Blogging To Earn Money

Blogging to earn money is a versatile career path if you have the endurance for it. It lets you earn from anywhere and work in a manner which suits you. But there’s a tonne of competition out there so blogging to earn money isn’t a quick fix solution. It can take months or even years before you’re earning a consistent income from blogging.

Initially you should expect too much from your blog in terms of monetisation. You’ll need traffic to your blog and in large quantities. You can monetise a blog with advertising, your own products or other people’s products (affiliate marketing). But without traffic you won’t have any visitors to purchase from you or click your ads. So getting traffic to a blog is priority number one for any blogger.

Blogging To Earn Money – Traffic

Traffic is the number one problem for most bloggers when they start out. You’ll need to get good at creating content on your blog and sharing it throughout your online presence. This can be done with the help of a number of plugins. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Plugins can also help you write your content with SEO in mind. SEO or search engine optimisation helps you tell Google search bots (and other search engines) what your content is about. The search engines will rank your content appropriately according to the content on your site. In a very competitive area, your content may not rank at all, or it may rank several pages down the search engine results pages (SERPS).

niche blogging

To get more eyes on your content, you can target the longer tail keywords which offer less SEO difficulty. This can give you an advantage in the ranking results pages because there’s lower competition for longer chain keywords than for the short tail ones with more competition. For example, if you wrote an article titled “affiliate marketing”, you would be going up against millions of other websites who target this keyword. But if you chose the keyword step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf, there’s far fewer competing websites and articles (blogs) with this content. As such, you have a greater chance of getting free traffic from the SERPS.

Blogging To Earn Money – The “Right” Traffic

Not all website traffic is equal of course and depending on how you choose to monetise your content, some will be more valuable than others. If, for example you choose to monetise a blog with affiliate products, your visitors will need to be interested in your products to make a purchase. Therefore, before creating content for your blog, you should align this content with your product, in some way. Having the wrong kind of content on your site might bring traffic to your blog, but it might not necessarily result in a sale.

blogging to earn money
Finding blog post ideas with Google’s keyword planner. See also content ideas for blogging

To give more context, let’s use the example of a review website. Before making a purchase of a particular item, it’s often useful to read a review. Reviews tell us about a product without having to buy it to find out. Perhaps we want some final information about a product before we make a buying decision. Review websites therefore are great at attracting a buying audience who wants something specific.

On the other hand, a DIY website might offer many “how to” guides which explain the process of fixing various things around the house. Someone looking at “how to fix a broken toilet” won’t have such a specific interest in a specific product they want to buy. So traffic on a DIY site may not convert into sales as well as that from a review website, for example.

Blogging To Earn Money – Target Audience

So before starting out with a blog to earn money, it can be useful to define what your site will be about. How will you monetise it and what will you write about? Having a topic you know about is really helpful because it means you can create content for a good, long time. Blogging is super competitive and there’s millions of blogs out there. To stand out, you need to be a little bit different and offer some great value on your site.

target

You simply can’t do this if you’re only half hearted about your blog. Expect to be working on your blogging for several months at least, before you start to see some traction. This of course will depend on your competition, topic, how much you can put in and your working hours. It also depends on the quality of your content and your ability to share and promote your blog posts.

Give yourself a head start by choosing a topic you’re at least interested in. There’s nothing worse than trying to write about something for months which you have a waning interest in! It soon fizzles out and you’re left with nothing!

It’s also worth defining who your target audience is. When you know who you’re writing for, you are better able to communicate with them in a meaningful way. Defining your target audience lets you get clear on your blog topic, and who you want to serve with your content and your products/service. See also target audience for affiliate marketing.

Monetising With Affiliate Products

You can monetise a blog in many ways including selling your own products, using affiliate marketing or pay per click advertising on your site. Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways you can monetise a blog because you can find products which relate closely to your topic and promote them using banners and contextual links in your copy.

You can also promote affiliate products through your email list. An email list is a good idea for bloggers as it lets you build longer term relationships with subscribers than you possible could from a website. On a website, a visitor will only hang around a few minutes. This is a very short period of time if you’re trying to sell them something.

aweber

But if you get your visitors to sign up to your list, you can communicate with them over a much longer time frame. This lets you build trust and offer more value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to trust your product recommendations and buy from you through your affiliate links. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Most bloggers will use an autoresponder and offer some freebie giveaway on their blog to build an email list of subscribers which helps them promote affiliate products and monetise their site.

A Long Term Strategy & Passive Income

The good thing about blogging is that over the longer term it can give you a passive income (see passive income affiliate marketing). Once you have put in enough work, you should see traffic coming to your site from free sources. However, this can take months or even years and there’s a lot of work to be done before this works.

To give yourself the best chance, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you’re passionate about. That way, working on your blog is a pleasure not a chore! Here’s a picture from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits which I think best explains the effort needed for making blogging profitable.

blogging to earn money

The graph shows results over time which you would expect to be linear. In fact, blogging is a very slow strategy to generate traffic which takes much longer than expected! But after some time, if you stick with it long enough, you should see the results increasing exponentially. Before this, you will put in a lot of work without seeing very much. In fact it is this time which is the most difficult because it seems very bleak! Especially if you’ve already put a huge amount of time and effort in! Stick with it and your older content will start generating views as you create and share newer content. Expect a sudden growth spurt at some stage when your traffic will suddenly “sprout”!

A Blogging Analogy

A good analogy is with the Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese Bamboo tree has several years of gestation underground before it sprouts from under the soil. If you are trying to grow the bamboo plant, and didn’t know what it was, you could easily assume that it was dead, and throw it away! This is what many bloggers do when their blogs fail to make them any money!

But after four to five years of gestation underground, the Chinese Bamboo will have a growth spurt and grow up to 90 feet in five weeks!

chinese bamboo

Knowing this, it’s definitely wise to choose a project which you will love while you’re building it. If you pick a topic you don’t know about (or care about), your blogging journey will be much more difficult! But if you choose a topic you have an interest in, your blogging journey can also help you learn and grow, so you’ll never grow tired of it!

See also choosing a niche for your blog and blog niches that make money.

Promote Affiliate Products For Free

There’s lots of ways to promote affiliate products for free. You can write content on free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. Upload videos to YouTube and TikTok and link back to affiliate products and your blog posts. You can link to your content through article marketing sites such as ezinearticles.com and through article guest posting and blog and forum commenting. All of this takes time and effort of course. But if you’re willing to put in the work, you can make affiliate sales without spending a dime!

beginners guide to affiliate marketing

If you’re willing to spend a little, it’s well worth getting your own website. Having your own domain name and hosting sets you apart a little online and gives you more control of your content. Some free blog platforms will limit the links you’re allowed to post. With your own website, you’re in charge! Plus, the search engines will give you more kudos with your own domain and hosting. So using free blog platforms means you can have a harder time getting traffic.

Your own website looks far better for your potential customers too. It shines of more authority than a free blog platform does. This can affect your sales considerably.

Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Email Marketing

You can also promote affiliate products through email marketing. Get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing by clicking on the banner below.

aweber

Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. By building an email list of subscribers, an email list can give you much more clout than a website can. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision using one of your affiliate links.

But once you get them onto your email list, this period of time is vastly extended. Often subscribers will purchase something from an email list months or even years after subscribing. With an email list you can build trust with your subscribers by giving them value in your email follow up campaigns.

When people get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you. Data shows that most customers will need several touch points before making a buying decision. Email marketing lets you do this with customers. Selling directly from a website makes it more difficult for a visitor to trust you completely, because they don’t yet know you.

Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Blogging

niche blogging

Blogging is one of the simplest and most straight forward ways to attract an audience for your affiliate products. Whether you use a free blog platform or have your own website (recommended), you can continue creating content and attract an audience from the search engines. This doesn’t happen immediately and often bloggers will find it can take several months or years before they attract free traffic in abundance.

Initially though, you can attract an audience through sharing your content on the social media platforms. There’s a number of free plugins you can use if you have your own WordPress website. This is another reason why having your own domain name and hosting is recommended for traffic. You can more easily optimise your own website, and add plugins to help you get shares. This can’t be done on free blog platforms. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Creating content which ranks on the search engines can take some time. For the fastest results, aim for the long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty. Writing content for shorter phrases which get more traffic may seem like a good idea. But those keyword phrases are hugely competitive and therefore you’re less likely to rank your content for them.

Promote Affiliate Products For Free – Social Media

Social media platforms are a good source of traffic for your affiliate products. You only need a strategy which you can get stuck into to start generating results. You don’t need hundreds of strategies, only one which works! See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube attract millions of visitors every single day. Tapping into this potential goldmine can be done with simply daily habits. A simple Facebook strategy is to join groups where you target audience might be hanging out. (See target audience for affiliate marketing.)

promote affiliate products for free

Interact with people in your selected groups and answer questions. As you do this more, people will naturally gravitate towards your profile to have a look at you. If you set up your profile to showcase your offer, those who are interested will naturally checkout your offers and services. Offer something for free, in exchange for people’s emails. That way you can collect subscribers and build an email list. Then promote your products through your list.

There’s many strategies like this one which are absolutely free to use. You just need to be a little patient and make habits out of doing the work every single day. Over time this builds up and you should see some people interacting on your website, signing up to your offer and buying your affiliate products. See also unpaid social Media marketing.

Think Outside The Box

Another simple strategy for free product promotion is to tag your affiliate link on your email signature. This may look a little spammy, so it’s worth purchasing a domain name which you can forward to your affiliate link.

So instead of a long, messy affiliate link, your link is a domain name (e.g. yourproduct.com rather than https://tinyurl.com/mnkkkk4m). When people see a messy affiliate link, they are less likely to click on it. But a clear domain name which gives more context is more likely to arouse their interest.

Once you have set your email signature to include your link once, you never need to think about it again. All outgoing emails will showcase your domain name (and/or affiliate link).

Link shortening can also be done very quickly using sites such as

  1. TinyURL
  2. ShortURL
  3. Cutt.ly
  4. Bitly
  5. Ow.ly
  6. Buff.ly

See also where to promote affiliate links and low cost advertising techniques.

Customer Avatar Worksheet PDF

Use this customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you define who your “perfect” customer is.

Your customer “avatar” is your ideal customer. That is, someone who will love you and your products/services and become a life long fan. You can get an idea of who this type of person is by looking at your existing customers. What do they have in common? Chances are good that there is a thread running through many of your customers. Perhaps they are of similar age, or they have certain beliefs. Depending on your product or service, you can find common threads connecting your customers which include things such as:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Interests
  • Hobbies
  • Marital status
  • Income bracket
  • Information sources
  • Job title
  • Level of education
  • etc.

Customer Avatar Worksheet PDF

But suppose you don’t have any customers yet? You can work on defining your customer avatar using the customer avatar worksheet pdf. The worksheet below will give you some ideas of what to think of when defining how to approach your potential customers through your marketing methods. It can be very easy to get caught up in focusing on your product or serviceWHAT you’re selling.

customer avatar worksheet pdf

But this can be a huge mistake. Even with the best product in the world, you’re not going to sell anything if you put your marketing message in front of the wrong people. This is why WHO you are selling to is so important and often overlooked by marketers.

To learn more about your perfect customer, it’s important to do some research. Without actual data, some of your information might only be guess work! Still, the more you learn about who would be the best fit for your products and who they would serve the most, the more you can understand them, and find them with your marketing.

Using the form below, fill out as much as you can about your perfect customer avatar. What are their goals and ambitions? What holds them where they are and what challenges do they face in their daily lives?

Customer Avatar Worksheet PDF

Goals & Values:

Goals:

Values:

Your typical customer will have goals and values which are aligned with your products in some way. Try and think of goals and values which your products can help with. How does your service tie in with this? What do you offer which meets their needs?

Challenges & Pain Points:

Challenges:

Pain Points:

When you can understand the challenges and pain points of your avatar, you can tailor your marketing messages to speak directly to their needs. No body wants to buy a product unless it offers a solution to a problem. By addressing their problem and presenting the product as a solution, you can meet their needs. This is much more powerful than simply showcasing your product, whatever it is.

Sources Of Information:

Books:

Magazines:

Blogs/Websites:

Gurus:

Other:

Use this section to define your target avatar carefully by finding things they would know about, but other people would not. For example, avoid Gurus who are well known, because everyone would know about them, therefore, you’ll pay more for your marketing and include a broader audience. This idea here is to narrow your audience down and get specific.

Objections (To The Sale/Product) & Role In Purchase Process:

Objections to the sale:

Role in the purchase process:

This is an important section because you can talk directly to these objections in your marketing messages. When you address them in emails and sales copy, you’ll answer questions which your avatar has, and which would otherwise stop them making a purchase, or signing up to your email list.

Other Demographics:

Age:

Gender:

Age Of Children:

Location:

Level Of Education:

Occupation:

Job Title:

Annual Income:

Favourite Saying/Quote:

Other:

Getting to know your avatar more personally through this section will help you understand them better. This can help when writing emails and sales copy, for example. You’re more likely to resonate with someone through your marketing messages when you have spent the time getting to know who they really are.

Customer Avatar Worksheet – Collecting Data

To know your customer avatar well, it’s important to actually do some research. Talk to existing customers and ask them what led them to you. Get to know and understand them, and they will help you get clearer on their pains and problems which your product helped them with.

If you don’t have existing customers, don’t be afraid to draft a customer avatar anyway. You can always change it later on as you get to know your best customers further down the line. By going through this process time and time again, you’ll get more familiar with what drives your customers and the type of person your products and services are a good fit for.

When you don’t understand your perfect customer avatar, you can easily fall into the trap of focusing on the product you sell instead. This is a mistake though, especially in affiliate marketing. With affiliate products you have a global audience to put your products in front of. Most of this audience won’t have any interest in your product because they don’t fit the mould of your customer avatar.

By getting very clear on who you are marketing to, you can also better understand how to communicate the value of what you are selling.

See also target audience for affiliate marketing.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

The easiest way to promote affiliate links effectively is through an email list. With an email list, you can automatically follow up with your subscribers, sending them regular messages after they have signed up to your list. This is one of the best ways to promote your links for a number of reasons:

  • You can build a longer term relationship with people through a list, whereas on a website you only have a small time “window” to sell and one touch point.
  • A list can be built in multiple ways: with content marketing and paid strategies
  • You can connect with your subscribers multiple times. Data shows customers need multiple “touch points” before they will buy something.
  • People can buy from you long after they signed up, months or even years later.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links – Get An Autoresponder

You can access an autoresponder for free through the banner below:

aweber

Once inside the software you can start creating opt in forms which you can use with a website or landing page. Opt in forms allows you to offer something of value to your website visitors in exchange for their email details.

You can also use a landing page software to create specific landing pages which give your visitors less choice than a website. This forces them to make a decision: sign up or leave the page. On a website, they can browse around and look at your content. But on a landing page, you have a more specific intention for your visitors: to encourage them to sign up to your email list.

Here’s an example of a landing page (see below). As you can see, there’s only a small amount of information on the page, and only two options: sign up or leave. (Click image to view landing page).

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Once you have set up a landing page, you can use it forever. You can also set up a number of automated follow up emails which offer your subscribers information and link to your affiliate products.

Once you have done this step, it’s time to choose a promotion method where you can drive traffic to your landing page. This blog, for example, is used to drive traffic to my various landing pages and put more and more subscribers on my email list. You can use content marketing (e.g. blogging or v’logging), or you can drive traffic with paid marketing.

Paid marketing is far quicker and easier to do than content marketing. Depending on your particular topic, content marketing can be time consuming and it’s a slow process. It can take many months before you have constant traffic flowing through your landing pages. But with paid marketing, you can get traffic much more quickly.

Paid marketing platforms such as Google Ads (Adwords), Facebook and YouTube offer some of the best targeting options – see target audience for affiliate marketing. Getting good at targeting means you are finding the right kind of audience who are the most suitable for your product/service.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links: Paid Ads

With paid ads, you’ll also need to set up a compliant landing page which is in agreement with the terms and conditions of your particular advertising platform. This might mean using disclaimers on your landing page and being in compliance with GDPR (general data protection regulation), as well as having things like privacy policy on your site.

Check with your individual marketing platform for compliance before launching any campaign.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

Paid ads are the best form of marketing when sending traffic to your landing pages for a number of reasons:

  • You can easily set up a campaign and learn from it very quickly
  • If it works, you can keep it going, if not, you can easily shut it down and try another strategy
  • You can target a specific group of people who are most likely to show an interest in your giveaway product and affiliate products/service.
  • It’s very scalable – if a campaign works well, you can scale up to an ever larger audience.

With content marketing, it’s very slow. You need to create multiple pieces of content and market them. Over time, your content will gain some traction, but it’s much slower initially and much more difficult to scale than paid advertising. It also takes a lot more effort than running a paid ad.

Landing Page Software

You can access landing page software with products such as Convertree and LeadPages. These softwares make it easy to build custom made landing pages according to your needs. You can also use the software to compare landing pages with each other – this is called cross testing. Cross testing is used by affiliate marketers to compare different pages and see which ones convert into leads and sales the best.

If you’re going down this route it’s well worth doing this, and comparing large volumes of traffic across two different pages to see which performs the best. Once you have done this across a number of visitors, you’ll get a picture of which pages are best according to your target audience.

You can also access landing page software through this all in one business system and online training resource.

Easiest Way To Promote Affiliate Links

The Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is something which you can offer to your landing page visitors in exchange for their email address. This should be something of value which ties in with your affiliate products.

For example, one of my lead magnets is an ebook on affiliate marketing. I follow up in my emails with affiliate tools and resources which have helped me as an affiliate. If my subscribers buy something through my affiliate link, I earn commissions based on what they purchase.

beginners

See also lead magnet examples and ebook lead magnet.

Multiple Sources Of Traffic

The good thing about creating landing pages is that once you have created them, you can use them forever. Simply direct traffic to them from a blog, or a vide you have uploaded. You can also place ebook pictures throughout your text which lead people back to your landing pages.

Over time, you content (and paid ads if you choose to use them) will compound and you should see more and more traffic finding their way to your lead capture pages.

This can happen very quickly with a large marketing budget, or over a longer period of time with free marketing strategies. Or, use a combination of both depending on your individual situation to suit.

niche blogging

Best Products To Sell As An Affiliate

What are the best products to sell as an affiliate? There’s millions of products to choose from, so how do affiliates pick their products?

As an affiliate you can sell almost anything online. From physical products that you’d find on eBay and Amazon, to digital products and software products which help online business owners build their businesses. But which are the best? To answer this properly, we also need to look at the methods of promotion you’re going to use as an affiliate.

If you’re yet to start out, you can choose almost anything. But if you’re attempting to be a blogger, for example, your niche is pretty important. Some topics are far more competitive than others. If you decide to promote something from a blog in a competitive niche, you could be at it for years before getting anywhere. On the other hand, if you’re interested in a very untapped niche, you can make headway much more quickly.

The same goes for if you’re building a YouTube channel. If you’re using paid marketing, it’s a different story. You’ll need a good product range to make it worthwhile and to more easily recoup your marketing budget; a high ticket business model, for example.

Best Products To Sell As An Affiliate – Digital Vs. Physical

Digital products tend to pay more than physical products; but can be harder to sell. The typical physical product you would find on Amazon pays from 3%-10% commission. On the other hand, digital products will pay from 20%-40% commission and sometimes more.

Best Products To Sell As An Affiliate

Physical products though as fairly easy to sell if you can attract an audience. There’s not much explanation needed to sell a camera, for example. To sell a training course though, can be a lot more difficult. It’s much more arbitrary, for starters, and conveying the value of a training course can be more arduous than showing a picture of a camera, for example!

Digital products do sell well though, particularly those which offer huge value, such as online business training courses. In addition, you can also earn recurring income from selling digital products, which you can’t with physical products. Recurring income affiliate programs offer the ability to build income streams from each and every sale, which builds up more quickly into a good income. With physical products, you need to continue selling multiple items to make the same amount of commission as with only a few recurring income products.

aweber - email marketing autoresponder

Certain business software products are good for affiliates to promote because they’re needed for businesses to run. So when a business becomes successful, the customer will more than likely maintain their membership for life! This means affiliate commissions for life, if you have referred that product.

Best Products To Sell As An Affiliate – High Ticket Products

High ticket products have a larger than average price and therefore offer a larger than average commission when you make a sale. This means you can sell far fewer of a high ticket item to make the same amount as selling thousands of a low value product.

high ticket

High ticket items can be digital or physical products and are generally pretty expensive compared to the basic level product you would find on Amazon, for example.

Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product you can find on a site called Hammacher Schlemmer.

Best Products To Sell As An Affiliate
Hammacher Schlemmer pays 8% commission to affiliates so you would make $31,600 if you could sell this item through your affiliate link

Your Niche & Product Choice

If you already have a website or blog, and it covers a specific topic, you would be wise to offer something for sale which suits your particular audience. Trying to sell kitchen furniture on a mobile phone information website, for example, won’t lead to many sales. Your audience won’t fit your product, in this scenario.

Likewise if you’re starting out as a blogger, it’s wise to choose a topic which you have an interest or passion in. Otherwise, you’ll quickly run out of enthusiasm and stop generating content. Many coaches say to choose a topic which you love. That way, you can continue writing and creating content in your niche for a good, long time. But you also need to choose a topic which can be monetised. Otherwise all your hard work will be for nothing!

Balancing these two things can be tricky, but it’s worth choosing a topic (and product) which you can really get behind. If you don’t believe in your topic, or product, it will come across in your marketing and this will reflect in your sales, or lack of them!

See also target audience for affiliate marketing.

There’s various ways to promote affiliate products and your marketing methods will likely reflect the products you choose to sell. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Ideally choose a product you would buy yourself. Promoting products you actually like yourself means you’re being very genuine and congruent in your marketing. Whereas if you promote products only because of the commissions they offer, your intentions can come across in your marketing; that you’re not actually bothered about the product at all!

Summary

You might think that the best affiliate products to sell pay you the most in commissions, or pay recurring commissions. Those kinds of products will certainly give you more for your efforts. But you also need to choose products which you believe in and within a niche in which you’re prepared to work in for some time.

Making your first sale online is much easier if you’ve chosen a topic in which you have a passion for. You will definitely be able to work for longer without the reassurance of having made the sale in such a niche.

Since 95% of affiliates quit, it’s worth thinking carefully about the products you choose and the marketing strategy you’re going to use.

Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing

What is the target audience for affiliate marketing? Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products online for a revenue share. It’s important for affiliates to specify their target audience because that is the group (or groups) of people who are most likely to convert into paying customers. Not everyone will buy your affiliate product. So sending random website visitors to a website won’t necessarily mean you’ll make sales.

But if you get specific about who you send to your website, you can attract more sales for less.

target audience for affiliate marketing

Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Defining Your Target Audience

Depending on your particular product, you’ll want to attract a certain type of person. For example, DIY enthusiasts might be over a certain age. Of course there’s DIY enthusiasts of all ages, but most of them are likely to fall into a certain age bracket. So by targeting those over the age of, say 30, with your advertising, you’ll attract a larger percentage of buying customers than if you targeted people randomly.

DIY enthusiasts might also be home owners, too. So in your advertising, you can show your adverts to people who fit that criteria. If you own a locally based DIY store, you’ll also want to limit your advertising to people in your local area.

target audience for affiliate marketing

Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of your budget advertising to people who aren’t prepared to travel to visit your shop! Since online advertising is global, you’ll definitely want to limit your advert to a local search if you have a physically based business. Otherwise you’ll spend a tonne of your marketing budget on global traffic who will never convert into customers.

So with this example, you can see how you can define a few criteria for your target audience by:

  • Age – over 30’s, for example
  • Whether they own a house. or not
  • Their location – they must be local

By getting to know your perfect customer better, you can more easily target people like them with your advertising, saving you money and bringing in more paying customers for every dollar/pound you spend.

Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing

For affiliates, the location criteria is not always relevant because affiliates will generally sell world-wide. But with a world wide audience, you can easily spend a lot of money without making a sale; or create a lot of content and spend a lot of time! So it pays to get to know your customer better. If you have existing customers already, look to them for your market research. The more you can learn about them, the easier it is to see patterns emerging which you can use in your advertising and marketing.

Advertising platforms such as Facebook, Adwords and YouTube allow marketers to get super targeted with their advertising. They can specify, to a very minute degree, who they want to show their advertising to. Here’s a few of the criteria you can use in targeting your customer “avatar” – the perfect customer:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Interests
  • Books they like
  • Films they like
  • What they read
  • Who they follow
  • Their sex
  • Their income
  • The websites they visit
  • keyword searches
  • Videos they are watching
  • Topics they are interested in
affiliate marketing for beginners

So if you’re an affiliate for a Yoga course, for example, you can target your advertising towards people who would most likely purchase your course. They might already be searching for the term Yoga, or they might also be looking for diet and exercise programs. It’s also likely they fit into a certain age bracket too.

It can take some time and dedication to learn about your perfect customer “avatar”. You can also start out with broader advertising criteria, and learn from the data you collect. As you learn more, and certain people buy your products, you can get more focused in on the type of people who are most likely to buy.

Speaking To Your Customer Avatar

Many marketers make the mistake of creating a very generic advert and put in in front of everyone. But there’s a saying in marketing “try selling to everyone and you sell to no one”. If your marketing message is very generic, it doesn’t make anyone connect to it, because it doesn’t speak to their needs.

When you understand your perfect customer, and the needs they have, you can talk to those needs in your marketing message. This can be very powerful when put in front of the right people because you’re identifying them more personally and you know what drives them.

So for example, if you’re selling a Yoga course, you might identify a specific need which your course fulfils such as weight loss. By talking to those people who are struggling with weight loss, you are better able to connect their needs and desires with your product – a Yoga course.

Many potential customers might not necessarily be looking for your product, because they might not yet be solution orientated. They might have a strong desire to change though, and have a huge problem. By talking into this problem in your marketing message, you can more easily convey the value of your product to your audience.

If you only talk about your product, for example, this is more of a generic message and it doesn’t connect the problem (pain) with the solution (your product).

Define Your Customer Avatar

So it’s worth spending some time defining your customer avatar if you’re an affiliate. It can save you a heap of time and/or budget in your marketing message. Knowing your perfect customer means you can target them in your advertising, and communicate more personally to them in your marketing.

Without knowing your perfect customer “type”, you’re more likely to spend money on the wrong audience and attract people who aren’t buyers. You can even create a tonne of content which attracts the wrong kind of website visitor, too!

See also how to know your target market and why is target market important.

Increase Website Hits

There’s a few ways you can increase website hits. You can create more content, share it more frequently, build back links to it and promote it via paid advertising. You can also create content which offers less SEO competition than the more competitive keywords. This can be done by targeting the “low hanging fruit”; the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

There’s several plugins you can use too to help you increase the visibility of your website. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Here’s a few ideas of plugins you can use:

  • Yoast SEO – helps you optimise content for the search engines
  • Social media share plugins – lets your visitors share your content more easily
  • Revive Old Posts – lets you automatically syndicate content to social media
  • Push Engage – lets you alert previous visitors to your new content

You can also auto post your content on social media from WordPress using software, and automate this process.

Increase Website Hits – Your Content

Your content is of course the most precious thing you have. Good content will help you get shares, likes and return visitors. Google (and other search engines) will rank you better if your content is good, and if your social profile shows this. As more people share and like your content, and spend time on your site absorbing it, the search engines will use this as an indicator to judge your website.

niche blogging for profit

If people click away, don’t share and don’t link to your content, this too will be used to indicate the value of your site. So content is king! Without great content, your site will struggle to get more visitors. Even if you spend a lot of time promoting your content, the social media signals (and social interaction) don’t lie!

Even though content is king, you should spend an equal amount of time in the promotion of your content as the creation of it. Most of your content won’t go viral! So you’ll need to promote it heavily just to get eyes on it.

Increase Website Hits – Promote Content

To promote your content you can do a lot of different things:

  • Autopost on social media – see this article
  • Use PPC (pay per click) advertising
  • Use press releases
  • Link build with forum commenting or blog commenting
  • Link build through article guest post writing
  • Backlink from article marketing sites: e.g. ezinearticles.com
  • Upload videos and other content to sites outside your own e.g. YouTube, TikTok
  • Use article writing sites: Medium, Hubpages, etc.
increase website hits

Content promotion is easier if you have a large budget and can afford to pay for marketing. If not, you’ll need to build back links and other content pointing people back to your content. Link building has a two-fold benefit in that it improves your SEO (search engines optimisation) and brings in visitors directly from the sites you link from.

The Right Traffic

Of course website hits is only part of the story. Most website owners want more hits because they are monetising their website. No hits equals no income from your website. However, depending on how you monetise your site, you may need a certain type of visitor. Especially if you’re monetising with affiliate products and services. Not all visitors are buyer visitors. In fact most of them won’t be. So it’s worth considering the type of visitor you’re attracting with your content. For example, if your content explains free traffic strategies, you’ll likely be attracting the type of visitor who isn’t looking to buy. They’re looking for something for free!

Conversely, if you write product reviews on your website, you’ll be attracting people who are looking to buy a certain product. Comparing the two different pieces of content, which do you think will sell more products? Of course it’s the product review.

So it’s worth considering the content you’re writing before you start generating it. Creating content is time consuming and labour intensive. Imagine working for several months only to realise afterwards that you’ve attracted the wrong audience for your products. See also how to know your target market.

Traffic Into Sales

Turning traffic into sales can be done much more effectively if you get them to subscribe to your email list. If you don’t already have an autoresponder, you can get one for free here.

On a website, a visitor will generally only hang around for a few minutes if you’re lucky. To get their attention, offer something of huge value that they can access by giving you their email address.

increase website hits

Once on your email list, you can follow up with them over a long time span. Often people who join my email list will purchase something months or even years after joining it. If I only sold directly from my website, I would miss out on all these opportunities to monetise my website.

Using Long Tail Keywords

Many bloggers find long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty in the SERPS – search engine results pages. You can do some keyword research using Google’s keyword planner. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, look for the keywords which offer less monthly views and which ave three or more keywords. Then compare the keywords with others with a quick Google search.

By targeting the longer tail keywords, you can more easily rank your content in the search engines. It’s much easier to rank an article for three or more keywords, for example, than only two. Since those keywords are hugely competitive.

For more on this topic see also how to increase website traffic organically.

How To Increase Affiliate Sales

If you’re wondering how to increase affiliate sales, you’re not alone. Making sales as an affiliate is the main goal of affiliate marketing. Without sales, an affiliate business can’t make any money.

There’s many ways to make sales as an affiliate and to increase your sales will depend on the tactics and strategies you’re already using. If you’re yet to make a sale as an affiliate, it shows that the strategies you’re using aren’t working, or at that they aren’t working yet! For more strategies checkout my article covering 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

how to increase affiliate sales

Certain tactics will bear fruit far faster than others so being patient as an affiliate is an important aspect of the business, especially if you’re a content creator. Bloggers can spend months or even years creating content before they see the fruits of their labours. Whereas, those affiliates with a big marketing budget can supercharge their business much more quickly.

A small email list of a few hundred subscribers will reflect a small amount of sales if any. Whereas a list of tens of thousands of subscribers should be bringing in a lot more sales. Likewise with your other marketing efforts. Are you expecting too much from too little effort? Have you created enough content to see the kinds of results you really want? Is your marketing budget realistic considering the niche you’re in?

These are important questions for affiliates to consider to help them grow and focus on the activities which matter the most.

How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Customer Avatar

To make sales as an affiliate you need to put your marketing message (and affiliate link) in front of buying customers. Or, take a “cold” audience and warm them up to make the sales through a marketing campaign. This can be done through several different marketing strategies.

Before you do anything as an affiliate it’s worth getting to know who you can serve the best with the products you’ve chosen to promote. Unless you can match your audience with an appropriate product, no amount of advertising will give you any sales anyway.

aweber

You can spend years creating the content and still get it wrong! So learning about your “perfect” customer, or customer “avatar” is an important step for affiliates. When you understand the needs, pains and problems of your target audience, you’re in a much better position to communicate effectively to their needs.

To understand your customer means you know what kinds of content they are actively looking for and are therefore able to provide it; showing them products which can help them the best with whatever problem they have.

When you know your customer better than they know themselves, you’re in a great position to speak effectively to them through your marketing.

How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Get More Traffic

Of course the simplest way to increase affiliate sales is to get more customers interacting through your affiliate links. Depending on your marketing method this might mean to create more content, pay more for advertising, build a bigger email list or become more active at sharing content on social media etc.

how to increase affiliate sales

Here’s a few of the activities you can apply to get more traffic to your website:

  • Create more content
  • Use an SEO plugin to improve your SEO (search engine optimisation) score and get a higher ranking on the SERPS (search engine results page)
  • Share your content more
  • Use automatic share plugins
  • Use a social media share plugin
  • Create more backlinks to your content

Of course creating content is time consuming and slow. But you can also use paid marketing to generate fast traffic to a website or landing page. See also how to increase website traffic organically and PPC vs organic marketing.

How To Increase Affiliate Sales – Get More Conversions

Many affiliates make the mistake of endlessly creating more and more content without optimising their sales system. A small shift in your marketing efforts can reap larger rewards with less effort. For example, if you collect leads from a website, you can make sales through email marketing.

Email marketing lets you collect email subscribers from a website and turn them into customers by following up with them using an email marketing campaign. This is typically done by offering your website visitors a freebie giveaway of some kind. On my website I offer a free video series and a number of ebooks.

how to increase affiliate sales

By testing and measuring different opt in offers, you can quickly determine the best ways to turn the same number of website visitors into more subscribers. This is done by comparing different opt in offers:

  • Pop Up subscription forms
  • Drop down menus
  • Sign up forms (static)
  • Banners and images – leading visitors to a landing page

Over 1000 website visitors, for example, two different sign up offers will have a different level of interest. Even just changing a small element of your opt in form can have dramatic effect. Focus on the benefits of what you offer, rather than the features.

Focus On Money Producing Activities

Affiliates only get paid when they make sales. Therefore your time needs to be very focused on money producing activities as an affiliate. It can be easy to spend time on less important activities which don’t actually move your affiliate business forwards. This is known as being a “busy fool”. I was a busy fool for some time as an affiliate and can still waste time on less important actions which don’t help make more sales.

Depending on your marketing strategy, your best spent time could be:

  • Blogging
  • Running PPC ads
  • Creating landing pages which convert
  • Building niche websites
  • Building your email list
  • Testing different ads out
  • Cross testing opt in forms
  • Cross testing ads
  • etc

One way to help you focus on the things which matter is to rate your “to do” list in order of importance when you create it. Also operate a “won’t do” list. A “won’t do” list is anything which falls into the category of the unnecessary or unimportant. Ask yourself whether doing the task will move your business forwards. If not, if goes on the “won’t do” list.

Think Bigger & Ask Good Questions

It can be easy to forget that you have a global audience at your disposal as an affiliate. You can easily get caught up in the small actions which don’t matter and which don’t move your business forwards. Ask yourself frequently how you are holding yourself back in your affiliate business. In what ways does your thinking limit your business? What can you do to expand your thinking which will in turn grow your affiliate business faster?

We often only act from our comfort zone and operate from our current situation awareness and current resources.

how to increase affiliate sales

A good exercise to help you expand your thinking is to “zoom out” of your daily habits and visualise the future/business you want to create. Imagine living the life of your dreams and having the business you always wanted. Then “zoom” back into the moment and ask yourself whether the small daily actions you’re taking are actually taking you there.

If not, consider what actions will be necessary to take your business to the next level. These probably aren’t the ones you’re currently doing. They are probably a little uncomfortable.

Think about how you can double the number currently on your email list over the next couple of months. How can you double the opt in rate on your website and double your website traffic in the next few months?

Ask the right questions and you get better answers.

Create “Must Do” Mini Habits

As an affiliate it’s important to maintain a positive belief about your business and your ability to keep moving it forwards. A small step forwards each day for several years is better than sporadic leaps which can’t be sustained. If you’re a blogger, for example, it can take several months or years before you break through and start seeing the success you desire.

Affiliate marketing is tough and it’s easy to quit. To sustain your growth and keep moving forwards it’s useful to get into habits. Motivation is harder to sustain for the longer term than a habit.

A good mini habit will sustain your affiliate business over the longer term. Blogging, email marketing, PPC (pay per click) and various other marketing strategies can be broken into small daily achievable steps you can add to your daily “to do” list.

Over time, it becomes difficult to break a habit which has generated momentum. If you can apply this to content generation, for example, you can over time build a huge archive of content which makes affiliate sales for you, even when you are slacking off!

Tracking & Optimising

Yes tracking! Without tracking you’re blind in your affiliate business and you won’t know which sales are coming from which of your marketing tactics. Tracking is super important for affiliates because it shows them where sales comes from. This knowledge tells them where to focus their efforts.

Once you start making sales on a more regular basis, you can easily focus on the best performing marketing strategies. That’s when things can really improve because you can stop wasting time on those actions which produce the least and focus instead on the most profitable activities.

There’s many tracking options such as Google Analytics, Statcounter etc. You can also join a platform which gives you more information on your website visitors, keywords, rankings competitors etc. Software tools such as SEM Rush can help affiliates with this kind of information gathering.

How To Get More Hits On Your Website

Wondering how to get more hits on your website? Most new websites will struggle to get traffic. If your website is very new, you’re also likely to find you don’t even appear on a Google search for your own name! That can be because Google will “sandbox” new sites for a period of several months before including them in the search results. Even then, you can struggle to get traffic for a number of reasons:

  • You don’t have enough content on your site.
  • Your content isn’t optimised for search engines
  • You haven’t built enough back links to your content from authority sites in your niche
  • You’re competing in a topic which is very competitive, therefore there are many other sites offering more authority, back links and content than your own; which take the top listings
  • Search engines aren’t rating your content highly enough

You can of course run paid advertising to your content for super fast traffic. But this is costly and you need to test and measure paid advertising before you can determine profitability. This costs money and most ads won’t work in bringing in profit immediately, so it can take time to determine which ads work and which don’t; all the while you’re burning through cash! So what’s the answer? A compromise is to spend a little on paid marketing, and spend time building and optimising content. You must also promote your content as you publish it for the best effect!

How To get More Hits On Your Website – Paid Marketing

How To Get More Hits On Your Website

Paid marketing is the fastest way to get more hits on your website. Hits don’t necessarily turn into customers or profit though, so you need to be careful when approaching paid marketing. Google Ads (Adwords) is a good place to start, or Bing (Microsoft Ads) is an alternative.

With paid marketing, you can burn through your daily budget quickly, so it’s worth considering which keywords are the most valuable to you before you start your campaign. Using a generic keyword phrase can bring in thousands of visitors the same day, with a large enough budget. But often these will be browsers not buyers. Determining your customer “avatar” is an important step here. By learning more about your “perfect” customer, you can target ads more appropriately and save yourself heaps of cash. See how to know your target market.

For example, if you target a generic keyword associated with your business, it will bring traffic from anyone who types this keyword with any other keywords attached. This can be costly if they are looking for freebies, or if your business is locally based and you end up paying for global website traffic! You can eliminate these problems by adding the term “free” to a negative keyword list, and targeting your ads only to your local area respectively; if you’re based locally. Getting to know your platform can save you a heap of cash, and bring you the right customers for less.

How To Get More Hits On Your Website – Blogging

Blogging is a great cheap method of generating more website traffic. Blogging is time consuming however, and is a longer term strategy of traffic generation than paid marketing. With paid marketing you can reach a lot of people fast and scale up globally. With blogging, you can get free traffic over a longer time period and your efforts can compound over time. Initially though, results are slower with blogging than from paid advertising.

But over time, if you stick with blogging, it can give you a heap of traffic for free. So profit you generate from your previous blogging efforts is all profit, since you’re not paying for ads.

niche blogging

If you’re going down the blogging path, it’s worth making a daily routine of creating content for your website and uploading it. It’s worth getting a good SEO plugin which will help with optimising your content for the search engines. See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Blogging isn’t just about creating lots of high quality content, although that’s a good place to start. As a blogger you will also want to:

How To Get More Hits On Your Website – Quora

Quora.com is a question and answer website which offers the opportunity of sharing your content when answering questions on your topic. So it can be a good resource for traffic to your website.

To use Quora.com to get more traffic, you need to find questions on the site which you’ve already answered with your content. Then, answer the questions on Quora.com and link back to your content.

How To Get More Hits On Your Website
quora

Quora.com is aware of spamming of course so you need to be careful doing this. You can’t simply spam your links without giving some value first. So make your answers useful and informative. If you do this well, you should be allowed to paste your link to relevant content on your website. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Back Links To Your Website

Back links are another important thing you can work on to get more traffic to your website. They are doubly important because they bring people to your site through the links themselves and also they indicate to Google (and other search engines) the authority of your website. With a lot of backlinks, from reputable sources, Google will give your website a higher rating and therefore list your content higher up in the search results than others which are similar.

A natural back link profile should indicate that people are naturally linking to your website content over time. This is a clear indication to Google that your site is a valuable one.

How To Get More Hits On Your Website

Links are like “votes” indicating recommendations from others in your field of expertise. Older sites which rank well on the search engines often will have tens of thousands of back links to them from other authority websites. This can make the job of moving your website up the search listings very difficult; particularly if your site is new and in a competitive industry/niche.

Get Backlinks By…

To get back links you can:

  • Create the best content you can in your topic. The better it is, the more likely people will naturally share it and link to it
  • Offer to guest write for other websites within a similar niche to your own (look for guest blogging opportunities)
  • Comment on blogs, forums and websites which offer a comment section
  • Optimise your content so that more people see it (and can therefore link to it if they choose) – SEO
  • Share your content and promote it after publishing; which gives people more opportunity to share and link to your content
  • Ask for links directly from other website owners
  • Use SEO services to create link building services on your behalf
  • Write content on article marketing platform: e.g. Ezinearticle
  • Upload videos to YouTube and/or TikTok and link to your content via your uploads
  • Link to content via shares on social media

Content Marketing

Building content on your website is the cheapest strategy you can use to get more hits on your site. However, there’s a fair amount of work you’ll need to do to get traction using this method. It’s a long term strategy and it can take months or years to get traction, depending on your topic, and the relative competition in your field of expertise.

Be prepared to work consistently for several months and make a habit out of uploading content daily. Over time, you should see traffic slowly increasing if you put in the work. As your content grows, your traffic can compound from newer articles and the back log of older content you have created. You can also run paid advertising to give your traffic a boost alongside your blogging efforts. See also how long for a new website to get traffic, and is blogging worth it.

Hits On Your Website – Turning Hits Into Cash!

Of course it’s also worth mentioning that not all hits on your website are going to turn into sales or customers. Many of your website visitors will leave, never to return having never bought anything from you or taken any action on your website.

To make the most of your efforts, it’s worth starting out knowing about your perfect customer, or “customer Avatar”. The customer “avatar” is your perfect customer. It’s the person who loves you, what you’re doing and the products you’re promoting. They want everything you have to offer, and are prepared to pay for your services for a lifetime!

If you have existing customers, look at them to see what attributes they share. This will help you understand the demographics which best sum up your perfect customer. They might be of a certain age, live in a certain location, or have particular interests or hobbies.

Once you understand the audience you can best serve, you’re in a better position to help them with your content. Creating content which attract the wrong audience can be time consuming and wasteful. So if you’re starting out on a content generation mission, it’s best to target your content towards paying customers, rather than generic visitors. See also how to know your target market.

By writing content which attracts your perfect customer, you can shave years of a blogging campaign and achieve success more rapidly by targeting your content at the right people who have buyer intent, rather than “browser” intent.

Email Marketing

Another good way to make the most out of your marketing strategy is to use email marketing on your website. With a website, visitors only hang around for a few minutes. Most will leave never to return again! That’s a huge waste of all the work you’ll be doing to get them there! Many website owners therefore offer something of value on their website so they can capture the email addresses of their prospective customers when they come to visit.

aweber

For example, I offer a free video series on my website, and several free ebooks. When my visitors access these, I collect their emails and they join my email list. I can then follow up with an email marketing campaign which can last for months and even years!

Once you start using email marketing, it’s much easier to turn website visitors into customers because you can build a relationship with them over the longer term. See also the power of email marketing and free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing

If you’re wondering how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing, you’ve probably just started out as an affiliate. Your choice of niche is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Depending on your approach, you could be creating content on a YouTube channel, or blogging, for example. Whatever you decide to do, if you’re choosing a niche for affiliate marketing it means you’ll be creating content in that niche.

choosing a niche for affiliate marketing

Over time, as your content grows in volume, it will attract an audience which you can monetise with affiliate products. Ultimately you will want multiple sources of traffic coming to digest your content. As visitors land on your site, you can offer them value through your content, and by building an email list of subscribers. You can offer value through content and through your email list, promoting products which are of value to your visitors.

The two key elements in this business model are traffic and products. If you don’t get traffic, you don’t make any money. Mismatch your product with your visitors and you won’t make any money. If your visitors don’t want your products, or they aren’t valuable, you don’t make any money!

So the key ingredients for successfully creating a profitable affiliate business through a niche are:

  • Getting traffic – not getting traffic is often the main reason affiliates quit
  • Offering value – if your content isn’t valuable, people won’t like, share and link to it. Your online presence won’t grow.
  • Connecting people with valuable products which they want or need

How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing

Since getting people to your content is so important, it makes sense to start out looking at the content you will be creating. Your niche is important because you’ll need to be creating content for a long period of time to get traction with an affiliate business. In a competitive niche, you’ll need to do more work for the same or similar amount of traffic. But in a competitive niche it can also be easier to monetise with a greater choice of affiliate products. A less competitive niche may be easier to get traffic for, but may be harder to monetise. A unusual niche can present difficulties when looking for good products to promote from it. Therefore, even with a large volume of traffic, it can be an obstacle monetising your niche.

Ikigai

While most people will say choose a niche you love, this is only partly true. You also need to choose a niche you can monetise if you want to make any money from affiliate marketing. A good way to choose your niche is to start out with an interest you have, something you know about or something you want to learn about. You don’t need to be an expert in your niche because you can learn about it and share what you learn in your content. If you choose a niche you’re uninterested in, it is very difficult to keep up the necessary motivation to keep creating content over the longer term.

Choose a topic you have a passion, knowledge or interest in and you can keep up the work over a much longer time period. This gives you an edge over the competition.

How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing

Imagine you’re trapped in a world where every day you go to work on your blog. Each day you craft a new piece of content to publish. This task never ends! This could of course by a v’log too, (a video blog), if that’s your bag!

This pattern of working goes on for months and years!

It’s this kind of commitment and dedication which will give you an income from an affiliate niche. Unfortunately, gone are the days where you can throw up a website with little effort, and see a tonne of free traffic. It can be done, but it’s much more difficult today than it was only 10 years ago. There’s so much competition now, you need to carve out your niche by creating a lot of content. See also how to create a niche affiliate marketing website.

If you enjoy a certain topic, and are actively pursuing it with an interest (regardless of income), it could be a good match for the niche you want to choose for your affiliate business. If you’re only thinking of how much money you can make from a certain topic, and choose it on that basis, it’s much more difficult to maintain your enthusiasm over the longer term.

How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – A Word Of Warning

One of the niches I choose was mushroom harvesting! I know I know; it sounds as dull and uninteresting as it was. (Apologies to the mushroom fanatics). The reason I choose this topic was one entirely based on competition and search volume (more on this later). I knew I could rank my site on Google and get free traffic. So I built the site and dutifully started researching the topic. Several months later (and several articles later), I came to a point where I no longer cared anything for the topic. I needed to research every single blog post, which was massively time consuming and laborious.

Also, there’s only so much you can write on the subject. It’s incredibly finite! I did get traffic but later discovered that it was also a difficult topic to monetise. Just think about a product related to mushroom harvesting! I gave up on the site and it soon fell down the search rankings. Someone more relevant and inspired to create content on a non stop basis took over the top listing. My site fell away and I eventually dropped it.

It was a disappointing venture, but I had learned a lesson! Don’t choose a topic just because you think it’ll be easy!

How To Choose A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – Competition & Keyword Research

I chose the mushroom harvesting niche based on competition, not based on anything I was interested in. It was a big mistake. However, it’s also worth noting your competition when choosing a niche. If a niche is very competitive, you have a far tougher job getting eyes on your content from the search engines. Affiliate marketing, for example is a hugely competitive niche, despite being one which is easily monetised.

keyword research for affiliate

Mushroom harvesting, on the other hand, was easy to rank for, but difficult to monetise.

For this website, I chose the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors” in order to tap into a niche within a niche. The affiliate marketing niche is so competitive, I simply didn’t have much chance of ranking my website for the keywords “affiliate marketing”. But after a search for “affiliate marketing mentor” on Google’s keyword planner, I saw that there was enough monthly searches for the term, while not being too competitive in terms of competing content.

how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing

As you can see from the above images, the term “affiliate marketing mentor” gets 210 monthly searches. The phrase in a Google search shows nearly 6 and a half million competing pages. Anything less than 10 million is generally worth considering for a niche website (as my general rule of thumb). See also keyword research for niche sites.

A Niche Within A Niche – Sub Niches or Micro Niches

A sub or micro niche is a niche within a niche. Micro niches are a good idea in a saturated field because they have less competition than the main niche.

A sub niche can be a good idea particularly if you’re choosing a competitive topic. Another sub niche of affiliate marketing, for example, might be “affiliate marketing for seniors”. If you’re going into the fitness niche, you might choose something which is less mainstream than the usual “lose weight fast”, but rather aim at a specific audience such as “weight loss for over 50’s”.

If your topic is psychology, you might find a sub niche targeting a particular subset of psychology such as “mental health for seniors”, for example. See also best micro niche for blogging.

Choosing A Product To Promote

Some affiliates recommend choosing a product to promote first, before you choose your niche. If you find a product particularly helpful, you’re going to be much better at becoming an advocate for that product.

If you’re not interested in the products you promote as an affiliate, it can be so much the more difficult recommending it to your audience. In addition, your lack of interest in your products will come across in your copy or videos. So, if you’re struggling to come up with an idea for your affiliate niche, another way to approach it is to look at the different products you would like to purchase yourself!

how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing

If you choose a single product to promote, the content you provide should connect your audience to it in a congruent way. So for example if your content is about ice hockey, for example, you’ll be promoting an ice hockey related product. If your content is about camper vans, you’ll want to promote camper van accessories, (or the vans themselves) so that your audience matches your affiliate offerings.

Without a good, congruent connection between your content and your affiliate products, it’s going to be much more difficult selling products to your audience. So if you can find products and services that you can get excited about, your content generation activities will be more interesting and fruitful.

Types Of Products & Monetisation

Your choice of product to promote is another important part of building your niche. With the wrong kind of product, a product mismatched with your niche, or a product which nobody wants, even with a lot of traffic and great content, you can struggle to make money from an affiliate site.

Having a topic you love isn’t the full story with affiliate marketing because you also need to make it pay. So choosing the right affiliate products is vital if you want to make sales. You should be proud of the products you promote and have invested in them yourself. Selling products you know nothing about is much more difficult than selling products you love.

It’s also worth noting that there’s a variation in level of commission you can earn depending on the products you choose. Physical products will typically pay much less than digital products for example. Amazon pays it’s affiliates from from 3%-10% (for most if their products). See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission. Digital products on the other hand pay much more, from 30-40% in most cases.

how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing

Clickbank is widely known to be a good place for digital products, although there’s an awful lot of bad products you can find there too! See also what is better than Clickbank.

Subscription Products & Recurring Commissions

Some products offer recurring commissions and this is one of the best ways to make affiliate marketing more profitable. When you’re building a niche website (or channel), it can take some time before you get enough visitors to start making regular affiliate sales from it. But if you’re using subscription products which pay a recurring commission, each sale will add up to your monthly income.

It’s therefore easier to start generating a good amount of income from your affiliate efforts if you use subscription affiliate programs. Even if you only make $10 a month from a subscription sale, it gives you a recurring income. With the right choice of product, and by selling value driven products which satisfy a genuine need, commissions can come in for years if a customer maintains their membership of a subscription product.

High Ticket Products

High ticket products carry a larger than average price tag and therefore pay much larger than average commissions. With a good high ticket product to sell from your site, you don’t need as many sales in order to become profitable. Some high ticket products will pay out over $10,000 per sale! That’s a huge boost for any affiliate business.

high ticket

Although many will see such a product as something which will be more difficult to sell, people do buy these products. Once you have a niche which is working for you, you’ll want to make the most out of the traffic you generate. So it’s useful to think about your choice of products before you get started and choose a niche.

The work you do can be the same for a small income or a large one, depending on the products you choose to promote. If you choose a niche which is harder to monetise, and has no subscription or high ticket products available in it, it can be more difficult making it pay.

Evergreen Niches

An evergreen niche is profitable all year round. Whereas a niche which is seasonal will have spirts of interest which change over the year. My mushroom harvesting site, for example wasn’t evergreen and since September is the best time for harvesting mushrooms, it’s around this month which will see most interest in the topic!

It’s therefore worth looking for an evergreen niche which can be profitable all year round, since this decision will serve you for years to come if your site is profitable.

Here’s a few of the most popular and profitable niche topics which are evergreen :

  • Health And Fitness
  • Wealth and Money
  • Love & Relationships/Dating
  • Hobbies
  • Luxury
  • Sports
  • Pets

Researching Profitable Sites

A good research tool is to look at a site called Flippa.com. This is a site where affiliates sell their websites. You can also buy ready built affiliate websites but the site can also be used to help you research your topic.

Use the search bar at the top of the page to type in whatever topic you’re thinking of for your niche. You can see how sites make money through the various monetisation strategies available.

Summary

Hopefully you now have a better idea about how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing. You can also sell your site using Flippa.com once it’s been built. Ideally choose a topic which you can get excited by, or at least have an interest in. If you focus on something you align with, it’s so much easier to build the necessary amount of content needed to stand out in your field.

Building a niche in any field is going to take some time and hard work. This is so much harder if you choose a topic you don’t really care about.

Another way to choose your topic is through looking at the products you want to promote. Find products which you align with and they can lead you to deciding on your niche.

To learn more about the various affiliate products you can promote through a niche website, access a free video series here.