The blog niches that make the most money are often those which are super competitive. This means that you’ll need to stick at blogging for several years to make any headway in these kinds of niches. Making money online, health and fitness, wealth creation, dating and relationships, technology, pets, hobbies/interests and travel are some of the most competitive niches.
Already existing blogs in these niches have often been around for decades! This means they have built thousands of blog posts around their topic. They have also attracted thousands of backlinks to their blogs in that time. Google therefore ranks them highly because of their domain age, content and backlink profile. To compete with these “monsters” takes a lot. You’ll need to create an awesome blog and spend a lot of time and money promoting it. You can’t achieve this kind of back link profile overnight, so expect a long journey.
An alternative is to aim for the less competitive topics. With less competition on Google, you can rank a website much more quickly. However, less competitive topics are often harder to monetise and so you’ll need to work hard at generating more traffic, often from fewer searches. So what’s the answer?
Blog Niches That Make The Most Money
One answer is to find a competitive niche and look for long tail keywords which are less competitive than the main ones. Build a site around your keywords and start blogging. With a niche website, you can rank a site more quickly if you choose carefully.
This can also be called a sub-niche. A sub niche is a niche within a niche and can be a good idea for bloggers because it offers an option to get free traffic for the more competitive keywords. A sub niche can work better than a less competitive topic which is harder to monetise.
So for example a sub-niche in affiliate marketing, might be “affiliate marketing for seniors”. A sub niche in dating and relationships might be “dating advice for widowers” for example. You can find sub niches in many topics by using Google’s keyword planner. Just type in your main keyword and look for long tail derivatives of your main keyword. When you find a good one, you can buy a domain name and build a website around it.
This can give you an advantage in ranking your blog for your chosen keywords.
Blog Niches That Make The Most Money
Because the blog niches that make the most money are in the most competitive fields, you should expect to work for several months or years in building your blog website. To sustain this kind of effort isn’t typical which is why so many affiliate marketers and bloggers drop out. See affiliate marketing success rate.
Ideally choose a topic you can get behind for a good length of time then. Only after creating a lot of content will you be successful. Don’t choose a topic you’re totally uninterested in because you’ll be more likely to quit after only a short time!
Evergreen Niches
“Evergreen” niches are those which make money all year round. While some niches are seasonal and will only make money when they are in fashion/trend. If you’re wanting to make more from your blog niche, look for topics which you can monetise with both high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate products.
With a high ticket product you can make substantially more from selling on your blog than by selling thousands of smaller value products. Likewise with subscription products which pay you a recurring income from previous sales you’ve made.
While you will still need to attract the right audience with these kinds of products, a small few sales can amount to a much larger profit than through selling only low valued items.
Summary
So which are the blog niches that make the most money? While there are certain niches which are incredibly lucrative for their owners, the most lucrative ones have been around a good long while. They have built up a high domain authority from years of blogging and therefore rank on the top of search engine traffic for some major keywords. To compete with these blogs as a newcomer is incredibly difficult and it can take years before you are able to replicate their success.
Instead you need to approach blogging as a very long term strategy for generating traffic and making sales online. Pick a topic you can build on over time and in which you have an interest. Focus on creating value for your visitors first with your content and develop a long term strategy. You can pick a micro niche within your particular subject too which can help you attract more targeted traffic and get ranked for your content more easily.
“Work from home”, “Blogger Moms”, “Learn Forex”, “Affiliate marketing”, “Drop shipping” topics are all lifestyle blog niches. A lifestyle niche generally refers to the lifestyle business concept, working from home, or the laptop and/or travelling the world working from a laptop. The lifestyle business is the latest online “fad”! More and more people are discovering they can work from home from their laptops and create more freedom and flexibility.
A lifestyle blog niche can also be “camper van life”, “caravan life”, “home sitting”, “dog walking” and so on. The online business concept can let you live anyway you choose and therefore a lifestyle blog can fall into two main categories:
The method of making money from home: Forex, Drop Shipping, Affiliate Marketing etc. or
The lifestyle you want/have – travelling related, hobby related or both, e.g. camper van life
Since you’re a blogger, it’s worth mentioning at this point that one of these topics is far more competitive than the other! Methods of making money online offer an incredibly high volume of competition for bloggers. So it might be a good idea to attract an audience based on the lifestyle someone desires instead!
Blogging is a long term strategy for generating traffic online. There’s a tonne of competition too so it can be wise to find a topic you love before setting out on the blogging journey. It can take months or even years before your blog is profitable. So pick a topic you love, and enjoy the journey!
Lifestyle Blog Niches: Campervan Life
Here’s a website I found on the topic of Campervan life:
Source: https://www.campervanlife.com/van-life/
There’s millions of people who are attracted to life on the road, and want such a lifestyle. If you’re passionate about campervan life, why not create a blog around your favourite topic. You can then attract similar people to yourself and use this strategy as a means to send people to your lifestyle business product, if you have one.
Travel Blog
A travel blog is another lifestyle blog niche which can attract an audience for your particular business/product. If you’re a massive travel fan, you can combine your passion with a blog to monetise through selling the lifestyle business to others on the same journey or who wish to live more freely.
There’s hundreds of ideas you can find in the sports related niches for blogging. So if you have a passion for SCUBA, surfing, climbing or anything sports related, why not create a blog around your passion?
Glamping is the new camping and is a lifestyle choice! Here’s a blog website I found on the topic of Glamping.
Glamping is a style of camping with amenities and therefore is often considered as “posh” camping! It’s a great topic for a lifestyle blog.
Blog Lifestyle Niches
Other blog lifestyle niches could be “blogging for profit”, “Nomad lifestyle businesses”, “Work from home”, “Earning from home”, and so on. If you’re looking for a good blog topic, checkout some other posts on this site on the topic of blogging:
What is the best niche for blogging with low competition? While competition is an important factor to consider in blogging, you also need to choose how you will monetise a blog. If you’re monetising with affiliate products, for example, you’ll need to find a product (or products) you want to promote. So this can effect your decision.
While many say to choose a topic you love, you also need to align this ideal with something which sells! Even if you choose to monetise with advertising (e.g.Google Adsense), the less competitive niches will pay less, because advertising in those topics isn’t as expensive. Therefore you’ll need to generate more traffic to make your blog pay!
Some of the best blog niches for monetisation are:
Wealth and money creation – very competitive
Gadgets and gismos – very competitive
Health and fitness – very competitive
Dating and relationships – very competitive
Pets – very competitive
Lesser known niches might not pay as well as the most popular niches but offer less competition:
Food & recipes
Travel related blogs
Parenting
Hobbies and interests
Education
Best Niche For Blogging With Low Competition: Your Passion
Blogging is definitely a long term strategy for traffic generation. Many bloggers will make nothing from their blogs so it’s important to remember that this is going to take some serious time and commitment. In twelve months of blogging, do you see yourself still creating content on your chosen topic or not? Or, do you think you’re more likely be burned out and disinterested?
If the latter is true, you need to re-consider the purpose behind building a blog in the first place. Unless there’s inherent value in your blog posts, for your readers, it’s going to be difficult to attract an audience and turn that audience into paying customers!
When you can align your passion or interest with your blog posts, you are much more likely to be able to sustain the necessary interest in your blog topic over the longer term.
Best Niche For Blogging: Pick One Which Is Sustainable Over The Longer Term
With so many more people turning to blogging as a means of income, there’s a lot more competition than there used to be. As such, even in a less competitive niche, you should expect to sustain your blogging habit for several months at least to break through and start generating income from it.
It will take longer in a more competitive niche of course. But you should also try to align an interest in your chosen topic otherwise it’s much more difficult.
One way to do this is to choose a topic you’re interested in and then niche down and find a sub-niche which you can become an expert on. For example, affiliate marketing is a sub niche of making money online. Yoga for seniors is a sub niche of health and fitness. A sub niche is a niche within a niche which you can use to find a more targeted audience which offers less competition. What’s good about a sub niche is that you can still choose a topic you’re interested in, without compromising your choice.
When you love your topic, you love writing about it. When this happens you give yourself much more chance of success with a blog, because you’ll sustain the work needed for longer than others in your niche.
Best Niche For Blogging
The best niche for blogging therefore might not be that which offers the least competition, but one which you can sustain over a long period. Competition is a factor though still so you should definitely do your homework before building a blog. Be aware than less competitive niches are often those which are harder to monetise. Scrap booking, for example might be an uncompetitive niche, but how will you monetise it?
I once built a website around the topic of mushroom harvesting. The domain name was “whentoharvestmushrooms.com”. I thought that by finding a long tail keyword for my domain, and building a blog around it would be a good idea because it could be easily ranked. It did rank at the top of Google, quite quickly. However, it was very difficult to monetise. Within a few months I was completely burned out writing about the topic, which I knew nothing of before starting. This made it very difficult to write each post because I had to research everything before creating content.
While it’s true that writing about your passion, or something you love is more sustainable, it’s not always going to be easily monetised. So it’s worth doing some research into blog monetisation first, before you start out.
Summary
So, what is the best niche for blogging with low competition? Given the volume of blogs on the internet today, there’s going to be a lot of competition in nearly every niche. Of course some are far more competitive than others, and for good reason; those are the blogs which are “evergreen” and make money all year round. The “money making online”, for example, is one of the most competitive niches. So going into it will likely be harder than going into the scrapbooking niche, for example. However, it can be much tougher making money out of the less competitive niches, which is why they are less competitive! So what’s the answer?
Ideally choose a topic you can get behind for a good, long time. imaging writing on your blog for at least a couple of years and how that will make you feel! If you’re already dreading it, it’s the wrong topic for you. But if you relish the idea, that’s your topic. You can then go about finding a sub-niche within that topic which offers less competition, but which you can also easily monetise for the best effect.
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.
