AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense

Yes, you can earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense. However, this does take some time and initially, be prepared to put some work in creating content. After some time, you will see a small, trickle income which is probably going to be sporadic at first. Once you have built up enough content, and are getting more regular traffic, you’ll see more consistent income.

There’s two main strategies which are used to earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense; blogging and v’logging. Blogging involves putting written content on a website. Blog = web log. V’logging is the video equivalent and you’ll be creating video content and uploading it to YouTube.

As your content grows in size, and if you have done your keyword research, you should start to generate organic traffic from the search engines.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense – Free Blogging Platforms

There’s several free platforms you can use as a blogger:

Hubpages.com
WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Weebly.com
etc.

You only need to choose one of these platforms to get started creating content for free. Over time, if you get good at promoting your content, you should see some natural organic visits to your content if you keep at it. However, one source of free traffic which doesn’t rate free blog sites very well is Google. Google will give you more search traffic if you build your own website and host it yourself. More about this here.

If you use a free blogging site, Google doesn’t see you as such an authority as if you had your own domain name and hosting provider. So if you want to take an Adsense income seriously, it’s worth building your own website.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense – A Niche Website

Traffic is the main problem if you want to earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense. To earn an income from Adsense, you’ll need a lot of traffic. Not all of your traffic (visitors) will click on your ads. Only a small percentage of them will. Plus, you’ll only earn tiny amounts from each click. This means that you’ll need a huge amount of visitors just to make a small trickle income using this strategy.

One way to jump start your traffic generation is to use a niche website. A niche website is one which is built around your topic’s main keywords. This website is an example of a niche website. To find a good domain name for your topic, use Google keyword planner and research keywords which offer less competition than most. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can use the same or similar strategy I describe in my article: building a niche website for a local business.

With a niche website, you build the site around your targeted keywords. This can give you a head start in terms of traffic. Most new websites will take several months of blogging to get just a modest amount of daily visitors. But using the niche website tactic can help you find traffic searching for your main keywords.

Traffic From YouTube

YouTube is another avenue you can use to make money passively from advertising revenue. YouTube is pretty competitive too, although not as much as Google. With YouTube, you can use Adsense advertising, channel memberships, Merch shelf, Super Chat and Super Stickers and YouTube premium revenue.

Again, as with blogging, you’ll need to build up a library of videos over a long period of time. There’s millions of YouTube users who create content on a regular basis. So you’ll have plenty of competition. Depending on the topic area you choose to create content around, this could take anything between several months or years according to the relative competition.

Making Adsense Work & Alternatives

The great thing about Adsense is that it can work in nearly every topic area. Whatever your niche, you can monetise it with Adsense, even if there are no affiliate products available in your topic.

The most popular alternative to using paid advertising on your content (Adsense) is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you use your content to promote related products and services (affiliate products). This can pay much better than Adsense, especially if you don’t get much traffic. To monetise through using affiliate products is pretty easy.

Earn Passive Income By Working From Home With Google Adsense — The various forms of affiliate income you can make described in this video series.

Simply promote the affiliate products of your choice on your content. You can also build an email list which helps you make more sales. With recurring revenue affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing, you can make much larger amounts, even from less traffic. With the Adsense program, you’ll need to deal in bulk and attract a lot of website visitors in order to make even a small trickle of income. See micro income streams.

Money From Adsense – Summary

Making money from Adsense can be done and it can become a nice passive income. However, before this happens you’ll need to have created a lot of content and get traffic for free. This can take some time and considerable effort. Depending on the topic you pick, and the relative competitiveness online, this can take months or even years!

Adsense doesn’t pay enough to make it worthwhile paying for traffic and getting free traffic online is tough. Expect to work for some time before you see even a small regular trickle of income from Adsense. The most popular alternative to Adsense income is to use affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can use products which pay you a recurring income. This means it’s easier to make more from less traffic. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can also use paid advertising to make sales much more easily. With Adsense income this isn’t possible.

Adsense is a great passive income if you can use existing content which already attracts website traffic. Or, if you have a passion for something and are willing to work for months or years to build some content. But if you’re looking for a faster business model, affiliate marketing might be for you instead.

Access a free video series by clicking on the image below for more information.

Micro Income Streams

Micro income streams are so much better than one single income. A single income usually comes from a well paid job, which takes a huge amount of your time. Micro income streams on the other hand can be largely passive and you can build them up over time around existing work.

A micro income stream might be a royalty income, a rental property you own, or income from the internet. The internet offers one of the best opportunities today for anyone to get involved in making micro income streams.

A micro income stream might not replace your main income straight away. But it’s something that can grow over time, if you give it some nourishment.

Micro Income Streams – Blogging

One strategy to build micro income streams which is accessible to anyone with a laptop is blogging. With blogging you create an online resource, or a digital property which you own. Blogs can then be monetised either through advertising or affiliate marketing. What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which affiliates refer customers to other people’s products. When a sale occurs online which has been referred by an affiliate, they earn a commission based on the sale. The best part about affiliate marketing is that the sale can be completely hands off and passive.

With blogging as the marketing strategy, it can take some time to build your online resource/blog. But over time your blog can work for you, making commissions from advertising or affiliate marketing. See also blogging QnA

Adsense – Micro Income Streams

Adsense is a popular way to monetise online content. You can also use Adsense with video too. On a blog, adverts are placed around the written content. When visitors click on adverts, the blogger earns a commission based on the advertising revenue.

With YouTube, advertising is placed on your videos and the same applies. You earn revenue according to how many people click on your ads. With both blogging and YouTube videos, it can take some time to earn even just a regular trickle income.

But some bloggers and YouTuber’s have this down to a fine art! They create a huge library of content which generates a growing number of visitors. Over time this starts generating income passively. The more content they create, the more they can earn. Whilst many struggle with monetising their content, top YouTuber’s and bloggers earn a full time living from their content generation.

Recurring Revenue Affiliate Products (Subscriptions)

Recurring revenue affiliate programs can pay you ongoing commissions for years and potentially for a lifetime. With the right products, customers will continue using them forever! See lifetime commissions affiliate program. Subscription and membership products are products and services which offer ongoing value. Software products and training programs fall into this category. You don’t have to personally own a product or offer a service to benefit from these kinds of products.

An example is an autoresponder email service for online business owners. Online businesses depend on software like this. So if a business becomes profitable, they’ll use this service continually. If you have referred the sale, you benefit from ongoing recurring commissions.

Selling just one subscription product once can give you an ongoing micro income stream for life.

Micro Income Streams – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the simplest ways to generate passive micro income streams. With email marketing, you send targeted visitors, or website traffic, to a landing page to collect the subscribers information. Once a visitor enters their details they join a database of email subscribers. Emails are sent out to subscribers promoting useful products and services – affiliate products.

Over time, email lists can grow in numbers into the tens and even hundreds of thousands. So, an email can be sent out to a list of subscribers, and hundreds of affiliate products can be sold at the same time! This process can be automated and scaled up quickly to generate a passive income from anywhere too!

This means email marketing is one of the best ways of generating micro (and not so micro) income streams. See the power of email marketing.

Online Design – Redbubble

Redbubble is a clothing company which pays artists to upload their designs.

So if you have a creative flare, or even an existing design, you can upload it in just a few minutes. Should your design catch someone’s eye and they make a purchase, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Photography Sites

If you enjoy taking photographs why not turn your passion into micro income streams? Foap.com, and several other such websites offer to pay you when someone purchases your pictures or videos.

With this micro income strategy, you should be uploading images on a regular basis for some time ideally. A single image won’t likely bring in much, but if you’re a photographer, you can upload images regularly and you should see some trickle income from your work over time.

An Existing Website

Do you already have an existing website? If so, you can monetise it passively using affiliate products!. Amazon and eBay are two of the most popular affiliate programs which anyone can join.

Ideally, decide who your audience is and what they are looking for. If there an affiliate program which offers something your visitors would like, simply put a link on your site, or use existing images and sales banners.

Other affiliate sites include ZVzoo.com, Clickbank.com and Click2Sell.com. To find affiliate products within your topic, just do an online search for “your topic affiliate programs”.

Most affiliate programs have banners and images you can use directly on your website to promote products. If someone purchases a product from your website, you earn a commission. You don’t need to deal with customers and send products and it can be another passive income trickle for your collection!

Learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Micro Income Streams Summary

So there’s a few micro income streams you can use to start building a passive income. This can take some time and effort, but over time, these income “trickles” can grow into something more substantial.

Interested in learning more about earning online? You can access a free webinar by clicking on the image below.

Multiple Income Funnel

A multiple income funnel uses a product range, rather than a single product. It also benefits from subscription affiliate products so you can earn a recurring revenue from every sale. With a built in sales team, automated up-selling and high value products, sales are closed automatically. The affiliate simply refers the initial sale through an email marketing campaign which can be set up through the step by step modules in the back office. Start here.

The multiple income funnel benefits from the following benefits:

An automated selling system – using a digital affiliate product range and an email marketing system
Subscription income – memberships pay affiliates a recurring income from members they refer
High ticket affiliate products within the product range – are offered automatically to your members as they move through the funnel
Multi-tier commissions – available at the top tier level for those purchasing the highest valued products

How The Multiple Income Funnel Works

A multiple income funnel uses multiple products within a range. The first offering in the funnel should be free. This is usually a free document or video explainer series.

The free offering is used to build an email list and subscribers are offered useful products once they join the list – as well as valuable content. Once a subscriber purchases a product, they are offered other products within a range which offer ever increasing value to the customer.

Of course many subscribers won’t purchase a product. But an email list can help to build a longer term relationship with subscribers. A small percentage of subscribers will purchase the initial product within a range of products. This product can also be a subscription product which pays a recurring income to the affiliate promoting the funnel.

Up-Sells

A percentage of customers will upgrade their purchase, or buy another item from the range.

Everyone knows what an up-sell is if they’ve ever been to McDonalds or Burger King. In McDonald’s the up-sell is “do you want fries with that”. In Burger King, it’s “do you want to go large?” With a multiple income funnel, an up-sell is a higher value product or a product “add-on” which makes it more valuable. Although an up-sell might not be very costly for a customer, for the business it can be very profitable over many customers.

Automated up-sells are the crux of a profitable multiple income funnel. Even with fewer customers, a product range including high ticket and subscription products can be more profitable than a smaller valued offering, or a single product.

Multiple Income Funnel – High Ticket Digital Products

A good multiple income funnel should have a number of high ticket affiliate products within it. A high ticket products is generally one which has a larger price ticket associated with it. $500+ products are high ticket items. High ticket items can be either physical products or digital products. High ticket digital items are often courses trainings and mentorship programs. They help people to build online businesses.

High ticket physical products pay a smaller percentage of the cost price in commissions. But they can still be good payers if the price of the product is high. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Multi-Tier Commissions Within A Funnel

Some companies offer multi-tier commissions. This means you can earn income streams from sales generated by your referrals, within a business system. The SFM Digital Business System offers multi-tier commissions at the top level of their business system.

To access the multi-tier commissions you’ll need to purchase the top level products.

Here’s a breakdown of a basic members commission structure on the SFM Mentors product range:

And with the addition of tier 2 commissions:

For more information see SFM Digital Business System.

One Time, Subscription & High Ticket

Most online affiliate programs offer a single commission on a product or O/T (one time) payments. With subscriptions (S) and through using multiple products within a range, including high ticket items (HT), affiliates can make recurring commissions and earn from later purchases made by existing customers.

With a good multiple income funnel, you can also benefit from a built in sales team closing sales in-house, and from multi tier commissions.

For more information access the free videos by clicking on the image above.

Marketing A Multiple Income Funnel

A multiple income funnel like this can be advertised by promoting a landing page and collecting email subscribers. Because a multiple payment funnel will generally return a greater revenue than single items, it’s much easier to use paid marketing to promote it with.

This means that anyone can start and build a profitable online business much more quickly with a system like this. Smaller value items leave far less room for error when using paid marketing. But a six figure plus funnel means you can use paid marketing and more easily recoup advertising spend.

Using paid marketing has another huge advantage too. With paid marketing, once your advertising campaign is running profitably, you can easily increase sales by increasing budget. With slower marketing methods such as blogging and organic marketing, it’s far more difficult to scale up.

Affiliate Marketer Website

The affiliate marketer website is one piece of digital “real estate” affiliates can use to generate traffic. Affiliates can also use a whole host of other strategies too.

What is traffic in affiliate marketing? Traffic is the term used for visitors who land on a website. Without traffic, an affiliate won’t earn anything from their affiliate efforts. So traffic is pretty important in order to generate affiliate sales.

The affiliate marketer website can be used to generate traffic in a number of ways and often affiliates will have more than one site. They might have different websites for different purposes. For example, an organic blogging website can be used to generate traffic from the organic search engines. This site could be used to create content about their topic to draw in visitors.

Another website might be used in conjunction with paid marketing. This kind of website must be compliant with the advertising platform being used. For example if you’re using Google Adwords to drive traffic to a website, your site must comply with the latest terms and conditions of their advertising platform. This usually means using privacy policy, disclaimers and cookie notice as a minimum.

With a paid marketing platform, traffic can be driven to a website in large amounts very quickly. With an organic blogging website, an affiliate might spend several months or years creating content which draws in traffic at an increasing rate over a longer period.

Affiliate Marketer Website – Authority Site

An authority website is one which is trusted. Trusted sites are what affiliate marketers want because if they get trust they get more visitors. On an affiliate marketer website this means more sales!

Trust comes in a number of ways: trust from other authority sites, trust from visitors and trust from industry leading experts. When you have trust, you also get trust from the organic search engines. When you get this, it means the search engines will reward all your hard work with more authority.

Once you are trusted by the search engines it means more traffic. This can take some time and a lot of work. There’s millions of new affiliate websites popping up all the time.

Google usually puts newer websites down in the rankings because they haven’t built any authority yet. This is often known as the sandbox. New websites can be held in the sandbox for several months before they get a clear ranking from Google.

Blogging With An Affiliate Marketer Website

This site is an example of a blogging website. With a blogging site, bloggers create more and more content with the aim of increasing their traffic gradually over several months or years. As you get more content on your site, and share you content as much as possible, it can start to receive organic searches. When this happens, you can get free traffic from Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines. Google is the main search engine and the most popular one. So it’s a good idea to use Google as the one to aim for.

One blogging strategy is to target long tail keywords. There’s several benefits of long tail keywords, but one of the main ones is the lower competition on the search engines. With a short tail (2 word) phrase, there’s going to a be a lot of websites and web pages which compete in the Google search listings. But with longer phrases (which have more than 3 words in them), there’s more chance of getting found for them in the search engine listings. So many bloggers find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

This strategy can take quite some time before you start to see website traffic coming of its own accord. But if you do this for long enough, it’s a cheap strategy which can pay off months or years later in organic sales.

Paid Marketing Site

Paid marketing is a much faster strategy to use for an affiliate. However, in order to be profitable, they will need a number of products which pay larger commissions. With smaller valued products, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing and still be profitable. So if you want to build an affiliate business more quickly, you’ll need a high ticket sales funnel which offers a number of high ticket affiliate products within it.

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? With a high ticket product you can earn considerably more than with standard affiliate products which only pay small commissions. A high ticket products will sell for more than $500. Standard affiliate products tend to sell for $100 or less and physical products will only pay 1-11% commissions. So for a $100 sale, the affiliate might only make $1, at the lowest commission level. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Email Marketing

The affiliate marketer website is a vital part of an affiliate marketing business. But some affiliates don’t even use websites. Instead they use simple landing pages to collect subscribers information and follow up with an email marketing campaign.

This works well because email marketing allows an affiliate to build a relationship with their subscribers over the longer term. Whereas an affiliate marketer website usually only gets visitors who stay on their site for a few minutes.

Still, a landing page needs traffic too, and affiliate marketer websites are a useful means to build this traffic in a cheaper way than using paid marketing. Without a website, you can still do affiliate marketing. Simply use a landing page software to create landing pages, and send paid traffic towards it to collect your subscribers information. See also the power of email marketing.

Get Started

You can join an affiliate program below which gives you access to everything you’ll need to start an affiliate business:

Website builder – set up in a few clicks
Landing page creator – build landing pages with a few clicks
Business system and set up – no products of your own? no problem! Use a ready made business system and step by step tutorials.

Access by clicking on the image below:

Affiliate Coaching Program

I found an affiliate coaching program back in 2014 which helped me learn affiliate marketing from scratch. Having already been working as an affiliate, I had had some issues – to say the least.

I was of course sceptical because I had already joined a number of courses and programs and was still struggling. But I knew that I had to keep going, despite my doubts. The alternative was much worse – a lifetime of 9 to 5 jobs! Here’s a video I created after joining the program, with my story of how I got started online, beginning with eBay.

Affiliate Coaching Program

The many courses I had previously taken didn’t offer actual coaching. And this was partly why I was struggling. Affiliate marketing is tough, especially if you have no clear direction. I jumped from one strategy to another and each course I took taught a different thing. No wonder I was struggling!

In 2014 I met co-founders of The SFM Mentors – Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek. These, and other members of their coaching program were the first affiliate marketers I had actually met in real life. Before then, program creators were difficult to connect with. I did meet one other affiliate online, but only via email. This was the first time I could actually meet people face to face who were actually building online businesses!

The SFM Digital Business system offers a multiple payment structure digital sales funnel which anyone can use to earn online as an affiliate. The business structure includes a number of training and coaching programs you can earn and learn from:

Subscription products you can earn recurring commissions from (memberships)
High ticket coaching programs you can learn (and earn) from
A number of live groups and sessions with coaches and mentors you can access
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
Multiple product range – earn from up-sells automatically offered to your members

Affiliate Coaching Program

In addition to this business system, the coaching and mentoring is available from mentors and coaches within the community. Weekly sessions are also available through booking using a 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching booking system.

Weekly groups are organised too. These are available to join even at the basic membership level. Access Mentors All In here to join.

I was able to access a number of groups and learn from those who were already successful as an affiliate. Here’s a snapshot of one of the group Q &A sessions:

Why You Need Help

Affiliate marketing isn’t an easy thing to do. It takes time and effort to earn online and more that I once thought. When I first started looking into affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s I thought things would be easy. I was promised easy money by many of the affiliate “guru’s” of the time! Unfortunately the get rich quick mentality isn’t useful for new affiliates. If anything it will bring more problems with it. Many affiliates quit within their first year and the affiliate marketing failure rate is high.

But if you’re genuinely looking to build a long term income from affiliate marketing, it’s well worth getting coaching. A coach can help you understand the parts of your mindset and mentality which hold you back. This is a large part of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing should be easy, but you as the owner are also the “glass ceiling” of that business. So depending on your background, habits, beliefs and working mentality, you will have a different experience to anyone else with it.

The actions you take in your affiliate business are a reflection of what you believe about it. Limiting beliefs, self doubt and procrastination can hold you back from taking the right actions. As Henry Ford once said, “if you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right”.

If you are coming from an employee background, it can be difficult to know the mindsets needed to succeed with your own business. See also affiliate psychology, affiliate marketing mindset and mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur.

Get Coaching

If you’re ready to take your affiliate marketing business seriously, access a mentorship program through this course. You’ll get an all in one business system, access to coaches and mentors and a range of 1 on 1 coaching programs and courses. You’ll also be able to access over 10,000 Linkedin learning courses with the Mentors All In program. These cover multiple strategies and skills which can help you personally and professionally with your online business building. Click on the image below for more details.

Is Blogging Worth It?

Lately I’ve been wondering is blogging worth it. Especially since many in the online business community I’m a part of are using paid ads. Paid adverts can get your business running much faster, but it still takes time and of course money. Blogging on the other hand, is free! The downside of blogging, compared to paid marketing is that it isn’t scalable. A blog post from several years ago can make me a sale, but I’ve no way of repeating that success on a large scale. But once you master paid marketing, you can scale up by increasing your budget.

I’ve been a blogger for several years now and it is how I started out online. Over time, I’ve come to enjoy writing, and it’s brought in a number of high ticket sales now too. But maybe you’re starting out wondering the same: “is blogging worth it?”

Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Sales System

Depending on how you decide to monetise a blog, it can take between several months and several years for it to provide you with an income. Blogging doesn’t work immediately and in the first instance it can be a little frustrating. Google especially doesn’t give new blogs much in the way of traffic. It usually sandbox’s them for several months. This means you don’t get traffic from Google, but there’s other search engines you can get traffic from: Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com.

You can also promote your content yourself throughout social media. There’s a number of plugins for WordPress which help you automate this process. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

As traffic comes to your blog, you’ll want a strategy for monetisation if you intend to earn from it. How you do this will go a long way (or not) to your income generation. Using affiliate marketing high ticket items and subscription affiliate programs has made a huge difference for me. Before I found such programs I was promoting low value physical products from my blog and I made a pittance for the same amount of work!

So before you build a blog and start blogging, it’s worth learning the different affiliate marketing business models and the affiliate marketing commission rates if you decide to monetise with the affiliate model.

It’s also worth building an email list from your blog. An email list allows you to collect visitors details and maintain contact over a longer period of time. This helps with sales too. See the power of email marketing.

Is Blogging Worth It? – Your Topic

Some bloggers simply pick a topic they love and enjoy writing. With this kind of spirit, it’s much easier to sustain your blogging habit over the longer term required to make an impact. If you can choose a topic you love, and align it with an affiliate resource you can get onboard with, or with your own business/product, then so much the better.

Writing a blog about something just for the sake of money will often mean it’s much more difficult over the longer term. Plus, each piece of content needs to be thoroughly researched – so it takes longer.

I chose a topic I knew nothing about and spent several months writing about mushroom harvesting! It was a bad idea and I eventually burned out and gave up. The trouble way I had zero interest in mushroom harvesting. I was only looking to make money from the site. I utterly failed with it although it did reach top of Google for its main keyword terms! But monetising was a problem and the site was eventually ditched.

Writing about a topic you enjoy is a different story. If you can find something you love writing about, you’re on to a winner.

Don’t Look For Results – Look At Your Activity

One of my business coaches once told me, don’t look at results when you’re starting out. Look at your activity. When you start out blogging, it can be easy to look for signs of traffic and sales. You write a blog post and the very next day are looking for sales! Unfortunately it takes much longer than this in most cases. If you base your actions on your tangible results it’s likely to hamper your enthusiasm and motivation. Ah, no sales today, should I bother!? Well yes, you should. But expect to be writing for several months before you see the signs of your hard work. Celebrate a click to your website. Celebrate a lead on your email list. But don’t get too far ahead of yourself looking for massive results with a long term strategy like blogging.

From James Clear’s book atomic habits – this perfectly sums up expectations vs reality from blogging.

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits he shows the plateau of latent potential (shown above). This relates to blogging very well. When you start out, you look for results but none are visible. Some will quit because of this but those who continue for long enough will break past the “valley of disappointment” where nothing happens. Over time though, if you stick with it, you’ll see an exponential increase in your traffic. This might take months or years depending on the niche you choose to write your blog in.

One way to overcome the desire to look for results too early, and therefore get disillusioned, is to choose a long term goal for your blog.

Overall, companies that have published 400+ pieces of blog content received twice the traffic as compared to those that have published between 301-400 blog posts. source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/5-simple-steps-thatll-help-you-determine-how-often-you-need-to-blog/

Is Blogging Worth It?

Only you can decide whether blogging is worth it depending on your ultimate reason for blogging. It’s most definitely a long term marketing strategy, but it does work. Just don’t expect overnight wonders! To get the most from blogging choose a subject you enjoy and find a way to monetise your blog which aligns with your passions, interests or hobbies.

Some people just like blogging and it can be a rewarding way to spend your time even if you’re not doing it for the almighty dollar! But if you enjoy writing and have a business or product to sell of your own, blogging is a great way to increase your online presence and sales over time. If not, you can monetise with a number of affiliate products which you can find online.

There are affiliate products available to promote in pretty much any niche. So choose your niche wisely if you’re planning on blogging for the longer term.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing

Understanding affiliate marketing is key to achieving success with it. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which an affiliate recommends products and services online. When someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, the affiliate makes a commission based on the sale. Affiliate marketing is therefore a referral based business model in which third party referrers are rewarded for generating sales online.

A good analogy is that of recommending a restaurant to a friend. Only with affiliate marketing, when your friend goes to that restaurant, you get paid a commission for the referral. Referrals are tracked through affiliate links which are coded to the individual affiliate who referred the sale. When a sale is made, the vendor (product owner) knows who to pay because of the link it came from.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available for affiliate marketers to join online. One of the most popular is Amazon.com. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program once they have met the partner program criteria. More details of Amazon’s affiliate program here.

Once you have become a partner or affiliate for Amazon, you can promote any product from the site and earn commissions from sales you generate. Amazon pays between 1% and 11% commissions which is one of the lowest rates in the affiliate industry. See affiliate marketing commission rates. But Amazon can work well for affiliates from all walks of life because of the huge range of products they can promote.

Amazon is a trusted website too and most online shoppers are comfortable using it.

Digital Products

Another type of product affiliate marketers use is digital products. With digital products there’s no postage or delivery costs and this means savings can be passed on to the affiliate. With an affiliate doing the selling, it can mean sellers can pay less in advertising fees.

Affiliates can also earn much larger commissions selling digital products online. Most digital products pay much more than physical products in commissions. Typically digital products will pay from 20% to 40% commissions, some even more.

One of the most popular places new affiliates get started is on Clickbank.com. Clickbank has a huge selection of digital products in most topic areas. This can be useful if you already have a website in a certain topic area, or niche. For example if you have a sports related website, you can join a program which offers a related product and sell it from your website.

High Ticket Products

The best paying products are high ticket products. High ticket affiliate marketing products are those which carry a price tag larger than around $500. With a high ticket item, you can make a much larger commission than with a standard product, especially if it’s a digital product.

High ticket items also let you learn paid marketing much more efficiently. With a low value item, you’ll need to sell many more items in order to break even on advertising costs, or make a profit. A high ticket item gives you more room for testing and measuring your advertising campaigns.

If you have a marketing budget of $1000, for example, you’ll need to sell 100 low value products at $10 commission to break even. With a high ticket product, you may only need to sell 10. See also what is high ticket affiliate marketing.

Subscription Affiliate Products

A subscription affiliate product can pay an affiliate over and over again, potentially for life. These are a great idea to use, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. Subscription products are membership and software type products which offer ongoing value for the customer. Selling a subscription product for an affiliate is far better than selling a product which only offers a one-off commission.

A good subscription product can also overtake the profit earned from a high ticket commission over time. If a customer maintains their subscription for decades it will mean an ongoing income for the person who referred it. With each sale, an affiliate can earn a passive income from subscriptions. See subscription affiliate programs.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Promoting Affiliate Products

Affiliate products can be promoted in a number of different ways although the fastest way to scale up your sales is through using paid marketing. Some affiliates create content (like this blog), and others run paid marketing to a large audience using paid platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Adwords etc.

One of the best ways to build an affiliate business is through using email marketing. Email marketing is a cost effective way for affiliate marketers to build a relationship with many subscribers over time.

By getting website visitors to opt in to an email list, an affiliate can automate email messages over a long period of time. Some subscribers will buy an affiliate product years after joining an email list, some will purchase straight away. But as your list of subscribers grows, you’ll find you make more and more sales. See also the power of email marketing.

How an affiliate promotes a product will depend on their own unique strategy. The main ways are through:

Content creation – blogging, or video blogging
Social media – either paid or free strategies
Paid marketing – Using social media or advertising platforms (YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc.)
List building – email list building is definitely recommended for anyone starting out

Why New Affiliates Struggle

Affiliate marketing is a business and like any other it takes time to generate an income from. Many affiliates will quit within their first few months or years because they haven’t gained any traction. This in part is because of high expectations of earnings or lack of understanding of how affiliate marketing works. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Depending on how you go about your affiliate marketing business, it can take months or even years to see any sales coming in. With paid marketing methods, things can happen considerably quicker than with content marketing strategies such as blogging. As a performance based business, everyone will experience a different outcome according to the training, products and strategies they use.

There’s many different affiliate marketing business models affiliates can use, and each offers a different earning potential. To use paid marketing and build a business model quickly, it’s recommended to use a high ticket sales funnel which offers more earning power. See also the fastest legit way to earn money online.

Most new affiliates will struggle if they expect too much from affiliate marketing too soon. If you have a good strategy, and get help and support it can considerably shorten the journey and give you more confidence in your chosen route.

Before you get an results with affiliate marketing it can be easy to think that it doesn’t work. In the beginning this is a tough period because your belief is low and your expectation is high. When nothing shows, it can be easy to throw out your expectations and lose the faith!

Access a free training resource by clicking on the image below.

Online Selling System

An online selling system is definitely one of the best ways to make money online and this can be done by using systems, automation and software.

Online businesses use these basic elements:

A website/landing page
An email marketing follow up series
Products and services which are hugely valuable

Online Selling System – Affiliate Marketing

Using a business model known as affiliate marketing, anyone can generate an income from an online selling system. What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third party referrers send customers to products and services online. You don’t need your own products and you can become a third party referrer for many companies.

Amazon is one of the most popular online shops; anyone can join Amazon as an affiliate marketer and promote products from the site? When an affiliate successfully sells a product through their unique affiliate link, they earn a commission based on the sale. There are thousands of people who earn an income from the transactions which happen online every day.

Digital sales is a booming industry and more and more people are shopping online all the time. In fact the digital boom is replacing many traditional high street shops and the high street has seen a number of chain stores close as of recent years.

What Is Online Selling System?

An online selling system uses a number of tools to put products in front of customers. With certain products, the customer is sent directly to the product. With other products, such as digital ones, an email marketing campaign is often used. Online marketers use email marketing because it’s a efficient way to reach thousands of people instantaneously with an automated marketing message.

Through using websites, sales pages, email marketing and digital products, products can be sold globally with no postage or handling costs; savings are passed to affiliates.

From the outset most online marketers (sales people) use a marketing platform to target specific customers with their advertising. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Google Adwords can be used to put messages in front of potential customers. They are then sent to specific web pages which collect their details and follow up with an email marketing campaign.

An email list gives the marketer the opportunity to build trust with a potential customer by offering value and delivering useful content. With online products, there’s no shipping or handling costs either; which means product creators can pass the savings back to the referring affiliate who recommended the sale and found the customer. See also the power of email marketing.

Products and Sales Funnel

Using a ready made sales funnel and an existing business system is the fastest way to create a profitable online business. As a third party referrer, the affiliate only concentrates on finding customers and referring them to their sales funnel. Once the selling system is set up, this means sending people to a landing page and collecting their email address. The automation then sells the products automatically through a series of email messages.

A good product range means you can benefit from a number of purchases your referral makes later on. Sales are closed in-house by a built in sales team. You only refer the initial sale and this is done through email marketing.

What Products?

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products you can choose to promote as an affiliate. Some pay better than others and some are far more valuable than others too. See affiliate marketing business models and affiliate marketing commission rates for more on this.

Physical products like you would find on Amazon, for example will pay from 1%-11% commission. Whereas some digital products will pay far more, even from 40-100% commissions. Digital training and education products are some of the most valuable you can promote. Consider how much you would pay to learn how to earn a full time income online, for example. This is a valuable education which can serve someone for the rest of their lives. It can allow someone to escape a difficult job or career, work from home and sack their boss!

High ticket affiliate products pay the most to affiliates who refer them. Access the video series here for more info.

This kind of education is pretty valuable so the kinds of products you can find in this area are therefore worth a lot to people. These are hence good products to promote too, because they offer larger commissions than many other affiliate products.

Email Marketing – Why Build An Email List?

Online marketers use email marketing because it offers a good way to communicate with a growing number of subscribers. Long term marketers build their email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. With a good product, they can email their list and make multiple sales from a single email sent to thousands of subscribers.

An email list can be automated too! Most marketers will build a huge number of email messages which are sent out completely on autopilot. Over time, these will enable a marketer to build a relationship with their subscribers. If the subscriber gets to know, like and trust the marketer through their messages, they are more likely to make a purchase.

On a website a visitor only has a small opportunity to make a buying decision. Most website visitors are gone inside 10 minutes but once a website visitor subscribes to an email list, this period if time is extended. Some people purchase even years after joining an email list.

Best System For Selling Online

The SFM Digital Business System is the best system I’ve found for selling online. It benefits from multiple earning methods and a step by step tutorial for building out your selling system. Here’s some of the advantages to using this system rather than any other affiliate product:

Step by step tutorials walk you through your selling system setup
A built in sales team helps you close sales of high ticket items
A product range means you can sell multiple items, not just one
High ticket items pay larger commissions
Subscription products mean you can earn ongoing commissions from each sale you make
Training and education is ongoing and full support is available.

For more information and to access the Mentors All In program click on the image below:

Online Selling System Summary

An online selling system comprises of a number of systems of automation:

A marketing platform or strategy: blogging, paid marketing, social media, etc.
an email autoresponder – an email marketing service which automates delivery of daily email messages
Affiliate marketing products – ideally use a digital product range with a built in sales team – see SFM Digital Business System.

Most affiliate programs have a range of sales materials you can use. If you are interested in learning more about affiliate marketing access a free webinar by clicking on the image below:

Topics For Blogging For Beginners

Here’s an article about topics for blogging for beginners. When I started out online blogging, I tried all sorts of topics. But over time I realised what I enjoyed about writing the most would be my best bet. After several failed attempts at niche websites on all sorts of topics, I looked towards my values and found I like helping and inspiring with my content.

One of my “failures” was a niche website built around the keywords “when to harvest garlic”. I knew nothing of garlic harvesting not did I have an interest in it! But I had found this keyword and it seemed to be easy for me to rank according to my research. So I spent about 6 months creating content in a bid to rank this website, which it did. It ranked top for my main keyword “when to harvest garlic”. The trouble was, it was a difficult site to monetise – which had been my primary aim for building the site in the first place!

I was sick and tired of writing about garlic harvesting too and had pretty much run out of steam after several months. The site was a failure and I eventually dropped the domain name. But it taught me a valuable lesson – don’t choose a topic you have no interest in!

Topics For Blogging For Beginners – Your Product

A good topic for bloggers is always one you can sustain over the longer term. Blogging is pretty competitive and there’s plenty of other people out there who are really passionate about their topic. So if you’re not that bothered about it you’re at a major disadvantage. For starters your content will be less than impressive if you don’t care about your topic. It will show. And the other, more passionate bloggers will stick at it much longer and provide better, higher quality content.

One way to find your interest and passion is to look at your life, and perhaps the product/s you have chosen to promote through your blog. If you’re not at this stage yet, you can simply choose a topic which you’re interested in. Find affiliate products in that category and write about the products.

Topics For Blogging For Beginners – Google’s Keyword Planner

I’ve found Google’s keyword planner a useful tool for finding blog post topics. You can type any keyword into the planner and it will give you the keyword variations of your chosen keyword. This has a couple of advantages:

You find keywords which are already being searched for, therefore you know there’s an audience for them.
It means you can target longer tail keywords which are more specific to what you’re offering or your interests.
You can target longer tail keywords which offer less competition in the search engine results. See find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Topics For Blogging – Use Popular Trending Articles

Another way to find topics for blogging is to use a site called Buzzsumo.com. Buzzsumo shows you the most popular trending articles on the social media platforms. Type a keyword or topic into the search bar at Buzzsumo and you’ll see a number of articles and YouTube videos pop up. This can help you find content ideas for your own posts.

The article titles can also give you ideas for your own content. Since these are trending bits of content, titles are already working well and getting shares and clicks. So it can be a good idea to use similar titles for your own content.

Your About Me Page

Most people know a lot about themselves! So creating an About me page is a good place to start. You can mention your reasons for building your blog, inspirations and struggles. Check out my about me page here. I came to be a blogger after a lot of financial struggles and not having a clear career direction. I jumped from one thing to the next and even became a stuntman to escape the 9 to 5!

Most people have something they are passionate about. If you don’t have an interest or passion, you can talk about your direction for your blogging, what you intend to change about your life or something which inspires you.

Using YouTube For Inspiration

YouTube is another great source for inspiration for your blog content. If you head to YouTube it will often recommend content for you which relates to your previous searches and interests. So if you’re stuck for ideas about your blog content, it’s a great resource.

You can also type keywords into the top search bar on YouTube and look for the search suggestions which will come up under the search bar. This is a little like using Google’s keyword planner.

YouTube can easily suck a huge amount of time from you, so it’s worth being mindful before starting down this path. Have the intention of finding a blog topic when you look on YouTube and avoid getting sucked into hours of video watching!

Long Tail Keywords Benefits

What are the long tail keywords benefits? For starters long tail keywords have much less competition than their shorter counterparts. Plus, a long tail keyword will also have the shorter tail keyword within it. So a piece of content targeting the longer tail keyword, also uses the shorter term, which is generally more competitive and harder to rank for.

So by choosing long tail keywords for your content titles, you have the chance to target both the short tail and long tail terms. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and it will give you a bunch of related search terms.

To find those with less SEO (search engine optimisation) difficulty, simply look at the search results and compare the number you’ll see at the top. You can also compare the top ranking sites for those particular terms.

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Niche Websites

If you were to write content around short tail keywords, you’ll most likely find it much harder to get your content ranked on any of the search engines. This site, for example, is built around a competitive keyword “affiliate marketing”. I would have a very difficult time ranking my website for this term. But with a bit of keyword research I found that “affiliate marketing mentors” was a good longer tail alternative I could use to build the site.

So, the long tail keywords benefits for a niche website are fairly straight forwards. Shorter terms would mean more competition. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for because there’s far fewer competing websites for those long tail terms.

So for a niche website which is built around keyword research, it’s worth looking for those which have longer chains of words (long tail). It’s also worth putting in some time to research how competitive your keyword is, whether you’re building a niche website or just writing some content.

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Conversion Rates

If someone types “affiliate marketing” into the search engine (e.g. Google), it can be a very general query. But if someone is looking for “affiliate marketing coach“, there’s a very different intention behind the search.

Here lies another of the long tail keywords benefits. The long tail search queries can and do carry a much better conversion rate for website owners. That’s because the intention behind the search queries are more specific. The people who are using the long tail searches know more about what they want.

Let’s use an example of someone searching for “camera”. If your content shows up for “camera” you can attract a wide variety of browsers. Compare this with the search for “SONY a7 III Mirrorless Camera with 28-70 mm f/3.5-5.6 Zoom Lens”, a much longer tail counterpart, and you can see the person is a much clearer on what they want.

This is pretty valuable for content creation because it can help website owners target the specific long tail keywords which are most likely to convert into sales.

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Content Ideas

Another huge benefit of using long tail keywords is content ideas. One of the most powerful ways to attract visitors to a website is through creation of a blog. But if you’re starting out, it can be a little overwhelming coming up with ideas for writing content.

Head to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main seed keywords; those keywords which best describe your website/business in the shortest sentence. For this site, that term might be “affiliate marketing”, for example.

Google’s keyword planner will then bring up many longer tail keywords which are associated with your original “seed” keyword. These can give you ideas about what to write for. Those long tail keywords which are particularly relevant to what you’re selling are the ones you should target with your content.

Summary

Long tail keywords are those which have 3 or more keywords within them. Compared to one and two word combinations, they offer a much easier way to get your content in front of an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation.

This is because there’s much less competition in the search engine results for those kinds of keywords. Where there are millions of competing search results for shorter phrases, the longer tail results often offer far fewer competing web pages. This means you can have more chance of getting a ranking in the search results if you create some great content for them.

Using long tail keywords in your content can also mean you can increase you chance of ranking for both the shorter terms in the phrases as well as the long tail terms.

Long tail keywords are far more specific search queries. This often means the person using them knows more about what they want. Conversion rates are therefore much higher from these kinds of searches.

Long tail keywords also can give you some great ideas for content, especially if you’re struggling for inspiration to write blog posts.