AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Marketing Advice

There’s a tonne of affiliate marketing advice available on the internet. But what advice will help you the most in making money from affiliate marketing?

How can you get started if you’re a complete beginner?
What are the best affiliate products to promote?
How will you promote your affiliate offers?
What are the best promotion tactics?

Affiliate marketing can be tough and the right information will give you a huge head start. So getting help if you’re a beginner should be your first port of call. You can access a free video series here and an all in one affiliate training resource.

Affiliate Marketing Advice – Know Your Products

If you choose to sell something as an affiliate, it’s useful to get to know your products well. When you know your products well it serves multiple purposes:

You understand the benefits of your products.
You can create more content around your products.
It helps you define your audience better.
You will come across as more authentic to your buyers if you understand the product, and have bought it yourself.
You can answer customers questions regarding the products you recommend.

Choosing your products is important for affiliates too. It’s good to choose a product you believe in and use yourself. It sets you apart from less authentic affiliates who’s only aim is to make money.

Affiliate Marketing Advice – Know Your Audience

Knowing your target audience is a major key to knowing how to sell to them. There’s a saying in business, “try to sell to everyone, and sell to no-one”. Your target audience for affiliate marketing should be well defined. If you don’t get to know your target market, you’ll waste a lot of time putting your marketing message in front of the wrong people.

Since affiliates sell globally, you have the world to sell to as an affiliate. But if you don’t know how to define your target audience, your affiliate business will be like a scatter gun. You’ll waste your energy. You want your marketing efforts to be like a sniper, not a scatter gun!

target audience for affiliate marketing — Knowing who your audience is = marketing tactics will be more efficient

By defining who exactly will be most interested in your products or services, you can save marketing time and budget, and focus your efforts on those people who are most likely to become customers. See customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this topic.

Getting the wrong people to a website, for example, won’t result in a sale. So knowing your customer avatar well is a worthwhile use of your time.

Choose A Marketing Strategy

Affiliate marketing is nothing without marketing. The word is right there in the term “affiliate marketing”! But this can be easy to forget if you’re new to the business. You can get easily distracted after joining an affiliate program; following training videos and building websites. It can be easy to think your job is done, even if you’re just watching training videos all day long!

Without an effective marketing strategy, your affiliate business cannot work.

Marketing can take the form of paid ads, blogging, video blogging or social media marketing strategies etc. There’s a huge number of marketing strategies you can choose from. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

The marketing strategy you choose will depend on your circumstances. If you’re very busy, use paid ads. If you don’t have the money; hustle! Creating content is an option if you have time but not the money; but it will typically take a lot longer to get traction than through using paid ads.

Affiliate Marketing Advice – Build A List

Top affiliates have email lists because a list can put your in charge of your traffic and allow you to build longer term relationships with your subscribers.

Whether you’re using paid marketing or organic marketing, you can build an email list by offering something to your subscribers for free from a website or landing page.

As your list grows, and you communicate regularly with your subscribers, you can promote affiliate products over a much longer time period than a website would allow. You can also build your list to thousands of subscribers. A single email can mean multiple sales in this scenario. A website can take years to generate this kind of readership. But an email list can be built very quickly. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game and an email list will help you reach more people in less time.

Affiliate Marketing Advice – Subscription Products

Subscription products deserve a mention here too. With most affiliate products you only get paid once for each sale. But with subscription affiliate products you can make a sale and earn a recurring income from that one sale. With many sales this mounts up to a nice passive income.

Products such as business tools are particularly good for affiliates because they are hugely valuable to the people that use them. As such, online business owners will tend to maintain their subscriptions (to online tools and membership programs) which help them build their businesses for life. If you sell those particular products, this means you can more easily earn money consistently from an affiliate business.

One off or (one time) commissions only pay once so you need to keep making regular sales in order to keep the money coming in.

High Ticket Affiliate Products

High ticket affiliate marketing products typically pay $500 and over in commissions. If you consider the basic products you’ll find on Amazon, for example, you can see the difference. An Amazon product valued at $100 might only pay out $3-$10 in commission for referring a sale. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

commission structures in affiliate marketing

But high ticket products will pay much, much more. When you consider that it will often be from the same amount of effort that you can make $10 or $500, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the high ticket items.

Many people think that high ticket items won’t sell as well as the low value ones and in some ways this is true. Of course they may not sell in the same quantities, but once you know how to target your audience, the work involved won’t be very different for both types of products.

Product Range

Most affiliate products only pay you once and after that the company you have referred the customer gains a customer – often for life! That’s a shame because it means you’re only rewarded once for your efforts. You then need to keep sending new customers to the products in order to earn more money.

With subscription products you are rewarded for the lifetime of a customer. But with a product range, you can also earn commissions if a customer purchases a product from the same company – even years after your initial referral.

Product ranges are also often linked to high ticket products which means when your referral upgrades their membership, you earn a fat bonus! For more on this see SFM Digital Business System which offers a range of products you can promote as an affiliate, including subscription products and high ticket products.

You also benefit from a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf. So there’s no need to personally sell those high ticket items yourself. (You simply refer the basic entry level products in a product range, the sales team does the up-sell). This is a good route to take if you want to sell high ticket items, but don’t want to personally do any selling!

Earnings Through Blogs

Is it possible to make earnings through blogs alone? Blogging is a popular way to generate content online. With enough traffic to your blog website, you can start generating income in a few ways:

Through your own business/products
From advertising
By selling affiliate products – other people’s products/services

But just how much traffic is enough to make blogging pay and when can you quit your day job?

Earnings Through Blogs – Competition

It’s useful to remember that there’s millions of bloggers out there blogging about pretty much everything. To attract the search traffic from the organic results pages (SERPS – search engine results pages), your blog needs to be better established than the others. A blog which has been around for decades, has hundreds of posts and many backlinks will tend to rank much better than a brand new blog with only a few posts and zero backlinks.

So if you’re just starting out blogging, be ready for a long journey. Another factor is of course the topic of your blog. In a very competitive area, you’ll need to work a lot harder and for longer to compete with the top websites in that particular niche.

Affiliate marketing, for example is a very competitive niche. So if you’re starting out with a brand new affiliate blog, you’ll have your work cut out. It will take several months or years to generate the kind of traffic you’ll need to make even a small amount of income from your blogging efforts.

However, there’s many less competitive topics than affiliate marketing. If you have an interest or passion for something less mainstream, it can be a considerably easier journey to generate an income from blogging.

Earnings Through Blogs: Free Traffic & SEO

On the whole earning through blogging requires you to attract free traffic. You can of course use paid marketing too, to attract people to your blog. But this makes it more difficult to become profitable. Since bloggers are concerned with attracting the traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. they need to learn the strategies needed to get traffic from those search engines; Google being the main source.

Google uses a number of criteria which bloggers should be aware of so they can optimise their efforts. They number into the thousands but the main ones are:

The quality of your blog content – length of posts, content, links etc.
Visitor activity on your posts gives Google feedback too: (e.g. if they click away too quickly, it’s a sign the content wasn’t useful/appropriate)
Back links – the back link profile of a website gives a strong signal of it’s quality: backlinks are like “votes”. the number of them and quality of them determine to some extent your ranking ability (see also building backlinks for SEO)
Social media presence – how are your posts being shared on social media, are you active on social media platforms etc.
Domain age – older domains tend to fair better against newer domains on Google

Bloggers need to get good at optimising their content for the search engines as well as creating quality content. SEO – or search engine optimisation helps bloggers reach more people through the SERPS – search engine results pages.

Earnings Through Blogs – Monetisation Methods

If you don’t already have a product or business of your own to help monetise your blog, the most popular methods are advertising and affiliate marketing. An advertising platform (e.g. Google Adsense) allows you to place code on your blog content which is transformed into ads which are relevant to your content and visitors). When your visitors click on the adverts, you earn commissions based on the advertising revenue. In some topics you can earn more than others. A very competitive topic can pay several dollars per click whereas a less competitive topic may only pay cents. As the blogger, you earn a percentage of this advertising revenue which is typically only tiny amounts per click.

adsense earnings - ads on your blog posts — Google Adsense program – shows adverts on your content from which you earn revenue

So if you use this form of monetisation, it helps to be in a competitive niche and get lots of traffic. Without huge volumes of traffic, you’ll likely only make small amounts. So traffic generation is key.

Another monetisation method is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote other people’s products and services from your blog and earn revenue based on what sales you refer. Affiliate marketing can be more lucrative than advertising if you have the right audience for your products. Audience is more important if you’re monetising with affiliate products because you need your website visitors to be a good match for your products.

Earnings Through Blogs – Email Marketing

Most bloggers who are earning from their online content use email marketing. Email marketing is a method of promotion which can help bloggers gain more notoriety and control the flow of their traffic better. They can also use their email lists to promote affiliate products.

When you’re relying on a single source of traffic such as the search engines, your earnings from a blog can be very uncertain. With a list, you put yourself better in control of traffic by building an email list of subscribers. On a website too, a visitor only has a small opportunity to buy a product from you. But once you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can extend this time period to weeks, months and even years.

Bloggers build email lists by offering something useful on their websites. This can be anything which is suitably valuable to their visitors and also which connects your blog posts to your affiliate products in some way.

Earnings Through Blogs – How Long Does It Take?

How long does it take to make money blogging? This is the million dollar question! Blogging is definitely a long term and slow strategy to gain traffic. Over time though your older and new content can gain traction and your efforts can compound to generate a passive income. (See passive income and affiliate marketing). But this can take months or even years of hard work. Depending on the niche you choose to blog in, it can be shorter or longer depending on the competition, what your daily actions are and your ability to create valuable content in that particular topic.

Ideally choose a topic you’re inspired by and passionate about, that way, you’ll enjoy the journey and stick at it for long enough to gain traction.

A useful analogy to blogging I like is the Chinese bamboo tree which takes several years of gestation before it even breaks the surface of the soil. But once it does it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks! Blogging can be like this too. You can work for months or years without much happening. Suddenly your efforts compound and you find you’re generating free traffic, leads and sales without much work!

How Much Can You Make?

The amount you can make from blogging is potentially unlimited. However, many bloggers make nothing from their work. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make? Top bloggers can make over six figures from their blogs if they gain enough traction.

Those who have been at it long term tend to make the most from blogging, since they are able to build huge authority over time. The amount you make from blogging is determined by how you attract traffic but also how you monetise your blog. If you choose the affiliate marketing route, for example, you can increase your earning potential by choosing high ticket affiliate products and through using subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions.

Expect to work at blogging for several months on a daily basis if you’re serious about making money from it. Over time, your efforts compound and this increases exponentially if you stick with it long enough. Initially though it can be tough because it takes a while for your efforts to bear fruit.

Using Long Tail Keywords

Many bloggers will target long tail keywords with their blog posts. The keywords which attract a particular section of search traffic can be found using Google’s keyword planner. The most competitive keywords are the shorter phrases of two or three words. These keywords attract a huge volume of monthly search traffic. See also short tail and long tail keywords.

Longer tail keywords have fewer monthly searches but less competition on the Google search results pages. As such, bloggers have a far higher chance of ranking their content for the long tail keywords which have three or more keywords in them.

To find these longer tail keywords, you can type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look through the results. The planner shows all keywords which are searched for which relate to the main “seed” keyword. By finding long tail derivatives of your main keyword to create content for, you can more easily get rankings on the SERPS for your content. See also how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Summary

Earnings through blogs varies according to the length of time someone has been blogging for, how much effort they put in and the relative competition in their particular niche. Your monetisation method will also have a bearing on how much you can make from a given amount of website traffic.

Depending on how you monetise your blog, you can even earn more from fewer visitors. For example if you sell subscription affiliate products from your blog, you can earn recurring income from sales you’ve made previously. In a low competition topic/niche, you can only make small amounts from using adverts (e.g. Adsense) because the cost to advertise is generally lower in less competitive areas. In a high competition niche, you can earn more from advert clicks but it’s much harder to obtain the necessary traffic required to get clicks.

Building Backlinks For SEO

Building backlinks for SEO can work wonders for your website traffic. Back links are basically little votes coming to your website from other websites. It shows to Google that someone has recommended your site for some reason. Generally speaking the more backlinks you have coming to your site, the higher your site will be in the rankings SERPS – search engine results pages. However, this isn’t exactly true because another factor is the quality of the incoming links. Not all links are equal and Google will determine some links to be of far more value than others.

If you think of links as reviews of your site, you can understand that a couple of bad reviews will do more damage than many good reviews can repair. So therefore where your links come from is important to building your website authority. You want the good links not the bad ones!

Generally speaking the rule is that links should be recommending websites which are useful to the visitor. If this isn’t the case, it will generally mean the link is spammy and therefore counterproductive to the growth and authority of your website. So you want to avoid spammy links if your website is to benefit from them.

Building Backlinks For SEO – Spammy Links

Google’s guide outlines some examples which may fall into the category of a spammy link:

When a link is purchased or sold. Either for money, goods and services or “free” products in exchange for the link.
You link to me and I’ll link to you schemes or partner pages which are exclusively for the sake of link building
Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns
Keyword rich anchor text links
Using automation to create links

Generally speaking if a link is bought, it’s not a natural link. If you want your link profile to help build your authority, you need naturally occurring links and not spammy links. The above examples are going to look unnatural to Google, and therefore you will be penalised for them.

Building Backlinks For SEO – High Authority Backlinks

High authority backlinks are much harder to obtain because generally the high value websites are such because they are more discerning in who they link to and why! Sites such as The Guardian and The BBC, for example have thousands of high quality links from reputable sources. They will only link to other high quality sources too!

Links from low quality spammy websites covered in adverts and popups are much easier to obtain, and many will even pay for them too! Hence why Google discriminates between the different types of backlinks you can obtain.

To increase your domain authority, you will want more high quality backlinks. As your domain authority increases, you should see your content ranking more highly in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

Building Backlinks For SEO

So having determined what we want to help us to build our site’s authority, (more high quality links), how do we go about building them?

One way to build a natural link profile is to create content which is very helpful to people. Resource articles often contain a lot of useful information in one place. Reviews, guides, lists and infographics are just a few examples of useful resources which people will naturally link to over time.

If you create such articles and put them on your website, as people find your content, they are more inclined to link to them freely because of the value they offer. So one key to a natural link profile is to create highly valuable online resources which attract a lot of attention. Promote them too so you get more eyes on them and over time you should earn natural backlinks from them.

Of course getting eyes on your content can be a hurdle to getting your articles naturally shared and linked to. So you also need to promote your content in order to make this happen. See where can I post my blog to get more traffic?.

Building Backlinks For SEO – Guest Posting

Another popular way to build backlinks is to write guest post articles for the sites you want to build links from. You really want links from sites which are relevant to yours. Why build links from sites which bring the wrong kind of visitors? There’s no point! You’ll only be bringing in traffic which isn’t going to be interested in your topic.

To tap into good sources of website traffic from other sites, and boost your site’s authority, you need relevant links from blogs and websites which cover similar topics to your own.

Not all bloggers accept guest posts so you’ll need to find those in your niche which do.

To find guest post opportunities from sites accepting guest posts do a Google search like one of these:

Target Keyword + guest post
Main Keyword + guest post service
Focus Keyword + free guest posting
Keyword + submit a guest post

Once you find a suitable site, write to the owner of the website and offer to write for them in exchange for a backlink to your site.

Finding Unlinked Brand Mentions

You can also set up a Google search for any mentions of your name or the name of your website. This is useful if you’ve been around for a while. If you’re brand new online, the chances of getting mentions are less, since you’ll have less content which can be found.

You can do this by setting up a Google alert. Use your name and/or the name of your website. When someone uses your brand, name or website name you will get an alert. When someone mentions you, but fails to link to your website, you can approach them and ask directly for a backlink. If they have mentioned you already, they are much more likely to be willing to give you a link; since they are talking about you already!

Fix Broken Links From Websites

Here’s another strategy you can implement which can work towards your link building. Most bloggers are pretty busy and will often have broken links on their websites. Many are too busy to even know this and so neglect to fix these. As a result this can affect their website rankings.

If you find these broken links for them, you can be their knight in shining armour! By reaching out and letting them know about a broken link, you’ve done them a massive favour!

This website lets you find broken links on any website you care to check. Obviously you’ll first want to find those websites which will have the biggest impact on your back link strategy: those which are in your particular niche and of high authority.

Use the tool to find broken links and reach out to the website owner. Offer to replace broken links with links to your own content! Of course how you communicate this message will have a strong bearing on your level of success! You’ll also need to find the appropriate broken links which you can also help replace with your own content.

Getting Your Content Found

Even with superb content on your website, it can be hard to get eyes on it and get the links you deserve. One way of doing this is to create high quality content which targets long tail keywords which has much lower competition in the search results pages.

Use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO competition.

Choose a long tail keyword to create some useful content around on your website. Use an SEO plugin to help you optimise your content for the search engines. Write a piece of content which is better, longer and more informative than the currently ranking article on Google.

Rinse and repeat this strategy and over time you should see your content ranking on the SERPS. As it does, more people will find it. If your content is good, you should also naturally get likes, shares and backlinks.

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting and forum commenting are other methods of building backlinks to your site too. Find blogs which offer commenting, which are also in your target niche and have a high domain authority.

Once you find a suitable post on a website, make sure you read the post before leaving a comment. I’ve seen tonnes of spammy blog comments on my posts and unless they are clearly from a reader, who has read my content, I delete them! Don’t be generic with your blog and forum comments. Read the post and try and add some value with your comment.

There’s many people trying to get easy backlinks using this method and they just don’t even bother to read the post. They leave comments like “great post”, or “thanks for the share”. Comments like these are very likely to be removed as spam! But if you take some time over this, your comments are more likely to be approved and this can mean a strong, high authority back link from a relevant site. Here’s a list of high quality blog commenting sites. (That link was also a list I found with a quick search; as I mentioned earlier: high quality content gets natural back links over time).

Competitor Back Links

You can also find a competitor of yours who has a similar site to your own. Type their website address into SEM Rush search tool and find their backlink profile.

If a website has given a back link to your competitor, they are much more likely to offer you one too! You can build content similar to that of your competitor and reach our to ask for a link. You may not always be successful when asking for backlinks, but if you approach a website owner in the right way, and try and build a relationship before asking for something, you can get backlinks in this manner. Try and offer something in exchange though, rather than just asking for a link. You may need to create some new content or write as a contributor to get a link.

Summary

There’s lots of ways of building backlinks for SEO and you can even pay someone else to do it for you if you’re not inclined to do it yourself. I use this company to help me build backlinks as I find it rather difficult and time consuming.

Backlinks are one of the best ways to generate more traffic both directly from the websites themselves and from increasing your domain authority and moving up the search listings with Google. So it’s well worth spending some time doing it if you’re serious about getting free traffic to your website. It can be hard work but it’s worth it in the long run when you’re getting a tonne of free traffic!

How Much Can SEO Increase Traffic?

How much can SEO increase traffic to a website? With a lot of work and invested time, you can build content on your website which attracts an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation. However, if you don’t have the time or resources to invest in content creation, paid marketing is the way to go. Paid marketing can get you to the top of Google almost immediately, if you’re willing to spend. Getting a top placing for your content organically is much more difficult. If you’re in a competitive industry/niche, it’s going be be even harder still.

But that shouldn’t stop you from creating a longer term organic strategy to improve your SEO. SEO can, over time dramatically improve your volume of traffic. Plus if you achieve it, it’s free traffic. The real question is then how much can SEO increase traffic; and is it worth your time?

How Much Can SEO Increase Traffic: The Right Traffic

Since we’re talking about spending time on SEO, it’s important to ask why we would do this. Presumably it’s to increase your ROI – return on investment, and make more sales: acquire more customers? This needs to be addressed because more traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to more customers. You can have a tonne of traffic for free, but if that traffic doesn’t convert into sales, it’s not been time well spent (or money well spent).

With this in mind, it’s useful to define your target audience or customer avatar. Your target audience is the small section of the whole who are interested in what you have to sell, or the service you have to offer. If you randomly create content on your website without this in mind, you can spent a lot of time attracting people who don’t actually want what you’re selling.

The content you create will attract a certain audience. Define that audience before creating your content and there’s a much higher chance of converting website visitors to paying customers. Don’t do this and you can create a lot of work for nothing! See customer avatar worksheet and how to know your target market.

How Much Can SEO Increase Traffic: A Lot!

“Search is the single largest online traffic source, driving well over 50% of most industries’ web traffic.

The average top blog gets 66.47% of its traffic from search, of which 99.77% is organic and only 0.23% is paid.”

Source: https://growthbadger.com/traffic-study/

Top bloggers get 99.77% of their traffic organically! This means that it’s obviously well worth having a long term content creation strategy. Even if you only manage a much smaller percentage of traffic from organic as the top bloggers do, it can still make a massive difference.

However, top bloggers work very hard at creating content over a long period of time. So whether this is worth the effort for you will depend on your other marketing strategies. If you’re already profitable with paid marketing, it’s easy to scale up by increasing your daily budget.

Optimising Your Website For SEO

There’s a few ways you can optimise your existing content for SEO:

Get an SEO plugin and optimise existing content – see best free blog plugins for WordPress
Create more content – blogging
Build a back link strategy – or pay someone to do it for you
Use social media for content exposure
Build a niche website which targets specific keywords/topics

Your competition, your domain age, back links and various other criteria are the main factors which will determine your stand alone website ranking. In a competitive niche, you’ll need to do a lot more work in order to improve your ranking.

To increase your ability to rank your site highly for appropriate keywords you can build a lot of content on a blog. This shows Google that you are an authority in your niche. Over time, as more people link to your content, it proves your worthiness for a highly ranking listing on the SERPS – search engine results pages. This can take some time though, but if you’re prepared to work for it, your efforts compound over time as your content grows.

How Long Will It Take?

SEO takes time and effort to build up. Depending on your SEO strategy and your relative competition it can take weeks, months or even years to start seeing a large increase in organic traffic. But you can also make small significant changes to your website’s SEO in order to see some quick results.

It’s worth using a site such as SEM Rush or The Hoth which can take an inventory of your site and suggest some quick wins. Over the longer term, you can create some high quality content which will attract a suitable audience for your products/service.

If you don’t have the time to create content you can outsource it, but it’s well worth make even some small steps in the direction of SEO improvement. Over the longer term it can make a dramatic effect on your business. Shorter term, it can be difficult to see what effects the work you do on a site has on your organic visibility.

For faster results use paid marketing. The compounding effect of free traffic can, over time, make a significant difference to your bottom line, if you choose a good strategy and stick with it.

Summary

How much can SEO increase traffic and is it worth your time/investment?

SEO can dramatically increase your website traffic, and sales over time. You can even have a few quick and easy wins with SEO. But the degree to which you can use SEO effectively depends on a number of things such as:

Your niche/topic
The relative competition on Google (and other search engines)
Your domain age and authority
Back links to your site (how many and where are they from)
Your content building and marketing strategy

One of the best things you can do for your SEO is to create a content marketing plan; building content consistently over time which attracts the right audience for your service/product.

Is it worth your time? Yes – most definitely it is if you wish to generate more traffic, leads and sales. But it does takes time and consistent effort. If you don’t have the time, or a paid marketing is more appropriate to your business, it’s most definitely faster and more scalable using paid marketing than SEO. However, SEO compounds over time and free traffic is worth the effort if you’re prepared to invest the time and/or money it takes to make it worthwhile.

Best Way To Improve Search Engine Ranking

What is the best way to improve search engine ranking? Search engines rank websites according to a number of factors. So the best way is to learn what these factors are and apply that knowledge to your website in multiple ways. Search engines rank websites according to a number of criteria. Google uses hundreds of ranking criteria to determine where to rank your site. Some of the best known factors are:

Domain authority – how Google sees your website compared to others in your industry/niche
Back links – your back link profile shows search engines who has linked to your site, when they linked and the link profile over time.
Content – your content is used to determine the value of your site; how much, the quality of it and how well optimised it is for SEO – search engine optimisation
Viewer actions – how someone reacts to your content is a big signal to Google as to how to rate your website – do they click away immediately, share content or link out to you, for example.
Social media presence – is your content shared regularly on social media? do you have a large social media presence linked to your site?
Domain age – older domains are generally more well thought of by Google than brand new ones; particularly if they have built up more back links and quality content over time.
Outgoing links – the sites you link out to tell something about your site. If you link to high authority sites, you’re more likely to be more credible, for example than if you linked out to spammy sites which offer no value.

Best Way To Improve Search Engine Ranking – SEO Plugin

One of the best ways you can improve search engine ranking on your website is to use an SEO plugin to optimise your website for its keywords. Yoast SEO is a popular and free plugin which helps you write search engine friendly content on your site; or improve existing content.

So if you don’t have this plugin or something similar, you can do a very thorough examination of your content with the plugin. It helps you target specific keywords in your content; letting you know where to place keywords. Keywords should be placed in headers, image alt tags, and through your copy. It basically offers suggestions which will help with your SEO – search engine optimisation.

Best Way To Improve Search Engine Ranking – A Site Audit

You can do a site audit too, which will show you how your site is performing in the search engine rankings and offer suggestions for “easy wins”. If one of your pages is ranking on page 2 on Google, for example, you can then improve your content and optimise that particular page. As you do so, your page should move up the rankings on to page 1, depending on your competition. The same can be done for content you have which ranks at the bottom of page one of the search results.

Once you know which pages are almost ranking near the top of page 1 on Google, you can focus your efforts there for more traffic. Here’s a company which will help you with this. Or you can purchase access to software which will help you do this. SEM Rush is one such software which can help you with this. It will also show you errors on your site to be fixed and a number of other things which can help you rank better.

Best Way To Improve Search Engine Ranking – Social Media

Social media signals are another way you can increase your visibility on the whole; while also signalling your online presence and growth to Google, and other search engines.

You can increase your social media presence in a few different ways:

Social media share buttons on your site – to make it easier for visitors to share your content – see also best free blog plugins for WordPress
Automated syndication software which places your fresh (and older) content automatically throughout your social media presence – see autopost to social media from WordPress
Use a social media feed on your site to show current social activity to your visitors

Best Way To Improve Search Engine Ranking – More People

Once you have social share software on your site, more traffic will naturally lead to more shares, assuming your content is good! It should also, over time, lead to a natural back linking profile which comes from people who appreciate your content and link out to it.

Your search engine rankings can therefore also be improved simply by increasing your traffic. This can be done in many ways including paid advertising, but here’s a couple of cheaper methods. (See also how to boost traffic to your website.)

Push notifications allow you to have your visitors opt in to pop ups which will appear on their browser when you publish new content. Push engage is a simple and free plugin which does this for you.

You can also accomplish this with an email marketing software which collects emails from your website and automatically sends out email notifications which can lead subscribers back to your content. See the power of email marketing.

Content Is King

If you content is good, Google will know. They see how people will respond to your content. If they click away immediately, it’s a signal that your content isn’t what someone is looking for, or that it’s bad! So Google will down rank your content accordingly when they see this.

So as much as SEO is an important part of ranking your site better, you also need to create content which is good. If it’s good a number of things will happen:

More people will stick around on your site
Google will see this and add it to their ranking factors for your site
People will be more likely to like and share you content
More people will build backlinks to your content – helping your rankings further still.
People are more likely to sign up to your push notifications and/or email list

So make your content as good as you possibly can. If it’s good, older content will stand the test of time too, which will further compound your results over time.

Backlinks

Of course backlinks are going to help you rank your site better than other sites with fewer (or lower authority) links. Ideally you would get backlinks from authority sites within your niche. This can be a challenge though because high domain authority sites got that way because they don’t link out to just anyone! There’s a few ways you can build backlinks to your site:

Do guest posting – ask to write content on other websites within your niche
Blog/forum commenting – comment on high quality sites within your niche
Directories – allow you to place links on them for free or for a small fee
Outsource back linking using a company which offers SEO services

Having great content on your site is a must for a natural link profile which should happen over time if you do a good job of it!

Blogging – Yes Create More Content

Having a lot of content on your site is a big signal to Google (and others) that you’re an expert in your particular field. It also is a useful way to build your authority and generate traffic at the same time.

Use an SEO plugin and write the best quality content you can. Blogging takes time and is a lot of effort, particularly in the early days. A lot of work doesn’t seem to achieve very much.

But over time your older content will start ranking and bring you new visitors, who of course can share, like and subscribe. When this happens in a large enough numbers you site should start taking off. This can take months or years depending on your topic, and how much effort you can put in.

Target Long Tail Keywords

Writing content won’t necessarily get you ranking on Google. If you’re in a competitive field and you write for the short tail keywords, you’re up against a lot of competition. One way around this is to write content and target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

There’s many benefits of long tail keywords but the main one is that you can more easily rank your content for them in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Whereas with shorter phrases, although there’s more traffic for them, there’s also a lot more competition in the search results.

Finding those untapped keywords which offer far fewer competing pages on Google gives you much more chance of a top ranking on the first page!

Paid Marketing

If you’ve done all of the above, and your visitors are sharing your content as they visit your website, a little paid marketing can go a long way. It won’t immediately increase your ranking of course, but if your visitors are sharing and linking to you, it can speed up the process of your SEO.

There’s many paid marketing platforms such as Google Ads, Bing (Microsoft), Facebook, YouTube, etc. Adwords (Google) is a good place to start and they even do a dynamic advert which can crawl your site and place an appropriate ad according to your content. This is a great way to get more eyes on your blog posts very quickly, which of course can lead to more shares, likes and links too, if you’ve done a good job of your content!

Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing

There’s a few ways to get organic traffic for affiliate marketing. As the cost of paid marketing rises, it’s more apparent to many affiliates that they need an organic marketing strategy. Without a good high ticket affiliate product in your funnel, and/or subscription products, paid marketing can be out of reach. This makes organic traffic for affiliate marketing all the more attractive and even necessary.

You can find traffic organically through blogging, a YouTube channel and using the many social media platforms to connect with and market to potential customers. You can also build a niche website and get your content ranking on Google, and the other search engines.

Niche websites are targeted towards a specific audience and often use specific keywords in them. This site (Affiliate Marketing Mentors) has targeted specific keywords in order to attract an audience for free from the SERPS (- search engine results pages).

Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – A Niche Website

A niche website is one of the simplest ways to attract free traffic from the search engines. Start with doing some keyword research around your chosen topic. A good keyword based domain name can make a massive difference to your ability to attract free traffic from the search engines.

To decide on your domain name, you should spend some time researching the keywords you want to choose. The right keyword should have a good amount of monthly searches, but not be too competitive. Medium tail keywords are those with 3-4 keywords in them. They are often the best because they have a good amount of monthly search traffic, while not being as competitive as short tail keywords.

Once you find a good keyword phrase to build your site around, purchase a domain and start building content. It can take some time before Google recognises you site and gives you a ranking. You’ll also need to provide some useful content in order to be in with a chance. This content can also attract the attention of the search engines too. You can use Google’s keyword planner to find other related phrases for your main keyword. Then write content for the keyword suggestions which come up on the keyword planner.

Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

Blogging is a good strategy if you have chosen a topic which you’re interested in and if you can keep up the necessary motivation to keep blogging over the longer term. Blogging is definitely a slow strategy but over time, if you stick with it, you should see a compounding effect of your content. Initially there won’t be much to show for your niche website. Over time, after Google and other search engines index your site, you should see traffic being drawn to your content.

With blogging, it can be months or even years before you have the desired amount of website visitors. Depending on your topic, and the relative competition in your chosen area/niche, the time will vary. So expect to work hard on your blog, creating useful content which offers value for your visitors. Over time, people will like and share your content, and this in itself is a good way to grow your traffic organically.

Of course if your content isn’t good, this won’t happen; or at least it will happen less. Content is king, so make sure you focus on providing good quality content from the outset. You can also manually build links from other websites using strategies such as guess blogging or blog/forum commenting etc. You can also outsource this work to link building companies and SEO experts. I use this company to do link building for me.

Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – SEO

SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is an important part of organic traffic generation. When you build your site, and start writing blog posts, it’s important to optimise your content for the maximum possible impact from the search engines.

This means using the keywords within your content, in the image alt tags, headings and so on. Good SEO can go a long way when your site starts ranking on the search engines. To neglect it is to leave traffic off the table.

Ranking Factors

The SEO ranking factors which Google (and others) use include things such as:

Your domain authority – which will take some time to build if you have a new site
Back links from other sites – how many and where they are from are both factors, plus how spread out and natural your link profile looks to Google
Quality of your content – is observed by viewer interaction on your website. So if your content is bad, Google will know because people will click away very quickly, and people won’t link to it.
Domain age – the age of your domain has an affect on your ability to rank a site. Older domains which have built authority over time will carry more weight than a brand new website.
Amount of content on your site – a thin site will seldom rank as well as a site with lots of content on it.
Social media presence – the prevalence of your shared content on social media
Plus many other ranking factors.

To give yourself a good head start with organic traffic, you should aim to create some awesome content which will be shared naturally over time. You can also use a free SEO plugin to help you with your optimisation. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Plugins can make your content more easily shared, help with SEO and also syndicate your content throughout your social media presence automatically. See autopost to social media from WordPress.

Organic Traffic Trough YouTube Channel

Many social media platforms can be used to promote affiliate products. YouTube is just one of them. YouTube is good in that it is a video sharing platform and you can upload countless videos to build your presence for free. The algorithm used by YouTube will restrict your views initially and give more views to those who have built up a huge library of videos over time. As your viewers and subscribers grow, you should see an uptick in your traffic.

Again, much like blogging this can take some time and effort before you see the traction from it. As with blogging, it can be slow at the beginning. There’s millions of websites and YouTube channels so it’s a competitive field. To draw attention, you need to keep at it for a long time, continuing to upload content on a daily basis for several months and years.

As your video or blogging library grows, you’ll see visits to new and older content which you have created weeks and months before. This compounds and eventually there is an uptick in traffic which is the result of your previous efforts.

For more strategies to find organic traffic for affiliate marketing checkout my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Medium Tail Keywords – What Are They?

Medium tail keywords are those keywords which lie between short and long tail keywords. Short tail keywords are generally thought of as having no more than two/three words in them. While a keyword with four or more keywords in it is generally thought of as a long tail keyword. So an example of a short tail keyword might be “running shoes”. An example of a long tail keyword would be “nike air running shoes”.

Short tail keywords are the most competitive keywords for traffic. Since there’s a lot of content created around short tail keywords, they offer the highest amount of competition on Google for organic search traffic. There’s also a high search volume of traffic for short tail keywords. Long tail keywords offer less competition, but they also generally have much less traffic than their shorter tail counterparts.

Medium tail keywords therefore can offer the best of both worlds: both traffic and low competition in the SERPS – search engine results pages.

Short tail keywords: 1-2 keywords
Medium Tail Keywords: 3-4 keywords
Long tail keywords: 4+ keywords

Medium Tail Keywords – Why Use Them?

Medium tail keywords have more traffic than long tail keywords but less competition than short tail keywords. So for some content creators, medium tail keywords are the best of both worlds. They give a blogger/content creator an opportunity to rank their content for those keywords which get traffic in higher volumes than if they went for long tail keywords.

With long tail keywords there’s much less competition in the search results. So a blogger, for example, has a much greater chance at getting found on the first pages of the SERPS. However, even with a first place listing for a long tail keyword, that might only mean a tiny amount of traffic. A long tail keyword such as “nike men’s air zoom structure 22 running”, for example, might have very low competition in the SERPS. However, looking at Google’s keyword planner, it also only gets 10 monthly searches. When you divide this search volume with the top few websites on Google, you’ll only get a slice of this even if you rank at the top of Google for it.

Here’s some examples of what might fall into the medium tail keywords:

As you can see, these shorter phrases have a larger search volume. So if you managed to rank content for any of these, you would have a larger amount of search traffic, even when you consider that you’ll be sharing the traffic with other competing websites.

Medium Tail Keywords Vs Short Tail

Have a look at Google’s keyword planner results for shorter tail keywords within this same topic.

The search term “Nike Pegasus”, for example gets 301,000 monthly searches. However, with such a competitive search term, there are bound to be many competing websites for this search term. As such it will be unlikely you can get your content to the first page of Google, or the other search engines.

Medium tail keywords on the other hand offer a much better opportunity to get your content listed on the search engine results pages, and get enough traffic to make it worth your while.

Summary

While short term keyword phrases offer a huge volume of traffic, it can be very difficult getting your content ranking for those particular phrases because of the huge competition. Your chances of landing your content on page one of Google are therefore very low. So even with a lot of work, your content is very unlikely to get more visibility from the search engines.

Long tail keywords offer the least amount of competition on Google and the other search engines. You can rank content more easily for those particular keywords. However, with longer tail keywords the search volume is very low. Even if you rank your content at the very top, you’ll still be sharing low search volume with the other top ranking websites. So for a monthly search volume of only 10 searches, you’ll likely only get a percentage of this amount landing on your website.

Medium tail keywords are those which sit between the longer tail and shorter tail keywords. They typically fall between 3 and 4 words in length. Medium tail keywords can offer the best of both worlds for content creators: less competition and more traffic.

Benefits Of Long Tail Keywords

There’s several benefits of long tail keywords for bloggers. With short tail keywords there’s a much larger search volume. But with this comes a lot more competition too. Long tail keywords offer a much lower level of competition and therefore there’s a greater opportunity to rank your content on the first page of the search results (SERPS – search engines results pages). This means free traffic if you can do it and more traffic means more sales! (See also short tail and long tail keywords.)

Long tail keywords are also typically very targeted too. While short tail keywords can be more generic. This is good for marketers because they can target the very keywords which are being used by those people who want something very specific. Here’s an example. Let’s use the phrase camera. There’s millions of people searching for the phrase “camera”. But it’s very generic. If you’re promoting a certain type of camera, it may or may not be what the searcher is looking for.

Benefits Of Long Tail Keywords – Targeted Traffic

However if your content is very specific, it will attract a very specific search term:

Here’s a search for 70mai smart dash cam pro which gets 1900 monthly searches. It’s also a very specific search term. If you offer that particular product on your website, searches for it will be very likely to result in a sale. Whereas if your search traffic is only looking for the term “camera” when they land on your website, your offering may not be what they’re looking for.

Ranking For Short Tail Keywords

Having a lot of content on your site shows the search engines that you’re an expert in your field. Not only does using long tail phrase attract very specific buyer traffic and gives you more opportunity for easier rankings (and sales), but it also helps you rank for the shorter phases as well.

The more content you have, the greater your authority with the search engines. If your content is attracting an audience related to your shorter term keyword phrases, Google will see you as an authority in that particular niche. You can therefore increase your authority for short term phrases by creating content for more targeted longer tail keywords.

Long Tail Searches Account For More Than 70% Of Search Traffic

Yes more than 70% of search traffic is for longer tail search terms. This is great news if you create a lot of content on your site targeting longer tail search terms. While short tail search terms have massive volume, their shorter tail derivatives account for more search volume overall.

This makes sense when you think about it. People want to get exactly what they want on their first try. They don’t want to have to do multiple searches to find what they’re looking for.

To get a more targeted result, it’s far better to key in more words to describe what you’re after.

The Rising Popularity Of Voice Search

Voice search is on the rise and with new gadgetry such as Alexa, Echo and Siri, using devices and voice activated searches looks like it’s here to stay. When someone does a search using voice activation, they’re more likely to find you if you have those keywords on your site.

Stay ahead of the trend and optimise for voice search going forwards and you’ll likely receive more traffic from this kind of search query.

Summary

There’s many benefits of long tail keywords:

Visibility – long tail keywords offer less competition in the search engine results pages. Therefore you have a better opportunity to rank for them if you create high quality content which out performs the competition.
Longer tail keywords are typically very targeted. You can therefore use them to get laser focused on the search intent. This means higher conversion rates if you’re selling from your website.
Having a lot of high quality content for longer tail keywords on your site can help you also rank for the short tail keywords within your niche.
Long tail keywords account for over 70% of all search traffic
Voice search is becoming more popular and so it’s worth having longer tail phrases on your site which match voice searches over the coming years.

Short Tail And Long Tail Keywords

Short tail and long tail keywords offer different opportunities for bloggers and content creators. Short tail keywords have a higher volume of search traffic but it’s much more difficult ranking your content for them. An example of a short tail keyword might be “affiliate marketing” for example. If we look at Google’s keyword planner for the monthly search volume of this keyword, we will find a huge amount of traffic.

short tail keywords and long tail keywords

In fact it’s 673,000 monthly searches for this particular short tail keyword. The year on year change (YoY change) is +22% which means the search traffic is growing yearly!

Having your website rank at the top for this keyword would be fantastic because of all the free traffic you would get. However, doing this would be incredibly difficult. Let’s have a look at the pages which rank on page 1 of Google for the term “affiliate marketing”.

The top three results are investopedia.com, blog.hubspot.com and neilpatel.com; three incredibly high authority websites. If you look at the number at the top too, you’ll see it’s 2,340,000,000 which denotes the amount of competition for this domain name. A closer look can be done with inverted commas around the keyword on Google like so “affiliate marketing”. The number which shows denotes the competing web pages for this search phrase.

Wow: 56,900,000 pages competing for this phrase. So ranking your website for this phrase will be pretty difficult if not impossible. The websites which rank for this phrase have hundreds of thousands of back links, high authority and have been around for years if not decades. So it’s not a good idea to try and rank your content for such a highly competitive and short tail keyword. There’s simply too much competition.

Short Tail And Long Tail Keywords – Finding Long Tail Keywords

This is why many bloggers and content marketers who use organic search for their traffic target longer tail keywords with their content. Instead of targeting “affiliate marketing” for example with your content, you can find longer tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This can be done with Google’s keyword planner.

Click the header in the column (in Google’s keyword planner) which denotes average monthly searches until the search volume drops. You will see the keywords change like so:

Longer tail keywords generally offer lower search volume and you can see for example the keyword for “best niche for amazon affiliate marketing 2020” only gets 30 searches a month. Despite this being a much lower volume than the term “affiliate marketing”, you will have much fewer competing websites for this search term. Because of this, you have a much better chance of ranking your website content for that particular term if you create a blog post for it.

A small percentage of 30 searches a month, is far better than zero percentage of the 673,000 searches for the short tail keyword of “affiliate marketing”. If you try and rank content for “affiliate marketing”, you site has almost no chance of making it to the first page of Google. However, if you target the longer tail keywords, such as “best niche for amazon affiliate marketing 2020”, you have a stronger chance of getting your page to the first page of Google.

Short Term Vs Long Tail Keyword Phrases

Lets head over to Google and see how different this phrase is in terms of competing pages.

As you can see, “best niche for amazon affiliate marketing 2020” for a phrase match only shows 1090 competing pages. Here’s what the results show for a normal search of the term:

Google search results and determining relative competition

3,300,000 and 1090 are a lot lower numbers than the ones for the shorter tail keyword of “affiliate marketing” which were: 2,340,000,000 and 56,900,000 by comparison.

By aiming for the “low hanging fruit” bloggers and content creators can attract an audience to their content for free through the search engines. All they need to do is research which keywords will give them the best opportunity for ranking and bringing in the right audience for them to their website.

Of course some of the longer tail keyword phrases won’t have the right kind of search intent for your website. So you’ll want to find the long tail keywords which offer less competition and which also bring the right kind of traffic to your website.

Search Intent & Your Offering

If you’re promoting affiliate products from your website, you want to attract an audience which is a good match for your offerings. Attracting the wrong audience, even if it’s for free isn’t a good idea. The wrong traffic to your site is much less likely to be buyer traffic.

So even though some long tail keywords will give you a chance to get free search traffic to your site, you also need to keep in mind the search intent of the person doing the search. For example, looking through the keyword planner at the longer tail keywords I can find a keyword here which may offer a good opportunity at first glance:

“Free traffic for clickbank products” might offer me the opportunity to rank for content based around this idea. However, do I really want people who are looking for free traffic and who are promoting Clickbank products? People who are seeking free stuff are much less likely to turn into buying customers.

Knowing your target audience is therefore useful when targeting long tail keywords with your content. See also how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

See also find long tail keywords with low

Get Rich Affiliate Marketing?

Can you get rich affiliate marketing?

Affiliates promote other people’s products and services for a profit share. If they are successful, they can make sales in their sleep using automation and other people’s products. But before you can be successful with affiliate marketing, there’s a lot to learn. Don’t believe the “guru’s” who say it’s easy! It most definitely isn’t. But affiliate marketing is a strategy which can be used to step away from the trading time for money trap.

In a job, your income is always limited if you trade time for money. Even in a well paid career, your earnings are limited because there’s only so much time in the day. But with affiliate marketing, your income is generated by selling products online. Because this process can be automated (and scaled), it’s a better strategy than selling your time; (if you want to earn a lot of money).

You can get rich affiliate marketing if you learn a strategy which works and are able to scale up to a global audience. But not every affiliate achieves this. In fact most affiliates will “dip their toe in” and quit! To get rich affiliate marketing you need to be in the 5% of affiliates who don’t quit! See affiliate marketing success rate and how much does the average affiliate marketer make.

Can You Get Rich Affiliate Marketing?

Many affiliates will struggle, especially when they are learning. Learning affiliate marketing does take some time and dedication. At first, you’ll be figuring out what works and how to make affiliate sales. Depending on your marketing strategy, it can take anywhere from months to years to generate traction. This can be a frustrating experience especially if you’re taking the longer route of content creation.

While paid marketing is a faster route, it also has a greater financial risk involved. Content marketing is a slower but cheaper method of finding customers to put your affiliate products in front of. However, if you use content marketing, such as blogging, you can, over time, generate a passive income from affiliate marketing.

high ticket funnel - affiliate marketing

Paid marketing is definitely a faster way to start generating affiliate sales though. But paid marketing is expensive so it’s worth having some high ticket affiliate products in your inventory. With high ticket products you can earn much larger commissions. Subscription affiliate programs too are worth considering if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate. With subscription products, you can earn ongoing income passively once you make the sale. With many sales this can build up into a substantial income which requires very little or no effort to increase and maintain.

To get to this stage requires some serious commitment and work though. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here.

Get Rich Affiliate Marketing – Fastest Methods

One of the fastest way to get rich affiliate marketing is to use a high ticket sales funnel; which offers multiple products within a product range. A product range is useful for affiliates because it offers a means of making multiple sales to the same customer. While many affiliate programs only offer the opportunity to make a single affiliate commission, a product range gives you multiple earning methods:

A low value “entry level” product – which is affordable to many
Higher value offerings which gives the customer more value (high ticket items)
Subscription products which pay affiliates recurring commissions
A built in sales team, closing sales on your behalf

More on this can be found at SFM Digital Business System.

Once set up, this kind of business system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience through using paid marketing. Paid marketing works well because it is easily scaled up. This can be done by turning up your marketing budget once your business is profitable. See also how to scale affiliate marketing.

Before you get to this stage however, there’s work to be done. This involves setting up your sales funnel, landing pages and marketing platform. You’ll need to test and measure advertising strategies and campaigns until you find one which works and is profitable. This can take some time and investigation before your business is scalable.

Growth Mindset & Affiliate Marketing

There’s various affiliate marketing business models you can choose from and there’s a lot to learn. Most affiliates quit, in fact 95% do. See affiliate marketing failure rate. But with the right mindset, you can turn your affiliate skills into profit. What’s good about affiliate marketing is that once you’ve learned the skills, you can sell pretty much anything anywhere. Since affiliate marketing is a global business model, you can join any affiliate program and sell to anyone globally.

Affiliate marketing is a skill though and one which is well worth persevering to attain. With the right growth mindset, anyone can become good at promoting affiliate products through the various marketing strategies available such as:

Blogging
PPC – pay per click marketing
Email marketing – see the power of email marketing
Social media
V’logging – video blogging
and many others – see 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Summary

Can you get rich with affiliate marketing? You can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing yes. However the top earners in affiliate marketing are in a minority. Checkout this article on affiliate marketing earning potential: How Much Does The Average Affiliate Marketer Make?

To make a lot of money with affiliate marketing, you need to be better than the average. Top affiliates can earn 6, 7 and even 8 figure incomes. But this doesn’t happen overnight of course! The scalability and potential of affiliate marketing is huge though and anyone can do it given the motivation and drive to succeed.

Access a video series here to learn more and get started.