AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Blogger Problems – Staying On Track With Blogging

Do you have blogger problems? If you’re a blogger, chances are good that at one time or another you’ll have come up against it. Writers block, choosing a topic for your blog and making money out of blogging are all potential problems you’ll face as a blogger. If blogging is your strategy to build an income from the internet, it can take some time and this in itself is a problem. You can doubt whether it will work, this can lead to inactivity and procrastination. You might even ask yourself “Is blogging worth it?” If your belief is low, you’ll find yourself procrastinating and not creating the content you need to build.

By making a daily habit out of creating content, you can let a strategy work in your favour rather than worrying and overthinking about whether your strategy works or not. This kind of thinking won’t help you build an income from blogging! If you doubt whether a particular course of action will work for you, take steps to try another strategy out. But don’t let your scepticism stop you from moving forwards. Far better to take a small positive step forwards every day than spend weeks procrastinating over your marketing strategy.

Blogger Problems – Staying On Track With Blogging

There’s a lot of work for a blogger to do. But thinking about the size of this task is seldom helpful! Instead, break it down into small achievable chunks which you can do right now, today; not the long winding road ahead. I’ve wasted countless days procrastinating over my marketing strategy and whether or not blogging can actually work. I’ve agonised over it! But blogging can and does work over the longer term and if you enjoy writing then it’s well worth keeping up with your blogging.

Once you have a habit of blogging, let your habit work for you. Habits are hard to break, especially if you’ve been in them for a while. Procrastination is also a habit if you keep it up long enough. Take imperfect action and consider it a stepping stone to building a long term habit. Even though a single blog post won’t make your online business boom, it’s a first step to a long term strategy. Concentrate on building habits which move you forwards and let your content do the heavy lifting over the longer term.

Blogger Problems – Staying On Track With Blogging

Mini habits by Stephen Guise is a great book particularly for bloggers. Make a mini habit out of blogging and it will serve you well. A mini habit is something you can sustain even on your worst days. If you’re crawling out of bed, miserable and depressed, you should still be able to do that one tiny action which becomes your mini habit. On better days you can do more, but a mini habit should be so ridiculously easy that you can do it every day, without fail.

Make a mini habit out of blogging and over the longer term, it will feel wrong not to be writing your blog post every day! Once you build this strategy into your life, blogging will become a part of your life. This is what’s required to get traction from blogging.

It’s easy to quit your blogging when you’re feeling like it’s not working out! Perhaps your blogs aren’t attracting enough visitors, and you’re not making any sales? Write another blog post – use your struggles to identify those of your readers! You can simultaneously solve your own problems and those of others too by taking this approach!

Blogger Problems – Atomic Habits

Another great book for bloggers is James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Similar to Mini Habits, James Clear talks about small wins over time, overcoming old habits and creating new ones which serve you. Most people have built up a library of habits which aren’t serving them and they stick to them like clockwork.

Creating small changes is what is needed when you think you need to change everything about your life in one go. Most times when we try to make big changes we fail. Think about the New Year’s Resolutions made by those who join a gym in January. Most have dropped out by March, and fallen back to their old habits. If they only used mini habits and made their commitments tiny, they could build a bedrock from which to build sustainable actions over longer periods – atomic habits!

Disappointment When Blogging

Take a look at the image above which is from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. This is a great diagram for bloggers because it shows the “valley of disappointment” which bloggers will face when they don’t get the views/traction they expect. It’s at this point when you think about quitting!

You’ve laboured over your blogging for months and nothing is happening. So you lose momentum and a few months pass without you doing anything. If you only had kept up the habit, you’d have a few more months of content! You look again and still no traction – “why bother” you wonder – so you quit!

A blog can take off exponentially, as you see in the graph. But this might happen a lot later than you might hope. But once you start seeing this potential it gives you more hope and this can encourage you to keep going. Before this point it can feel like a long slog which is heading nowhere! That’s when you’re tempted to quit!

The Chinese Bamboo

The Chinese Bamboo tree is a perfect analogy for blogging. The tree has a gestation period of 3-5 years in which nothing breaks the surface of the soil. It needs water and fertiliser to grow and establish itself. After the gestation period it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks. Blogging is a similar thing in that much of the work you do will be largely unseen.

As you become more established, older posts get traction as you write newer content. Once you break through and get more visitors, leads and sales, growth can speed up quite quickly. But there’s a huge time period before this can happen and many bloggers will quit during this “gestation” period.

Summary

Blogging is a great way to make an income online but it does take time to break through. If you choose a topic you love to write about, you can more easily sustain the necessary effort required to make blogging work for you. Habits are either your friends or your enemy!

Make a habit out of creating content for your blog and it can serve you much better than trying to do something huge all in one go. Let your habits become the path to successful blogging. Once you have some ingrained habits around blogging, you can build on them. But don’t let procrastination and indecision burden you and stop you from writing. Focus on the small little actions you can do today, not the huge mountain ahead!

Choosing A Niche For Your Blog

Choosing a niche for your blog is the most important decision to make. Your niche can make or break the future success of your blog, so you need to think about your blog topic carefully. You can also build a niche website around specific keywords too which can help you get more traffic from the search engines. This website, for example, has been built around the main keywords affiliate marketing mentors, which has helped it rank for those specific keywords.

You should choose a topic in which you have some interest in too. This is for a couple of reasons. Don’t aim solely at a topic because you think it will be profitable. If you aren’t interested in your topic, it will be much more difficult to keep creating content for it. Plus, you’ll need to research every article you write, which will be much more difficult than writing about something you love. Choosing a topic you have a passion for, and interest in will mean you can keep going for much longer – and you’ll enjoy the process much more. It’s no fun writing about something you have no interest in, and you’re more likely to quit too.

Choosing A Niche For Your Blog – Monetising with Adsense

Monetising a blog can be done through either affiliate marketing or advertising (e.g. with Google Adsense). If you intend to create a blog which makes money, it’s worth thinking about how you are going to monetise it. Even if this won’t happen until later down the road.

If you’re going for earning from advertising revenue, from placing adverts on your site, it’s worth looking at what revenue you’ll be getting from each click. Advertising revenue will vary according to your traffic and the niche topic you choose. There’s a variation from $0.20 cents a click to $15 per click. The content which attracts the $15 clicks will be much more competitive, topics such as forex marketing, or online business, for example, are likely to earn more per click than stamp collecting or scrapbooking.

But these topics are also much more difficult to get traffic for, because of their competitiveness. Easier topics may get you more traffic, but you’ll earn less per click for advertising revenue.

Choosing A Niche For Your Blog – Monetising With Affiliate Marketing

Monetising your blog with affiliate marketing can work better than through placing advertising on your site with Google Adsense. Especially if you match your products to your audience well. Before choosing a niche for your blog, it can be a good idea to research the affiliate products available for you to sell. You may find certain topics don’t have much in the way of affiliate products in them. You don’t want to find this out months or years in, after you have already created heaps of content.

To find affiliate products in your niche, do a Google search for {your niche} affiliate programs. Spend some time finding a good product which you would like to become a representative for. Products can also give you ideas for content too. Ideally find an affiliate product which pays recurring commissions. This will pay off later and make your hard work more worthwhile. It’s much harder making an income from one off sales as an affiliate, especially in the beginning. See recurring commission affiliate programs.

Most bloggers will use an email marketing service too, to collect email addresses of visitors to your blog. This lets you build a longer term relationship with your visitors and will help generate more sales from your blogging efforts. See the power of email marketing.

Blogging Your Passion

Whether you are niche blogging for profit, or simply as a hobby, you will enjoy the process and have more success if you choose a topic you can sustain long term. I built a site around a topic I had no interest in, or knew nothing about once. It was a site about mushroom harvesting which I choose only to make money from! After 6 months of difficult blogging, creating content I had to research each time, I threw in the towel.

I also didn’t research any affiliate products in the topic area. I later found there were limited available products within this niche. My main reason for choosing this topic was that I though it was untapped. But even though I got a top placing for my website for the main keywords, the venture was doomed from the start. I let the site go and another more passionate blogger took its place at the top. Eventually I dropped the site as it didn’t make any money and I couldn’t bare to write any more about garlic harvesting!

Don’t make the same mistake – choose a topic you are passionate about and you have much more chance of success.

Finding A Long Tail Keyword To Build A Site Around

The strategy I like is to find a keyword which encompasses your topic well and which is already getting searches on Google. Type your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner and look for its longer tail derivatives. This can take some time, but it can give you a head start when it comes to traffic generation.

Keyword domain names can help you get found on the search engines, despite what some people say about it, even though it’s not essential. Ideally, find a longer tail keyword which you want to rank your site for. It should have low competition on Google for other competing websites and still get traffic which you can see using Google’s keyword planner.

using keyword research for a blog keyword

See also niche affiliate marketing website for more on this.

Your keyword should bring together your interest/passion and a “buyer” keyword which attracts a good audience for your affiliate products. Avoid using keywords with “free” in them for instance because it will attract the wrong kind of audience if you want to sell affiliate products.

Niche Blogging For Profit

Niche blogging for profit – creating written content on a blog to get free search traffic. That traffic is then converted into income through selling affiliate products or using advertising on your content.

Google Adsense is the most well known advertising program which lets you do this. However, if you are targeting a specific niche, it’s worth doing affiliate marketing as well or instead of using Adsense. With clickable ads on your content, you only earn a tiny proportion of the advert cost with each click. So you’ll need tonne of traffic to make this strategy pay.

Affiliate marketing on the other hand can pay much more, but you’ll need to sell a product (or products) which are well suited to your niche. Ideally use recurring income affiliate programs and high ticket programs for the best return. However, depending on the niche you choose to create content around, these kinds of products may not be suitable.

Niche Blogging For Profit – Choosing Your Niche

There’s a lot of content on choosing your niche with a blog. Some say pick an “evergreen” niche which can make money all year round. Others suggest choosing a niche which has a tonne of traffic. However, popular niche topics such as money making, health and fitness, dating and relationships can be extremely competitive. Going into a competitive niche might mean you’ll need to work doubly hard to get anywhere. Whereas a less competitive niche might be easier.

Ideally choose your niche according to your passions and interests too. Choosing a niche you don’t know much about, or have no interest for means your content will need more research and will be more difficult to create. Blog niches that make money are those which attract a lot of traffic. To get a lot of traffic, you’ll need to maintain your blogging habit for some time. How long does it take to make money blogging? This will depend on your blogging topic and strategy and how well you can get people to your content and promote yourself.

Ikigai – “reason for being” – choosing your blog topic is probably the most important part of niche blogging for profit.

Traffic from blogging is hard to come by so it’s worth choosing your topic carefully. Ideally choose a sub niche in a topic you know something about, or have a passion for. The best micro niche for blogging will depend on you and what you want to write about. Choose a difficult topic you don’t know about, and it can be more difficult to sustain the necessary motivation to keep going for long enough to make it pay.

Niche Blogging For Profit – Monetising Your Blog

Traffic is the most important factor in order to make money from blogging. Without it you can guarantee you won’t make any money. Bloggers will often work for many months or even years before they are able to make regular income from blogging.

So the key is to choose a topic you love and maintain a habit of content generation over a long period of time. To monetise your blog, you can link directly to affiliate products and services which are a suitable match for your audience.

Most bloggers also use the power of email marketing to generate affiliate sales. With email marketing, bloggers offer something to give to their website visitors in exchange for their email address. Once they sign up to a bloggers email list, they receive a free giveaway (e.g. an ebook) and regular email updates.

On a blog, a visitor only has a few minutes to purchase something. Once they leave your website they are gone forever. But if a blogger can get their visitors to sign up to their email list, a relationship can be built on over months, years and even decades! This gives the blogger more leverage over their traffic.

Writing Blog Posts

There’s various strategies for writing blog posts. Some bloggers just write what they want and others target specific keywords in their blog titles. This can help to get free traffic from the search engines. Ideally all your blog posts will show up on Google and rank for free, but this seldom happens especially at first. There’s millions of blogs out there, so getting yours found on the search engines is tough. So promoting your blog posts should become a regular habit if you want people to find them.

If you write in a less competitive niche, your posts have more chance of being found and listed in the search results: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc. More competitive topics like “make money online”, health and fitness etc will be more difficult to get free traffic for. One tactic bloggers use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

If a particular keyword phrase is less competitive in the search results, you’ll have a greater chance of yours being shown. This article title for example “niche blogging for profit” is less competitive than “make money online” for example. So there’s more chance of getting a listing.

Promoting Your Blog Posts

Once you publish a blog post, you should also promote it as much as possible. Just publishing a post is not enough! You can use social media to share your blog posts and there’s various software which can help you automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

You can also place social share buttons on your website to encourage visitors to share your content. The most popular blogs have often been around for a long time, and have multiple back links pointing at their content. Back linking is a major ranking factor with Google and older sites are generally given more kudos than newer ones because they have far more backlinks.

In order to build back links, bloggers can write guest posts for other bloggers and link back to their own content. If you focus on create great content, this is the best thing you can do for the long term success of your site. People should naturally link to great content over time. They won’t link to poor content though and this will show up and be seen by Google as a ranking factor.

Traditional Vs E Commerce

What’s the difference in traditional vs e commerce business? With a traditional business, you require staff, premises, stock and a large investment to start. However, with an e commerce business, there’s far lowers costs involved. Most people already have a laptop and internet connection to start an e commerce business with.

You don’t need to hold stock or even anything of your own to sell. With an e commerce business model known as affiliate marketing, you can promote other people’s products and services and earn commissions based on the sales. Other models such as print on demand or direct selling allows e commerce owners to partner with companies who provide a product/service, sell products directly from a website, and organise the delivery through a third party company.

So e commerce is far easier to enter into for the modern day entrepreneur or “solopreneur”. A traditional business requires a lot more investment and the addition of managers and staff to run. An e commerce business can collect customers from a website and refer them to other people’s products online. So a single person working on their laptop can generate thousands of sales using automation and online systems to find customers.

Traditional Vs E Commerce – Costs

Many high street stores have closed because they simply can’t compete with the internet and e commerce. High street property rental is costly but an internet business can be based anywhere. Amazon is a good example of an e commerce business. Over 50% of Amazon’s revenue comes from entrepreneurs who run businesses from home – promoting other people’s products and services.

How can high street stores compete when Amazon’s prices are so low? More and more people are now shopping online because it’s so much more convenient and cheaper. Business owners have to turn to internet sales to survive.

In comparison with a traditional business, the entry level costs of an online business are far lower too. A traditional business requires a business premises to locate which needs to be near its customer base.

Traditional vs E Commerce – Convenience

An e commerce business can be run from anywhere in the world from a laptop. With a drop shipping business there’s slightly more involvement in terms of customer interaction and organising deliveries etc. But an affiliate business can be much more hands off. See affiliate marketing vs drop shipping. Through using automation with an online business, e commerce owners can largely automate the process of online selling. This means they can work when they want because customer services and product delivery are dealt with by product owners, not the referrers.

This makes an online e commerce business one of the most flexible in terms of bot when and where you want to work.

Conversely, a traditional business requires you to turn up, or at least pay your staff to turn up. Physical businesses are located in a specific location and this means you need to be too. This also limits the business to the local population, unless the business caters to online selling as well as a local premises.

Scaling Up – Traditional Vs. Online Business

An online business has fewer limitations regarding who it can reach. While a traditional business is limited to the shop size, and its ability to sell to the local population, an online business is less limited. With an online business, you can sell to anyone globally.

Through the use of websites and checkout portals, an online e commerce business can cater to far more people than a traditional business. In terms of scale, a traditional business is limited by it’s ability to sell multiple items simultaneously. An e commerce business can sell multiple products from a website instantaneously, providing there’s a flow of customers through the site.

If an e commerce owner can become profitable, they can scale up their business quickly too, simply by spending more on advertising. Once the systems are in place, this is straight forward and just like turning on a tap. More advertising means more sales. But with traditional business, it’s more limited to the physical nature of the business. People have to turn up in person to a physical shop, whereas people can purchase items online from their homes or phones.

Traditional vs E Commerce Business – Summary

Traditional businesses are suffering at the moment due to increased online shopping, convenience and lower costs. So if a specific traditional business model can be replaced by an online business, it’s probably going to be! Traditional businesses have far more costs involved than online e commerce businesses have. Anyone can start an online business at a far lower cost than they could a traditional business.

With an online business you need a laptop and internet connection, which many people already have. A traditional business requires staff, premises, stock and advertising. An online e commerce business can be up and running much more quickly, with less hassle and costs and also scaled up to a global audience. Traditional businesses are limited to their location and their ability to serve a local audience.

For more information and to start an online e commerce business, access a free video series and learn about the different e commerce models available.

Do You Need A Following For Affiliate Marketing?

Do you need a following for affiliate marketing? Affiliates refer people online to products and services and they do this in several ways:

Through their websites
From an email list of subscribers
Through paid advertising
From social media platforms
Other advertising strategies on or offline
See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products

The short answer is that no, you don’t need a following in order to sell affiliate products. Some affiliates will use websites to refer organic traffic directly to products without putting their face “up there” or building a following.

Others use social media or build an email list which they promote products to. However, building a following online is a good way to attract the right audience for your affiliate products, and in large numbers. But anyone can become an affiliate just by placing a banner on their website and referring website traffic.

Do You Need A Following For Affiliate Marketing? Staying Anonymous

Many employees don’t want to attract attention to their affiliate efforts which would alert their employers to their escape plan! Or their employees wouldn’t approve for some other reason. Funny how employers don’t want you to have another income?! So there’s a slight conflict in this regard if you want to build a large affiliate business. Those will large followings such as Tony Robbins for example, attract the most amount of attention online and make more money because of it. So if you’re trying to stay “incognito” as an affiliate, it can present a problem.

However, you can still build an email list and promote products to a large audience, without even showing your face. But doing so again can be a barrier to larger success. Potential customers want to see someone – people buy from people! A visible presence online can help your affiliate business because it shows you’re a genuine person (assuming you are!). If you’re hiding behind the internet and don’t want to show yourself, it can put some potential customers off – depending on what you are promoting.
Many affiliates simply build websites which attract an audience through organic search. Products can be sold directly from websites or through an email list.

But if you’re trying to be anonymous and build an online business, you’re best off at least using your own name! Otherwise you risk presenting yourself as someone you’re not, which could jeopardise your business. But you don’t need to present on video if you’re not into it. There’s other ways to build an affiliate business and you can keep a low profile as an affiliate. In fact many affiliates like a low profile which is partly why they become affiliates!

Do You Need A Following For Affiliate Marketing?

Most affiliates start in the same place, without an online presence of any kind. They learn the “ropes” as they go, and as a result of building an online business, also develop new skills to draw people towards them, or their products. Taking yourself out of the equation is simple – just send people to your products instead.

However, the most successful affiliates have built up a following of people online. This can take months or even years to accomplish. But you don’t need to become a major personality or video presenter in order to do this. It can be done through an email list.

With an email list, you can automate a series of email messages to communicate with an ever growing audience. You attract that audience through running adverts, or offering some giveaway through your social media platforms or creating useful content. See also the power of email marketing.

As a beginner affiliate, you’ll learn how to get someone to opt in to your email list. This can take some time, but once you’ve done it once, you can repeat this small success many times. Over time, your email list will grow and you’ll attract more and more people who want to join your email list. An email list is powerful for affiliates because it allows them to build a relationship up with their subscribers over a long period of time. On a website, you only have a few minutes to communicate with potential customers. After that they are gone forever!

Summary

So, do you need a following for affiliate marketing? The short answer is no, you don’t. However getting a following will definitely help your affiliate business. Affiliate marketers refer online traffic to products and services. When they make sales through their affiliate links, they earn a commission. So the more people you can draw to a website, or video, the more you can send out to a particular product or service.

Affiliates generate sales in many ways online and you don’t need to be an “influencer” or presenter. You can run adverts and send people to an email list. Then, promote products and services via email to your list. Many affiliates are relatively unknown.

Top affiliates tend to build a following in some way either through their blogs, videos or email marketing campaigns. But you certainty don’t need to be in the public eye as an affiliate. You can go relatively under the radar – if you’re a beginner especially.

Access a comprehensive training course and become an affiliate here.

Should I Do Affiliate Marketing?

Are you asking yourself “should I do affiliate marketing?” Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate an income which is completely independent of a job or boss. So if you’re highly motivated to escape a career, or generate more income from your laptop, affiliate marketing might be a good fit for you. Affiliates use all kinds of tactics to build an income online.

Some use a blog and others create videos. Some run advertising and build an email list of subscribers. No matter what strategy you use, you’ll need a good deal of self motivation and the ability to work under your own steam. Affiliate marketing is often touted as a “get rich quick” scheme, but the truth is that it takes a lot to make a consistent income from it.

So is being an affiliate worth it? For those who stick at it, affiliate marketing can be the answer to financial independence and geographical freedom. But many affiliates will quit for a number of reasons:

They don’t make money immediately – it takes time
Their time is taken up already from a job
They aren’t motivated enough to overcome the difficulties
They don’t get the help they need
It’s just too difficult!

The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high too – around 95% of affiliates quit. So “should I do affiliate marketing?” is a reasonable thing to ask yourself if you’re currently sitting on the fence.

Should I Do Affiliate Marketing? Your “Why”

Your “why?” for doing affiliate marketing needs to be pretty big. Unless you’re self motivated and committed to the journey, with all its ups and downs, you’re likely to join the 95% who drop out. The 5% who eventually turn their affiliate marketing endeavours into a consistent income often stick at it for years. They commit for the long term and are prepared to overcome any obstacles which stand in the way. Good affiliates learn from their set backs and continually improve.

It’s far easier to drop out when you meet your first set back than to use it for “feedback” to push on.

If you have a big “why?”, such as you’re exhausted by your career and can’t tolerate another 10 years of the same, that’s a big enough reason to succeed at affiliate marketing. If you’re just thinking of “giving it a go”, and are quite happy in your job, it might not be for you.

Affiliates spend a fair amount of time learning and growing their businesses. It doesn’t happen overnight but takes some time and consistent effort before things start showing up. I worked for years with affiliate marketing before making a consistent income from it and tried several courses without success.

Should I Do Affiliate Marketing? Already Blogging or Own A Website?

Affiliate marketing is a simple strategy to monetise a blog or website which you already own. Simply find an affiliate program which matches your topic and use their marketing materials on your site. This is an easy win if you already have an online presence of some kind. Partnering with companies who can help serve your audience is a quick way to make money from existing online content which you own.

The quickest way to find programs which match your topic is with a Google search. Type “{your topic} affiliate programs” into any search engine and look for the best program for your audience. Join a program you like the look of and put some banner adverts on your site which have your unique affiliate link in them. When your website visitors click on the banners and purchase something, you can earn a commission. Hey presto you’ve monetised your blog/website – even without any products to sell of your own.

If you don’t already have a web presence, that’s going to be the biggest challenge for you as an affiliate. To earn money as an affiliate marketer you will need to learn how to generate interest in your products. This can be done through content creation or through using paid advertising. Sign up here for a comprehensive affiliate marketing training resource.

Your Marketing Strategy

An affiliate’s marketing strategy can determine whether they are successful or not as an affiliate marketer. Some bloggers take years to achieve success through their writing. Other affiliates use paid marketing and get there much quicker. Your choice of marketing strategy will depend on your interests and abilities and of course you finances too.

With more time you can focus on generating content through a blog or through using videos and uploading to YouTube. Alternatively if time is less available you might opt to build a business using more automation and through running paid advertising and building an email list.

Whatever your strategy is, you’ll need to focus on the long term, keep focused and maintain your motivation, even when you don’t see any results for some time. This is easier if you are able to join a community and get help and support. Going it alone is difficult and you can easily veer off-route and go down many rabbit holes which don’t lead you to a good outcome!

Highly Motivated Or Just A Dabbler?

Are you highly motivated or just a dabbler? Many people try out lots of things but never stick to anything. This makes them a dabbler! Affiliate marketing is something which attracts a lot of people because the potential outcome is incredibly desirable:

Financial independence & freedom
Geographical freedom
Never work for a boss again
No more commutes
Choose your own schedule and build your business around your life, rather than the other way round!

But there’s downsides too and building an internet business takes time and effort. At first you will spend a lot of time learning, too. Affiliate marketing is a commitment to your freedom, which if followed through and maintained over the longer term will bring some amazing lifestyle benefits with it.

But during this journey, you’ll doubt whether it works, wonder if you’re doing the right thing and will be derailed many times by setbacks and problems. To overcome all of these and keep moving forwards requires a commitment most aren’t going to accept. They want the “easy win” and when they discover that affiliate marketing isn’t easy, they quit rather than re-investing more time into it and themselves.

So if you’re wondering whether you really should do affiliate marketing, ask yourself some simple questions:

What is your “why?”? Do you have a strong reason for doing it – financial independence or geographical freedom?
Are you a dabbler or highly motivated?
Are you looking for a get rich quick scheme? – if so affiliate marketing isn’t for you
Will you keep going given multiple set backs and adversity?

If you’re serious about making an income from affiliate marketing, access a free video series to learn more by clicking on the image below.

Lead Magnet Examples

Looking for lead magnet examples? Getting someone to your website can be tough enough. But if they leave without taking action they might never return. So all your efforts are wasted! Getting your website visitors to subscribe to your email list can be the best thing you can do for your business. But what’s the best way to do so? Using a lead magnet which offers a relevant and highly valued piece of content is the way to go!

So what are some lead magnet examples you can start to use to get more of your website visitors to turn into subscribers and customers?

Lead Magnet eBook

The ebook lead magnet is one of the best options to encourage your website visitors to opt in to your email list. An ebook can be created and targeted towards your audience with relevant content. Think about what your website visitors most want and need and provide the answers in your ebook.

Ebooks are great for lead magnets because they can be given away automatically when someone signs up to your email list. They can be super targeted to your specific audience and created fairly cheaply.

Lead Magnet Examples – The Webinar

Webinars are great lead magnets and some affiliate programs even offer them for you to use. Or, create your own webinars and automate them so they run 24/7 all year round on complete autopilot!

A webinar works well for lead generation because they generally offer a lot of value. A 90 minute webinar will encourage serious people to sign up for access. It’s a different kind of lead magnet to the ebook and will encourage a different type of lead.

Here’s a webinar I offer as a lead magnet which has been created by one of my own affiliate mentors:

Lead Magnet Examples – A Video Series

A video series is something else you can offer to encourage website visitors to become subscribers. Ideally choose a topic which aligns with the interests of your website visitors. I offer a free video series for anyone interested in online business or affiliate marketing. It explains the various business models available using online products and services.

Lead Magnet Examples – A Training Course

Training courses are also good lead magnets if they speak to a need your target audience has. You can create your own email course, or create a series of videos like the one above.

A good course will offer some useful free content which is spread out over a few days. It gets people to opt in to your list and in the habit of opening their emails too. Then, when you follow up with more material, they are already in the habit of opening emails from you. Aim to provide real value first, and promote products later down the line.

If you don’t have much in the way of content, you can create an email course which helps your subscribers over a series of several emails, sending out an email each day for several days.

Discount Codes

Many business websites offer discounts to their subscribers through a discount code. If you’re about to purchase something on a website, check to see if they offer discount codes. Just by signing up to the email list you can save 10% with a discount code. They’re a great way to get more website visitors on to your list.

A Newsletter

A newsletter isn’t always the best lead magnet but it can work well for certain websites. It’s best to offer benefits when promoting your lead magnet so that your visitors will take action and opt in. If you offer a generic call to action of “Sign up to the newsletter”, you have less chance of getting subscribers than by using “Get the latest discounts and offers with our newsletter” for example.

Newsletters can work if you have a community type of business and people want to hear about the latest activities that are running. Newsletters are good for clubs and organisations. But if you’re trying to sell something from your website, you might be better off with a more compelling lead magnet.

Lead Magnet PDF Downloads

You can use a pdf guide which is similar to an ebook. Pdf’s are easy to create and you can put something together which is less hassle than creating an ebook with a pdf guide. Here’s an example of a couple of pdf guides I created to use as lead magnets and as content on my website:

Summary

So there’s a list of lead magnet examples you can use to generate more leads from your website. Here’s a quick run down of the items covered:

Ebooks
Webinars
A video Series
A training course
Discount codes
Newsletters
PDF downloads

Remember a good lead magnet will be enticing for your audience and a good fit for the content on the website. Focus on the benefits of your offer, not the features of it. See also how to capture emails on your website and free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

How To Capture Emails On Your Website

Wondering how to capture emails on your website? A website is a great tool to attract more visitors to your business. But most of your visitors will only drop by for a few minutes, or even only a few seconds. Once they’ve left your website, most will be gone for good. Capturing their email address is one of the best things you can do for your business growth.

Once you turn a website visitor into an email subscriber, you can keep in touch with them for much longer. Many business owners will build email lists from their website and collect tens of thousands of subscribers. Once on their list, they can send regular emails offering value and building trust. Over time, lists help businesses build trust and offer value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, through your email messages, they are much more likely to purchase from you.

How To Capture Emails On Your Website – An Autoresponder

An autoresponder is a piece of software which gives you a landing page opt in form. You can place the form on your website pretty much anywhere you choose. It’s a good idea to have it show on each page of your website, so every visitor sees it clearly. Websites can also use pop-up forms, drop down forms and other styles of design to showcase their offers.

A good form will offer something valuable to the website visitor. Without a enticing offer, less of your visitors will subscribe to your email list. After all, there’s thousands of other websites which use this tactic.

Once you have subscribed to a few of them, your inbox starts looking rather full. So some of your visitors will be less likely to opt in unless you offer something they really, really want or need. What you offer on your form will depend on your business but it is usually something of value. Many businesses offer discount codes which they provide to subscribers who opt in to their mailing lists. Others offer ebooks or some series of emails offering value such as a video series (see above).

How To Capture Emails On Your Website – A Free Autoresponder

An autoresponder can be used to collect emails from a website. (See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing). Once you have access to the software, access for free here, you can place code on your site which creates a form. Choose from a template gallery which form is most suitable for your website.

template gallery — Using Aweber form gallery

Once you have created your form with the fields of your choice, publish your form and grab the code by copying and then pasting on to your website.

Follow Up Emails & Double Opt-in

Once you have set up a form on your website, and created a compelling offer to give to your subscribers, you can create a series of follow up emails. These will be sent out automatically to your subscribers once they opt in to your form. This can be done through your autoresponder service. You can also choose whether you want subscribers to “double opt-in” to your subscription service.

With a double opt in, subscribers must find your confirmation message in their inbox (or spam folders), and click on it to confirm their intention to join your email list. This can be a good thing in that it means your list quality will be very high. However, it can reduce the number of subscribers who will ultimately get your messages as some subscribers might miss out this step. Many website owners will opt out of this option to reduce to cost of subscribers when paying for their marketing strategies.

Pop-Ups

You can also use software which integrates with your main autoresponder and helps users engage with your opt-in campaigns. Drop down menus and popups can be more eye catching that a standard opt in form.

Icegram offers a free plugin for WordPress which lets you integrate pop-ups and lead opt in forms with your main autoresponder service. Too many pop ups can be annoying for visitors but ultimately using them works, and helps you to build your email list.

Your Offers & Split Testing

How many people sign up to your email list will depend on the amount of traffic you have, the visibility of your offer and how enticing your offer is to your visitors. Usually there will be only a small percentage of website visitors who sign up to your email list.

So you’ll need to have a good flow of traffic to benefit from putting a lead capture form on your website. The way you present your offer is another important factor. Focus on the benefits of your offer, rather than features. A benefit of a good offer is more enticing than its features will be.

how to capture emails online your website — Split testing your opt in forms is a good way to determine which one work best according to colours, call to actions, type and your offer.

You can also split test your opt in forms to see which ones work the best. Change colours, titles and “call to” actions on your forms to see which one outperforms the others. Over time, and with enough testing this should show which opt in form is the most enticing for your website visitors.

Using An Ebook As A Lead Magnet

“Lead magnets” are what you use to give to your subscribers to entice them to opt in to your email list. Ebooks make good lead magnets because you can create an ebook quite easily and write it about any topic. Tailor make your ebook to be a good match for your website visitors.

This website is about affiliate marketing so I often use this ebook to encourage people to sign up to my email list:

You can also use email courses too, and design a course to help out your subscribers with a particular problem or challenge. A video series makes for a good “hook” too. Here’s another lead magnet I use on my website to get people on my email list:

Fastest Way To Make Passive Income

What is the fastest way to make passive income? While royalties are a great way to earn a passive income, it can take years of training/work to get into a royalty earning field such as acting or writing. Owning property is another way to earn a passive income but this takes investment. So if you don’t have the capital this can be difficult. Putting money in a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is an option too but again, requires an investment in order to make money.

The fastest way to make passive income I’ve found which requires less investment has been through an online business model using affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you sell other people’s products and services through online content. Affiliate marketing can take some time to learn, but with membership products and subscription services you can earn a residual ongoing and passive income once you’ve done the heavy lifting. Do it right and this income can grow quite quickly too.

Fastest Way To Make Passive Income

With a membership website, and through using existing products and services which pay referrers an ongoing income, you can make a passive income quite quickly. To create your own membership products and sell them takes time and a lot of work. Plus you’ll need to come up with some product or service which is worth paying membership for. But with affiliate business you can “piggy back” on existing products which offer huge value already, and which are already selling.

Membership and software products are the best for giving you a passive income. Those are the kinds of products which business owners use to run their businesses. Once someone has a successful business online, they are going to need those products. So if you have referred the sale, and the affiliate program offers ongoing commissions, you can potentially earn an income for life from each sale!

Fastest Passive Income – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to market affiliate products. The fastest way to build a large email list of subscribers is through using paid marketing. Of course there’s an investment involved in doing this but there are cheaper (slower) ways too, such as blogging/v’logging (video blogging).

Many bloggers make a passive income through creating content, much like this website. When a blogger sells something from their blog, they earn a commission. Bloggers also create ebooks to encourage visitors to join their email list. Then, they sell affiliate products to their subscribers.

The building of an email list can be largely automated too. Which further helps this income source to be a passive one.

The main problem for affiliates who build their list with paid marketing is recouping their expenditure. The best way to solve this problem is to use a high ticket sales funnel with a number of products and services to sell. What is high ticket affiliate marketing? High ticket affiliate marketing refers to the price of the affiliate product and also what you can earn from a single sale. While subscription affiliate programs pay ongoing commissions, high ticket products produce larger single commissions. Combining both these earning strategies means you can more easily scale up quickly and generate an ongoing income.

Access Step By Step Modules

To learn how to sell affiliate products does take some investment of your time. Promote high ticket and subscription products for the best result and return. With subscriptions you can earn a passive income from each sale which is what makes them so powerful for affiliates.

Join a training program and follow a step by step modular system. You’ll be able to build a fully functional sales funnel and promote existing products and services including subscription products. Your website can be set up with a few clicks and you can choose a number of marketing strategies to promote your website and/or landing pages.

Promoting affiliate products can be done in a number of ways:

Using YouTube to create videos and draw visitors to your website/affiliate products
Blogging and building websites
Using social media platforms
Promote using paid marketing platforms like Facebook, Google Adwords or YouTube
Using an email list and emailing subscribers

Summary

One of the fastest ways to make passive income is through selling subscription affiliate programs. With subscription programs you earn ongoing income from previous sales. Even a low value monthly membership which pays out $20 in commission to affiliates will grow as you get better at selling. Sell 10 products and earn $200 a month. Sell 100 and earn $2000 a month. Sell 1000 and earn $20,000 a month.

The hardest affiliate sale to make is your first one and this can take some time to learn. But once you have sold one product, you can sell many more. Through using paid marketing and the power of email marketing, you can scale up to sell to many people in a short amount of time.

Learn more and get started with this training resource.

Easiest Affiliate Products To Sell

Looking for the easiest affiliate products to sell? If you can put a product in front of someone who is desperate to purchase it, you’ve cracked affiliate marketing. The trouble is finding these buyers who are “red hot” buyers isn’t easy. Some people are just browsing the internet looking for information. After all, the internet is an information gathering tool!

When I started out as an affiliate, I looked for the easy path too. One of my very first sales came from selling a program called XSite Pro. It was a website building tool which has been outdated now. Today, websites are easily put up and the software is likely to be redundant. The reason this sale went through was because I wrote a review of the product, and someone found it and bought through my affiliate link. I found a red hot buyer because my review attracted someone who was perhaps looking to buy the software I was reviewing.

This is one of the best strategies to sell affiliate products. Writing reviews attracts the audience you want to sell to. Someone who is looking for a review of a product is just seeking some final information on it before making a buying decision. So, with a review you attract a red hot “buyer audience”.

Easiest Affiliate Products To Sell

Products sell themselves if they are good, too. The main problem for affiliate marketers is finding the people who want those products and putting their links in between the customer and the product. If you’re new to affiliate marketing you may have tried many things to get traffic. But you also need the right traffic for your affiliate products, and you need to convey the value of those products to your audience.

With some products this is self evident. A camera is something a photographer might be looking for. Before purchasing they might read a few reviews about the particular camera (or camera’s) they are looking at. That’s a red hot buyer who (almost) knows what they’re looking for. A review website is a simple strategy which might work well in this case. If you can get your review website in front of the right audience, you know you can lead them to the products they want. Physical products, from the likes of Amazon therefore, are pretty easy to sell if you find the right audience for them.

But physical products don’t pay that much for affiliates. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission and affiliate marketing commission rates.

Easiest Affiliate Products To Sell – Sales Pages & Affiliate Resources

Before deciding on an affiliate product to sell, it’s worth looking at the affiliate program and products you’re offering. In particular, what sales resources are offered by the company selling the products? With a good program which offers a lot of resources, it can be a whole lot easier to sell a product. Some products offer banners and sales pages, and others offer webinars and email follow ups to your leads – effectively selling products for you!

With a good product, which you can stand behind, your own marketing efforts will be more effective. If you choose a product you don’t believe in, or haven’t bought yourself, this attitude will likely “leak” into your marketing materials and your potential customers will see it!

So it’s wise to choose products which you have purchased yourself and which you value and trust. If you are interested in the product, and genuinely endorse it, this will show in your marketing. If you’re selling something just for the outcome, this will likely show in your marketing and can put people off.

Easiest Affiliate Products To Sell – Your Marketing

Selling any product online as an affiliate isn’t always easy, especially if you’re starting out as an affiliate. By aligning a passion or interest with a product, you give yourself a greater chance of success. Your marketing is ultimately what brings customers to your affiliate products. Unless you can do so successfully, the best products in the world won’t sell and you won’t make any money.

Choosing your marketing strategy is therefore pretty important. As a marketer, which is what affiliates are, how you show up will determine your success, or lack of it. There’s many ways to market affiliate products online:

Blogging or v’logging
List building – email marketing – see the power of email marketing
Using social media to build an audience
Paid marketing

Many affiliates will align their passions and interests and find suitable products which they can promote from a niche blog. Then they attract an audience through blogging around their passion. This can be a good way to attract an audience because it aligns with your passion. When you’re passionate about something, it’s a whole lot easier maintaining a blogging or v’logging habit for the time it will take to break through and achieve success. See niche blogging for profit.

Summary

The easiest affiliate products to sell online are often those which you cherish yourself and therefore can align your content towards. Physical products are easy to sell but finding the right audience and putting your affiliate links in front of the hot buyers can be a challenge.

Make sure you are investing in the right education to learn how to effectively sell online too – access a free webinar here. Good products are easier to sell than bad ones and it’s worth looking carefully at the sales materials offered by affiliate programs. Good products sell themselves – especially if there’s a heap of sales resources you can tap into to promote them with.

Selling products online isn’t always easy. Use an email list to build a relationships with your subscribers if you’re selling something digital. This can help you gain trust in your subscribers and sell over a longer time period. With a website, someone only has a short time to make a buying decision. So getting website visitors on your email list can make a massive difference.