors can get to know your business. If a blog is successful, it can attract many thousands of customers by creating content.

Businesses can use blogging as a marketing tool by creating content which their potential customers are looking for on Google. Typical content which relates to a business is that which answers customer’s questions about your products or service. So a good place to start if you’re thinking about building a blog is Google’s keyword planner.

Purpose Of A Blog For Business: The Keyword Planner

Google’s keyword planner can show you which keywords are being searched for which relate to your business. So for example, if you were selling an online Yoga course from your website, you can create a bunch of content which your potential customers might be searching for. To find the keywords which will attract your target audience, you’ll need to create content which attracts them by helping them answer their questions.

There’s just a few of the keywords which are being searched for already on Google. You can see the average number of monthly searches besides the keywords. This indicates the number of people looking for that particular phrase every month. So by creating content for your chosen keywords, you can potentially attract more visitors to find your products/service.

Purpose Of A Blog For Business: Main Issue

The main issue with this as a strategy is that there’s millions of other competing websites which also want to get found for those keywords too. The more competitive your topic is, the more other websites will have similar content to your own. This can make it difficult to get your content found as a blogger. A solution is to target the long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty.

For shorter keywords such as “Yoga classes online”, there’s going to be a huge volume of search traffic. To get your content to the top of the search results will be difficult. But if you target the long tail keywords which have less SEO difficulty, you can more easily rank your content and get found.

So, for example instead of writing content targeting “online Yoga classes” you could target “free online Yoga classes for beginners” instead. Because this is a longer tail keyword, it will typically have less competition than the shorter phrase of “online Yoga classes”.

Building Authority & Trust

A blog is also useful for building authority with your potential customers. By creating a lot of content which answers your customers questions, you can build your search engine authority over time. It can take months or even years to work your way up the Google rankings for your keywords. But the longer you blog for, the more authority you’ll build and this means free traffic.

It can take a while for Google to recognise you as an authority in your niche. But once it does and your content starts to get more traction, this can mean more post shares and more backlinks will naturally be built to your content. When this happens your search engine presence can have a sudden spurt of power! Your traffic can go up exponentially.

Summary

The purpose of a blog for business is to attract more customers through content creation. Once a blog becomes established and trusted by Google (and other search engines), it can attract a huge volume of potential customers to your business. From your website you can offer a telephone number, a booking form or an email opt in offer which helps your visitors with some problem they might have.

Many business owners offer discount codes or some form of freebie from their website. By giving something of value away on your blog, you can get your visitors to give you their email address and you can follow up with an email marketing campaign. See the power of email marketing.

How Many Blog Posts Per Week?

For bloggers, how many blog posts per week is a good amount? While there’s no definitive answer to this question, most experts say between two a four times a week is a good amount. Some bloggers post more than this, but this is unusual and generally only longer term bloggers who have the time and funds do more than 3-4 times a week.

For the best SEO (search engine optimisation) result, post more often. As your content grows your SEO score should too. As more people see your posts, you should see more people sharing and linking to your content, if the quality is good and your blog posts are useful.

Make sure your blog post quality is high. If you write many posts on the same day, the quality might suffer. The length and quality of your blog posts are a factor too, in your SEO score. More lengthy posts tend to rank better with Google. So offer high quality posts as often as you can.

How Many Blog Posts Per Week?

Your niche, or topic is a factor too in determining the outcome from blogging. In a very competitive niche, such as affiliate marketing, it will typically take much longer for your content to attract an audience for free than in a less competitive topic. So if your sole source of traffic is from blogging, it would make sense to focus on creating more content and posting more regularly. Most bloggers will post 3 or more times a week and this is a good amount to start with. Over time as your content gets more traction, you can increase the amount of content you post.

But this might be difficult if you’re juggling a full time job for example. Full time bloggers can manage more but that’s because they have made blogging their full time source of income, so they will have more time.

A good answer to this question is “how many blog posts can you manage, without it affecting the quality?” and “what is your desired outcome from your blogging strategy?” If you want more traffic, increase the amount of blog posts you publish, but only so long as the quality doesn’t suffer.

How Many Blog Posts Per Week? Why Do Bloggers Blog?

Blogging is a great way to attract an audience and build a business cheaply. It only costs your time, or if you’re outsourcing it’s the amount it costs to pay your writer. Over time, your content should become a “digital asset” which attracts free customers to your business through the search engines.

The length of time this takes will vary from business to business and according to the relative competition and the quality of your content. It will also be determined by your ability to promote your content and get eyes on it. Ideally spend at least the same amount of time, if not more, on content promotion as you do on creation of your content.

Without content promotion, it will take much longer to get traction from your content. Content promotion can involve such activities as:

Sharing on social media
Using plugins to help syndicate content – see autopost
Using paid marketing to promote content
Back linking to your content from other websites

SEO And Blogging

Even with a well thought out content marketing strategy which involves creation of multiple posts a week, you can still struggle to get traction from blogging. That’s because there’s a huge amount of competition for so many topics. If you find yourself in a particularly competitive niche, it will be harder still. To get found on the SERPS – search engine results pages, you need to write better content than what is already there. This can be tricky and especially with shorter keyword phrases it can be near impossible!

That’s why many bloggers will find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. The short phrases are often too competitive to rank at all. Even if you write content targeting the longer tail keywords, Google may still not rank you if they don’t trust your content. Trust is built by being in the game over the longer term. So if you have a new site, it can be all the more difficult to get traction.

Summary

So how many blog posts per week should you write for maximum benefit? Keep in mind that blogging is definitely a long term strategy for website traffic. So it can take years before your blogging starts to gain traction and makes a difference to your business. How long can you keep up blogging 3 times a week? How long can you maintain a habit of blogging 5 times a week? Does the quality drop when you increase your blogging output?

The quality of your blogging is a factor as is your promotion strategy. Ideally automate your blog promotion strategy as much as possible. See best blog plugins for WordPress and auto post to social media from WordPress for some of the simplest blog share strategies.

Better to blog less if it means you can spend some time on quality control and content promotion. If blogging more means you’ll quit in a few months, then a small number would probably be better. Think long term and choose a level which is sustainable.

How To Build A Niche Website

Can you build a niche website which makes money? Niche websites are built with the purpose of ranking them to get free traffic from the search engines. If you’re successful, you can have free traffic from Google, Bing and the other search engines. If you can turn this traffic into sales, you’ve built a website which can earn income passively. This is quite an achievement but since there’s so much competition on the search engines for content, it can be also quite a challenge.

To build a niche website from scratch, start with keyword research and by defining your “perfect” customer or customer avatar. If you’re an affiliate marketer this will depend on your product and topic. It’s so important to do this because if you don’t give some thought to it before building your niche site, you can waste a huge amount of time. Since it can take months or even years to get a niche website working, you need to lay the foundations first before you build. A niche website can get traction quite quickly too, but it’s still worth doing the planning to ensure you’re building it in the right way.

Build A Niche Website – Why Customer Avatar Is So Important

If the purpose of your website is to make money, you need to make sure the traffic you will ultimately attract is going to be interested in your product or service. If you attract traffic that doesn’t buy, you will have wasted a lot of time! Of course the product or service is pretty important too. As an affiliate you need to choose products which sell well and offer loads of value. Even with a tonne of traffic, you can’t guarantee a sale. But this is especially true if you haven’t chosen a good product to sell on your site, or attracted the right audience. See also best affiliate products to sell.

Your customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They are interested in your product/service. When you can connect products to customers through your niche website, you’ll know you have succeeded in attracting the right audience for your particular product/service.

Your main focus for a niche website initially is defining your target audience and choosing a good keyword which offers monthly traffic and low search engine competition.

Build A Niche Website: Warning

When I first discovered niche websites I built many of them and rushed to throw them all up! One particular site I built was about mushroom harvesting. I chose this particular keyword because it had low SEO difficulty, so I could easily rank the site, and monthly search traffic. Unfortunately the site was a failure and although I got a top ranking for my main keyword, I didn’t make sales and the site eventually dropped off the listings. I gave up on it and shut it down. The two main reasons my site didn’t work were:

I chose a topic I didn’t care about
The search traffic didn’t convert into sales – I didn’t investigate monetising the site until afterwards

I didn’t lay the groundwork for this site and so it was a failure. It taught me a couple of valuable lessons:

Start with your product (or service)- I didn’t have a viable affiliate product to sell and in fact the site was difficult to monetise (not many affiliate products in this niche)
Choose a topic you are passionate about – I lost interest in the site after 6 months of writing about mushrooms! (Something I knew nothing about beforehand and which took a huge amount of effort and time).

Build A Niche Website: Keyword Research

Once you have defined your target audience and chosen your product, you will need to look at Google’s keyword planner for keywords. Start with your “seed” keyword which is most appropriate for your business. In the case of this website, it was “affiliate marketing”.

As you look through the search results, you can choose a good keyword which meets the following criteria:

Attracts the type of people who might be interested in your product
Is 3 or more words long – see why long tail keywords are important
Has lower competition on Google search results pages than most
Is a topic you can build on/ are interested or passionate about

For this website, for example, I chose the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors“

As you can see, the search results using Google’s keyword planner first brings up the most competitive keywords which get the most traffic. However, your chances of attaining a top listing for these kinds of keywords are incredibly small.

Longer Tail Keywords Are Easier To Rank For

So instead of looking at the shorter tail keywords which get the most traffic, look for the longer tail ones which have lower search volume. Do this by clicking on the Avg. monthly searches tab in the right hand column (image above). You can then scroll through the results until you find a suitable keyword for your niche website.

Here’s an example of a search term I’ve found which might be suitable for a niche website: “youtube affiliate marketing for beginners”.

Once you have found a suitable keyword for your niche site, head over to Google and type it in to the search bar. Do a normal search and a “phrase match” search (in quotes) for your term. You should find a number which correlates to the amount of competing websites for that particular term.

This can give you an idea about the relative difficulty of ranking your niche site on Google. You can also look for the top listed websites which is also an indicator of how difficult it might be to rank your site.

Buy Your Domain Name

Once you find a good keyword match you can head over to namecheap.com and see if you can purchase a domain name for your chosen phrase. Ideally, you’ll have all your keywords within the domain name and a .com.

If you’re a locally based business though, choose a domain name which will have the most authority in your particular country. For example, for me, a .co.uk would be better for a locally based business because I’m in the UK. But for an affiliate site, choose a .com because it has the most authority worldwide.

In this example, the keyword domain is free and you could build a site around this particular keyword. However, it’s a bit of a mouthful so it might not be the best domain name for your site, but it’s only an example! When I looked at purchasing “affiliatemarketingmentors.com” it was already gone. So I tagged the “online” onto the end so I could purchase a domain which contained my keywords in it.

Host Your Site & Setup

I use Hostgator to host my websites and it offers a simple quick install process very cheaply for website owners. You can get a basic website hosting package for less than $10 a month with Hostgator. Since there’s a tonne of information available on YouTube about setting up a website using Hostgator I won’t cover this here. Once you’re ready with your WordPress website, there’s lots more to cover. Namely, building your site so that it will eventually rank on Google (hopefully).

Once you’re inside your WordPress dashboard on your new niche website, set up your settings so that you use your main keyword in your site title like this:

Setup your permalink structure so your post title is part of the url like so:

You can also get a number of plugins which will help you with your SEO – search engine optimisation. Here’s an article explaining some of the best free blog plugins for WordPress.

One of the best ones is Yoast SEO which will help you to write search engine friendly articles on your niche site.

Blogging – Write Content On Your Site

The next step is to build content on your site. Remember all those keywords you looked through for building your site initially? They are the keywords you can use to attract your customer avatar to your site through the search engines. Make a habit of building content on your new niche website on a regular basis.

You can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty in the same way you built your niche website. Then write content for those particular keywords.

Although blogging is a slow process, having built a niche site around a low competition keyword should give you a bit of a head start. Ideally choose a good keyword from which to base your content around for your site. Having a congruent theme throughout your site should give you more authority in your niche than if you were to jump from one topic to another.

Remember, it takes time for Google to recognise your site, so don’t be discouraged if your site doesn’t appear immediately. Look at Bing, Duckduckgo and Yahoo at first because they will rank your niche site sooner. It can take a few months for Google to give you a ranking.

Why Long Tail Keywords Are Important

There’s a couple of reasons why long tail keywords are important. Despite the fact they get less monthly searches than shorter tail keywords, they also have far less competition on the SERPS (search engine results pages). This means if you use long tail keywords in your content, you have a much better chance of them finding their way to the first page of Google. This means free traffic if you can do it and although there’s considerably less traffic for those key phrases, there’s more chance of a ranking.

A small “cut” of something is worth much more than no share of everything!

If you go after the more competitive keywords, in the hope that all that traffic will be yours, you’ll be disappointed. Your chance of getting ranked for such competitive keywords on the first page of Google is vastly diminished by the huge volume of competing content. Your content may rank on page 10 of Google though, but no-one scrolls through to look at page 10 for their search query.

Why Long Tail Keywords Are Important: Downsides

There’s downsides too of building content using long tail keywords.

Even if your content appears on page one of Google at the very top, you’ll still be sharing the clicks with the adverts and other top few listings. So the main problem with long tail keywords is the lack of traffic. If your long tail keyword gets 30 views a month, for example that’s only one click a day! So even if you get a third of that traffic, it’s only 1 click every 3 days! Since many web based searchers will leave your website after only a few seconds, you can see how this strategy is a very long term one!

Still, if you build enough content, those small numbers add up. Plus, as Google recognises you as an authority on your topic, they are likely to give your SEO (search engine optimisation) a boost too. This all takes time and a lot of work to achieve. More and more people are building content as I write. So there’s a growing amount of competing content.

If you’re aiming for ranking for long tail keywords, it’s well worth writing a good lengthy piece of content which out performs those which rank already. Often Google won’t even rank your content above another, older piece because you haven’t built up the authority to outrank them. Google may not trust you yet, even though your content may be far longer and more superior to the existing one which Google ranks at the top.

A top ranking article might have tens of thousands of back links, which is very difficult to compete with as a newcomer.

Why Long Tail Keywords Are Important: Alternatives

But what’s the alternative? Pay for traffic? Or build content differently? Another way of building content is to write catchy titles and help them go viral. You can look on a site called Buzzsumo.com to find some of the top trending articles. With a good title, more people are more likely to click on the link to read your content. But you first need to get it in front of people in the first place, which means promotion on social media.

Another alternative is to target shorter tail keywords which have more competition. But again you need content promotion to get your articles seen. Even with long tail keyword targeted article, your content might not rank. With a shorter tail keyword, it’s much less likely to rank still.

Short Tail Vs. Long Tail Keywords

Here’s a few examples of short tail and long tail keywords. Let’s start with the title of this article “why long tail keywords are important”. To find long and short tail keywords, type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner. I started with “why long tail keywords” as my main keyword in this instance and here’s the results the planner brought up:

As you can see, the keyword I chose only gets 30 monthly searches. So if I ranked on top of Google for this keyword, I’d still have to share 1 click a day with the other top ranking websites (and of course adverts, if there are any).

However, let’s look at a more competitive keyword for comparison.

“Long tail” as a keyword search gets 40,500 monthly visits! Surely I’d be better going after a slice of this traffic? To answer this question we can have a look at the Google search results for a simple search of this keyword and a “phrase” match search.

Have a look at the number at the top of the image above. That’s over 1 billion competing search results. Plus, investopedia.com is the top search result, a very well established and high authority site (difficult to outrank). A phrase match search gives us a closer idea to the competing websites which have this phrase targeted specifically with their content:

Still the number is pretty high as you’d expect from such a short term phrase as “long tail”. Over 29 million competing search results here.

Comparing Keywords

Now let’s compare these results to my longer tail key phrase I used for this blog title.

That’s still a pretty high number at over 45 and a half million, but it’s still a lot less competition than “long tail” was. You can see though that the phrase match for this keyword has a much lower number. This might give me a chance to rank this piece of content for that particular keyword.

Summary

While I’m not going to get a huge amount of traffic even if this content ranks at the very top of Google, each piece of content you create adds up to domain authority with Google. With thousands of pieces of content on a site, all these articles add up and increase search traffic and domain authority at the same time.

At the beginning of a blogging journey, it can seem daunting to create hundreds of pieces of content only for a small amount of traffic. But over time your efforts compound and eventually you can have a passive income from blogging with this strategy, if you put the work in.

At around 300-400 blog posts you should see an uptick in traffic. As you continue writing more and more content, this compounds to dramatically boost numbers of visitors to your website.

The other important thing about long tail keywords is that they bring in much more targeted traffic than shorter tail keywords do. Take our earlier example of “long tail” versus “why long tail keywords are important”. You can see the second phrase is much more specific. If you’re an affiliate or are promoting something from your website this is pretty important. A shorter phrase is very general while a longer term phrase will bring a different type of visitor to your website. If you can target the long tail phrases which are the most relevant for your business, you can not only bring traffic to your site, but targeted traffic: people who will buy from you!

Highest Paying Affiliate Programs With Recurring Commission

The highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commission are mentorship and coaching programs. An affiliate coaching program offers multiple products within a range of products:

A high ticket product range
Memberships (subscription affiliate products)
Personal mentoring and coaching
Tools and software for building an online business from scratch

This is one of the best things to promote online as an affiliate as having a product range means you can benefit from multiple income streams. There’s several benefits to promoting such a product range:

Highest levels of commission and recurring commissions (from high ticket affiliate products)
It’s easier to use paid marketing platforms to promote your funnel
Offers a faster way of building an affiliate business – easy set up, just focus on marketing
Paid marketing means your business will be more scalable and marketing is easier than endless content creation.

Here’s what a typical high ticket sales funnel looks like:

Access one of the best highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commission here.

With the highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commissions, you’ll typically need to invest at a high level yourself to access the highest commissions.

Recurring Affiliate Programs

Here’s a few other recurring affiliate programs which don’t offer high ticket commissions:

Aweber – For email marketing
Leadpages- For custom landing pages
Get Response – Email marketing
Elegant Themes – WordPress website themes
Social Pilot – Social Media Tool
SEM Rush – SEO tool
Snip.ly – Conversion/opt-in tool
Shopify – Online Store Builder

Subscription affiliate programs are great for affiliate marketers because they offer the ability to make recurring commissions month in, month out. Most affiliate programs don’t offer this, and you’ll need to keep selling products over and over to make a consistent income from them.

With subscription products though you can earn continual income from previous sales. If you sell the right kinds of subscription products too, you can make a passive income for life from the sales you make.

High Ticket Programs Without Recurring Income

There’s also many high ticket programs too which don’t offer a recurring income with the sale. But when you make large commissions of $1000+ from a sale, you can easily make up for months of subscription commissions.

High ticket products are another good idea for affiliates because a high ticket sale can earn you the same in commissions as many low value sales. Here’s an example of a high ticket product which you don’t need to personally purchase to make the maximum commissions from: