AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Automated Ecommerce Business For Sale

Are you looking for an automated ecommerce business for sale? E-commerce, electronic commerce or internet commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet. Since much of today’s trade happens on the internet, a lot of traditional businesses have suffered.

Just look at the below graph which shows the upward trend of e-commerce sales from 2000 to 2017. E-commerce is set to continue in this upward trajectory, expecting to total $5.55 trillion in 2022.

Do you want to become a part of this multi trillion dollar industry? You can. Using a simple strategy known as affiliate marketing, anyone can learn how to sell other people’s products and services online.

Automated Ecommerce Business For Sale

ecommerce sales boom graph — The global e-commerce market is expected to total **$5.55 trillion in 2022. Source: https://www.shopify.co.uk/enterprise/global-ecommerce-statistics**

Affiliates promote and sell other people products through a variety of online activities:

Blogging
Paid marketing
Email marketing
Social media platforms
Video marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation
etc.

See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Affiliates are basically “middlemen” for the sale of goods and services online. Anyone can become an affiliate but to make money doing affiliate marketing you need to put yourself between the products and the customer.

Automated E-commerce Business For Sale

To become an affiliate you can sign up to any affiliate program and start promoting your unique affiliate link. The main problem affiliates face though is making sales through their links. Skilful affiliates have learned this skill and can promote any number of products and services online. They also can do this automatically, without having to be at their computers or laptops all the time.

To automate an affiliate business you need tools and software:

Websites – which sell products and services 24 hours a day, 365 days a week
Email autoresponders – send out automated messages to subscribers, promoting affiliate products
Marketing platforms – can help affiliates reach a global audience to sell their products
Subscription affiliate products – let affiliates earn recurring income from previous sales they have generated.

Types Of E-commerce Business

Affiliate marketing isn’t the only e-commerce business you can build. There’s other models you can use which are based on e-commerce. Drop shipping is a similar business model in that you promote and sell other people’s products. Only with drop shipping you take inventory and deal with customers in a more hands on approach.

With affiliate marketing, it’s much more automated. You simply send customers directly to the products via your affiliate link. If the customer buys, your link is tracked and you earn a commission. You’re paid directly from the vendor (product owner). You don’t have to deal with customers or take payment. This is all handled by the product owner. See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.

This is why affiliate marketing is the best business model for automation and simplicity. Affiliates are basically middle men/women who refer sales. Once you learn how to promote your affiliate link, you don’t have to do anything else! When this process can be automated, you hand a hands off business model. See also hands off business ideas.

Automating Your E-commerce Business For Beginners

If you’re new to e-commerce there’s a few ways to do it. You can purchase an affiliate website outright from sites such as Flippa.com. Flippa is an auction site for online businesses and affiliate websites. You can outright buy a profitable affiliate website from the site, if you have the money. This is probably the quickest way to get yourself an autopilot money making site. Just beware and buy with caution. Websites which claim to make a lot of money also cost a lot!

Another strategy is to buy into a franchise business. A franchise business gives you tools and training to build your own online business from scratch. Plus, you can learn from coaches and mentors and learn marketing techniques to help your business grow. Selling high ticket digital products is one of the best ways to make money online. But in order to access the highest commission structures, you’ll need to invest. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this or get started here.

You can also look at drop shipping. Drop shipping requires a bit more than affiliate marketing because you’ll need a website to act as your “shop front”. You take orders from your website and then buy and send directly from the distributor to the customer. See affiliate marketing vs drop shipping and alternatives to drop shipping.

Best Affiliate Marketing/Ecommerce Business Model

I like affiliate marketing and for me it offers the simplest way to generate an income on autopilot online from e-commerce. The fastest way to use the affiliate marketing model effectively is to use a high ticket sales funnel which offers the following benefits:

A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
A range of digital products from which you can earn from globally
High ticket products which offer huge value (and huge commissions)
Subscription products which pay recurring commissions

Once you have set up your sales funnel you only need to focus on marketing. You’re effectively sending targeted customers to a ready made business model. You earn commissions based on sales generated. The fastest way to do this is through using a paid marketing platform. Ultimately you can build a globally scalable business model using this strategy. Get started here.

While most of this business is completely done for you, you’ll still need to learn marketing to send customers into your sales funnel.

As an automated ecommerce business for sale, this offers one of the best opportunities for anyone wanting to benefit from the ecommerce sales boom. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Autopilot Affiliate Website

Wouldn’t it be great owning an autopilot affiliate website? A website which generates income from selling affiliate products entirely hands free? There’s a couple of ways to do this:

Build a Google/Facebook compliant website and send paid traffic to it
Build a lot of content and generate traffic from SEO for free (search engine optimisation)

In this article I’m going to talk about these two strategies and how you can make them work for you. If you’re successful you can build an entirely automated income from the internet! Of course you can also do a combination of the two, using SEO and paid marketing.

Autopilot Affiliate Website – Products

To make your autopilot affiliate website more effective it’s useful to look at what affiliate products you’re going to sell. It’s entirely your choice which products you are going to sell as an affiliate. If you’re building content, it is probably a good idea to choose a product which lines up with your topic.

Your topic should ideally be something you’re at least interested in, even passionate about. Working on something you don’t give a s*#t about makes the job of building content very difficult! So I wouldn’t recommend it! See also best niche to blog about. I did actually do this and it turned out to be a bad idea. So I would always recommend creating content on a topic you know about, or at least have an interest in.

This topic choice may give you your product which you want to promote. Your topic should line up with your product choice. There’s no point promoting a seat belt cover on a website which talks about flower arranging! Your product needs to match your target audience. See also how to know your target audience.

Different types of affiliate products will pay different levels of commissions. So it’s useful to know which pay the best. Here’s a quick overview:

Physical products pay 3-10% commissions
Digital products pay 30-50% commissions
Subscription affiliate products will often pay recurring commissions (monthly payments from each sale)
High ticket products pay much larger commissions, most pay out over $500 for a single sale.

Of course you can sell high ticket digital products, or high ticket physical products, both of which will pay more than low value physical products. See what is high ticket affiliate marketing. The best products to choose will depend on your topic and how you’re going to promote your website.

Autopilot Affiliate Website – Organic Traffic

If you’re going the organic route to get traffic to your website, expect a longer journey before you can get enough traffic to make your site profitable. There’s a couple of things you can do to help you speed up this journey, but it will usually take several months of content building before you can reap the benefits through using SEO as your main strategy. See also how to increase organic traffic to your blog.

Build an email list – an email list lets you control your traffic which is hard earned through SEO methods. An email list will help you speed up the process. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Use subscription products – when you make an organic sale through SEO it can be after a lot of work. Subscription affiliate products, which pay recurring commissions, can help you attain more consistent income more quickly.

Building traffic organically means creating a lot of content. This takes time and you will need to consistently add new content to your website on a regular basis. Over time, your work compounds and you can find your website is generating traffic without much work. Ultimately the goal is to build a autopilot affiliate website which generates traffic, leads and sales without you lifting a finger! To get this working you’ll need a lot of targeted traffic, a good opt in offer and a product which is worth a lot to your audience. See also website conversion optimisation.

Autopilot Affiliate Website – Paid Version

To build an autopilot affiliate website through using paid traffic is a much faster way to build an affiliate income. However, you’ll need a marketing budget, a Google/Facebook compliant website (which doesn’t contravene terms and conditions of your advertising platform), and ideally a nice high ticket sales funnel to monetise with.

The last thing you need when building this out is to be hit by your advertising platform with a penalty for contravening their terms and conditions. So make sure you read them if you’re going this route. You can also join an online community through this website, who can help you set this up from scratch. Sign up to the free email video series to learn more and join.

Paid marketing is expensive, especially if you’re using platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. So to monetise effectively you’ll need a high ticket offering and subscription affiliate products. Without these it can still be done, but your margin for profit is much lower so it’s much more difficult.

Once you set up your sales funnel, you main focus is on marketing. Learning marketing can take some time in itself, so getting a simple step by step setup of your sales and marketing funnel is of huge value. You can start that process here.

Organic Version Vs. Paid Version

There’s advantages and disadvantages of each of these ways to generate an autopilot affiliate website. With SEO it can take a long time before you start to generate enough traffic to see sales coming in. But it’s a cheap way to do it. Plus with SEO you ultimately build a digital resource online which can make money for free for years to come potentially. Your efforts are compounded over time, even though in the early stages there’s not much to show.

With paid marketing you can get much faster results. Plus, once your sales funnel is profitable, you can scale up globally using the data you collect. the downside is that you’ll need a lot of marketing budget first to test your funnel and learn about it, and then to scale up and build your business.

You can of course use a combination of the two methods. Many affiliates will build an SEO blog website to slowly build their free traffic, while also building a site which is dedicated for sending paid traffic to.

According to your available time and budget, choose your promotion methods accordingly!

Summary

Building an autopilot affiliate website is a challenge, whichever way you do it. But ultimately it can give you a passive income which comes from using the systems and automation you build to help you promote and sell affiliate products online.

Using subscription products can help you speed up this process and you should also definitely use an email list which helps you control your traffic, and build relationships with your subscribers on autopilot. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing if you don’t already have an email autoresponder service. See also the power of email marketing for more on this topic.

When Did Affiliate Marketing Start?

When did affiliate marketing start? The concept of revenue sharing predates affiliate marketing and the internet. But it was 1989 when William J. Tobin set up an internet affiliate program for his business, PC Flowers & Gifts. By 1995 PC Flowers & Gifts had launched a commercial version of the website and had 2,600 affiliate marketing partners on the internet. Tobin applied for a patent on tracking and affiliate marketing on January 22, 1996. He was issued a U.S. Patent on Oct 31, 2000.

Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. In February 2000, Amazon was granted a patent on components of an affiliate program. Most people think of Amazon as the first online affiliate program and Amazon’s patent was submitted in June 1997. This predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others who were there before Amazon.

Although Amazon wasn’t the first affiliate program, it was the first one which was available to the general public. Amazon helped popularise affiliate marketing and made it become more widely known.

When Did Affiliate Marketing Start?

80% of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing models or pay per sale (PPS). (Others use cost per action or pay for traffic, rather than sales). This means that for most affiliate programs, the affiliate who refers the product gets paid a commission based on the sale. Mostly, affiliates earn money by referring customers to products online.

They don’t have to personally own anything themselves, which is one of the reasons why affiliate marketing is such a popular business model. Anyone can learn affiliate marketing from anywhere. They only need to learn how to drive traffic to any given affiliate program. All they need is a laptop and internet connection.

when did affiliate marketing start — For many, affiliate marketing is a way out of the 9 to 5 rat race!

Many affiliate programs are completely free to join too. This means almost anyone can join and promote their affiliate link for a share of revenue! So why aren’t more people becoming affiliate marketers and earning their own independent income from their laptops?

There’s a few answers to this. Many people are still unaware of the affiliate marketing business model. Even if you are aware of affiliate marketing, there’s still a lot to learn to become successful as an affiliate. As more people have taken to the internet to sell their own products, and other people’s, there has become more competition for affiliate marketers. This makes it more difficult to make a living using the affiliate model.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Here To Stay

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing business model which puts the main risk at the hands of the affiliate. If a business owns a product or service, they can offer out a percentage of revenue to the referrer for making a sale. But they only pay when a sale is made! This puts the risk firmly in the hands of the affiliates, not the business owner!

The affiliate has to figure out how to send targeted website traffic to a product and make a sale. They only get paid when a sale is made, unless they are in a CPA offer (cost per action). This makes it super cost effective to pay affiliates. Far cheaper than risking your own marketing budget is to pay an affiliate to take that risk themselves!

Affiliates too want to make independent income and this is often their driving ambition and reason for learning affiliate marketing. If an affiliate can make their living online, selling affiliate products, it means they can pretty much control their time and not work as an employee.

A recent Gallop poll showed that 85% of workers are unhappy in their work. This means there’s a huge market for affiliate marketers. There’s a never ending surplus of people wanting to quit their jobs, or who are looking for an extra income. Plus many jobs are being replaced by automation in almost every sector of society. So more affiliates are bound to enter the marketplace. The rate of e-commerce sales is booming. This means many high street stores will continue to close, leaving people without employment.

What It Takes To Be Successful?

To become successful as an affiliate takes more than most people can achieve. In fact, 95% of affiliates will quit. See affiliate marketing failure rate. Perhaps the huge competition explains this is part. But it can also be explained by the ease of entry to affiliate marketing. Most businesses will require a huge financial investment in order to get started.

For a physical “bricks and mortar” business, you need business premises, staff, equipment, permits etc. There’s a large start up cost involved. But with affiliate marketing you only need a laptop and internet connection. Most people have these!

To become successful as an affiliate means you need to learn how to sell affiliate products. It’s easy to join a program and get an affiliate link. What isn’t so easy is to learn how to put your marketing message in front of a lot of people. This can take either a lot of time, or a large investment in your marketing budget, or both! See 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some of the marketing strategies available to affiliates.

Summary

When did affiliate marketing start? Referral compensation schemes have been around long before the internet. But it was 1989 when William J. Tobin set up an internet affiliate program for his business, PC Flowers & Gifts. This is when affiliate marketing first appeared on the internet. Amazon followed shortly behind in 1996 with the first publicly accessible program which anyone could join. Since then, affiliate marketing has grown in popularity around the world and this trend is set to continue.

How Old Do You Have To Be For Affiliate Marketing?

How old do you have to be for affiliate marketing? While there is no age limit set for affiliates, many programs will require you to be 18 years old to join. Some affiliate programs allow under 18’s to join, but you may also still need a valid PAN number and a bank account to get paid. Without a valid bank account you may also be able to get paid through a credit card or Paypal account. Paypal requires you to be 18 years old to legitimately open an account and this applies to credit card companies too.

If you can, enlist the help of a parent or guardian to sort out the payment factor where needed. But many programs allow you to join them without needing to be over the age of 18. Amazon affiliates is an example, and anyone can join regardless of age (*at time of writing).

How Old Do You Have To Be For Affiliate Marketing?

The good news is that you can start learning affiliate skills regardless of your age. It can take some time to build up an affiliate business to be profitable. So, if you’re under 18 and already looking at affiliate marketing as an option, time is definitely on your side!

There’s many successful affiliates who are teens, so it shows it can be done. Teens are often well ahead as affiliates because they know how to communicate online. Those who have built huge followings through TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms are best placed to be successful with affiliate marketing. Influencers with large followings are those who become successful affiliates.

Do I need a following for affiliate marketing? You don’t have to start out with a following to become successful as an affiliate. Anyone can learn and more and more people are becoming affiliate marketers.

Successful affiliates have learned how to connect with people and direct them to products and services online to make money from referrals.

How Old Do You Have To Be For Affiliate Marketing? Platforms

Many of the online platforms which affiliates use have a limited age restriction. YouTube, for example requires you to only be 13 years old for an account. Blogger.com has the same age limit for access to their free blog platform. Hubpages.com is the same. Its age limit is 13 years old for users of the site. The same is true of Facebook and Instagram.

blogger - free blog platform — Blogger.com is a free blog platform used by affiliates to promote their products and services.

Joining a platform and creating content is something which teens will often do, regardless of whether they become affiliates or not! Becoming an affiliate can be a natural progression from having already created an online presence. If you’re struggling to join certain programs because of an age restriction, or if your payment setup is a problem, consider building your online presence instead.

The main problem for affiliates is often traffic. But to make sales online you need visitors/traffic. Without traffic affiliates don’t make any money. It’s the most important ingredient in affiliate marketing. Since most online publisher platforms are easily accessible to anyone, regardless of age, it’s a good place to start. YouTube, TikTok, Blogger.com, Hubpages.com are all accessible to anyone over 13.

Choosing A Niche

If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may not yet have heard the idea of choosing a niche? A niche is simply a specific topic in which you will be creating most of your content. It’s important to find a niche you can focus on because your content will be driving traffic. If that traffic is focused and specific, you can more easily monetise it with specific affiliate products. If you wander around from one topic to another, it can be difficult to define your audience and therefore monetise it with appropriate products.

Your niche is an important part of becoming an affiliate marketer. Affiliates promote other people’s products to earn commissions based on product referrals. Without a specific focus, it’s easy to fail as an affiliate because it is harder to channel your content towards a specific product.

Getting clear on your niche as an affiliate is worth taking some time over. Top affiliates have a clearly specified purpose and “mission”. This is all the more powerful if you can find a purpose within your affiliate marketing business. A deeper reason and purpose behind what you do will mean:

You’ll stay driven and purposeful for longer – giving yourself a better chance of success
You are able to influence more people if you’re inspired, and therefore inspiring.
You can enjoy the process while you develop yourself and your content.

If you hate every minute of your affiliate journey, chances are good that you’ll drop out before things start happening for you! If you are aligned with a deeper purpose and mission, you’re much more likely to stay the course and create success.

Summary

Anyone can become an affiliate marketer whatever their age; although certain programs will require you to be 18 years as a minimum. You also will need to arrange payment too. This might be a barrier if you’re unable to accept certain payment methods. Paypal, for example requires a minimum age limit of 18 to use the platform; and this payment method is used by certain programs. Ideally find someone over 18 who can help you with the payment setup, which may require a credit card or bank account.

Amazon lets anyone join their program regardless of age. However, you still need to set up a payment method via bank account.

In terms of affiliate activities, regardless of whether you join a program, you can still learn the skills required for affiliate marketing. Affiliates use various platforms to build content such as:

TikTok
YouTube
Blogger.com
Hubpages.com
Facebook
Instagram
etc.

These platforms require only that you are 13 years of age to join. Join a platform and start creating content to build views. The traffic you generate can be used to sell your affiliate products; even if it’s at a later date. Paid for platforms such as Google Ads have an age limit of 18, so they may be harder to access if you’re under this age.

Is Clickbank A Scam?

Many new affiliates start out on Clickbank and so will be asking is Clickbank a scam? Clickbank is a legitimate marketplace and not a scam! You can find a huge selection of digital products to promote on Clickbank in order to earn commissions on their sale.

ClickBank is a subsidiary of Keynetics Inc. and was founded in San Diego, California in 1998 by Tim and Eileen Barber. In 2011, the site had attracted over 1,500,000 affiliate marketers, approximately 100,000 of whom were designated as ‘active’ at any given time.

However, many of the products you can find on Clickbank.com are of low quality. Promoting those products may not lead you to the success you desire because some of them don’t sell particularly well.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’ll have a lot of challenges. If you go into affiliate marketing without a clear idea of what you’re doing, like many affiliates, the chances of success are vastly reduced. Many affiliates will of course fail, since affiliate marketing is a performance based business. See affiliate marketing failure rate. If you also choose products to promote which don’t sell that well, even when your marketing is good, the outcome can be disappointing!

So the key is to get support and training and choose products which are already selling well. You can determine whether a Clickbank product sells well by looking at the product’s “gravity”. A high gravity shows the product is selling well, whereas a low score for gravity shows a product isn’t selling. See also how does Clickbank work.

Is Clickbank A Scam? Products To Choose On Clickbank

Choosing a product to promote on Clickbank can be tricky. Too high a gravity and it means there’s many other affiliates out there promoting that product already. This means there’s potentially a lot of competition for it. Your promotion method will have a factor in your success here of course. But if you’re trying to get free traffic, you’ll need to look out for competitors, especially if you plan on ranking a affiliate website, for example.

Too low a gravity means the product isn’t selling at all. In general it’s a good idea to choose a product who’s gravity lies between 20 and 100. This shows the product does actually sell, but you also need to be mindful of the competition. A gravity of over 100 typically means there’s a lot of affiliate promoting it, and this means lots more competition.

It’s a good idea to choose products which offer recurring commissions since this means you can start earning consistent income more quickly with your efforts. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer ongoing commissions for previous sales and typically are software or membership type products. To find them on Clickbank, head to a site called CBEngine.com and scroll down the page until you find CB Recurring. You’ll also see tabs for CB Top Gravity, CB Reviews and CB Best gains, which are worth a look.

Scepticism & Affiliate Marketing

There’s a lot of scepticism with sites like Clickbank because many people don’t understand the basic business premise on which it is based. Clickbank is a “middleman” which effectively connects “vendors” or product owners, with “affiliates” who promote the products for a commission based on their sales. It can be easy to think the business model of affiliate marketing is some kind of scam. You can work really hard at it too, without ever seeing any results in terms of income. That’s because affiliate marketing is hard! It’s definitely not an easy way to earn a living, but many people do.

As a beginner affiliate I struggled for some time before even making my first sale. I thought affiliate marketing must be a scam too, until I was able to earn from it. The main problem with this scepticism is that it doesn’t lead you to the right actions if you want to build an income from it! If you’re harbouring fear and scepticism, how long do you think you’ll keep working on a business you don’t believe in? Not long right?!

But once you can leave fear and doubt behind, and find a good way to promote affiliate products online, you can build more trust in it, and this leads to bigger actions steps. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Before this can happen, it’s typical to go through a difficult phase of learning and failing with affiliate marketing. But if you think of “failing” as part of the learning curve, you’ll keep going long enough to succeed. See also super affiliate mindset and the psychology of affiliate marketing.

Summary

Clickbank isn’t a scam, no. It’s a legitimate marketplace where you can find hundreds of digital products to promote as an affiliate marketer. If you have a digital product of your own to sell, it can also offer a great place to list your product to get affiliates to promote it in a very cost effective way. Since affiliates only get paid when they sell, for vendors (product owners), this takes the risk out of doing your own marketing.

For affiliates, affiliate marketing gives the an opportunity to build an income which is independent of a job, and to become entrepreneurial. This is why affiliate marketing has become so popular. But that popularity doesn’t make it any easier. In fact the opposite is true. More affiliates means more competition. most affiliates will drop out and only something like 5% of them actually keep going and make it their living. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Increase SEO Traffic

Want to increase your SEO traffic? SEO, or search engine optimisation, is used to increase your website’s visibility on the search engines results pages (SERPS). Everyone with a website will most likely have heard of this if they intend to get free traffic from the search engines.

Getting SEO traffic isn’t always straight forward. Whether you can find free traffic from the search results depends on your particular niche/topic and the relative competition in your area.

In a competitive niche, it can be difficult to compete for traffic; especially when targeting competitive terms. A way round this issue is to look for and create content for longer tail keywords which offer less competition on the SERPS. To find low competition keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can start by using Google’s keyword planner.

Increase SEO Traffic – Keyword Research

The first step in increasing your SEO traffic is to create content. Since the search engines give you traffic only when you have earned it through content generation. Competitive terms have hundreds of thousands of competing websites vying for their attention. Terms like “affiliate marketing” for example are so competitive that you have little chance of ranking for them on the first page of Google.

But a term such as affiliate marketing mentors gives you more chance because there’s less competing websites using those three terms. Generally the more words you add to your term, the less competition you’ll find on the search results.

To find longer tail keywords you can start by typing your main “seed” keyword into Google’s keyword planner. You can also type them into Google and see what Google “autosuggest” comes up with.

Increase SEO Traffic – Compare Your Chosen Keywords on Google

Once you find a good long tail keyword, you can head over to Google and type it into a normal Google search. You’ll see a number beneath the search bar which shows the number of competing websites for the search term. Generally the fewer competing websites the better it is for your chances of ranking it. Then do a phrase match of the same keyword by putting your keyword in quotes “like this”. Look for the number which comes up under your search bar. Less than 40,000 is a good benchmark to look for.

So let’s use an example from the Google autosuggest image above: affiliate marketing training for beginners.

Here’s the image which comes up when I do a normal search for it on Google:

Then do the same search with quotes around your keyword. 90,100,000 is quite a big number. I tend to like to aim at keywords which offer 10,000,000 or less for an open search (without quotes).

With the phrase match you can see there’s very few results – only 97! So this might be a good keyword to consider creating some content around. With a newer website which has less authority, it’s going to be more difficult to rank your content than if you have a larger authority. So choose wisely. If your website is brand new, you’ll probably want to look for those keywords which offer very little competition, to give you more chance of it ranking.

Increase SEO Traffic – Content Creation

Once you have chosen your long tail keyword and done your research, it’s time to start your content. Use your keyword for your new blog post or article title. Use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO. See also best free WordPress plugins for bloggers. This will help you optimise your posts and use your keywords in the right proportions throughout your content.

It will remind you to put your keywords in your article title, image alt attributes and through your meta description, description and SEO titles etc. It will also help you get your keywords used throughout your copy in the right percentages. Too much and it will appear spammy. Too little and the search ‘bots’ will think your content isn’t relevant.

When you create content for SEO it can take some time for it to be indexed by the search engines. Google may not rank your content at all, but that’s no reason not to do it. You can get content ranked more quickly and easily with the other search engines: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.

It might take several months for content to appear, so make it worth your while and write good quality content which will stand the test of time. You can also look at the currently top ranked content which you will be competing against to give you an idea of the length of piece you need to create. Create content which is better, longer and more useful that what exists already on the top of Google to give yourself the best chance.

Share & Promote Your Content

Yes – you need to share and promote your content once published. I use a plugin which automatically syndicates content when it’s published called Revive Old Posts. You can also use this plugin to automatically share older content too through your social media profiles.

You can also use other plugins to offer social media share buttons on your site. This encourages your visitors to share and helps you gain more traction from each post you publish. See this post again for some useful plugins.

Sharing content brings people to your content as well as helping your SEO through building social media back links. You can also create back links through blog commenting or reaching out to other websites in your niche and offering to guest post. Backlinks are a major factor in ranking content but if you target longer tail keywords like suggested here, there’s less of a need to do this in bulk. Linking can be time consuming if you do it yourself. But you can also enlist the help of back linking professionals. I use this company to help with my back linking.

Summary – Content Is King

Google uses a number of factors to determine whether to rank your content. Here’s just a few:

Content – volume and quality
Backlinks – where, when and who – (a natural back link profile beats a fast spammy one!)
Visit paths and visitor time on your content
Click away rate
Social media presence and authority
Followers
Comments
Etc.

There’s hundreds of factors which the search engines use. Your content will determine a large proportion of what happens afterwards, such as natural linking which is another huge factor. Natural linking happens when other websites naturally link to your as an authoritative article. This will happen only if you have created some awesome content. Content is king, so make sure you spend some time creating the best quality content you can. It will pay you later if you do!

Website Conversion Optimisation

Website conversion optimisation is the process of optimising a website for greater numbers of leads or sales. Much of SEO – search engine optimisation is concerned with getting more traffic from the search engines. A greater part of this process involves building more content.

With more content you can attract more visitors to your website for free, through the SERPS – search engine results page. With more traffic you would expect to naturally get more leads and sales from a website. But there’s another factor in play: the rate at which your visitors convert into leads or customers.

This is dependant on more than simply traffic. Much of a website’s visitors are simply searching for information. They don’t expect to pay for that either! So over 95% of search engine traffic will be visitors searching for information. To convert this kind of traffic can be tough, or impossible. The other 5% or less may actually be searching with intent to purchase something.

This is buyer traffic. That’s the kind of traffic you want on your website. An example of buyer traffic is those visitors who are looking for reviews of a product. Reviews attract buyer traffic because a review is often the last piece of information which is searched for just before a purchasing decision is made.

So one way to increase your conversion rate on a website is to create more content which attracts buyer traffic.

Website Conversion Optimisation – “Buyer Content”

But it’s hard to get free traffic in the first place, let alone buyer traffic. How can this be done? When creating content, focus on the intention of the keyword you create it around. Ask yourself “is this keyword going to attract buyer traffic“? If so, create the content. If not, find another keyword!

Of course certain keywords are much more obviously going to attract buyers:

“Buy Pentax SLR Camera” – has the word buy in it!
“Pentax SLR Review” – has the word review in it – which often leads to sales
“How to fix a toilet seat” – has the intention of finding information, rather than buying. Although they may need to buy accessories to fix the seat!

If most of your information on your website is about “how to”, you may find it hard to convert visitors to buyers, especially if there isn’t a clear reason why someone should buy your product, or sign up to your offer!

Website Conversion Optimisation – Visitors To Leads

Whatever your amount of traffic to your website, you can increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website by creating an attractive opt in offer.

Most blogs and websites offer something of value to their visitors. Having your own subscriber benefit pop up is one way to do this. A pop-up offers a visitor an option to subscribe to your email newsletter, or list.

Pop-Ups

Your own pop up, or email opt in form should be highly benefit driven and highly visible from all pages of your website. It’s often easy to make the mistake of describing features rather than benefits when you come to do this. A “feature” of your offer might be “Access a step by step digital business system”. Although this might seem beneficial to some, for the lay person, this doesn’t look very attractive. What does that mean? Why do I need it? A host of questions arise and your visitors click away. A clear benefit driven message might read instead “Discover how to earn online in this step by step tutorial”.

The difference between your messaging can mean you convert 5% of your visitors to email subscribers rather than 3%. Out of 1000 visitors a month, that’s 50 subscribers on your email list compared with only 30 – an increase of 20 subscribers a month, just from changing your call to action on your opt in form!

The best way of knowing your best messaging is to test and measure 2 different opt in forms and compare the results over 1000 displays. Your best form will be the one with most opt ins. Then create another one and run it against the winner. Keep doing this to find your perfect opt in form which converts your visitors the most into subscribers.

Selling Through Email Marketing

Getting website visitors to opt in to your email offer is one of the best ways to make the most of your traffic. On a website, a visitor only has a short period of time (usually under 10 minutes) to make a buying decision. Most visitors will usually leave without having taken any buying action.

Online customers will in fact often need several points of content with a product or website before they decide to buy something. This is where email marketing comes in. If you’re trying to sell something directly from your website, you can increase your sales conversion rate simply by getting them to sign up to your email list. From your list you can continue to keep them informed of your products and even go into more depth about what you offer. You can also build trust and offer more value through your emails over a long period of time than you can from a website.

Often customers will purchase products from an email list, months or even years after signing up! This simply isn’t possible from a website. Most visitors will only land on a website once, and leave never to return.

There’s many ways to get visitors to convert into subscribers but you will need an email autoresponder to collect their details form your website. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Tracking & Data Use

Another aspect of website conversion optimisation is tracking and use of your data. You should always set up tracking on your website so you can see which pages lead to the most sales or conversions. Often you can spend a heap of time unnecessarily looking for more and more traffic, when you only need to get more traffic to a certain page, for example.

Tracking and data collection is the ticket to a much simpler way to optimise your website for leads and sales. When you know where your leads and sales come from, you can focus your attention on the 20% of your activities which are already producing results, rather than the 80% of activities which don’t give you the outcome you desire (see Pareto rule in business).

Of course you need date in the first place to make any marketing decision. But setting up your tracking using Google Analytics is a good place to start. You can also tag certain actions on your website such as the thank you page and the checkout cart so you can track back these actions to the pages where your visitors arrived on your site. For more on this checkout how to set up and install tag manager.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money?

How does blogging work to make money? Bloggers make money from their content usually from a couple of methods. They can partner with an advertising platform such as Adsense and make money from placing adverts on their blog. When visitors click on their ads, they earn a small percentage of the advertising revenue.

The other most often used method of monetising a blog is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing involves linking out to other people’s products and services. You can promote affiliate products directly from the text in your articles/blog posts, or use banners and images to sell other people’s products from a blog. Often, bloggers will give something away for free on their blogs too, in exchange for their visitors email address. They can then follow up with email marketing messages, promoting affiliate products.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Traffic

The main problem many bloggers face is finding enough visitors (traffic) to make their blog profitable. Depending on their niche or topic, this can take several months or even years to accomplish! Even with great content and a great product to offer their visitors, without enough visitors, it can be tough to make a blog profitable.

So the challenge for bloggers is getting their content in front of more and more people over a long period of time. This can be accomplished through first creating a lot of content in your particular niche or topic. Over time, if you’re successful, your content with gain momentum and your traffic will increase. This is accomplished by building good quality content in the first instance. Bloggers should also share and promote their content as much as possible.

If you stick at it for long enough Google, and the other search engines, will reward you with free traffic from the SERPS – the Search Engine Results Page’s. When this happens your traffic can explode and you can suddenly have a large uptick in visitors. But typically this won’t happen without a lot of content and content promotion first.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Why Bloggers Quit

If you’re intending to start a blog and earn money from it, expect to work at it for several months before you see consistent visitors coming to your website. This can be tough, especially if you are unsure of your topic. So it’s well worth taking some time and finding a blog topic you can stick with for quite some time. It’s very easy to rush in and choose a blog topic and give up on a blog when nothing happens.

Your choice should be something you can continue generating content in for a really long time. That way, your blog will continue to grow because you’ll never run out of enthusiasm for it!

This is an image from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. It’s a good book to read if you’re considering becoming a blogger. It clearly shows what he calls the “valley of disappointment” where your expectations don’t meet the reality! I think this is also a great illustration of what a blogger goes through!

Blogging for income seldom goes the way you expect. There’s so much competition on Google that it’s hard to get traffic. When it does come, it comes very slowly from blogging. But over time your work can compound and previous blogs posts will get found as you create more and more. This shows in the picture too as the “what actually happens” line gains momentum and moves up exponentially.

How Does Blogging Work To Make Money? Write About Your Passions & Interests

A simple blogging strategy is to write about things which you have an interest in. Make your blog specific to a single topic, rather than a range of things which aren’t connected. That way, you can direct your visitors to products which will be suitable for them. With a generic topic, you are less tangible for visitors, so it can be harder to monetise with affiliate marketing.

With Google’s Adsense program you can still make money regardless of your subject area, since you are placing clickable adverts on your content with this strategy. However, this can be tough because you only make tiny amounts per click. So you’ll need a huge amount of traffic to make Adsense profitable with a blog.

With affiliate marketing, you can promote high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions. This can make a blog more profitable more quickly.

Targeting Your Content To A Specific Audience

Since affiliate marketing requires you to refer customers to products online, you’ll need to match your product with your subject in order to make money from it. For example, if your blog is about car exhausts, you will need to sell something related to that on your site. People don’t buy flowers from a car exhaust website!

To find an affiliate program which is suitable for your topic, you can do a simple online search for “{your subject} affiliate program”, where {your subject} is your chosen blogging topic. You can find affiliate programs for all kinds of products, so choose a product wisely which will work well in your subject area.

Join the affiliate program and use the banners and/or links given to you to sell the products/service.

An SEO Strategy

Bloggers use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help search engines find their content and rank it in the search results. They often use plugins to help them with this so they can write more SEO friendly content. (See best free blog plugins for WordPress).

Typically the main keywords you may want to be found for as a blogger are hugely over-competitive. A two word keyword will likely have hundreds of thousands of competing websites, so it can be very difficult to rank your blog post for it. A key strategy therefore for many bloggers is to find the long tail keywords which offer less SEO competition.

This can be done using Google’s keyword planner. Type in your main keyword and look for longer phrases which come up. Compare them on Google with a simple search and a “phrase match” search (in quotation marks). Google will give you a number if using a laptop or desktop computer and this correlates to the number of competing websites for that particular keyword.

Summary

So, how does blogging work to make money? Bloggers create content on a website to attract an audience. They promote it as much as possible to get more and more visitors over time. This is done through sharing content on social media, linking to their content from other websites and platforms, paid promotion, SEO and various other methods.

Over the longer term, if they have done the right things, bloggers will see more and more traffic coming to their site for free from the search engines: Google, Bing Duckduckgo.com etc. They can monetise their blog either with their own business, or through using affiliate marketing products or an advertising platform, such as Google Adsense.

Bloggers also build email lists from their website too. This can help them build more authority with their subscribers and let them know about their affiliate products over a longer time span. From a website/blog, a visitor only has a small time to make a purchase. But on an email list this time period is extended to weeks, months and even years! See also the power of email marketing.

Is Affiliate Marketing Difficult?

Is affiliate marketing difficult? Affiliate marketing is a business model which rewards the sale of products and services online. It’s a performance based business model. This means there’s a huge potential to earn with affiliate marketing and no income cap! However, if you don’t make any sales, you don’t get paid! So affiliate marketing becomes beneficial only for those affiliates who stick at it for long enough to start generating consistent commissions.

How long this takes will depend on a number of criteria such as:

Your individual marketing strategy
The products and services which you choose to promote
The number of hours you can put in every day
Your marketing budget, or lack of it
The training and coaching you get or whether you get help or not

Many affiliates find affiliate marketing so difficult they quit before even getting a single online sale. The affiliate marketing failure rate is high – around 95%. But for the small percentage of those who stick with it, affiliate marketing is a challenge which gets easier over time.

Once you break past the difficult beginning phase of affiliate marketing, and start generating consistent sales, it gets easier because you have a reference point for what works! Before this happens, you are doing it all on faith! This can be tough and if you don’t have a strong enough desire to succeed, or belief in yourself and what you’re doing, this is often enough for someone to quit completely.

Is Affiliate Marketing Difficult? Yes It Can Be!

Affiliate marketing can definitely be difficult yes. It’s a business and businesses are tough. But you can definitely make it easier for yourself. When I started affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s I tried many tactics. I didn’t know what worked the best, the best products to promote or how to promote them. So I floundered around, jumping from course to course not really getting anywhere! It was incredibly frustrating. You can have a look at some of the courses I took and my experiences in this article.

I had what I now know to be called “shiny object syndrome”. Shiny object syndrome is the tendency for new affiliates to jump around looking for something easier that what they are already doing! With the many marketers out there telling you how “easy” it is to make money with affiliate marketing, it can be a hard pill to swallow when you find it to be difficult.

So instead of working hard and studying, you abandon the course you’re on for an “easier” one. The trouble is, it isn’t easier, someone just sold you another course with their marketing spiel! Now you’re back at the beginning again starting from scratch – potentially with another strategy which could take months before you see the fruits of your efforts. Which of course won’t materialise if you jump ship when you see another “shiny object”! It’s a viscous circle which you don’t see when you’re a beginner!

The “Busy” Fool

The “Busy Fool” is another problem for affiliate marketers. When you are a beginner, you can become overwhelmed by information and spend time on useless activities and unproductive habits. If you’re used to being an employee, you can bring your employee mindset to your business. But of course an employee is rewarded for their time, but an affiliate is only rewarded for performance.

The trouble again is you don’t know you’re wasting time as a beginner. You can spend months watching training videos without taking a single productive action, feeling like you’re getting somewhere. Or you might enjoy making your new shiny website look nice, instead of driving traffic to it! So as nice as your website might look, it’s useless without any visitors! The time you spent polishing your website would have been better spent learning a productive marketing strategy to get more visitors.

Making Affiliate Marketing Less Difficult

So, affiliate marketing can be difficult yes. But it can be a lot of fun too! Learning new skills and putting them to work can be an interesting and creative endeavour. You can use several strategies which will gear your affiliate efforts towards a greater outcome:

Use subscription affiliate programs – which pay ongoing recurring commissions
Build an email list – which gives you more control over your traffic (see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing)
Use paid marketing – if you can because it gives you more scalability and control, plus it’s faster
Choose to promote high ticket affiliate items – which pay the largest commissions.
Get help from coaches and mentors

Affiliate marketing can definitely be tough and it’s definitely not for everyone. So if you’re serious about making it work, the points above will make it easier to accomplish in a shorter period of time. The beginning part of affiliate marketing is most definitely the hardest. You have no experience or results to learn from. You’ll need to take many imperfect actions which may or may not lead to affiliate sales. Once you have learned some strategies which are working, it can become easier to repeat that success.

If you have chosen an affiliate business model which is more lucrative (subscription and high ticket products), when this does eventually happen, your work will be for a much larger prize!

Equally if you invest in your education, it gives you a better base from which to build an online business. Getting help from coaches and mentors is well worth this investment because you’re much more likely to stay the course if you do.

Why Affiliate Marketing – Motivation & Mindset

So the short answer is Yes – affiliate marketing is difficult! But if you want to control your destiny, work under your own terms, live anywhere and quit your job, you didn’t expect it to be easy did you?!

Affiliate marketing can give you complete autonomy over how you live. Many affiliates quit but that is for a number of reasons. Affiliate marketing is a super low cost business opportunity which almost anyone can “have a go” at. So of course many will drop out when they realise that it’s not an easy fix!

The top 5% of earners in affiliate marketing have typically been at it for much longer than the rest. See how much doe the average affiliate marketer make?

To succeed at affiliate marketing you therefore need a strong reason to keep at it and overcome the initial hurdles. As a beginner it’s very easy to lose enthusiasm and give up. That’s why it is better to get help – getting help from a community can hold you accountable and put you in among other business people and entrepreneurs. They can give you the tools and mental clarity to keep going when times are tough, which they will undoubtably be at some point in your journey!

Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing?

Which product is best for affiliate marketing? There are so many products available to promote for affiliates that it can be confusing for new affiliates to know what to promote. Should you promote physical products or digital products? Should you choose subscription products or those which pay one off commissions? What about high ticket products?

There’s no perfect answer to this question, since everyone will have a different approach to the way they promote products. However, certain products are definitely more lucrative than others. So if the same amount of work is involved in product promotion, it makes sense to choose those which pay more!

free video series — OT – “One time” S – “Subscription and HT “High Ticket” commissions

This is certainly the case if you’re starting out from scratch and have no marketing experience yet. That way, your work will compound to bring about more income, more quickly, once your marketing starts kicking in. But what about if you have a website already which is generating traffic? Or an email list? If that’s the case, it makes sense to choose products which are aligned with your existing audience, since you can quickly take advantage of your existing online presence.

Your budget is another consideration too. With a small budget, you may not be able to purchase a high ticket sales funnel which offers the best affiliate commissions. Nor may you be able to afford paid marketing platforms which can easily burn through your budget while you’re learning.

Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? – Your Marketing Method

It can easily be said that subscription products are the “best” because they pay recurring commissions each and every month! High ticket affiliate products pay the largest commissions for a single sale, so they’re they “best”. However, some digital products which pay the most are also in the most competitive niches. This means if you’re going for a particular marketing strategy, particularly organic marketing methods like blogging or video blogging (v’logging), you’re going to be up against a lot more competition.

This means you’ll need to work a lot harder and for longer before you can break through and start making regular sales. In a less competitive niche, these kinds of marketing strategies can work more effectively, and more quickly. So for example if you’re trying to promote affiliate marketing programs, you should expect to find more competition within the organic marketing arenas. But for a topic less competitive, such as scrapbooking, you may have more success with organic traffic generation.

If, on the other hand you’re going to be using paid marketing, you’re far better off with choosing high value products. Paid marketing platforms are expensive and so to profit, you’ll need high value products. It’s much more difficult to promote low value affiliate products using paid strategies.

Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? – Physical Products Vs. Digital Products

Physical products tend to pay less than digital products in terms of commissions for affiliates. For example, Amazon pays affiliates from 1% to 20% on its product range. Mostly though this will range from 3-10% see affiliate commissions Amazon. Digital products tend to pay much more 30-40% on average.

Physical products can be easier to sell of course. The value of a physical product is fairly obvious whereas some digital products offer a more arbitrary benefit. Trust is another issue when selling products online too. Amazon is a well trusted site and many people are comfortable purchasing from the site. But be ware too that Amazon has and does change their affiliate terms to the detriment of the affiliate.

Why Digital Products Pay More?

Physical products have a whole heap of costs involved in their manufacturing process. They need building and posting. For everyone to get a “cut” of the profit and make it worthwhile, the advertisers fee will likely go down in the future too! Digital products pay more because they can.

The main cost of selling a product online is advertising, which is what the affiliate is getting paid for. With a digital product, there’s less involved cost-wise in manufacturing and distribution. Since delivery of a software or training product can be completely free online, this saving is passed on to the affiliate promoting it.

Once digital products are created, they require less input in the manufacturing process. While they may still be improved and developed, the “finished article” can be sold multiple times for free over the internet.

High Ticket Products

High ticket products pay far more than the average commission rate to affiliates. A typical high ticket product will pay $500 or more to an affiliate. Even standard digital products don’t offer this benefit. Many digital products sell for around $100 offering around $30-$40 in commission, depending on their commission structure. High ticket products have much larger price tags and so for what can be the same amount of work for an affiliate, you can make much more money!

Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product, the Helicycle!

At a cost of $395,000, an affiliate can earn an 8% commission with this product if they can refer a sale. That’s $31,600! So a single sale of such a product can obviously be worth many sales of a cheaper item. You would need to sell 790 of the standard digital product (priced at $100) given a 40% commission. in order to make the same as selling just one of these!

So selling high ticket products can be very lucrative. You might think that nobody will buy such an expensive item, but they do! It may be more difficult to sell such an item online. But it won’t be 790 times as difficult! To make the same money will require a lot more work selling the lower valued item.

Subscription Products

Subscription products are great for affiliate marketers because they pay ongoing commissions from each sale. An example of a subscription product is some form of software or a membership product. Products like these offer ongoing value for the customer.

Business tools in particular are good because businesses need the product in order to run their business!
An example might be an email autoresponder which is used by affiliates themselves. You may already have one? If not access a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

With subscription products affiliates can get the much needed traction in their business much more quickly because of ongoing commissions on their every sale! A “one-off” commission is short lived and even with a high ticket item, may not pay as much as subscription products will do over their lifetime! See also subscription affiliate programs for a list of products.

Which Product Is Best For Affiliate Marketing? What You Align With

Another consideration for affiliates when choosing products is of course their alignment with the product. As a new affiliate it can be tempting to promote any product you find online, whether you know the product or not – and even if you haven’t purchased it yourself! This can lead to problems because if you’re not aligned with the product yourself, it can be more difficult to promote it as an affiliate.

If you choose a product which you believe in, it’s much easier to get behind it in your advertising methods.

It can therefore be a good idea to promote products you have purchased yourself. At the very least this means your promotion of the product is a genuine recommendation, and not out of integrity with your own purchasing decisions. It will also mean you’re a more genuine affiliate and this comes across in your sales materials, advertising and copy.

If you go down the route of organic marketing – using strategies such as blogging and video blogging, this will help you stay the course because you’re promoting with integrity. It can also help you choose a topic or niche, if you’re particularly interested in something and choose the longer route of content creation and organic marketing.

Working on something you’re interested in and enthusiastic about can mean you stay the course much longer than if you choose something only for the commissions! This is what might be needed, depending on how you approach your affiliate business and the marketing strategies you choose to use. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

I hope this article has helped you better understand which product is best for affiliate marketing? There is of course a lot to consider. If you have anything to add that I may have missed please comment below.