AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Marketing Hacks

Everyone wants those affiliate marketing hacks which promise to save them time and effort. But the truth about affiliate marketing is that it isn’t easy! In fact many affiliate marketers quit and the affiliate marketing failure rate is very high. But then if you decide never to quit, you can never fail! Endure the struggles and ultimately you’ll come out on top.

When I began my affiliate marketing journey I was shown a number of affiliate marketing hacks. Some promised large profits for little work – if only it were true! Over a number of years I took some of these hacks and made them work. I also found an affiliate coaching program where I learned other affiliate marketing strategies which could be called “hacks” too!

Affiliate Marketing Hacks – #1 – Ranking A Website on Google

My first affiliate marketing hack I learned from a guy called George Brown who ran a course called Google Sniper! It was a fairly cheap course which taught a specific strategy for getting the attention of the search traffic within a specific niche. You can also read about the many other courses I took in my article digital profit course review.

A niche affiliate marketing website is built on specific keywords which offer less competition than most. By finding long tail keywords using Google’s keyword planner, and looking for those which offer the least competition, you can build a site and get free traffic to it from the search engines. Once you’ve built your site (using a keyword domain name), write articles and create content which target other keywords which relate to your main keyword.

This strategy takes some time and effort, but if you find a good keyword and target carefully, you can have free traffic for the longer term.

Affiliate Marketing Hacks – #2 – Target Long Tail Keywords In Your Content

This is a similar concept to building a niche website as in #1, only this can be done through creating written or video content. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. To determine the SEO difficulty of a keyword you can use Google’s keyword tool to look for long tail keywords which are three or more words long.

Then compare them to a general Google search and look for the number at the very top of the screen. This will only show on a laptop or desktop computer though and not on a mobile. The number will give you an idea about the general competitiveness of your chosen keyword.

A high number will denote a lot of competing websites for that particular phrase. A low number will mean there’s less competition. Once you have done that, do the same search for your keyword using quotes around it, i.e. “affiliate marketing hacks”. Again you’ll find a number which you can compare to see its relative competitiveness.

Affiliate Marketing Hack #3 – Use Recurring Income Products

Most affiliates will start out promoting products from Amazon or eBay. These kinds of products tend to pay the smallest commissions in the affiliate marketing industry. With one time commissions you need to continually sell more and more products in order to make money. But with recurring commission affiliate programs you can continue to earn from sales you’ve made previously.

Recurring income programs are usually membership programs or software products. With a good software product and sold to the right customer, you can earn lifetime commissions on your sales. Online business tools and software are good to promote because when an online business become profitable, the tools are essential to the running of the business. So the owner is more likely to keep paying for the membership.

#4 – Use A High Ticket Product “Suite”

With high ticket affiliate marketing products you can earn substantially more from a sale than with most other products. This will often make sales more difficult to close but if you use a high ticket product “suite”, which offers a built in sales team, you can benefit from the team closing sales on your behalf. You can then promote the lower valued product within a sales funnel and the high ticket products are sold later on to your referrals.

With a good product range, up-sells can mean you don’t need as many customers in order to become profitable. One high ticket sale can pay the same as 100 low value products which only offer one time commissions. A good high ticket sales funnel offers subscription products and high ticket products. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

A high ticket sales funnel like this can also allow you to use paid marketing more easily. Whereas with low value affiliate products it’s much more difficult to make a profit using paid marketing strategies.

#5 – Using Social Media For Marketing

There’s many ways to sell affiliate marketing products including SEO (search engine optimisation), paid marketing, social media, link building, blogging, niche website building and email marketing. (See 22 ways to promote affiliate products). Social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc. offer a number of opportunities for promoting your affiliate products without having to pay for marketing.

One such strategy is to use Facebook to find traffic. Set up your Facebook profile and offer a free giveaway of some kind, or a link to your website. Then join Facebook groups where your audience will be likely to hang out. See how to know your target market.

Apply to join the groups which are most suitable for your affiliate products. Then, interact with other members. Do this without spamming your links everywhere if you don’t want to get kicked out of the groups! Over time if you give this some time every day for several months, you should see people finding your profile and clicking on your links. Like with all free marketing strategies this will take some time and dedication to start generating traction.

See unpaid social media marketing for more on this hack.

Niche Affiliate Marketing Website

A niche affiliate marketing website is one which covers a specific topic. By doing so, it attracts a certain targeted audience. If that audience can be led to affiliate products and services which interest them, the affiliate can earn from the sales they generate.

A niche affiliate marketing website is often used to generate traffic for free. This is done by building the site around a specific purpose and set of keywords. This site, for example, is a niche affiliate marketing website. The site was built on the keywords affiliate marketing mentors.

Niche websites can get ranked on Google more easily than generic websites, in some cases. A niche website can also be targeted to attract a specific keyword search on Google. If Google ranks a niche website, it means the affiliate can get free traffic – potentially for life!

Niche Affiliate Marketing Website

A niche affiliate site is never guaranteed free traffic though. Google uses a number of criteria to determine whether or not to rank a website in its search results. These are things like content quality, backlinks, site speed, site authority, domain name and age and a number of other things besides. Google can see also how visitors interact with a site’s content too. If people generally click away after only a few seconds, this can be used to identify a potential problem, or a lack of quality of a particular website.

So if you decide to build a niche website for affiliate marketing, make sure you focus on quality content. Affiliate links also play a part in your content getting ranked. Too many links and not enough quality content and Google will likely flag you as a spammer! New sites too will generally sit on the sidelines and not rank at all on Google.

There’s what’s called Google’s “sandbox” which is used for new websites. They don’t appear in the search results at all for some time. Other search engines might index your website long before Google will show it though. So it’s worth checking whether you site appears on Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and other lesser known search engines. If it appears there and not on Google, there’s a good chance you’ve been sidelined by Google while it determines your site’s quality and usefulness.

Niche Affiliate Marketing Website – Getting Started

In order to build a niche affiliate marking website which gets free traffic, you should start with keyword research. Building a site on a very competitive keyword is far less likely to get free traffic than one built on an uncompetitive one. But those longer tail keywords which are less competitive tend to drive much less traffic. So picking your keyword is an important step in building a niche website.

Ideally find a keyword which is 3 or more words long. Shorter terms will likely have a lot more competition and be harder to rank for. Longer terms will have less traffic but be less competitive. It’s also a good idea to align your keywords with the affiliate product you have chosen.

Look carefully at your keyword and ask yourself what the search query tells you about the visitor. Will the visitor buy from you if they land on your website. For example, a long tail keyword in the affiliate marketing space might be “free online courses for affiliate marketing”. Even if this keyword looks good in terms of low competitiveness and regular traffic, the term “free” indicates that you’re not targeting a buyer audience. Most of your traffic will not buy your products if you target the “free” term in your keyword selection.

Niche Affiliate Marketing Website – Keyword Criteria

So choosing a keyword to base your niche website from is the key! I choose keywords based off the following criteria:

Must have a good amount of monthly visitors – ideally more than 100
Low competition in terms of other websites for that keyword – less than 10 million in Google search and less than 20,000 in phrase match (in quotes). To find this look for the number under a Google search – (works on desktop computers/laptops but not mobiles)
Keyword must have some good buyer intent – not a “free” or generic search term but buyer related

Google’s keyword planner and monthly searches for terms related to “car exhaust”

Once built, you can add value to your niche site by choosing other related search queries related to your main keyword. Write articles for all the keyword terms which come up when you type in your main keyword in the keyword planner.

A Niche Website Which Gets Free Traffic

Building a niche website which gets free traffic isn’t guaranteed! You might need to build a few websites to get the measure of what works and what doesn’t. There’s no guarantee of getting your site ranked. However, there’s a few things you can do to give yourself the best chance of free traffic:

Spend some time looking at your keywords before choosing.
Choose a keyword which matches your product, gives you little competition and which gets monthly searches already
Make sure your keyword has a potential buyer intent – doesn’t contain “free” for example
Spend time building your site and create some quality content
Use an SEO plugin to help build your content – I use Yoast SEO
Promote your content as much as possible. See best free WordPress plugins for some of the best ones I’ve found.
Learn from each niche website you create and keep going – your first attempt may not work but don’t let this stop you!

See also micro niche website for more on this topic and best micro niche for blogging.

Summary

A niche affiliate marketing website can attract a lot of free traffic if you’re prepared to put the work in. Not all of them will produce the effect you want though. Many of my niche websites have fallen by the wayside! Just keep going and eventually you’ll get a winner!

A quicker way to benefit from affiliate marketing is to use paid marketing and create a Google compliant website, sending paid traffic to it and collecting emails. This can scale up much faster too because you’re not relying on organic traffic. So if you don’t have the patience for building a lot of content over a long period of time, this might be a better strategy.

Learn more about marketing your own online business through affiliate marketing. Access affiliate coaches and mentors through an all in one training community and business system. Click image below for more info.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential

All affiliates start at zero when they begin, but ultimately the affiliate marketing income potential is huge. Top affiliates can earn millions from their affiliate businesses. The highest earners are those who create products themselves and have affiliates selling the products for them. But these entrepreneurs have often come from an affiliate background themselves and have become super affiliates; earning millions from selling other people’s products online; before going on to create their own products and courses.

Despite the affiliate marketing income potential that is possible, many affiliates struggle. The affiliate marketing failure rate is around 95% which means many who attempt it will simply drop out. But for the 5% who stick it out there are huge rewards, particularly if they promote the right program and are able to sell in bulk and scale up to a global audience.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential

But selling in high numbers is not the only key to affiliate success. Selling the right products and using the right business model and marketing strategies is also a major factor in someone’s success.

There’s many different affiliate marketing business models and if you get stuck with the wrong product or marketing strategy, it could mean your affiliate business goes nowhere. Amazon for example typically pays between 1% and 11% commissions on products within its affiliate program. Digital products pay much more – often 30%-50% commission on referred sales.

Smart affiliates know to use recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket products to give them the most profit for their efforts. But many new affiliates don’t know to do this, or can’t afford to invest in a high ticket program which gives them larger commissions. This means they’re stuck with low value items to sell and this limits the choice of marketing strategies that are open to them.

Even when they make a sale, if the commission level is as small as 1%, that’s only a tiny amount, even with an expensive item.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential – Starting Out

When an affiliate starts out they will be earning nothing. Everything they do will determine whether they make a sale online or not. The first few months and years of an affiliate business are the hardest. Nothing is guaranteed in affiliate marketing and for many, several months of hard work with little to show is too much to bare.

If you manage to get through this stage and make your first online sale, congratulations. This is a fantastic achievement and should be celebrated! Affiliates should always celebrate small wins because the small wins lead to bigger wins!

Income is generally sporadic even once you’ve broken through and had some successful sales. From one month to the next, you won’t have a guaranteed income. This is why many quit. But if you keep going and hold onto the day job while you build your affiliate business, income can overtake whatever you’re earning from trading your time for money in a job – even if you have a six figure salary.

Subscription Products

Going back to business models it’s important to use some subscription products in your affiliate business. With a low value product from Amazon which earns 3% commission, you’ll only earn $3 on a sale of a $100 product. That’s a tiny amount and you’ll need to sell a lot of them to make a good income.

With a subscription product, your earnings compound over time because each sale you make builds your monthly income. So selling a software product which pays a recurring commission can give you $20-$30 each and every month (providing your customer maintains their subscription).

10 sales gives you $300 a month, 100 sales gives you $3000 a month, and so on. With a global audience to sell to, there’s an unlimited earning potential. When you add high ticket products to your product range, your earning potential increases again. Providing you choose good products which give huge value, customers will maintain their memberships and subscriptions – often for a lifetime.

High Ticket Products

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? High ticket products are those products which carry a much higher price tag than most affiliate products. Most affiliates don’t realise that this is the key to large earnings with affiliate marketing, in addition to subscription products. With a high ticket product, an affiliate can earn commissions ranging from $500 to $5000 for an individual sale! What many think is that selling such a product will be much more difficult than selling a $100 product to earn $50.

But to earn $500 you would need to sell 10 of the lower valued ($100) product or 1 product at $1000 – (given a 50% commission for both). To earn $5000 with the lower valued product you would need to sell 100, or sell just 1 product valued at $10,000. Selling a higher priced product might be more difficult than selling the lower valued product, but it won’t be 100 times as difficult! So it makes sense to go for the higher priced items as an affiliate.

In addition to this, by choosing a sales funnel with a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf, you can avoid having to do much of the selling. With a good high ticket sales funnel you only need refer the initial sale. If your customer should purchase another product from the range, even years later, you still get credit for this sale. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Affiliate Marketing Income Potential – Summary

The affiliate marketing income potential is unlimited but many affiliates don’t earn anything – especially when starting out. To earn money from affiliate marketing takes some time, patience and dedication. But once you start breaking through and making sales, you can focus on the things which have created those outcomes. In the first instance, you’ll spend a lot of time on unproductive actions which may not bring about sales. But if you stick with it long enough and keep learning, you should see some results.

Initial results aren’t consistent for most affiliate. They tend to be sporadic depending on your marketing methods. To help build a more consistent income from affiliate marketing it’s worth using subscription products which pay a recurring income month after month.

High ticket products too can help you generate more cash flow which should be reinvested back into your affiliate business to help it grow. Keep hold of the day job as long as possible because once you start relying on affiliate income you have less to invest back into growing your business.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Affiliate Marketing Vs MLM

Affiliate marketing vs MLM, which is better? MLM (or multi level marketing) is a legitimate business model which is often mistaken for a pyramid scheme. While a multi level marketing business is legal, a pyramid scheme is illegal. A “pyramid scheme” can often be spotted because there’s no obvious product or service within the model.

Whereas a legitimate business will offer some form of product or service. MLM’s have become popular because they offer a higher earning potential for those willing to build a team of sales people. Once a MLM member has built a huge team to help them sell a business model or product, they benefit from sales generated by their team.

Most MLM’s involve an initial investment and a product which you can sell. In addition to selling the product directly, you can earn a percentage of sales generated by your referrals. This is where higher earnings can be achieved. Many people are sceptical of such schemes and this makes it more difficult to recruit members. In addition to this, building a big team isn’t for everyone. It can take a lot of hard work and if you’re not particularly sales minded, this can be a huge barrier.

You can also use an MLM business without recruiting. Companies like Herbalife and Avon for example can allow you to build a customer base from only selling products and earn commissions from the sales. However, the higher earnings can’t be achieved without building a team of other sales people also doing the same.

Affiliate Marketing Vs MLM

A few popular MLM companies are:

Herbalife.
Arbonne.
Stella&Dot.
Younique.
MONAT.
Isagenix.
Nu Skin.
doTERRA
Avon

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is another business model in which affiliates refer customers to existing products and services online. You don’t need to invest in order to join an affiliate program, although it’s worth investing in training if you have no experience.

With affiliate marketing you only get paid when you generate a sale of a product or service through your affiliate link. So it’s a performance based marketing strategy. You don’t have to recruit anyone with an affiliate marketing business and you can generate sales using automation. This makes it potentially very lucrative (if you are successful) because you can grow and scale up your business globally, selling products and services internationally.

Affiliate Marketing Vs. MLM – Affiliate Pros & Cons

Affiliate marketers use a number of different strategies to promote and sell products online. Some affiliates use blogging, others build email lists and run paid advertising campaigns. They then sell products through automated emails using their affiliate links. One of the benefits of affiliate marketing is that you can build an affiliate business from anywhere without any products of your own.

A downside it that it takes some time to learn.

learn affiliate marketing — Click on image for free video explainer.

There’s thousands of affiliate products online and you can choose products or services based on your interests. Often affiliates will create content on a blog or using YouTube. They will then promote products which are suitable for their audience. So there’s much more choice in products with affiliate marketing than with MLM companies.

MLM’s typically have joining fees and you have to sell physical products or recruit to earn money. With affiliate marketing, there’s no joining fees and you can choose your products from around the internet. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate companies. Anyone can join Amazon’s associate program and get paid for referring sales on the site.

Is Affiliate Marketing Better For Introverts?

In my own experience I’d definitely say affiliate marketing is better for introverts like me! I ran a Kleeneze business for a couple of years in the UK and struggled to get the traction because I wasn’t good at selling the opportunity. I did however build up a small customer base who regularly bought Kleeneze products from me. The MLM business also involved dropping off magazines door to door and collecting them and processing orders. Ultimately it didn’t work for me and I dropped out.

I later discovered affiliate marketing and found that I could refer sales online with no door to door selling or “salesmanship” needed!

With many affiliate programs you can use existing sales materials to promote on your own website and through email marketing. So it’s a much better model if you don’t consider yourself a gregarious people person who is good at selling! Affiliates have no need to promote products directly, speak to customers or handle any products themselves. This makes it a perfect career option for introverts who want to work from their laptops!

Affiliate Marketing & MLM

One of the best affiliate marketing business models combines affiliate marketing and MLM with a tier two commission structure. With such a model, you can benefit from sales generated from your referrals. This can give you a massive advantage if you’re intending on building a full time income from affiliate marketing.

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme? Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model which is based on referring customers to existing products and services. With a two tier affiliate program there are parallels to pyramid schemes because you can earn commissions through recruiting other members. A pyramid scheme though typically offers no product or service, just a promise of money through recruiting, whereas an affiliate program will. Like with MLM, your efforts are rewarded to motivate you to make more sales. The best way to do this is by bringing in more sales people.

MLM’s and multi tier affiliate programs can be a great way to earn a passive income from the work you have done previously. Affiliate marketing vs MLM? In my experience, MLM’s are more difficult to build. In either case, it’s worth using the power of the internet, automation and a global reach to generate more sales. Certain MLM companies are limited to certain countries and unless you’re particularly good at selling, it can be a more difficult option.

Learn more about affiliate marketing through this free video series.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Drop Shipping

Affiliate marketing vs drop shipping – which is better? There’s a number of differences between the two business models. With drop shipping you will need at least your own website, whereas with affiliate marketing you can “get away” without having one – although having one is a good idea. In addition to having a website for drop shipping, you will ideally need to invest in a web store software. Unless you know what you’re doing, you’ll also need to pay a subscription for a service to connect you with information and contacts of quality merchants.

Drop shipping is more involved too in that you’ll need to deal with customers and merchants. With affiliate marketing this isn’t necessary as you simply refer customers to products. With both models you don’t handle products yourself. Affiliate marketers send people to other people’s products. Customer service and product delivery is handled by the product owners.

In drop shipping, your website is the “front facing” end of the business. For a customer, they might easily assume you are holding the products, even though you are only a referral based website. You’ll therefore have to deal with customers queries with drop shipping and take orders and relay those orders to the drop shipping companies you’re dealing with.

Affiliate Marketing Vs. Drop Shipping

With affiliate marketing you can start for much less of an investment – in fact zero! Anyone can join an affiliate program for free and refer customers to products online. You don’t even need a website and you can post your affiliate links on social media or through your own email. See where to promote affiliate links.

Affiliate marketing is pretty versatile and there’s many ways for an affiliate to promote their products. There’s no product handling or dealing with customers either. This makes affiliate marketing the preferred choice for many would-be online business owner.

However there are downsides to affiliate marketing which make it difficult. Affiliate marketing is pretty competitive. There’s thousands of affiliates who are potentially selling the same products as you. This makes getting traffic difficult. Traffic is the major difficulty for affiliates due to competition. Drop shipping can be less competitive because there’s less competition. The larger entry costs can put people off and this means fewer competing websites in a particular niche.

So if you find an uncompetitive niche in drop shipping there’s a greater potential to dominate the market. With affiliate marketing this can be more tricky because there’s so many affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing Vs. Drop Shipping

With a drop shipping web store, your entire website store is yours. You can take orders directly from customers and this gives you a certain authority. The customer doesn’t know you are a third party referrer of products and might easily assume they are buying directly from you. You can also sell many different products from multiple drop shipping companies to the same user/visitor using a shopping cart.

This is very different to the affiliate model where affiliates will send people to another website. Visitors can easily click away without making a purchase or leave an affiliate website never to return. A way around this for affiliates is to use the power of email marketing, but still, affiliate links lead customers away from the affiliate themselves towards another website. This hands off approach of affiliate marketing can mean it’s less profitable than with an e-commerce store of your own using the drop shipping model. This of course depends on how popular your store/affiliate site becomes and this comes down to your marketing efforts.

Summary

So which is better in the affiliate marketing vs drop shipping debate? In terms of competition and profitability you might lean towards the drop shipping model. If you can find a niche and dominate it you can be more profitable than with an affiliate marketing business. However there’s a lot more involved in set up of a drop shipping business.

For setting a successful drop ship web store you need not only to find the right products and providers, but also to constantly update prices and inventory. You need to watch your competitors and adjust your price ranges accordingly. You may need to manually order deliveries and answer customer’s questions. There’s also a larger investment of time and effort involved in learning drop shipping and becoming profitable.

Affiliate marketing is considerably cheaper and there’s much less hassle involved in setting up. (See also alternatives to drop shipping). You don’t need to talk to customers or arrange product delivery. You simply refer customers to products online through your affiliate links. However, due to the low entry costs for affiliate marketers this means everyone wants to do it. This floods the market with competing websites and affiliates are everywhere online. As such, it can be more difficult to find your audience with all the noise there is from other affiliates online.

Access a free video series explaining the various online business models.

Celebrate Small Wins

Why should you celebrate small wins when going for a big goal? A big goal can be intimidating and if you’re aiming high it’s easy to get frustrated. This is all the more true when building an online business. If you’re not sure of your approach, if can be easy to become overwhelmed and quit.

The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high (around 95%). To be in the 5% of those who manage to build an income online you need a good strategy; not only in building your business, but also in developing mindsets and attitudes which will help you overcome problems and frustrations. Overwhelm is a pretty big problem for new affiliate marketers. Imagine how you’ll feel after several months of working without any sales or feedback. That’s the point where a lot of people become frustrated and quit.

In a state of frustration or overwhelm, it’s a good idea to remember to celebrate small wins.

Celebrate Small Wins

Big goals can create a lot of frustration if you’re unsure how you’re going to achieve them. Breaking big goals down into small achievable steps is the best way to combat this problem. A small micro commitment each day to do the next little thing, is very powerful over time. For affiliate marketers this could be baby steps such as:

Write an article or blog post
Watch a training video
Build a back link
Set up an advert
Add an email message to your autoresponder
Learn something new

If having a profitable online business is the goal, you need to break this down into smaller steps which are easily achievable. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time in indecision, procrastinating and getting frustrated. Imperfect action is better than perfect procrastination!

Mini Habits

In Stephen Guise’s book Mini Habits, he breaks down big achievements into tiny micro steps which are easily achievable. Habits are powerful over time and this is the leverage you need to build into your life as an affiliate marketer. A strong habit can make your business and set you on the path to your longer term goals. Building a new habit which serves your longer term purpose is a great thing to focus on.

As a new affiliate marketer I spent a lot of time in the state of confusion, procrastination and overwhelm. I couldn’t decide on my strategy and spent a huge amount of time jumping from one thing to another. When I got no results for my efforts I became dissatisfied and procrastinated all the more.

By making habits out of tiny micro-commitments, you are focusing on what you can do in the moment, not on your results or lack of.

Small Wins Through Blogging

One of the strategies I’ve used as an affiliate marketer is blogging. I’ve made a habit out of blogging over a number of years. The effect of this habit has compounded over time. Initially of course a single blog post won’t make your online business. But as you maintain the habit of doing it regularly, you will soon have hundreds of blog posts which can attract more and more visitors over time.

A single blog post also seems a bit daunting if you’ve never done one. You may wonder what to write about, or if your content is good enough. But once you break the inertia of not doing, and turn your attention to mini habits, you’ll find it eventually will be more difficult not to write that blog post than to write it!

Use this same analogy in any aspect of your life whether it be fitness, diet, building an online business or anything else you want to improve. Start with building habits out of the things which will impact your life the most. Don’t start with a huge list of things to do.

Just start with a mini habit. Mini Habits should be so small that even on a bad day you can still do them. A single press up, reading 10 pages of a book, writing in a diary daily are all examples of mini habits. Alone in isolation they don’t seem like much, but over months and years they compound. Once you’re in the place of doing that single push up, you’re more likely to do another.

Celebrate Small Wins – The Plateau Of Latent Potential

The above image is from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. The “valley of disappointment” is where many people find themselves when attempting to attain a large goal. This is where many give up and their efforts dwindle. They start thinking their goal is too big, or not possible. They lower their goals rather than doubling their efforts.

Having a strategy to focus on small achievable steps which carry you to larger goals is fundamental to success. When you are in a state of frustration, upset, overwhelm or procrastination, you focus on the one thing you can do, rather than the myriad of things which are out of your control. By doing it over and over, and having a mini habits strategy, you can avoid falling into such a negative state. In a state of overwhelm, it’s easy to waste an entire day accomplishing nothing. Far better to do one small thing which is easily accomplished and takes you even a small distance forward.

A Positive Feedback Loop

When you celebrate small wins, you set up a positive feedback “loop” which reinforces a behaviour you intend to make into a habit. So a tiny step forward can become the bedrock you build your goals on. By taking tiny steps each day, and focusing on a 1% improvement, rather than a giant leap, you set yourself up for long term success.

Thinking of huge goals but without a clear action step to take in the present can set up the opposite. You remind yourself of the desire, but your results aren’t there yet. So you become frustrated and procrastinate, doing nothing useful. It becomes a negative reinforcement loop of frustration!

Don’t look for results, focus only on the small thing you can do today to move towards your goals.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Blogging

Affiliate marketing vs blogging? Which is better? Affiliate marketers are often bloggers too and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Bloggers though can earn money from blogs in another way – through advertising. This makes blogging quite versatile since you can place adverts on any content you might have. Affiliate marketing on the other hand tends to be more specific. An affiliate website is often built with a specific purpose in mind – to sell a specific affiliate product.

Affiliates can also use paid marketing and drive traffic towards landing pages. There, they get visitors to subscribe to an email list and follow up with email marketing. But this too can be done from a blog of course!

Blogging can be done in a pretty much any area. If you have an interest or passion, you can start a blog around it. So, many people start blogs around passion projects. Blogging is often the first step for anyone wanting to turn a passion into an income.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Blogging

Blogging is definitely a slow, long term strategy. Many bloggers do what they do for pleasure, rather than for making an income; and an income is definitely not guaranteed from either a blog or affiliate marketing.

As an affiliate marketer and a blogger, I can say that blogging can be incredibly frustrating if your sole reason for it is to make money. After building a number of blogs in areas which I wasn’t particularly interested, I would say that’s a pretty bad strategy. Blogging only for money is demoralising, especially if you’re not interested in your subject. But it can be fun if you enjoy your topic.

Successful bloggers therefore usually love their topic. Their blogs marry up with their interests. This means they can blog around a topic for a long period of time. This is usually what is required to make a blog successful. Top earning bloggers have usually been at it for years, not weeks.

Affiliate marketing offers other faster strategies which you can implement to make money through online selling. With affiliate marketing, you can use paid marketing, email marketing, video and a whole host of other strategies for making money. Blogging is a strategy used by affiliates too, but a long term and mostly slow one which requires a lot of work and consistency.

Blogging And Google Adsense

Google Adsense is the “go-to” advertising platform for bloggers. Adsense lets you place code on a blog and earn advertising revenue from clicks made on them by your visitors. The main problem with this earning strategy is that you need thousands of daily visitors to your blog to make it worthwhile financially. But if you love your blogging, why not turn it into an income if you can?

affiliate marketing vs blogging — adsense

You only earn tiny amounts from advertising clicks on a blog. This is why many bloggers turn to affiliate marketing to monetise their blogs. You may need 1000 clicks to earn the same as you would from one affiliate sale! So, if you can turn your visitors into buyers, you can make more from affiliate marketing in less time and with less traffic.

Traffic is a major issue for many bloggers and affiliate marketers. Without it, you won’t make any money whatever your monetisation method is. Bloggers attract traffic organically, although they can use paid marketing too. Their main method is using SEO (search engine optimisation) and the goal is to have free traffic find their blog posts. In order for this to happen, they spend a lot of time creating and sharing content.

Blogging is a great idea if you enjoy writing. But if the idea of spending months or years putting out content and plugging it on social media isn’t for you, affiliate marketing might be a better option.

Affiliate Marketing Options

Affiliate marketing is the business of promoting other people’s products and services online. Even with high ticket affiliate products to sell, you still need a method to put them in front of people. For some this means using paid marketing and building an email list. You can use a blog too, which is what many affiliates do. Affiliates use YouTube, social media platforms and a whole host of strategies to earn money from the internet. So if blogging is not for you, but you want to earn online, affiliate marketing might be an option.

Learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free video series by clicking on the image below.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically

Wondering how to increase website traffic organically? Website traffic can be one of the hardest things to attain organically. With paid marketing, you can simply turn on traffic like a tap! But this isn’t great if you don’t have the budget to play with and see how your campaign performs. If you’re on a tight budget, but have the time to create content, organic traffic might be the answer. Or you can spend some time on organic traffic, while also running paid adverts.

The niche you are in, and the topic you create content for will have a large part to play in your organic traffic. In a competitive niche such as affiliate marketing, you can spend a lot longer creating organic traffic than in a less competitive niche. Organic traffic is typically created through content. You can either build a blog and post regular articles, or upload videos to YouTube and create content that way. A combination of the two can also be a good idea.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Blogging

Blogging on a website is a strategy used for organic traffic, but it can take some time. There’s lots of competition on Google and according to your topic and your desire for success, this can take months or even years to accomplish. Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty can help. This strategy allows the blogger to target specific keywords which offer lower competition than most. If successful, these blog posts will reach the first page of Google, or other search engines and attract free organic traffic.

You can use plugins like Yoast SEO to help you write your content with SEO in mind. See best free plugins for WordPress. This plugin will help you write content based around your chosen keyword. There’s no guarantee of ranking at the top of Google for your main keyword though. Some will do better than others. The key is to create good quality content and outperform the competition by writing better content that those which already rank on Google.

Back linking is a major factor to organic traffic. Most high ranking websites on Google will have many backlinks and a high domain authority. You can build back links by writing quality content, reaching out to other bloggers and asking to do guest posts and sharing content throughout your social media profiles. Backlinks are built up over time and should be natural. Google will spot an unnatural back link profile and you could be penalised for attempting to “gear” the system by building links too quickly. Where your links come from is an important factor too. Spammy sites won’t fair as well as high quality websites within your niche.

Make blogging on a regular basis a habit as one means of attracting organic search traffic.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Promotion

Just creating blogs on a regular basis might not be enough though to attract the traffic you really want. You also need to promote your content as much as possible. A blog post will largely be invisible unless you promote it. Do this through your social media websites and other sites.

Link back from YouTube from videos you create and upload. Place share buttons on your website to encourage others to share on social media. You can also use a clever plugin called Revive Old Posts which will syndicate your older content through your social media platforms. See best free plugins for WordPress.

You should also build an email list from your website. Each post you publish can be shared with your list of email subscribers. Use newly published posts you write to link back to older posts. using deep linking. Deep linking tells Google (and other search engines) the keyword/s you want to rank each page for. It helps with your SEO (search engine optimisation).

Content Is King

Content is king. Google uses multiple indicators to determine how to rank your website. Content is pretty important because Google can see how people react to it in several ways: whether people naturally link to it, how long they stay on your page, if they take any action on your site and click on any of your links. So writing quality content should be a priority if you want organic traffic to your website.

Don’t write only for SEO. Use an SEO plugin to help you, but write content for your readers not for the search bots! Ideally write at least 1000 words per article, ideally more. Much of the highest ranking content will be over 1000 words long. If you find content ranking for your chosen keywords, have a look at it and create content which is better than the best performing article.

Multiple Traffic Strategies

Once you’ve published your content don’t expect Google to place your content at the top of the search engines, even if you’ve done everything right! It might not or it might take months before it recognises it. To give your content the best possible chance, assume it won’t get ranked and share and promote it as much as possible.

Use the plugins I’ve shared in this article to help: social share plugins, Revive Old Posts etc. Push Engage is another great plugin which will help you get more people to your blog posts. It allows visitors to opt in to updates. They’ll get automatic notifications when you publish new content.

Quora.com is another great source for organic traffic if you use it correctly. With Quora you can answer questions relevant to your content and post your website content underneath. Be careful not to spam your links without first providing some good answers and content. See also affiliate marketing on Quora. There’ definitely quite a bit of work in building organic traffic. But if you take steps every day and keep doing it for long enough, you’ll build up organic traffic over time.

Using YouTube With Your Website

It’s well worth getting a YouTube account and using it to upload videos too. Create videos which are relevant to your website content and link back to your articles. This will have a two-fold benefit. You’ll be building back links yourself which will help with SEO, and you’ll find visitors will also come from your YouTube videos to your website too. The will find your videos according to the keywords you have put in your video title and descriptions.

So before uploading your videos, it’s well worth doing some keyword research to see which keywords give you the best chance for success. A short title might not give you the best opportunity to get your videos found. Type your keywords into the YouTube search bar and see what comes up. Then look at the competition to determine the best keywords to use. See also long tail keyword benefits.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Paid Ads

You can also consider running some paid advertising to your website. Although this doesn’t fall into the definition of “organic marketing”, over the longer term, more visitors to your website means more data for Google, and potentially more shares on social media sites and more back links. If your content is good, remember content is king, this is more likely. Therefore a stint of paid marketing will pay you back in good will!

One strategy I use for my blogs is Google Adwords Dynamic ads. With dynamic ads, you can take a generic advert and apply it to all your content throughout your website/blog. Search queries are automatically directed to the most relevant content from your advert. You can also set a very small budget and give your website traffic an instant boost using this strategy.

Facebook

Facebook can be a great source for organic traffic. I’ve already shared how important sharing content throughout social media is. But with Facebook you can also create a business page to connect with your website.

This again shows the search engines that you’re relevant on social media and not just a spammy lone website! Connect your Facebook business page with your website so that updates are automatically shown on your website. I’m using Smash Balloon customer Facebook feed on this website.

A good idea before you create your business page is to research carefully the name you choose. A good name for a business page can show up on the Google search results and through a Facebook search, so you can pick up passing traffic through using one. Share content through your page and interact with people on Facebook to encourage interaction and over time this can be a source of organic traffic too.

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free service which definitely deserves a mention here. Although this service is mostly for physical businesses (based in a physical location), depending on your specific niche it can help you with another organic trickle of traffic.

Using your home address for an internet based business can work with Google My Business. All you need is a verifiable address to work from and you can have a free listing.

Again, find keywords which are most appropriate for your business. Verify your listing when Google sends out the code and you’ll get a listing. Other free listings are available too with companies like Bing and Yell.com. Search for “free business listing”.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Future

Wondering why affiliate marketing is the future? Affiliate marketing is the future for a couple of good reasons. Firstly it offers a super-competitive marketing strategy for owners of businesses and products. Affiliates are referral marketers and a company pays them on a performance basis. If you’re a product owner, affiliate marketing offers the most cost effective way to advertise. Products owners pay affiliates only when a sale is made, so the advertising risk is passed on to the affiliate.

Advertising your own products and services can be costly, especially in the first instance. With paid marketing, a lot of money is spent in the testing and measuring phase. Affiliates can take this risk away from owners. Providing the affiliate is incentivised to sell your product for you, they use their marketing and promotion skill-set to promote your products.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Future – Technology

Technology is taking over and many jobs are being lost to automation. High street stores are closing because they can’t compete with internet prices. Most people are shopping online and this is having a massive impact on other businesses and high street stores.

All of this means many jobs will be lost over the coming years both due to automation and competition. Many people will need another source of income and affiliate marketing is a solution for many. With affiliate marketing, you can build an income online through referring web based traffic to products and services. Most affiliates will start their online business alongside other work because it can take some time. But as more jobs become obsolete, alternatives will need to be found.

Affiliate Marketing Is The Future Of Flexible Work

Affiliate marketing is a good flexible way to earn an income. Not many business models offer the same levels of flexibility. It offers a very low barrier to entry too, unlike many other businesses.

With most business models, there’s business premises to purchase, staff to employ etc. There’s huge cost involved just in starting. But with affiliate marketing, anyone can start on a shoe string budget. The use of automation within affiliate marketing can mean a single affiliate can reach thousands of people with various products and services online.

Affiliate marketing isn’t for everyone and definitely isn’t an easy thing to learn. In fact the failure rate of affiliate marketers is pretty high. But for those who are determined and hard working, there’s great rewards.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Future – Lifestyle

Affiliate marketing offers a means to generate income through automated systems and technology. This can give successful affiliates the ability to earn potentially unlimited incomes from anywhere. While nothing is guaranteed with affiliate marketing, as with any business, this potential makes it very desirable.

For some though affiliate marketing offers the the perfect flexible working strategy. Not everyone wants the jet set lifestyle. Most people want to eliminate struggle and live with peace of mind; affiliate marketing can deliver on this! But for the ambitious affiliate, affiliate marketing has the potential to create financial freedom.

Successful affiliate marketers can generate a passive income, work from anywhere and earn unlimited income. By using automation, a global reach and products which can be sold internationally, they can automate and scale up their businesses worldwide.

Summary

So that’s why affiliate marketing is the future! Automation and the shift of people purchasing online has meant high street stores have closed. They will continue to do so too and jobs will be lost because of this and automation. People will need a purpose whatever their governments offer them in terms of financial support. Affiliate marketing can be a part of that purpose for many who want to keep working and provide an income which is independent.

Affiliate marketing is a way to earn in a very flexible way, too. Most jobs can’t be so flexible and this makes affiliate marketing suitable for working around a single employment or multiple jobs. The unlimited earning potential of affiliate marketing makes it desirable, but not everyone will succeed with it. See affiliate marketing failure rate. Affiliate marketing though can be a useful strategy for earning in the future for anyone with a laptop and internet connection. This diversity makes it a very useful business model for those dedicated enough to learning it.

In short, here’s some of the main reasons affiliate marketing is the future:

Cheap cost effective means for businesses to promote their product or service.
Affordable business model for anyone who wants a second or primary income
Flexible working means it can be built around existing work
Can be done from anywhere with a laptop and internet connection
Low barriers to entry means almost anyone can learn with little start up costs.
Affiliate marketing is a scalable business model which can give unlimited earning potential.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing A Favourable Form Of Marketing?

Why is affiliate marketing a favourable form of marketing? For a product or service owner, affiliate marketing offers a cheap means to advertise. Product owners only pay for sales referrals when a sale is made. This makes it much more cost effective than running advertising campaigns in-house. Providing affiliates are actually making sales, they only need to pay a commission when sales are made.

There’s no limit to the number of affiliates that a company can take on either. The affiliates take all the marketing risk. So long as a company can offer an attractive opportunity for affiliate marketers, they can generate sales through referrals. Companies usually offer marketing materials to their affiliates such as banners and affiliate links to specific products. Plus commission levels are also an incentive. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

If an affiliate doesn’t make any sales for a company, it doesn’t cost anything! So even with thousands of affiliates working for you, you only pay the ones who generate sales.

why is affiliate marketing a favourable form of marketing — Why is affiliate marketing a favourable form of marketing?

To advertise yourself can be expensive and time consuming. Affiliate marketers are often well skilled in this area. So if you have a new product or service, affiliate marketing is a good strategy to run by itself or alongside your own advertising campaigns.

When starting an advertising campaign, you can spend a lot in the testing and measuring phase, before becoming profitable. Affiliate marketing allows companies and services to pass this risk to affiliates.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing A Favourable Form Of Marketing?

For the affiliate marketers themselves, affiliate marketing offers a way to earn independently of a job. Top affiliates can enjoy using automation to generate their income too, which comes with a number of benefits:

Passive income which is uncapped; large earning potential
They can work from anywhere with a laptop
Income can be grown and scaled quickly once profitable
An affiliate business can be built up around other work and offers a flexible working opportunity

For new affiliates, learning affiliate marketing can be tough. To successfully sell a product online is becoming more difficult as the market gets more competitive. There’s thousands of competing affiliates who are often selling the same products too. This can make the job of an affiliate marketer difficult, especially in a competitive area/niche.

Affiliate marketing is a good strategy for anyone looking for the so called “laptop lifestyle”! People want more autonomy and independence in their jobs and careers. Affiliate marketing offers a path to financial freedom and independence. Affiliates who become successful promoting other people’s products can live anywhere and work from a laptop. This is very desirable, especially for those trapped in employment which offers little satisfaction, poor working conditions and/or pay.

Where Do Owners Find Affiliates?

Product owners can find affiliates for their products through sites like Clickbank.com, JVZoo.com and Click2sell.com. These sites connect affiliates with products and offer a go-between for owners and “referrers”. Once you have placed your product and related sales material on a platform, affiliates can find you through a simple search.

Often affiliates already have traffic in certain topics/niches. So, for example, if you’re selling a golf related training course, affiliates with golf related websites will be looking for products in this area to sell.

This is great for product owners because they can quickly tap into affiliates who already have built up trust with their email lists and/or website visitors. It can be much quicker than running your own advertising campaigns and/or building your own websites.

Affiliates often have built up email lists over a number of years too. This means should they choose your product to promote, you can quickly tap into a reliable source of traffic and customers. See also the power of email marketing.

Learning Affiliate Marketing

Learning to become an affiliate marketer and promote other people’s products can take some time. Long term affiliates have large email lists and lots of traffic. As a beginner you will be starting from scratch. However, affiliate marketing can be a means to escape a job and work from anywhere. If you’re interested in learning more and joining an online community of affiliates, check out a free video series which will explain more by clicking the image below.