Your blog monetisation method will determine how much you can make from a blog as well as your traffic. Without traffic a blog will definitely not make any money, but unless you get your blog monetisation right, it can also be a problem.
There’s several ways you can monetise a blog and here’s the main ones used by bloggers:
Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products from your blog
Advertising – place paid ads on your blog (Google’s Adsense program, for example)
Sell something you own – if you already have a business or product, a blog can be used to find new customers
Create an ebook and sell it from your blog – ebooks are simple to create. You can sell them hands free without posting anything physically.
Sell space on your blog site – marketers are interested in your traffic. So you can sell them banner space on your site
Blog Monetisation – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to monetise a blog. With enough traffic and with enough of the right traffic, you can sell almost anything from a blog. You only need to find a product or program which appeals to your target audience.
With affiliate marketing your product and target audience is really important. You can’t just sell anything to anyone. You need to find the appropriate product which is a good match for your traffic.
For example, if your blog is about motorcycles, you’ll need a suitable motorcycle related item to sell, you can’t just sell garden furniture to motorcycle enthusiasts. If you’re monetising with advertising (e.g.Adsense), it doesn’t matter so much because you can advertise in almost any topic/niche. However, your topic will determine how much you can earn from an advertising click if you use ads on your site to monetise.
Blog Monetisation – Adsense
Google’s Adsense program lets you place clickable adverts on your content which you earn from every time someone clicks on them. However, you’ll need a huge amount of traffic to make this profitable because the click value is usually very low. In more competitive topics you’ll earn more. However the more competition you have in your niche, the harder it is to get free traffic from the search engines.
However you decide to monetise your blog, it’s worth considering your topic before you start. With affiliate marketing, you’ll need to be very targeted with your content creation strategy. Otherwise you’ll attract visitors who aren’t interested in your products. With advertising (Adsense), you don’t have to be so specific because the ads will appear relative to your content.
In a very low competition topic, you should find you can attract more traffic more easily. However, your ads will likely only product the smallest commissions when clicked. Competitive niches such as money making online or Forex marketing will pay more for clicks but will be harder to attract free traffic for.
Selling Yourself/A Product/A Service
A blog is a great tool to sell from if you have your own business, product or service. Small business owners often use blogs to write about their topic and attract free traffic from the search engines (Google etc).
If you’re building a passion based business, blogging about your topic is a great way to answer potential customers’ questions, build content and attract an audience for free.
If you have an existing business which is physically based, you can also use Google My Business which will give you a free listing. This is a great tool for more exposure of your business and it only takes a few minutes to set up. See Google My Business for more info on this.
Sell Your Own Ebook
An ebook is a great way to monetise a blog and you can even use your existing content to create it. You only need to set up a sales pages and direct your traffic to it via an image of your ebook.
To create an ebook is easy and if you don’t already have a pdf creation tool on your laptop, you can easily find a free one online.
Once you have your pdf file, you can also create an ebook cover or get one done for next to nothing. I use Fiverr.com for my ebook covers. You can then create a PayPal button on your site and automate the full download process to sell an ebook on your website.
You can also sell banner space on your website directly to marketers. Create an “advertise here” page on your site. You’ll need to attract the right people and you can find other websites in your niche to see their terms for selling and prices etc.
Before anyone will pay to advertise on your blog though you’ll need to have generated a considerable amount of daily traffic. So this is an option for when your site is doing really well. If you’re new to blogging, it’s unlikely anyone will pay to show a banner on your site; particularly if you’re still struggling to get visitors.
This article explains more ways to sell advertising space on your website.
What are the SEO strategies to generate traffic? There’s a variety of SEO – (search engine optimisation) tactics you can use for free traffic. Depending on your topic/niche, it can take months or even years before you can get traction. In a less competitive niche, SEO can have a much faster effect on your traffic from even small changes on your website. However if your topic is a competitive one, you will need to do a lot more if your goal is free traffic from the search engines.
Some basic SEO strategies include:
Blogging
Link building
Optimising – images, titles and content for specific keywords
Niche websites – building a website around a specific keyword
If you’re a blogger, one of the best ways to optimise your posts is to get an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, for example. This plugin helps you write SEO friendly content, use your keywords in your images, headings and content for the best results.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Blogging
Blogging is a well know strategy you can use to generate more traffic to your website. As your content grows, it’s a major signal to the search engines that you are an authority in your field. If you target long tail keywords within your blog posts, you can have more chance of getting your content ranking more quickly. Shorter keywords tend to be more competitive and therefore much more difficult to rank for.
To find these “low hanging fruit” keywords you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Just type in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and you’ll see hundreds or even thousands of related keywords which are already being searched for on Google. By finding the long tail keywords which offer less competition than most, bloggers can more easily get free traffic through ranking more highly on page 1 of the SERPS – search engines results pages.
Long tail keywords are those which contain more than 3 keywords. While shorter tail keywords generally have less. See also short tail and long tail keywords. Generally speaking the more keywords in your blog title, the less competition you’ll find in the SERPS for that particular phrase.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Link Building
Link building is another major signal to Google (and other search engines) which helps determine how to rank your content. If you look at the top ranking websites you will usually find they have thousands of back links pointing to them from other sites.
Backlinks are pretty important and there’s a few ways to build them. Start with your content. If your content is of high quality, people who find it will be much more likely to refer to it as a resource and therefore link to it naturally over time. This gives a natural link profile which is what Google looks for in a high quality website.
Other more spammy link building practices can give the opposite effect and if Google sees an unnatural link profile, it’s less likely to reward the site owner with a high rank for it. So link building should be done with care. Other methods of link building include:
Guest blogging – creating content for other website owners in your niche in exchange for a backlink
Blog commenting – some blogs allow you to leave a comment and a link to your website
Forum posting – join in discussions on forums in your niche and leave links in your comments.
Since Google will look for quality back links as well as the quantity of them, it’s important to find other high authority websites to write guest posts for in your niche.
SEO Strategies To Generate Traffic: Optimising
Optimising your website for SEO might be the only thing you do if you have another marketing strategy which is your main focus. Blogging is a very slow and long term strategy which doesn’t produce results quickly. But, over time blogging can really help your SEO as your content grows. Once you hit a high number of blog posts, Google will give you an uptick in traffic.
Whether you’re a blogger or not, you can optimise existing content to improve your SEO score. Use Yoast SEO for WordPress to help you write SEO friendly content and optimise existing content.
You can also use a company called SEM Rush to help you with content optimisation and data research to get the most from your website.
Niche Websites
A niche website is a website which is built around a specific idea or keyword. With a niche website, you can give yourself a head start when it comes to ranking in the SERPS for your main keywords. Although keyword domains carry less weight than they used to with Google and rankings, they can still have an effect on how quickly and easily you can rank a website.
This is particularly true if you pick a longer tail keyword which has low competition in the search results pages. If you were to choose a very competitive keyword to build a website around, it will have less chance because you’ll be competing with higher authority domains in your topic.
There’s several free Facebook traffic strategies you can use to bring visitors to your website. Here’s a very simple one which I’ve used to generate a nice steady flow of traffic by using groups.
First you’re going to set up your Facebook profile with a link to your website in it. You want to succinctly explain the benefits of what you’re offering on your website, to entice people to come and visit. Here’s mine, although it could probably do with some work!
You can see the link under my main profile picture which goes directly to my website. Plus, there’s a clear benefit of clicking it, should you be interested in earning online. Knowing your target audience here is vital because you want to attract only those people who will be interested in your offering.
Free Facebook Traffic Strategies
Next you’ll want to clean your feed. You’re effectively going to make your personal Facebook page into a magnet for free traffic. So you might want to post only business related things on your feed.
Once you’re happy with your Facebook profile page, and have linked to your website from it, you can start looking at groups. You’ll find the “groups” icon at the top of your Facebook platform:
Click on it and you should see the groups icon appear in the top left hand side of your platform:
Here’s where you can search the various groups for people who might be interested in what you are offering on your website. So, for example, I help people with earning online so I might look for groups which relate to:
Lifestyle business
affiliate marketing
drop shipping
traffic generation
earning online
online businesses
etc.
Once you start typing into the search box you’ll be show suggested keywords relating to your search like so:
Click on the most appropriate keywords which relate to your business or offering. Then you can apply to join groups to find people who might be interested in your business/website.
Free Facebook Traffic Strategies
You might have to answer questions in order to join a particular group and wait to be allowed in. So it’s worth looking for multiple groups within your niche that you can join. As you apply, answer the questions and agree to the terms of the groups.
Once in, you need to stick to the agreed terms or you can easily be removed from a group for non compliance. Most groups will simply require that you don’t spam or solicit your business! So pasting your website link in groups is often a no no!
Instead, what you can do is interact in the groups you join, ask and answer questions and be generally helpful. Make a daily habit out of interacting in several groups. It can be useful to log your daily activity so you know what you’ve done.
As you interact with people, you should find over time people come and visit your profile to have a look at you and what you offer. When they do they should be able to see your website link clearly and know immediately what you’re about!
People will click through to your website and also add you as a friend. As your friend list grows, you can also promote your website content through your Facebook feed.
Boost Your Posts
Once you’ve been at this strategy for a while, you should see more people coming to see your profile, asking to become Facebook friends and clicking on your website link. As with most free strategies it can take some time and effort to get the wheels spinning though, so don’t expect too much without any consistent effort. Ideally spend an hour or two per day for a consistent amount of time. The more time you spend, the better your results will become.
Another way of getting more people to your Facebook profile is through boosting a post or running a Facebook ad. Obviously though this isn’t free, but you can set your daily budget at a very low rate which you can easily afford.
I’ve been using Quora to drive traffic for some time now. It’s a slow process but if you’re short on advertising budget, it can work wonders. It’s a totally free strategy which works well in combination with blogging.
Some of my Quora answers have been deleted or collapsed and I’m consistently getting notifications from Quora.com telling me my answers don’t comply with the terms and conditions regarding spamming. Of course after I request a review of the decision, many of my answers are allowed.
There’s a fine line between spamming and giving genuine answers on Quora and then linking back to your blog posts. So using Quora to drive traffic means understanding the terms and conditions on Quora.com and playing the game so you come out on top! Here’s the strategy I use.
Using Quora To Drive Traffic
First you’ll need a Quora account so head over to Quora.com and create one if you haven’t already done so. You can also set up your bio with a link to your website. When people check out your bio, they should be able to see immediately what your offer is. So make it very clear the benefit of clicking through to your website. Here’s my bio on Quora.com.
So, one way to generate traffic from Quora is to set up your bio in a very simple way to attract the right kind of visitors to your website. To get more people to see your bio, you need to be actively participating on the platform. This can mean asking questions which attract your target audience, or answering them. Why is target marketing important? Simple, there’s millions of people looking at content on Quora. 99.9% of them won’t be interested in what you have to offer. So you need to know the type of questions which would be asked by your target audience. See target audience for affiliate marketing.
You should also track your bio link too. You can do that easily by adding the ?t= after your domain name. (My link is this: https://defy9to5.com/?t=bioquora so I’ll know when traffic is coming from Quora.com).
It’s also worth paying for a good domain name for this link too because what someone sees on your bio as your domain name, will influence whether they want to click on it. A spammy link or a direct affiliate link won’t look as professional.
Using Quora To Drive Traffic – Answering Questions
You can ask or answer questions which would appeal to your target audience. One of two questions isn’t going to cut it though. Most people read the answers and move on. Very few will click through to your bio and fewer still will actually land on your website. So you’ll need to build a lot of content on Quora to get some traction using this strategy.
Make a habit out of asking and answering questions every day and create a log of how much you are doing.
I mostly answer questions now rather than ask them, simply because I ran out of ideas for asking questions! You can also monetise your questions with the Quora partner program and earn advertising revenue from ad space on your questions.
Find questions which you can answer with content on your website. If you have an affiliate website, you can link to affiliate products and use traffic to make sales. However, you can’t use affiliate links directly on Quora as this is against the terms and conditions. Checkout Quora’s spam policy here.
Best Policy
The best policy to get your answers approved is to give long, detailed answers which thoroughly answers the question better than the other answers. If you do this you should be allowed to leave a link to an appropriate resource. This is where the fine line between spamming and giving value shouldn’t be crossed. If you do this for long enough you’re likely to be called a spammer by Quora, even if you provide real value in your answers.
However, you can appeal to a moderation and I’ve had a number of deleted answers successfully reinstated. Sometimes it’s just an automated bot making these decisions. So if you’re providing real value in your answers, and not just spamming your link, you should have good grounds to overturn a decision where your answer has been deleted.
When you leave a link, make it to an article on your website which you have created which answers the question more fully.
Here’s an example of a question I’ve recently answered, leaving a link to a post which answers the question in more detail.
Summary
Using Quora to drive traffic does work well if you stick with it for a long time and make a habit out of answering questions and linking to your quality content. Remember though that most people don’t click your links and will stay on Quora.com, which is of course what Quora wants. That’s why they will punish you for leaving too many links and/or not giving enough value in your answers.
Answers you leave don’t always need to contain links though, and it’s probably worth answering some questions without linking to content. This will show Quora that you’re a genuine person and not always after a bit of free traffic. It’s also worth choosing a good pic and bio because this is what can attract people to click through and learn a bit more about you. That’s when they see your website link and what you are offering.
This is of course no quick fix, but the more you do of it, the more traffic you should see coming to your site. Quora traffic is no-follow which means you won’t be building SEO friendly backlinks when you do this. However, it can bring people to your site, so it’s still worth the effort if you can’t afford paid traffic, or in addition to it.
Quora.com is also a great place to look for content ideas for your blog too and this strategy works well in conjunction with blogging!
Here’s my affiliate marketing handbook: what I wish I knew as a newbie affiliate marketer. As a brand new affiliate marketer, I was full of enthusiasm and hope. Little did I know the journey I had ahead of me. In this short article I’m going to share some of the things which would have shaved years off my affiliate journey. Although I think a bit of struggle is necessary to learn affiliate marketing, there’s definitely some hurdles you can avoid.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Getting Started
I first found out about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s. I was trying to sell my own ebook but struggled getting traffic to my website. So I put myself on a course with the intention of learning some traffic generation methods. Instead, I discovered affiliate marketing. I could sell someone else’s products and make ten times what I could sell my own ebook for! So I ditched the ebook idea and went full tilt ahead with affiliate marketing.
It was tough though and at first I started using the free blog sites such as Hubpages, Blogger.com and Squidoo, (now acquired by Hubpages). My first sale came from a review I wrote on Hubpages.com. I was over the moon at my first sale and knew I would make many more. Sadly though it didn’t happen like that at first. My account got shut down for spamming and I was starting again. I joined many courses and tried many tactics.
The next course I took taught paid marketing and just as things were about to work for me, my Adwords account got shut down. I seemed doomed to fail with affiliate marketing, I thought. This is where most people will quit forever, and I did quit several times. However, something kept nagging me to keep going. This I believe is the key for success as an affiliate marketer. Keep going and never quit. If you quit, failure is assured. If you never quit, success, or death is assured!
The thing which stood in the way of my success for a long time was shiny object syndrome. I believed affiliate marketing should be easy as I had bought into the idea that to make millions online would only be a matter of a few simple steps. This is false! It’s far more difficult than that, although in principle it should only take a few steps:
Find a scalable strategy for selling products continually,
Scale up by turning up the volume
Shiny object syndrome is the idea that anything else is always something better and than finding a new magic bullet to online success was the answer. I jumped from course to course looking for an “easier” way, which of course didn’t exist!
Don’t make this same mistake. Find a course and stick with it for at least 6 months. You can access one on this website.
Depending on your marketing strategy, affiliate marketing can take months or years to gain traction. It doesn’t happen overnight. Don’t believe the “quick fixes” the magic bullets and the push button claims. Technology has made affiliate marketing easier in some ways such as building websites and sales funnels, but it’s still a challenge to get traffic in large numbers; especially if you’re starting from scratch.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Don’t Quit Too Easily
95% of affiliates will quit so this means you’ll need to be in the 5% who stick with it for long enough to see some tangible results. When you break through this barrier you’ve proved to yourself that it works. This is a massive psychological achievement and you should celebrate the small wins. Small wins are actually big wins because once you have belief in your path, you will want to double down on your efforts. When you’re new, you doubt everything! If your mind is full of doubt about a particular strategy, how hard will you work at it?
When you know for a fact that a particular strategy is working for you, you’ll have much more belief in yourself and your ability to make it work.
Belief is therefore the biggest challenge for beginners in affiliate marketing. When you’re struggling, doubting and worrying, you’ll easily be swayed by a well meaning friend or relative who tells you “it’s a scam”!
To fuel belief in the beginning is super important because it’s what will carry you forward and keep you going. Without it, you’ve already quit!
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Get A List
An email list is a requirement for affiliate marketing if you’re serious about making your living from it. Why make things harder than they already are by not getting an email autoresponder. You can get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing too. Use the image below.
An autoresponder is something it took me a long time to get because I didn’t understand how powerful building an email list of subscribers could be. Once you build a list of your own, you can control your traffic much better. You can communicate with your email list and build trust over time. This is very difficult to do from a website where most visitors will be gone in a few minutes.
I’ve had people on my email list make purchases even years after they joined!
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Time Management
As an affiliate marketer you’ll need to get very good at managing your own time. There’s only a few hours in the day and if you’re working a job for most of it, you’ll need to prioritise your business outside of your work hours. This can be tough but you should commit to your affiliate business if you’re serious about making money from affiliate marketing. If you can only work an hour each day, you’ll need to be even more focused on the right kind of actions which can make the most difference to your business.
I wasted time when I started out doing affiliate marketing. I spent too much time on pointless activities which didn’t move my business forward. Affiliates only earn commissions when they sell something. It’s a performance based business model. So if you don’t get traction in your business you could earn nothing! So getting traction is key. That means focusing your time on money producing activities.
Don’t waste time being a “busy fool”. A busy fool fills their time with pointless activities, rather than the most important ones.
Affiliate Marketing Handbook: Marketing
Affiliate marketing doesn’t work unless you’re actively marketing. The clue is in the name. Having a nice website, won’t make you sales. Designing a logo won’t make you sales. What makes sales in affiliate marketing is getting good at marketing. Marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and potential customers. This can be done is several ways such as blogging, paid advertising (PPC – pay per click), video, social media, SEO, link building, email marketing and so on.
You need only one way of marketing that works to be successful as an affiliate. I jumped around from one strategy to another, looking for the “easy way”. Jumping from one strategy to another wastes time; time you don’t have! It can take months or even years for a strategy to start working. For blogging, for example, it will take much longer than if you’re running a paid marketing campaign using pay per click advertising.
Decide on your marketing strategy according to your budget and available time for your business. If you’re short on money, hustle, if you’re short on time, buy traffic.
Products
Not all affiliate products are alike and not all pay the same either. The products you choose to promote can mean the difference between success and failure as an affiliate. Physical products you might find from Amazon pay very little – between 1% and 10% in most cases.
Digital products pay much more – 30-40% commissions typically. There’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate programs you can choose too! With subscriptions you can earn a whole lot more than with a stand alone one off sale. Subscription products and software and membership products which pay out recurring commissions to affiliates.
A low value product on Amazon will pay only a small commission of say $2. But a high ticket product can pay out thousands of dollars in commission. You might think that more people will buy the low value product and therefore it will be easier to sell in bulk. However, you still need to get enough sales to make your affiliate business pay. Selling a few high value products is therefore much easier than selling the thousands of low value products you would need to make the same amount of money from.
Mindset
Your mindset is particularly important if you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer. See affiliate marketing mindset. Knowing that around 5% of affiliates go on to make a living from it, and 95% drop out goes to show that not everyone will make affiliate marketing work for them.
Affiliate marketing is a business and like any business you need customers to survive. Without making sales you won’t build a lucrative affiliate business. To do so takes more than most people can achieve. To keep going when others quit will require a particular approach to learning and implementing your skillset.
Being able to set goals, create a vision for your future and stick to a marketing plan over the long term is vital for success. How you deal with setbacks and adversity will require a strong desire to succeed. If you’re just “giving it a go” without a strong purpose and desire, you’re more likely to quit when things are tough. See also affiliate marketing psychology.
A “never say die” approach needless to say will have a much better outcome than a “I’ll give it a try” approach.
Get Help
This of course isn’t easy, particularly if you’re trying to do it all alone without any help. I started affiliate marketing and tried to do everything from watching videos. I struggled and struggled, for years! I eventually found an online community where I could connect with other like minded individuals on the same journey as I was. This is vital if you want to take affiliate marketing seriously and make a serious income from it.
Everything changed for me when I started taking it seriously and got help.
I always liked the idea of an online perpetual sales system. You know, selling online continually, with sales coming in every day on autopilot! I first came upon this idea after buying an ebook from eBay. The transaction was so simple and I wanted to get on the other side of it, to make digital sales every day.
A digital product is perfect for this because you can sell it to anyone in the world. You only needed a laptop and internet connection and you can purchase a digital product and download it immediately.
After trying (and failing) to sell my own digital ebook, I joined several marketing courses and learned a strategy known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can refer sales online to other people’s products. What’s better is that you can sell products which are worth much more than an ebook might fetch.
So I ditched the ebook idea and switched over to selling other people’s products online.
Perpetual Sales Online: The Affiliate Business Model
With affiliate marketing you get paid to refer online sales. When someone buys through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. This website, for example, is an affiliate website. So when someone buys something from it I earn a commission based on the sale.
The long term goal of an affiliate marketer is to achieve perpetual sales which come in day and night, even while you’re sleeping! This is entirely possible given a global business model and products you can buy from anywhere.
What you need to learn is how to reach people with your products; marketing. This was a huge challenge for me for quite some time. I built websites, I blogged, I ran paid advertising campaigns. Still making sales was a challenge in the early days. The sales were few and far between. Over time though as my content grew, I found sales coming in more frequently.
Perpetual Sales: Using Email Marketing
Email marketing was a bit turning point. With email marketing you can build a huge list of subscribers and automate regular messages promoting your products and providing information.
As your email list grows, older subscribers are further through your sales marketing funnel. Because of this they have digested more of your messages and you have (hopefully) built some trust with them.
I didn’t understand this as a beginner and was just desperate to make sales. So my marketing messages probably shone of this desperation that I was exuding! But as I become more comfortable with email marketing, my messages changed while my marketing strategies gathered steam.
This compounded into a much more effective sales “machine”, which worked continually on autopilot 24 hours a day!
Perpetual Sales & The Six Figure Funnel
I later discovered the six figure sales funnel which is a marketing funnel which contains high ticket and subscription affiliate products.
This kind of affiliate marketing funnel gives the affiliate a much better chance of success for a number of reasons:
The high ticket products give you larger profits for each sale
Subscription product sales compound to bring in a growing monthly income
You can more easily use paid marketing when you can make such large commissions
This makes the whole sales system much more scalable
Paid marketing is much faster than content marketing for generating perpetual sales with an affiliate business.
Summary
It is possible to make perpetual sales online selling other people’s products and services and turn it into a passive income. However, it does take some time and understanding to actually implement it and learn a marketing strategy which is scalable.
You can do it through creating content (like this blog post), or running paid ads into a high ticket sales funnel, which is much faster. Ideally also use subscription affiliate products because they allow you to make recurring affiliate commissions from previous sales you’ve made.
Can you earn a smart passive income affiliate marketing? With affiliate marketing your earnings are performance based. When you sell an affiliate product through your link, you earn a commission. There’s many ways you can do this but ultimately it’s a good idea to make your income passive.
Affiliates can create a passive income through:
Automation – automating the process of selling online
Building content – which generates sales passively
Subscription products – subscriptions and membership products pay recurring income, which is of course passive
Let’s look at these strategies in greater detail.
Smart Passive Income Affiliate Marketing: Automation
Affiliate marketing is great in that you can sell products without actually being there by your laptop. The automation affiliates use will depend on their own particular marketing strategy.
One of the fastest ways to generate automation with affiliate marketing is to use paid advertising to drive traffic to a landing page. From there, affiliates collect subscribers information and follow up with automated email messages. Emails contain affiliate links and if a subscriber purchases something through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission.
This process is one of the best because paid marketing is fast and scalable. So once you’re in profit, you can easily turn up the volume to get more traffic, leads and sales. One of the best ways to do this is with a high ticket business model because you can earn more from your commissions. This means accessing the more expensive marketing platforms is more within financial reach.
Smart Passive Income Affiliate Marketing: Content
Another way to generate a passive income from affiliate marketing is through building content. Blogging and video blogging, or v’logging, are two content marketing strategies. Content marketing is a much cheaper way to generate a passive income with affiliate marketing than through using paid marketing. However, it can take much, much longer for your content to start generating sales on autopilot for you.
At first there’s nothing much to show from building content such as a blog post. Over time though, your efforts can compound and you’ll find people sharing your content and linking to it. At this stage you will see an exponential growth in your traffic. However, to get to this stage can take months of hard work, or even years without much to show for your efforts.
So if you go this route you’ll need to be patient and able to work for a long period without much to show!
Smart Passive Income Affiliate Marketing: Subscription Products
Subscription affiliate products are another way you can earn passively from affiliate marketing. With a subscription product, such as a software or membership product, you can earn recurring commissions each and every month from the sales you have made.
If you choose wisely, customers can maintain subscriptions for a lifetime. For example, with business related products such as autoresponders for example, online business owners need the product to run their business. Therefore they are very likely to keep those products for life, especially if their business takes off.
As you make sales of subscription products, rather than earning only a single “one-time” commission, you earn every month for the lifetime of that customer. With each sale your monthly income grows, so choosing subscription products is a great way to build your affiliate business more quickly and ultimately earn passively from it.
Summary
You can of course do all three of these strategies in unison which will give you an even better chance of making a passive income from affiliate marketing.
Use paid ads to build an email list and automate an email marketing campaign, selling affiliate products through your list.
Build content which over time will compound to give you free traffic, which you can direct to your affiliate products
Use subscription products to build a recurring income from your previous sales.
If you also use high ticket affiliate products, you can potentially earn a lot more from each sale, or use a high ticket sales funnel which contains subscription products and high valued products to sell.
Breaking the glass ceiling meaning often refers to breaking the invisible barrier to success or achievement. This term “breaking the glass ceiling” is often used in reference to minorities or women. They cannot rise in their career because of the social barriers stopping them from achieving top positions. To break the glass ceiling means to break through this unseen social barrier.
The term can also be used in business too; where a business owner is stuck behind an invisible barrier of their own thinking. To break through this mental barrier might mean thinking in a different way. Affiliate marketers, for example will often have this problem. Their business cannot grow beyond the thinking they bring to it.
With affiliate marketing, you earn commissions online based on the sales you generate. As an affiliate’s business grows to becoming more successful, the business owner will often reach a certain point which they can’t surpass. For example, they are generating affiliate sales, and making profit, but their income is stuck at a certain level. This can be referred to as a glass ceiling in business. In order to surpass this level, they have to change something about what they do. But their thinking keeps them stuck.
Breaking The Glass Ceiling Meaning: Glass Ceiling In Business
An example might be that an affiliate is paying $1000 a month in advertising and making $2000 in commissions. So it makes sense to increase the advertising spend, given this relationship. However, this seems out of the comfort zone of the affiliate, and so they maintain their current advertising budget in spite of the obvious action they need to take.
But the necessary action isn’t always obvious; hence the business owner reaches a “glass ceiling” which they are stuck under, limiting the success of their business.
Many business owners will hire coaches and mentors to help them overcome their limited thinking. Often limited thinking can come from underlying assumptions such as the need to be frugal, or a poverty mindset; or a genuine lack of marketing budget.
With affiliates this is important to understand because most affiliate marketers are “one person businesses”, who operate entirely on their own.
Breaking The Glass Ceiling Meaning In An Affiliate Business
Henry Ford said “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”; your thoughts precede your actions. If you think in limitations, you’ll create outcomes which reflect that thinking.
In any business this is a useful concept to understand because your thoughts will always either grow or limit the outcome of your business.
Ask Better Questions
One way to improve your business is to ask yourself better questions. If you find yourself in a negative spiral, doubting yourself and asking yourself negative questions, stop. Think of better questions you can ask yourself.
Why is my business failing? vs. How can I grow my business?
Can I cut back on my spending? vs. How do I limit my business?
Why can’t I succeed? vs. What actions generate the biggest growth for my business?
How can I save money? vs. How can I grow my business faster?
The glass ceiling of your business is often determined by the questions and thoughts you have privately which no-one else is privy to. If your thoughts are sabotaging your business, your actions will likely follow.
Removing The Glass Ceiling
To remove the glass ceiling of your business you can start by paying attention to the thoughts you have about your business. Often it is limiting thinking which has stuck because of your previous experience in life and/or business.
Have you heard the saying that “you become the average of the 10 closest friends“?
If you are surrounded by people who think in a certain way, you’ll end up thinking like they do. This also means you’ll get the outcomes they get in their lives. A good way to grow as a business owner is to surround yourself with business owners, mentors and coaches. You can join an online business community here.
Coaches can help you to see your business in a different light and to change the way you approach it. See also 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching. This can take some time and effort because much of your thinking is habitual and will come from many years of experience. So you often need to unlearn your old thinking habits in order to make lasting change.
If you’re an affiliate you can also break through your invisible glass ceiling by getting consistently out of your comfort zone. Your comfort zone is a nice, comfortable place to be in, but nothing ever grows there! So if you’re stuck doing the same old things, try something different and make some changes which challenge you and help you to grow beyond your current level of success.
Do something that scares you if your want to grow. If you want things to remain the same, and to be “comfortable”, keep doing the same!
If you’re a content creator, you’ll need to keep coming up with new content ideas for affiliate marketing. Once you’ve built a huge volume of content, that content can work for you, bringing in sales on complete autopilot.
But before that can happen you need to create enough content to get traction in your affiliate business. This can take some time and serious effort. Many affiliates will quit because they can’t keep coming up with new content and sustain the necessary effort required to make work.
So it’s a good idea to choose an affiliate topic or product which you have an affinity for. It’s much easier to keep finding new content ideas in a topic you have a passion for, or at least an interest in. When you are excited by your topic, you can continue to learn and build new content around your knowledge.
When you don’t care about your topic, this is much more difficult!
Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing – Keyword Tool
One of my favourite hangouts is Google’s keyword planner which is always a good source of keywords for blog posts and videos. The keyword planner even gives you the volume of monthly traffic for specific keywords which you can create content for.
There’s a number of ways you can use Google’s keyword planner but one strategy I use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can do this by typing in your main “seed” keyword into the planner and you will find longer tail derivatives of those keywords. You can then compare the relative competition of those keywords on Google with a quick search of the keyword, and with a search of the keyword in quotation marks.
These two searches can give you an idea of the relative competition for the keywords. Once you find a good keyword which is suitable for your audience, topic and product, you can go to work creating an article or video for it.
You can also add filters to your main keywords to show it with terms such as “why”, “who”, “what”, “where” and “when” for example, to find popular questions in your niche.
Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing – Quora.com
Quora.com is a popular question and answer website where people post questions in all kinds of topics. By searching the site for the keywords relating to your business/niche, you can find queries which you can write/create content for.
Because there are so many questions, you can use this strategy in combination with Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keyword questions which you can answer with your content.
You can also write answers on Quora too, and even link back to your content if appropriate. Quora does have a lot of spammers though so it’s important not to just spam your links but to also answer questions with some depth. When you do this, you can link to your content from your answers. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: YouTube
YouTube is a great source of ideas for content whether you simply browse the site for your particular niche, and use videos for inspiration, or use the search feature on the site. To use the keyword suggestion on YouTube just type your main keywords into the search bar. You should see a number of common searches for longer tail derivatives of your main keywords.
You can then use these common keyword searches to build content around specific keywords.
Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Buzzsumo.com
Buzzsumo.com is a great site for finding trending popular content within your niche.
Type your main keyword (or a derivative of) into Buzzsumo’s search bar and you’ll get the most popular trending articles and content which is going viral on social media.
Use the content for ideas, or the blog/video titles can give you insights into the best titles to use to get the most traction from your content. You can use Buzzsumo for free or upgrade for greater functionality.
Content Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Use “How To” Posts and Videos/eBooks
Whatever niche you’re in, there’s a tonne of people looking at content you can provide on your website or YouTube channel. “How to” posts are very popular and people searching for “how to” in a topic relating to yours are potentially going to become customers if they land on your website.
You can find popular “How to” searches using Google’s keyword planner with the term added to your keyword, also use Quora.com or YouTube by using the search bar; i.e. “how to {insert your keyword}”.
You can create a lot of “how to” pieces to help your audience with a specific problem and lead them to your products/services.
You can also do the same with an ebook giveaway which can be used to build your email list. Here’s an ebook I created for affiliate marketing to help beginners:
Shift To Helping, Rather Than Selling
When you’re stuck with your affiliate marketing content strategy it can also help to shift your mindset. When I shifted from a mindset of “getting” to “helping” things began to change for me.
Writing became more of a joy and less of a hassle. Because of this, I no longer got stuck with ideas for writing and creating video content. Instead of struggling trying to sell, I just asked how can I help someone with my content.
Having this mindset comes across in your content and helps to build trust with your audience too. If you’re stuck in your content marketing strategy, try shifting your mindset to align with your values. When you’re aligned with what you are doing online, it’s so much easier to create content because there’s no inner conflict with what you’re trying to do.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are a good idea for affiliates for a number of reasons. Firstly a review is something which attracts buyer traffic. Compared to “how to” traffic, a product review should convert many more visitors into buyers because you attract people on the last stage of the buying cycle. If someone is looking at a review, they are already interested in a particular product, or solving some specific problem with a product.
So if you have a particular affiliate product which you know well, write a review or create a video about the product or service. You can also look at other reviews of the product on Google and YouTube for inspiration and insight.
Lists
Lists are always pieces of content which seem to do well. There’s always lists on Google at the top of the search results pages.
As you use Google’s keyword planner, look for ideas which can become lists. Here’s a few pieces of content I’ve put together into list format:
If you’re struggling for content ideas, brainstorm your interests, hobbies and passions. What topic would you be happy about learning about for the rest of your life? Zoning in on the topic you are aligned with can give you content ideas for the long term because you have a genuine interest and passion for the topic.
Long term content creation is definitely more difficult if you’re creating content in a topic you have no interest or enthusiasm for. There will always be someone more dedicated in a topic you have no love for!
It can take some time and experimentation to find your perfect affiliate topic, but it’s worth finding it because it can make all the difference.
What is a tripwire funnel? A tripwire funnel is a sales marketing funnel which uses a low value purchase to trigger a higher value offer. When someone purchases a low value product, at $7 for example, they are automatically up-sold another offer which has greater value, perhaps for $40, for example.
This is useful for marketers because someone who has already made a purchase from you is much more likely to re-purchase something else, particularly if you can show them huge value in their first purchase.
A tripwire funnel is therefore a means of building trust with paying customers, and up-sell them another product. If your products can help solve problems, people are much more likely to make a purchase. When you show the value of a product, they’re more likely to trust you.
Tripwire Funnel: The Marketing Funnel
A marketing sales funnel works by sending website visitors towards a landing page where they can access something for free. To access a free training video, for example, they must enter their name and email on the page. Once they do so, they have entered the marketing sales funnel. They receive emails regularly with the training materials they requested. By offering value through email marketing, the marketer can also offer products and services which may be of use to their subscribers.
The marketing funnel begins with an email opt in page like this one:
The entry level product in a sales funnel is usually priced to offer a lot of value for a good price. This is usually less than $100. Once the customer purchases the entry level product, they are then offered a high ticket offer, which is of larger value (and cost).
This is the “tripwire funnel” which has a range of products within a single marketing funnel. It’s great for affiliates because the affiliate only needs to refer the entry level product in a product range. If the affiliate program they promote offers a built in sales team, the up-sells are done automatically through the sales team and the tripwire funnel.
Benefit Of Using A High Ticket Sales Funnel
The above is an example of a six figure funnel. Once a purchase is made, a higher priced product is offered to the customer automatically: the tripwire.
This has another benefit for affiliates in that the entry level sale covers their marketing costs. If the affiliate can achieve this, it means they affectively acquire customers for free once they buy the first product in the range. After that, any up-sell is a profit for the affiliate.
So for example the affiliate runs an advertising campaign where they pay out $200. In return they make a couple of sales making $200. So they are at break even! But, with a tripwire funnel, they are actually ahead; the funnel will up-sell their customers automatically and the later sales will all be 100% profit.
This is how to benefit from a tripwire funnel as an affiliate.
