AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

If you’re wondering “why is affiliate marketing so hard?”, you’re probably struggling right now to make any sales! I know your pain, and struggled for years trying to make a living from affiliate marketing. You must remember that with affiliate marketing, most of what you do simply won’t work! While this is incredibly frustrating in the beginning, it’s worth the struggle when you finally do break through and start making regular sales.

Pareto’s principle states that 80% of the outcomes are attributed to 20% of the causes. With affiliate marketing this is very true. In the beginning, you’ll spend time on many strategies and activities; most of which won’t work. Only after you’ve tried and failed many times will you start to see sales dropping in to your inbox – unless you’re very lucky! Once this happens you can focus on those activities which brought in the sales. But until this point, you’ll be wondering why affiliate marketing does not work!

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

So why is affiliate marketing so hard anyway? Shouldn’t it be easy?! Well, no. If it was easy everyone would be doing it and nobody would have a regular job anymore! But remember what you’re doing as an affiliate – selling other people’s products. At first your lack of skill and experience will make everything difficult and challenging. Remember that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried!

This can also lead to the idea that affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work. It’s easier to believe it’s a scam, and quit, than to persevere among the difficulties.

If your belief becomes very low you’ll quit. It’s much harder to persevere in something you don’t believe in. So you need to keep your spirits high and keep climbing!

Affiliate Marketing – My Journey

When I started learning affiliate marketing I thought I would be able to throw up a website and get instant traffic. I believed the courses which told me how easy it was – I’d be rich in no time I thought to myself! But nothing could have been further from the truth.

I struggled for years building websites and writing content. I jumped from course to course, looking for the “magic bullet”. In many ways I made the journey harder because I thought it should be easy. So I was always looking for the easy path, rather than learning the skills and raising my game.

After all how difficult is affiliate marketing anyway? Surely you can build a funnel, send traffic and make money? How hard can it be? Affiliate marketing gets easier as you arm yourself with the right knowledge and gain experience. Once you prioritise your education, over making of money, things do start getting easier. For a long time I was focused on slow marketing strategies and I promoted products which paid peanuts. I didn’t have the best knowledge so of course I was going to struggle.

Affiliate marketing is a skilful activity and should be thought of as something which is worth training for. A pilot wouldn’t jump onboard a commercial jet and try and fly it would years of training and experience in smaller aircraft. A surgeon wouldn’t undertake a dangerous operation without prior knowledge. But with affiliate marketing, anyone can join a partner program and “give it a go”. It’s no wonder that they find it difficult, given this attitude.

Making Affiliate Marketing Easier

To make affiliate marketing easier, you should definitely invest in your education. Knowing a few key things can make all the difference. Getting help and support can make affiliate marketing easier too. Here’s a few things to focus on to make affiliate marketing a whole lot easier:

Don’t think it’s easy! Get support and focus on training and development. Don’t focus on the results, just on learning and growing.
Use products which pay recurring commissions. With recurring commission programs you can earn ongoing income from each sale. Once you break through and start generating sales, each one will be worth much more than single products which only pay once.
Choose high ticket products to promote too. With high ticket products you can use scalable paid marketing strategies. Smaller value physical products only pay a pittance and so you are left with free marketing strategies to make it viable.
Make daily habits which move your business forwards.
Learn to control your mental state and look after your health. If you start getting demoralised, your affiliate business will be affected. You need to keep yourself buoyant and positive to keep going when things get tough.
Choose a strategy which suits you and your own personal circumstances, and your product range. For some paid marketing is the best, for others it’s blogging or creating videos.
Focus on the activity not the results. At first you won’t have any results so it’s important to keep your spirits up and focus on what you can do every day, not on what hasn’t happened yet! Keep a daily diary of your activities which move your business forwards.

A Marathon Not A Sprint

Remember that affiliate marketing is a marathon not a sprint. Most people will quit before they even make a sale online. They don’t see the long term benefits of keeping moving and staying in the game. Keep your eye focused on what affiliate marketing can eventually do for you – complete financial and time freedom and complete geographical freedom. Not many business models can offer what affiliate marketing can. Surely this is worth some struggle and difficulty?

Have a look at the picture above. It’s shows a diagram from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. This diagram could easily show the journey of an affiliate marketer, too.

As a beginner affiliate, your expectations are very high. A little too high! You think it should be easy. So ultimately you’re going to reach the “valley of disappointment”, where your expectations don’t meet with reality. This is a tough time for an affiliate and they will either choose to carry on or quit at this point.

How Affiliates Should View Failure

But as an affiliate you need to be tough! Each failure should be seen as a stepping stone to success. If you try everything, you will eventually succeed. After all, there’s plenty of affiliates who have succeeded and built six and seven (even eight) figure businesses.

But initially, you’ll be trying things you haven’t done before. Many strategies won’t work to make you a sale. But everything you do will give you some feedback, even if that feedback is to not do it again, or do it slightly differently.

So as an affiliate you should look to learn something from every thing you do. You can only fail if you quit, everything else is feedback! Look at affiliate marketing this way and you’ll never quit. Each piece of feedback is a clue to the next step which will eventually lead you to success.

You can save a heap of time as an affiliate by joining an online community and learning from others who have already succeeded online. Access a free video series to learn more about an online training community.

Blog Niches That Make Money

There’s many blog niches that make money. In an “evergreen” niche, you can make money all year round. Evergreen niches are those which are popular all the time, whatever the month. Whereas some niches are based on seasonal trends, such as Christmas related blogs, for example.

Top performing niches are health and well being, money making and finance, sports and fitness, and dating and relationship related niches. However, a top performing niche which is evergreen is also usually massively competitive. So it’s much harder to break into these niches if you’re just starting out.

Blog Niches That Make Money

Reviews are another option too and can perform well in any niche. Review sites are good because a review is often the last thing someone reads before making a purchase. So if you can get eyes on your review site, it can do well for you.

Any niche can make money if you can get traffic and lead people to products online. Or, you can also monetise a website with Google Adsense; although this takes a long time and a lot of work, since you’ll only make tiny amounts from each advertising click.

Google Adsense is good for a blog niche which is difficult to monetise with affiliate products. You can of course use it in conjunction with promoting other people’s products too.

Whatever niche you choose to create a blog in, expect to build content and work on your site for several months or years before you break through and generate a liveable income from it.

Blog Niches That Make Money – Traffic

Blog niches that make money are often very competitive. Try and build a site around the making money online niche and you’ll have your work cut out. Just look on Google for the phrase “make money online” and you’ll see a huge number of competing sites for the keyword. Nearly 5 billion in fact!

What this means for a blogger entering into this topic with a blog is that they will need to work considerably harder, for less results than if they chose a less competitive topic.

Have a look for other competitive and lucrative blog topics such as health and fitness, dating and relationships and you’ll likely find the same. So before starting out looking for the most lucrative blog topics, it’s worth looking at the competition first. A blog can only be lucrative if you get people to it in the first place. Without traffic you’ll never make a thing from your blog!

Micro Blog Niches – Delve Into A Sub Niche

If you have an area in mind which you want to blog about, and it’s a competitive subject, you can delve deeper into the main keyword for your niche. Sub niches are niches within niches. So, instead of focusing your content on make money online, for example, you could create a blog around affiliate marketing for beginners.

This site (affiliatemarketingmentorsonline.com) is within the niche of making money online, but it’s a branch of the “make money online” topic. Affiliate marketing is still very competitive, but as you research keywords within your field, you’ll find longer tail keywords which offer less competition than most.

You can also build a niche website around a longer tail keyword, which can help you with ranking your site on the search engines.

To do this, use Google’s free keyword planner and enter in your main “seed keyword” of your niche you want to blog about. You should see a number of related keywords come up.

You can choose a keyword which offers less competition on Google but also gives you a good amount of traffic. Without traffic you won’t get any visitors to your site, but without a ranking you won’t either.

So choosing your keywords is quite important. If you go for a too competitive keyword to base your site around, you won’t stand a chance of ranking it and getting free traffic. If you choose a keyword which has no traffic, even if you rank your content, you won’t get enough traffic to make it worth your while!

Keyword Domain Names

This site, (affiliate marketing mentors online), has the keywords in the domain name. This strategy can be used to give you an edge when it comes to ranking your website on Google, and other search engines. It’s not the only factor of course, but it can help. If you know the subject you want to blog about, it’s worth putting in some work to find the best keywords for it, before building your website.

Ideally choose a “seed keyword” which will relate most strongly to your blog topic. Use Google’s keyword planner to find a keyword or phrase which offers traffic and is not too competitive.

The best micro niche for blogging will be one which suits you and in which you can continue to create quality content for the long term. Since the biggest ranking factor for Google is quality content, you’ll want to find a topic you can enjoy working on for several months or years. If you choose a topic you know nothing about, or aren’t interested in, this is a much tougher task than if you love your topic.

Choosing A Topic

Choosing a topic for your blog is pretty important. Without traffic you’ll never make any money with your blogging. To get traffic for free takes time and a lot of effort. In a competitive niche it’s so much more difficult, too. Successful blogs often have had a bigger reason to just the money. Many affiliate has quit in the search for a money making blog, because they put the cart before the horse – money before the passion.

In Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, he shows that through history, those with a bigger reason for their objective can move mountains whereas those only after money, status or more superficial outcomes often fall by the wayside – fail or quit.

Therefore it’s a good idea to base a blog around something you have a passion for. With so much competition for money making blogs it can be hard to stand out – particularly if your blog only exists to serve you.

To make money from a blog, you have to attract an audience. You can do this by sharing your passion for something or creating something of use. Blogging is a slow, long strategy which takes a lot of time and effort. But without a passion for your topic, or what you’re sharing and creating, it can be very difficult to stay the distance.

Some of the most successful blogs didn’t start out as money making ventures. They were just people sharing their thoughts and experiences and trying to help other people solve a problem they had or have.

For more information about building a blog from scratch visit this article about building a niche blog from scratch to earn money from.

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing?

How difficult is affiliate marketing, and is it worth “a go”? Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which affiliates recommend products and services online. If someone clicks an affiliate’s link, and goes on to purchase something, the affiliate makes a commission.

There’s various ways of making money through affiliate marketing, and each one has a different level of difficulty. Some affiliates are bloggers, others use paid marketing strategies. Some affiliates will create and upload videos to YouTube; others will use different social media platforms to generate interest in their products and services.

You could say that everyone’s journey with affiliate marketing will be different. Some will find they take to it easily, while others will struggle for years, or quit in a few weeks without having sold anything. Affiliate marketing, like any business requires consistent effort. Over time, if you stick at it, it gets easier when you know what actions to take to get the required effect.

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing?

But before you reach this stage, affiliates will have often have failed many times. Top affiliates didn’t reach their levels of success overnight. They go through months or years of learning and applying their strategies before they broke though and made it their full time living.

But once you find a strategy which consistently produces sale after sale, you know you can simply repeat those steps and get more of the same. Before this stage it can be very difficult and frustrating being an affiliate. Beginner affiliates will often drop out way before they should. Claims that affiliate marketing is “easy money” and the low barriers to entry does mean that affiliate marketing is very open for anyone to “give it a go”. But this also means there’s a huge drop out rate too.

For those who stick at it there are huge rewards; not just working from anywhere and geographical freedom, but financial freedom too. Affiliate marketing is a road to escape the mundane life, to escape the 9 to 5!

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing – The Hard Way

There are definitely easy and hard ways to do affiliate marketing. As a beginner affiliate, I made many mistakes. Before I knew what I was doing, I spent a lot of time building websites and wasting time creating content. I built many websites which got no traffic. No knowing which products to use, I just joined affiliate programs which I knew about. But many of them only paid very little in the way of commissions. So I spent a lot of time working on content creation without much in the way of reward.

My first online sale came from a review article I write on a free blogging site (Hubpages.com). It was an “one off” though, and after that I didn’t make any further sales for some time. Doing it all for free, not getting the training and promoting low value products which paid even lower commissions were all mistakes which cost me a huge amount of time. I made the odd sale here and there, but was never able to replace an existing income from all the effort.

The hard way to do affiliate marketing is to go it alone. Don’t pay for training and do everything for free. Doing affiliate marketing on a shoe string can be done, but it’s so much more difficult. At the very least you should invest in your education and purchase an email autoresponder and get your own website. It will take ten times as long to make a realistic income from affiliate marketing if you don’t get help, do it all alone, and do it all for free.

The Easier Way

There’s no easy path in affiliate marketing but there’s most definitely an easier path. If you don’t have the ability to invest in your education, purchase training and get help, it will be considerably more difficult.

The easier path to affiliate marketing is to invest in yourself. Would a doctor operate on a patient without training? Would a pilot expect to be able to land a commercial aircraft without hundreds of hours in an aeroplane? But unfortunately many people start out with the attitude that they can learn to be an affiliate all by themselves, and pay dearly for it! I wasted years trying to do exactly that!

Training can help you set your trajectory in affiliate marketing. But it’s also worth investing in a product range. With a product range, you can earn much more than with low value products you’d find on Amazon; for what amounts to a similar or the same amount of work. Would you rather work for months and earn $50 a week, or $500 a day?

With a product range, and high ticket and recurring commission products, you can also afford to use paid marketing much more easily. With low value products, you’re stuck with cheap or free marketing strategies like blogging, which can take months or years before they come to fruition. See “How long does it take to make money blogging?“.

With paid marketing, it’s still difficult because you have no experience or data to base your marketing decisions on. This is similar with any form of marketing. Once you develop some experience, you’re in a far better position to know what strategies and actions have the biggest impact on your business. But paid marketing is far quicker and very scalable. Whereas content marketing is very slow and not so scalable. So it’s harder to become successful with content marketing and much slower.

Pareto’s Principle

The Pareto principle states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of the causes. Affiliates need to be aware of this principle because most of their activities, at least in the beginning, will produce nothing in terms of results. Only by finding the 20% of causes which gives them the sales, will they know how to grow and scale their businesses. Before this happens, there can be a lot of struggle with affiliates trying to make sales, but without any results or knowledge to base their strategies on.

Over time, as affiliates start generating results in their businesses, they will get more confidence and certain about the steps they should take. But without this knowledge it’s easy to become despondent, procrastinate and dawdle! No activity equals no results though. But without motivation, inspiration and certainty, it’s difficult to take the necessary steps towards building a business online – especially if your belief in it is very low.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Many wonder whether affiliate marketing actually works, and some even believe affiliate marketing does not work. Choose your beliefs carefully if you want to become a successful affiliate! Affiliate marketing can have some magical results and give you time and financial freedom, not to mention geographical freedom too. But you have to put a lot into it before you get a lot out. Like with any business you need customers. To get customers you need to learn how to market your products and services.

This does take time and you need to be in for the long term to make affiliate marketing work for you. With recurring income products, and through building a list of subscribers, your work compounds over time. Affiliates can build six and seven figure businesses over time, but the main difficulty in affiliate marketing is overcoming your own preconceptions and learning to trust the process. For some this will be easy. But for others this is the hardest part of becoming an affiliate.

If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started, you can access a free webinar by clicking on the image below.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging?

How long does it take to make money blogging? It can take between a few months and a few years to make money blogging. You can write a single article and get a lucky sale, or even go viral. But the chances of this happening are slim to none. So your best bet as a blogger is to set your intention to work on your blog every day for a number of months or years.

For your blog to become profitable, you must monetise it somehow. You can do this either through affiliate marketing or by using Google’s Adsense program. Or, if you already have a business, your blog can be used to generate traffic and customers. See how to earn money through blogging.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging

If you intend on building an income from a blog, you need to set up your “stall” in the right way first. It’s easy to rush in and burn out within a few weeks. Or, if you choose a topic you’re unfamiliar with, you will have your work cut out for you.

If you don’t know your topic well, you’ll have to research every single post you write. This can get tiresome very quickly. Ideally at least choose a topic which you have an interest in and want to learn about anyway. Choosing a topic you love will make writing your blog a joy rather than a chore.

how long does it take to make money blogging?

If you make writing your passion, you can write for months and years. But if you pick a topic you know nothing about, or have no interest in, it’s much more difficult to sustain the necessary motivation to work long enough to make your blog profitable.

That way, as you learn something new about your topic, you can blog about it.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Products

Monetising your blog with advertising, such as with Google Adsense means placing adverts. around your content. When people click on your adverts, you make small commissions based on advertising cost. Each click will usually only pay tiny amounts (less than $1/£1), depending on the topic of your blog.

This is a tough monetisation method and you’ll need to create a lot of content and get a huge volume of traffic before it pays anything like a reasonable income.

Alternatively you can use affiliate products which relate to your blog topic. With affiliate products, you sell other people’s products and services for a commission based on the sale. Most bloggers have an opt in box to collect details of their visitors. When a visitor signs up to a bloggers newsletter, they opt in by handing over their email address. In exchange, the blogger gives them something of value, such as an ebook.

Here’s one of the ebooks I give away on my websites.

Types Of Affiliate Products

There’s different types of affiliate products you can use as a blogger. The type of product you choose to use on your blog will determine how long it takes to make a reasonable income from your blogging efforts. Of course, the amount of traffic you generate from your blog will also play a large part in it too. (More on this later).

Certain affiliate products will work harder for you, making you more money, than others. Some products only pay 3-11% commission. Others pay 40%-100% commission. Which do you think will get you a reasonable income faster? Of course there’s other factors at play too here. The type of product you promote on your website will also have a bearing on the content you write. Or, you could choose products based on what you like to write about.

Ideally, choose products which pay you the best commissions and, if you can a recurring commission. Recurring commission affiliate programs will allow you to earn a substantial income from a blog in a much faster timeframe than most other affiliate products. But in order to sell those recurring income products, you’ll need to write about subjects which attract the right audience for those products.

For example, if you write about knitting, you’re unlikely to sell software products which are used by affiliate marketers on your site. You’ll attract people who are interested in knitting. So you’ll need to find knitting related affiliate products.

Finding Recurring Commission Programs In Your Niche

To make your blog pay the most for your efforts, you will want to find the affiliate programs which pay the most commission. Digital products tend to pay much more than physical products. Amazon for example, will pay 3-11% commission to its affiliates. That’s not much if you’re wanting to earn a living from your blog. If you consider an “average” product sells for $10 on Amazon, you’ll only make 11% at the most on the sale – $1.10. Even a $100 product will only earn you $11.

Clickbank is another option too. Clickbank sells digital products on the internet which pay affiliates upwards of 40% commission. Products are usually valued at around $100. This means you’ll earn $40 a sale. There are even some recurring commission products you can find on Clickbank too. Find them by using CBEngine.com and using the recurring commission products tab.

Picking A Niche To Write About

Before starting a blog, think about what you’re going to write about and why. If you’re going to sustain your writing for long enough to make it pay, you’ll need to pick a topic wisely.

I started a blog about garlic harvesting but knew nothing of the topic. Within 6 months I was completely fed up of the topic and gave up. The site quickly fell off the search results and eventually I dropped it completely. It was a lesson learned – don’t choose a topic you don’t love!

Ideally, find some high paying affiliate products and create your content around them. Or at least find products you can align with so you can be authentic in their promotion. If you’re highly motivated within a certain topic, it will be much easier to write in it and keep creating content for the long term.

Generating Traffic To Your Blog

Just writing a blog won’t necessarily get you instant traffic. You’ll also need to share your content too. Over time, Google, and other search engines should rank some of your content. But you shouldn’t rely on this, especially in the early months. Depending on the topic you choose, getting traffic can be fairly straight forward, or very difficult. With a competitive niche, such as affiliate marketing, you’ll find there is lots of competition.

A less competitive niche, such as basket weaving, for example, might be easier to get traffic for than affiliate marketing. But whatever topic you choose, here’s a strategy to help you rank some of your content. Keyword research is a major key in getting traffic to your blog. If you just write random content, it’s less efficient than writing content which is already being searched for.

You can find long tail keywords which are already getting looked for by using Google’s keyword planner. Once you find a suitable keyword, which you want to write some content for, compare the competition for it with a Google search.

Then do a phrase match search for the same keyword too. These two searches can give you an overview of the possibility of getting your content on the first page of Google.

For more on traffic generation read “Create Free Website and Make Money“.

Monetising With Email Marketing

Getting traffic is one thing and selling products from your blog is another. To make the most of your blog traffic, you need to turn it into subscribers and build an email list. With an email list you can build relationships with your subscribers over months, and even years and decades! On a blog, visitors will likely only be there for a few minutes!

So if you build an email list, you can make much faster progress in making your blogging profitable than without one.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Plant a Chinese bamboo sprout in the ground and you will see nothing for four years, sometimes longer. You water and fertilise, water and fertilise, but nothing. If you didn’t know about the plant, you would presume it was dead, and throw it away. But approximately after 5 years of gestation something remarkable happens. In a six-week period the Chinese bamboo tree grows to a staggering ninety feet tall – that’s right, ninety feet tall!

I like this analogy for blogging. It’s a similar process where nothing happens for a long time. You need to put in the work of creating content, sharing your content. Keep creating and sharing, learning and linking. If you look for results too early, you’ll surely quit, since there’s nothing to see.

But if you do a little each day, build an email list and use recurring income products, suddenly things will start to happen all by themselves. Without lifting a finger, you’ll see people visiting your site, opting into your email list and purchasing your products. It’s like a magic money tree which needs years of love and attention first, before it bears the fruit!

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Summary

How long does it take to make money blogging? So to sum up, it can take months or years to make blogging. You can even blog and never make any money. You need to keep going, build an email list, and choose the right products for your audience. To make your blog work harder for you, you need to take the right steps:

Build an email list and learn how to build a relationship with your subscribers – offering them products and value in your emails
Target keywords in your blog titles which are relevant to your products and which give you a change of getting free traffic
Use products which pay more, ideally choose high ticket recurring income digital products, if possible in your niche.
Share your content and make it easy for your visitors to share, see create free website and make money for more on getting traffic.

Of course there are much faster ways to generate an income from the internet. If you’re not ready to spend months or years, you can use paid marketing strategies, social media marketing strategies and a whole host of others. For training and resources access the Mentors All In Program here.

How To Sell Other People’s Products

Learning how to sell other people’s products online is one of the best skills you can learn in today’s turbulent climate. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you place yourself in-between online purchases and take a commission for sales you have referred.

It’s a little like recommending a friend to a nice restaurant. Except that, with affiliate marketing you get paid for your recommendations.

Learning this skill could very well be the last thing you ever need to earn a living and become financially independent. Affiliates who earn full time from the internet can work from anywhere and never need to work a job, deal with a boss or take a commute ever again! That’s gotta be worth a little effort, right?

How To Sell Other People’s Products – Which Products?

There’s all kinds of products and services which affiliates can sell. Amazon and eBay are two of the most well know affiliate platforms. Anyone can join and promote products from these platforms through their unique affiliate link.

When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission based on that sale. There’s other things affiliate can promote too. Physical products like you would find on Amazon and eBay tend to pay the lowest levels of commission – 3%-11% typically. Digital products on the other hand will often pay 40% commission and over.

Digital products can afford to pay more because of the low costs involved in delivery of products. With a digital product you can deliver the item automatically over an internet connection. This cuts out many costs you would have with physical products such as manufacture, postage, handling and storage.

Some digital products also carry memberships too. With some membership products you can even earn recurring commissions based on each sale. See recurring commission affiliate programs.

Selling Online

There’s many strategies to selling other people’s products over the internet. Some affiliate marketers use content, like this article, to generate website traffic and lead people to products. Others use paid marketing and run adverts, leading visitors to a landing page where they collect their email. From there, they run email marketing campaigns to promote affiliate products.

The key to selling other people’s products online is knowing who the customers are and putting the right products in front of the right people. If you already have a website, and simply want to add another revenue stream to your business, affiliate marketing might be a solution.

To find the right products for you website you need to think about your topic and what your website visitors would be anxious to purchase.

This comes down to knowing your target audience.

Why Is Target Market Important?

Why target market is important? Whatever product or service you choose to promote, you’ll need to get very clear about who your products serves the most. What pains or problems does your product solve for people and how does your products do that. When you delve deeply into your customer avatar, you will know all about them: age, sex, location, interests, friendship groups and family circumstances etc. When you know this information, it becomes all the more easy to target the right audience for your products and services.

Without this knowledge, you can spend a huge amount of time running adverts, creating content and getting nowhere. The internet is a big place and you need to become laser focused on who your message is the most relevant to.

In a high street store, it’s very easy to know what someone wants. In a shoe shop, don’t try and sell them flowers. This sounds obvious, but it’s a mistake people make online all the time. They don’t define their customer avatar clearly enough. Because of this they try and sell to everyone and end up lost and confused as to why nobody is buying.

With a well defined customer avatar, you know where they hang out online. You’ll know what they are searching for and you’ll know how to target them with your products and services.

Using Websites To Sell Other People’s Products

Many affiliate marketers use a website to sell other people’s products. A website is a good place to start and offers a cheap method of getting eyes on the products you want to sell. Most affiliates start with a website and are disappointed when nobody comes to visit it.

Stuart Ross - selling other people's products from a website — Stuart Ross explaining a website building software

Even with a great looking website and a number of awesome products, you will never make any sales without traffic (visitors). To get traffic you can do several things:

Build a social presence on any one of the many social media websites
Create content on your website – see niche blogging for profit.
Place links on other blogs and websites to bring in visitors + increase your site’s authority with the search engines
Build content on other platforms (e.g.YouTube, ezinearticles.com), linking back to your website
Optimise your website for the search engines and your content (SEO – search engine optimisation)
Use paid marketing to bring targeted customers to your website – Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, Bing etc.

Building An Email List To Sell Other People’s Products

The email list is the “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Most affiliates build an email list so they can sell other people’s products from their list. As the number of subscribers on their list grows, they can earn more by selling other people’s products.

email marketing - selling other people's products via email

Some top affiliates grow their email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A single email to a large list can result in multiple sales simultaneously. List building is one of the best ways to earn money by selling other people’s products online.

The fastest way to build an email list is through using paid marketing and sending visitors to a landing page. Once on the landing page, visitors enter their details to access certain information or get some freebie of some kind.

As subscribers enter their details they enter the “sales funnel”. A sales funnel is a system of email marketing and product delivery which “warms up” customers and then offers an “entry level” product to the subscriber.

How To Sell Other People’s Products – The Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is the best way to sell other people’s product online. It lets you build a relationship with your customers by giving them something of value, and following up with an email marketing series.

the six figure funnel - selling other people's products via a sales funnel

With some products, you can earn commissions from a number of different strategies. Having only one product in your funnel is not as efficient as having multiple products to earn from.

With a product range, you can sell an initial product, and then follow up with more valuable products which they might like. Ideally a good funnel will have:

A digital product range – so you can offer existing customers more products
A recurring income product – you earn an ongoing income from each customer
A high ticket offer – high ticket digital products valued over $2000 giving the affiliate a 40% commission
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this kind of product range and to access a funnel.

Using Paid Marketing To Sell Other People’s Products

The fastest way to sell other people’s products online is through using paid marketing. Depending on which products you are selling, you can either send customers directly to the product sales page, or into a marketing funnel. The sales funnel in many ways is better.

If you send someone to a sales page, they have only one opportunity to purchase that item. But if you collect their email address, you can follow up with countless emails over a much longer period of time.

Often sales are made from subscribers who have been on a marketers list for years. So given that you’ll be spending money to get people to products, it’s a good idea to collect their information. That way, you can build a relationship and extend the period of time in which they can make a purchasing decision.

To earn an income through using paid marketing selling other people’s products, you’ll need to make a profit. That’s obvious! But initially, you’ll need to test and measure your advertising campaigns and determine whether a certain strategy is working.

Most beginner affiliates will do this for a while and then give up because it’s not working, or they’re making a loss. But those who stick at it will eventually figure out a strategy which gives them a positive return. When this happens they simple leave their advertising campaigns running, and/or scale up by increasing their budget.

Business Coach For Online Business

Are you looking for a business coach for online business growth? Do you have an existing business or want to start an online business from scratch? Two of the best things you can get help with to grow a business are accountability and mindset. An online business coach can help with both of these.

An online business coach can help you uncover your limiting beliefs, unlock old thinking patterns which limit your business and hold you accountable to taking action steps which help your business (and yourself) grow beyond what it currently is.

Business Coach For Online Business

I found a business coach through an online education community. You can also access multiple accountability and training groups through this platform. Click on the image below to access a free video series and learn more.

The SFM also offers a “from scratch” business system which anyone can use to earn commissions from online sales. Their business model contain a number of digital products to earn from. See SFM Digital Business System for more information. The business community also offers training and mentoring to its members and a number of coaches are available within the product range. So if you’re looking for 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching, The SFM Mentors could be a good fit for you.

You can access a 6 figure funnel through the SFM platform.

Business Coach For Online Business – Why You Need One

So why hire a business coach for online business growth? For years I tried (and failed) to build a profitable online business. But part of the problem wasn’t visible to me until I joined the groups and webinars offered through the Mentors.

By listening to other members question and taking part in Q and A myself, I was able to discover some of the main reasons why my business wasn’t working.

I also have access to personal mentors who tutor me 1 to 1. Some of the main takeaways to this mentorship have been huge breakthroughs in my online business.

Breakthroughs I Made Online

Building a business is tough, especially when you’re alone with it. There’s no-one to hold you accountable, cheer you on or help you uncover your mental and internal blockages.

This is where a mentor comes in. With mentors, you can follow other 6 and 7 figure earners who have already overcome many of the limiting beliefs which still hold you back.

One of my main problems was I was spending a lot of time on activities which were unproductive. Superficial activities like making my website look nice, are irrelevant when you have no customers! But I focused on activities I preferred rather than those which were the most productive and meaningful.

The most meaningful activity for online business owners is finding a scalable strategy which drives customers to their business. Once you can do this well, and once it’s clearly profitable, you can increase your marketing budget and start to increase the number of customers you attain.

Fear Vs. Action

But increasing your spending is counter intuitive if you’ve been brought up with the mentality of saving money and being thrifty and conscientious about spending, which many people have.

To grow your online business beyond what it currently is takes a change of mindset as much as it does hard work. Unless you can change your comfort zone and increase your marketing spend, you probably will have a similar sized business in the next year or so.

This doesn’t mean to randomly spend money on advertising without thought. Quite the opposite, most online entrepreneurs will start with a small marketing budget and slowly scale only when it’s profitable.

To know whether a particular marketing campaign is profitable you need to track everything so you know where your customers are coming from. You need to know your average annual return per customer and the cost you can afford to acquire a customer with paid advertising.

Business Coach For Online Business – Free Marketing

Free marketing is time consuming and if possible should be outsourced, particularly if you can spend time on more important activities within your business. But if you have the time, blogging or video marketing can be good strategies to gain traffic for free on your website.

If you can turn this traffic into customers, free marketing by content creation, or even through social media activity, can be great for your business.

Blogging is one of my favourite activities because it compounds over time. Old content I created years ago still brings in customers to my online business. But this can take months or years before you start to see the effect. Using paid marketing is far faster if you have a business model which supports it.

Proud Of Your Business?

“Are you proud of your business, Tim”?

This was a question one of my mentors asked of me. I had to wonder whether I was. At the time, I was hiding my business from many of my friends because I was afraid I would fail, or be put off by their negativity. So many people had tried to “warn” me off building an online business, because they themselves were afraid of the idea.

They had my best intentions at heart of course (perhaps), but I wasn’t proud of my business, I was hiding it instead. This one simple question caused me to look at this mindset which had spread into my marketing message. I was hiding in my marketing too.

I was also advised to send out some of my video marketing to friends and relatives to get their feedback. This simple action allowed me to let go of what they thought about me. Most of my friends did give me feedback although some of it was negative much of it was positive. But it told me a lot about the fears I had been harbouring. They only held me back.

Ebook Lead Magnet

Creating an ebook lead magnet is one of the best ways to turn website traffic into leads. It’s the perfect tool to offer to your website visitors to get them to opt in to your email list and become a subscriber. With an ebook lead magnet, your ebook should be a good fit for your website visitors. It should also connect your visitors to your products.

Here’s an example of one of my ebook lead magnets, Niche Blogging For Profit.

Creating An Ebook Lead Magnet

To create an ebook is pretty simple. You only need to be able to create a written document on your computer or laptop and turn it into a pdf. If you can’t do that from your laptop, you can use one of the many pdf converters you can find online for free. I’ve used this free pdf converter tool before.

To create your cover you can use software, or simply pay someone on Fiverr.com to do it for you. I paid someone to create the cover for Niche Blogging for Profit. Just $5 and you’ll get a nice cover for your ebook. Ideally, get it in 3D for promotion and 2D (see below) to place on the inside of your ebook.

I’ve created several ebooks over the years and they work really well as lead magnets. See affiliate marketing books pdf for the full list of my ebooks.

Using Ebook Lead Magnets

Ebook lead magnets should be used to get your website visitors to opt in to your email list. Your email list is then used to sell your affiliate products by building trust, delivering value and occasionally promoting your products. An ebook should therefore be aligned with your visitors purchasing something from you which helps them in a similar way.

As an example, I’ve used many ebooks to get people onto my email list. However, the best performing ebook is affiliate marketing for beginners, see below:

The reason this ebook does so well is that it’s a much better match for my product range. The product I promote the most through my list is The Six Figure Mentors program which offers training and education for people wanting to earn an income from the internet. So, affiliate marketing for beginners is much better at being the “stepping stone” to this product than Niche Blogging For Profit is.

“Niche Blogging” is a strategy in its own right. It tends to be more suitable for people who have more time and less money – hence “niche blogging for profit”. People who sign up for my niche blogging ebook tend to not be so likely to sign up as an SFM Mentors member. Perhaps this is because they have more time than money and hence want to blog for an income. People with more money and less time tend to be better customers for the products I recommend.

Customer Avatar

The customer avatar should therefore be determined before you go to work on your ebook lead magnet. If you get it wrong, and spend time creating an ebook which isn’t a good fit for your potential customers, you could spend a lot of time working for nothing.

“Niche bloggers” are the wrong target audience for my product range and although I do occasionally get purchases from people who opt in for the book, it’s not as well targeted as affiliate marketing for beginners.

To come up with lead magnet ideas, it’s a good idea to look at your affiliate products, or your service, if you have your own business.

What problem/s does your product/s solve?
Who would be most attracted to your products and why?
Where are these people?
What are they looking for online?
How can you create an ebook lead magnet based on what you know?

Setting Up Your Lead Magnet With Your Autoresponder

Once you’ve created your ebook, you’ll want to offer it on your website so that people can access it by signing up to your email list. There’s lot of software you can purchase such as Lead Pages, which can help you do this. But you can also use a simple autoresponder. You’ll be needing this anyway in order to collect emails and send out your messages automatically.

I use Aweber which has a number of opt in forms you can use to create your lead magnet. You can even add your ebook picture to your opt in form (see below).

Ideally, get your subscribers to opt in and then send them your ebook directly to their email inbox. This is better than offering it on a “thank you” web page because it ensures they have opened your email and therefore seen your very first automated message.

If you hand your ebook over to them on a thank you page, there’s no incentive for your subscribers to open their email inbox; so it’s much easier for them to miss your follow up messages! You don’t want this!

Marketing Your Lead Magnet

Once you’ve set up your email capture page on your website, it’s a good idea to promote your ebooks through blogging and sharing your ebooks wherever you can.

One of the best strategies I’ve found is to type the title of your ebook into Google’s free keyword planner.

You should find a number of keywords which you can create content around. Start with the least competitive keywords and work down.

You can see how competitive a keyword is by doing a Google search for the term and looking at the number which comes up on a desktop computer. Try this with and without “quotes” to see what comes up.

Write an article for each of the keywords which comes up and be sure to showcase your ebook in each one.

Facebook For Traffic

You can also use social media platforms to find suitable people to offer your ebooks to. Another simple strategy is to use your ebook on your Facebook bio, and any social media platform for that matter. Link it to a landing page on your website where people can find the book by opting in.

Once you’ve done this, you want to connect with people who fit your customer avatar. Join groups and interact with like thinking people. As you get to know them, they’ll search your profile and find your ebook. It’s a great little strategy if you put in some work every day.

See free traffic sources for Clickbank for a free Facebook strategy.

Using Quora For Traffic

Once you’ve written a number of articles around your ebook topic, you can get people to your content through Quora – the question and answer website. To do this, you need to find questions which your ebook gives the answers to. Offer good, in depth answers on Quora and leave links to your content which surrounds your ebook, or directly to your ebook landing page.

You need to be careful here too because Quora will delete your answers if you are obviously spamming your website links to the site. You need to offer some genuine help and advice in your answers first. Quora does allow this but there’s a fine line between spamming and giving genuine answers. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

How To Earn Money Through Blogging

If you’re wondering how to earn money through blogging, listen up! In this article I’ll talk about the best strategies to earn money through blogging and how to pick a suitable topic. Not all bloggers make money, but if you’re in it for the long term, you can earn money through blogging. You just need to keep growing your blog, and be persistent.

Getting started with a blog is the toughest part. Even though you’re probably massively enthusiastic to get going, you need to set out the groundwork if you’re going to make your blogging profitable. Don’t just rush in because you can quite easily hit a roadblock, get stuck; or worse still quit.

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Monetisation Methods

Most blogs are monetised through a couple of main strategies: affiliate marketing or advertising. An advertising platform any blogger can use is Google’s Adsense program. Adsense lets you place advertising on your site and earn from the clicks of your visitors. You’ll only earn tiny amounts from this strategy, so you need a lot of traffic.

Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets you earn by selling other people’s products and services. Although you can earn a lot more through selling other people’s products, your content will need to align with your products in order to sell anything. So with affiliate marketing, you need to create content which brings in the right kind of traffic, not just any old traffic.

On most blogs you’ll find a “giveaway product” which bloggers use to encourage visitors to opt in to their email list. From their lists, bloggers sell affiliate products. On a blog, visitors only spend about 10 minutes or less looking at a piece of content. So they only have this amount of time to make a purchase if you’re selling affiliate products. But once you get your visitors on your email list, you’ve got potentially years to encourage them to buy something, if they stay on your list for that long!).

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Traffic

Without visitors to your blog content you won’t make any money. This is something most newbie bloggers struggle with. I struggled for years getting people to my content too. Before I started getting regular consistent traffic to my blogs, I was full of doubt. I doubted whether I was going in the right direction, I doubted my content was good enough, and I doubted whether I would make any money blogging.

I would spend several months creating content and then look at my results. Nothing. I wondered what I was doing wrong, got frustrated and quit for several more months. What a waste of time! If I had only have continued writing a single blog post a day, I would have monetised my blog far faster.

Once results did start coming it gave me belief in what I was doing. Belief is a game changer for a blogger. When you start seeing leads and sales coming in, it motivates you to create more content and be more consistent. But if you were only consistent at the beginning, and had belief in what you were doing, it would be a far smoother journey!

How To Earn Money Through Blogging – Belief, Consistency & Knowledge

So in order to motivate yourself to blog day after day, with nothing to show in the way of results, you need belief in what you’re doing and consistency. This comes more easily when you get the right knowledge. If you understand SEO (search engine optimisation) better, then it will massively help you. I use an SEO plugin which helps me optimise my content for the search engines. Even so, much of my content doesn’t rank on Google. But I give it a better chance by optimising it.

I’ll also use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords to write articles around. This article “How To Earn Money Through Blogging” is a bit of a long shot whether I actually rank it. But I found the keyword using Google’s free keyword planner tool. This tells me how many people are (on average) searching for this particular keyword. Then I look on Google for the number of competing websites for the term.

Over time, the more content I write, the more content gets picked up by the search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo, etc.

Content Is King

Writing good content is your best weapon as a blogger. If you write poor content, it doesn’t get found because the ranking signals shows search engines that people click away, no-one links to it, nobody shares it and it’s basically rubbish content.

But if you write good content, or great content, it gets shares. People link to it, and search engines find it and rank it. When it gets ranked, more people see and share and on the cycle goes. So it all starts with creating content which is good. That comes down to picking a subject you love, have a passion for or have a keen interest in.

Ikigai

Ikigai is a Japanese term roughly translated as “reason for being”. It’s worth a mention here because if you can align your blogging with your passion, or interests, it’s that much easier to make it earn money for you. However you monetise a blog, it’s nothing without constant streams of traffic. So before you even think about your monetisation methods, you should consider how you’re going to write content for months and months without losing the will to live!

I’m no stranger to writing content I have no interest in. In my article on is blogging still profitable I talk about a blog I built around the subject of garlic harvesting – something I knew nothing about. I also spent 6 months working for an airport parking company writing about airports and parking! After that I was ready to throw myself under a bus!

There’s nothing quite as soul destroying as writing about something you don’t care about. So if you’re going to write a blog which will stand the test of time, you’ll need to be able to keep up your enthusiasm for month and even years.

Building A List

Blogging can be very profitable once you build up some momentum. At first it seems difficult because you have no results to build your strategy on. So picking a subject close to your heart is key to build up the momentum needed to create some regular traffic.

Once you start getting traffic, you’ll want to turn that traffic into leads. Turning traffic (website visitors) directly into sales is pretty difficult. If people don’t know you they will be more sceptical of you. Online retailers like eBay and Amazon have built up trust in their customers, but people are still sceptical about buying products they don’t know about from people they don’t know.

Of course you can monetise using Amazon’s affiliate program, but Amazon only pays from 3% to 11% commission to it’s partners. So you’ll be sending your well earned traffic off for peanuts. It’s far better to monetise with affiliate products which pay much more – such as high ticket affiliate products and recurring income affiliate products.

This can most easily be done through building a list of subscribers. Selling directly from your blog is tough. Your visitors will only be on there for a few minutes before clicking away. So they only have a tiny window of opportunity to buy. Get them on your email list and you can extend this window to months, years and even decades.

Lead Magnets – Profiting From A Blog

Lead magnets are what gets people to opt in to your email list. I’ve already showed you a few lead magnets on this article with my ebooks. Ebooks are a great way to get people to opt into your list. Have a look at some affiliate marketing book pdf’s I’ve created to help build my email list.

With an ebook, you create a small pdf and an ebook cover. You can use an outsourcing website like Fiverr.com to help you get this done. A good ebook is a good match for your visitors and for your affiliate products too. Ideally an ebook will encourage someone who is a website visitor to become a subscriber to your email list.

You can also just give away ebooks which contain your affiliate links within them. People who downloaded your ebooks years ago can still click on a link and make a purchase once they’ve got it! I like to use ebooks to get people on my email list because once on my list they are much more likely to purchase something as I email them regularly and keep in touch.

Money From A Blog – Emailing Your List

With an autoresponder, you can place email capture forms on your website and get your visitors to opt in to your email list. Once on your list, you can automate an email series to go out to your subscribers – often bloggers automate emails to go out one email a day, for several days in a row. After that’s finished, you can follow up with your subscribers every week or several times a week, depending on your particular style and business niche.

You’ve probably signed up to someone’s list already? Most businesses now try and get your email so they can bombard your inbox with spam about their products and services right?!

In order to keep your open rates high, you really don’t want to do this yourself! Ideally, give huge value to your list and fulfil on your promise when they signed up. If someone signs up to your list for an ebook, and you talk about something completely different in your emails, they won’t stay tuned in for long! But if you offer value and help them in some way, they are much more likely to open your emails when you send them.

Then, when you recommend a (relevant) affiliate product to them which can also help them, they are much more likely to trust them because you’ve given value and built a relationship with them; rather than just trying to sell them something and spam them!

Types Of Affiliate Products

Not all affiliate products are equal and although I’ve mentioned how Amazon have a huge amount of trust with customers, it’s not a great answer for bloggers. You might very well be able to sell Amazon products from your blog quite easily too, if your content is a good match for the product. But you won’t earn much from a 3-11% commission.

There’s better ways to monetise your blog and ideally choose products which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer the most value to bloggers. It’s also worth considering high ticket programs and two tier programs which offer commissions based on sales made by your referrals.

Digital products are a good idea because they offer 40%+ commissions compared to physical products which offer between 3-11%. Clickbank is one of the biggest market places for digital affiliate products. You can use a site called CBEngine.com which can help you identify the recurring commission products you’ll find on Clickbank.

How Long Does It Take To Earn Money Through Blogging

Depending on your blog topic, work ethic and consistency, you can make blogging start making an income in months or years. It really depends on so many factors that it’s impossible to say how long it will take for you.

I started blogging several years ago and struggled for a long time. I only started making consistent income from my blogging fairly recently after a lot of inconsistent blogging. But if I had been more consistent and focused, it would have happened much faster.

You can of course build an online business much more quickly without blogging or even needing a website. See fastest legit way to make money online.

Access a free video series to learn more about building an income online. Click on the image below to get access.

Get Started With Your Own Blog

You can get started blogging for free using a free blog platform such as Hubpages.com or WordPress.com. However, if you’re serious about making a living from blogging, I would recommend to get your own hosting and domain name set up. You can read about how that’s done in this article “Create Free Website and Earn Money”.

It takes a little more work to do this but once it’s set up it’s done. A website hosting will cost less than $10 a month and you can purchase a domain name for less than $10.

With free blog hostings like Hubpages and WordPress it can be more difficult to get traffic from the search engines. Plus, with your own website you can decide what you put on it. Free blogging platforms often limit your use of affiliate links and have more strict rules as to what you can post.

You can also set up a website quite quickly through using an online website platform. Have a look at the video below (click image) to see how quickly you can set one up. If you’re not very tech savvy, this is definitely an option you might want to consider.

Is Blogging Still Profitable?

Is blogging still profitable in 2021? Having learned several online marketing strategies over the years, I’ve jumped from blogging, to video marketing to paid marketing, social media and back to blogging. But blogging is still one of my favourite strategies.

When I first started blogging not much happened. I would write a few posts and then look for the money to roll in! This was years ago before I realised how much work is needed to make blogging profitable. Saying that, one of my first online sales came from a free blog platform (Hubpages.com), where I wrote a product review and promptly made a sale! It was a short lived success though, and most of my blog posts simply disappeared into the vast void of the internet super highway!

Is Blogging Still Profitable?

Since lockdown 2020 I’ve worked harder on my blog posts. My martial arts school was shut down and I switched to running online classes. This gave me more time (and need), to focus on the online business. So I blogged a lot and things started happening!

I’ve been a blogger for several years now though and over that time I’ve definitely improved. I understand SEO (search engine optimisation) better now and definitely write longer articles than I used to. In the early days of blogging though, nothing much happened. As a result of this I lost the faith in it as a legitimate marketing strategy. So my blogging was sporadic and I would quit for several weeks or months and then jump back on it again.

But since things started happening from my blog posts (leads and sales), I’ve upped the ante. There’s nothing quite like proof that something works to motivate you to work harder than before.

Is Blogging Still Profitable – Your Niche

Your niche is pretty important if you’re blogging, or thinking of starting a blog. With a good niche you can write a lot of information quite quickly. Since I’ve been studying affiliate marketing for several years now, and online marketing strategies, that is the subject of many of my blog posts. But this is a very competitive topic and hence why it’s taken me years to make a consistent income from it.

Less competitive topics are easier to gain traction from because the number of competing websites is far less. But with a less competitive topic, you have the problem of monetising. Less competitive niches tend to be more difficult to monetise and although you can monetise any niche, using Google Adsense, it doesn’t always equate to a reliable income source.

But beware of building a blog just for the money. It’s well worth aligning with a passion or interest because you should expect to keep at it for several months at least before you’ll see much in the way of traffic, let alone income.

Choosing The Wrong Niche – Case Study

A few years ago I was desperate to make money online. I was building niche website after niche website and none of them seemed to get me anywhere. A friend had built a site around the topic of potato growing and I decided to look for a similar topic. My strategy was to find a long tail keyword which already had traffic, and build a domain name targeted website around the keyword. My domain name was whentoharvestgarlic.com.

I knew nothing of harvesting garlic and this was on a bit of a whim! Researching information for my blog posts, I spent several months and wrote a tonne of content for the site. It started to rank and I got some traffic. Whoopee, I thought, and promptly realised it was very difficult to monetise my site. I joined an affiliate program which offered some vegetable products of some kind.

After placing some affiliate banners on my site and some Adsense adverts, I sat back to watch the money roll in!

I had no interest, zero, in garlic harvesting! I decided I had reached the end of the road as far as creating content was concerned, and my site started falling off the top spot. Eventually it was replaced by a garlic harvesting fanatic. They created posts regularly and videos on the topic. How could I compete given my lackluster approach?!

Lesson Learned

I realised that I was out matched and I had no interest in writing any more about garlic harvesting. After all, how much could I possibly write?! You just harvest the little buggers don’t you! Then you eat them!

After joining an online business community I later learned about Ikigai – a Japanese term roughly translated as “reason for being”. Garlic was most definitely not my ikigai.

Is blogging still profitable? I believe it can be yes, but in order to make blogging profitable, you need to find your ikigai. Blogging about something simply for the outcome, is no fun. It can be profitable, but it’s much more difficult than blogging about something you’re interested in, or passionate about.

Monetising A Blog

Monetising a blog can be the tricky part depending on your topic. With my garlic harvesting site, it was difficult to effectively monetise. I used some Adsense adverts and a banner from an affiliate website which was tentatively related to my subject. But I wasn’t getting nearly enough traffic to make any money. The site was largely a failure and I eventually let it go.

However you monetise a blog, you need traffic and buyer traffic ideally. Any old traffic can convert to advertising clicks, but it doesn’t convert when it comes to selling affiliate products. To sell affiliate products from a blog you need a very targeted kind of visitor and to show them products which they really want or really need.

Ideally use an affiliate program which offers recurring commissions if you can. This isn’t always possible and will depend on your blog topic. Monetising with Amazon products for example won’t pay as well as if you use recurring income products such as digital products, memberships and software products.

List Building & Lead “Magnets”

Every blog should have an email opt in form somewhere on the site. This is one of the best ways to monetise a blog. Offer a giveaway on your site, such as a free ebook which relates to your blog topic and your products in some way. Once on your list, you can email your subscribers for years to come; promoting your affiliate products and earning money.

On a blog post, visitors only have a few minutes before they leave, potentially forever. But if you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can keep in touch with them for years.

For bloggers it’s vitally important to build an email list to help monetise your blog. Whatever other monetisation you have, build a list of subscribers and build relationships with them through email marketing. Over time, as your email list grows you should start to sell more and more affiliate products by doing the same things – emailing your list.

Is Blogging Still Profitable?

I began blogging several years ago and found it pretty frustrating despite some short lived early successes.

If you are consistent with your blogging, you can start generating results within a few months or years. Initially, if you choose a topic you’re well suited to you should see some traffic growth after a few months. With a good lead magnet, some of this traffic will turn into leads. If you have chosen a good affiliate product and learn how to market it through email marketing, you should start seeing some sales coming in too.

The speed with which this happens will depend on a number of variables including:

Your consistency – and how much content you create
The quality of your content
How well you share and distribute your content – see create free website and make money
Your blog topic and relative competition
The backlinks you and others post to your content
How Google and other search engines view your content
How people interact on your content (as a social signal to Google)

To keep going for long enough to make blogging profitable, you need to love your topic or have a huge passion for what you’re doing. I’ve been at blogging for several years and have only really started making a consistent income in the last year from it, (albeit a small one). But I’ve been inconsistent with my blogging and taken weeks and months off at a time. Because I’m now using recurring commission affiliate products in my affiliate inventory, I’m earning consistently from my blogging.

If I was to use only products which paid me only once, it would be a different story.

Internet Marketing Ninjas

“Internet marketing ninjas” are the secret assassins of the digital world! They are the new breed of entrepreneurs who are earning a living though selling products and services over the internet. Anyone can learn affiliate marketing to better equip themselves to become more financially stable and build an income from the internet.

But exactly how do “internet marketing ninjas” make online sales? What do they do to get people to products and services online? And how do they make sales? In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the marketing methods which internet marketing ninjas use to get free and paid traffic to their products and services.

Internet Marketing Ninjas – Free Traffic

Many affiliate marketers make a living from selling other people’s products and services on the internet. With certain products you need to find free traffic in order to be profitable. Free traffic is much harder to generate than paid traffic but unless you have high ticket affiliate products to sell, you’ll most likely need to use free strategies.

A simple free strategy which many affiliates use is blogging. This website is an example of a blog. The more content you put on your website, the more traffic you can potentially find for your products and services. But there’s a key strategy which marketing “ninjas” use to get more traffic for less work! I describe this strategy in more detail in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit, but this is a basic overview of the strategy:

Find long tail keywords which are suitably targeted to your audience and product range. I use Google’s free keyword planner to do this.
Compare the competitiveness of this keyword with a quick Google search using both phrase match and a general search. This should give you a basic idea of how competitive your keywords are.
Once you find a low competition keyword, you can create content around your keyword. Make sure you use an SEO plugin to help you optimise your content for the search engines. I use Yoast SEO.

Paid Traffic

Other internet marketing “ninjas” use paid traffic and drive tens of thousands of people into their sales funnel to make sales online. Marketers spend tens of thousands of dollars every single month in their marketing budget. How can they afford to spend this much? Simply because they have tested and measured a sales funnel and learned how to put in $1 and make $2. Once they understand this, they slowly start to scale up their marketing budget.

If their sales system makes them $2 for every $1 spent, it makes sense to spend as much as possible to increase your income.

The marketers who do this are the real internet marketing ninjas! They spend their time building a sales funnel with a range of high ticket products in it. See SFM Digital Business System.

With a sales system which contains high ticket products, recurring commission products, multi-tier commissions and a product range, marketers can spend huge amounts (once they are profitable), knowing that they will make a profit on the back-end sales.

Internet Marketing – Social Media

There’s also plenty of scope for internet marketing “ninjas” to find customers for products through the various social media accounts available online. One strategy is to use Facebook to find suitable people online to showcase your products and services to.

Here’s a little “ninja” tactic I picked up from an online community I belong to.

Start with your basic Facebook profile and use an image which relates to your product or services in your bio. I use an ebook I put together to help people learn a little about affiliate marketing. Then link your image to a landing page where you can collect your visitors email address in exchange for the ebook.

Once on your list, you can send messages to your subscribers (email marketing) helping them out and leading them to your affiliate products.

In order to get people to your bio, you’ll need to do some work. Join groups through Facebook which are places where your target audience might hang out. So for example, I might join an affiliate marketing group and make connections with people.

Don’t hassle them or spam them with links or anything like that. Just be helpful in the groups, participate in discussions and genuinely connect with people. If you do this often and spend some time each day, you’ll start to generate some traction of people visiting your profile to learn more about you. Then they should see your image (ebook or other hook) and visit your website/landing page.

Marketing “Ninjas” – The Email List

To call yourself an internet marketing “ninja” you’ll need an email list of subscribers. If someone lands on your website, they only have a few minutes to browse around before they leave – potentially forever. Internet marketing ninjas know this and encourage their website visitors to opt in to their email list with a legitimate bribe. It could be an ebook, like in the previous example, or something else of value and related to your product.

Once on your list, you have the opportunity to connect with your subscribers and build relationships with them. This time period can extend to months and even years. If you genuinely offer value to your subscribers and help them, promoting products which have helped you, you can build trust and make sales. This can all be largely automated too and you can set up your emails to go out at a pre-determined time every single day, for years potentially.

As your email list grows, so should your affiliate sales. Many internet marketers use the email list with great effect, building 6 and 7 figure incomes from their list of subscribers.

Join a crack team of internet marking “ninjas” by accessing the free video series below (click on image). You’ll earn how you can build an online business from scratch.