AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically

How to grow social media followers organically? Here’s a simple strategy using Facebook.

To grow any stream of organic traffic takes a little more time and effort that you would expect when using paid marketing. Paid marketing can give you traffic immediately and you can also scale up just by increasing your budget. With organic methods of traffic generation, you’ll need to put in some time and effort upfront. Over time though, that work can pay out in free traffic, even after you stop.

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically

Here’s my Facebook page and as you can see it’s clear immediately what’s on offer. Start with an offer which is clearly visible on your Facebook page – such as a free ebook or online course. In my link, I offer a free video series in the intro. You can check it out here.

When someone visits your page, it should be clear immediately what your offer is. That way, if someone is interested in it they can immediately take some action – ideally signing up to your offer (and joining your email list).

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically – Post Useful Content

Whatever your offer is, it should be congruent with the content you generate whether it’s on your blog or your YouTube channel or whatever! For example, I post on this blog to help out affiliates and share content on my social media platforms. Your content should align with your giveaway offer and of course attract the right audience for whatever it is you’re selling. See also target audience and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

The target audience is a good place to start if you’re just beginning. Knowing who it is you want to attract, and the purpose of attracting them is vital. If you’re an affiliate, and are selling an affiliate product, you obviously want to attract the kind of person who will be interested in buying it!

You don’t have to post your own content, although it’s preferable. You can use other people’s content which attracts your target audience. If people like your content, they are likely to follow you and interact with your posts. When this happens they are likely to browse your profile and see your offer.

How To Grow Social Media Followers Organically – Use Groups

Groups are a great way to find other people on Facebook who are likely to have an interest in your offer and content. To find groups in your niche, simply type your main keyword/niche into the search bar at the top of Facebook once logged in. You’ll find a tab called groups:

In this example I’m using the keyword “affiliate marketing” because it related to my offer and niche. But you can use any keyword which is most suitable for your topic. Join groups which seem appropriate to your niche. Some groups will ask for your reason for joining and you’ll have to answer certain questions and agree to the rules.

In particular you must avoid spamming and overtly promoting your offers otherwise you’ll likely get kicked out the the group! Instead, interact, help and join the discussion. Spend some time each day in the groups you join and engage with others.

As people interact with you some will visit your profile and engage with you, even adding you as a friend and liking your content.

– Discipline

Like with any organic method of traffic generation, this takes some time and discipline. Make a habit out of spending time each day interacting with others and joining the discussion. Log your daily routine and spend a few weeks doing so building up a long term habit of it.

This small “mini” habit can seem relatively pointless at first. But over time your comments and interactions will bring people to your profile. Some of them will see your offer and sign up to it (if you have it set up). This is why it’s important to set up your offer and a giveaway of some kind so you can build an email list alongside with your social media followers.

If your profile isn’t set up to showcase your offer, your visitors won’t know the action to take when they find you.

High Demand Products To Sell Online

What are the best high demand products to sell online? While high demand products have a large audience, there’s also a lot of people promoting them too. This means there’s plenty of noise around those kinds of products so it can be tougher getting found online.

There’s two main strategies for promotion of products online: paid marketing and organic marketing. With organic marketing, such as blogging or creating a video channel, it can take a long time building your audience. So many new starters in the online space opt for paid marketing methods. Paid marketing is so much faster and more scalable than organic marketing, which can take months or years.

High Demand Products To Sell Online – Teaching & Mentoring Courses

One of the most popular products to sell online is training to help and support beginners learn how to earn online.

A recent Gallop poll showed that 85% of workers in the US are dissatisfied with their employment. This is a universal experience and it’s not just the States. Many people either want a second income from earning online, or to replace their income completely, and escape their employer.

high demand products to sell online — https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx#ite-506897

Of those people who don’t want to quit their jobs, there’s a huge amount being made redundant. Artificial intelligence is replacing jobs at a phenomenal rate. So whether you are actively seeking to leave your employment or having it forced on you, it leaves a big question. How will people be earning a living in the next 10 years time with such a large proportion of jobs disappearing?

highest demand products — https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65102150

High Demand Products To Sell Online – The Answer

One answer is to shift to the online space and learn how to earn a living from selling other people’s products and services online. This is known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates recommend products and services online for a share of the profit. Some of the highest demand products to sell are those which help people transition from traditional employment into the entrepreneurial space, through selling products and services online.

There’s many products which claim to help people earn online. However, actually doing so is something which requires a lot of motivation and effort. If someone could short-cut this journey they would be likely to pay a lot more so they could escape the 9 to 5 job permanently.

The answer is to sell the highest value products in the online learning space for digital earning. These are products which offer more personal one-on-one coaching and mentoring for affiliate marketing.

Selling A Multiple Product “Suite” From A Product Range

Selling multiple products within a product range solves another problem. The main problem for affiliate marketers when using paid marketing is to get a good return on their marketing investment. With most affiliate products, you can only earn once from each sale.

So each customer can only bring in a certain revenue, making advertising more costly. But with a product range which includes subscription products, mid and high ticket products, you can earn multiple times from each customer. This increases the average revenue per customer you are able to earn, making it easier to build a profitable business given the same marketing budget.

With high value products which are in high demand, this offers one of the best business models for anyone looking to build an income online. Mentorship products are also digital products. So they can be accessed online. They also pay much larger levels of commission than a similarly priced physical product would.

Summary

Some of the best high demand products to sell online are those which teach how to earn online. In particular, those which offer the most value are the best. The best kinds of products offer multiple products within a range. The benefit of this is that a customer can choose their level of support through the product range and according to their circumstances and level of commitment. This means more customers are able to purchase something from you, even if it is the lowest cost item within your product range.

With mid and high ticket offers in addition to your basic level product, you can sell higher value products to those who want them, without excluding people who don’t. A good multi-tier offer should be of high value and offer multiple earning methods including a product range and subscription products which pay recurring commissions.

See this video for more info.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing

What are the skills needed for affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. When you sell an affiliate product, you earn a commission. Don’t make sales though and you won’t earn any commissions. So the main skill needed to become successful with affiliate marketing is marketing. Unless you learn how to successfully market a product somehow, you won’t be successful.

Anyone can learn the skills of affiliate marketing though, but it does take some time and commitment. Good affiliates are problem solvers and they will often experience certain problems on the affiliate journey. These might be technical difficulties, such as setting up a website, or marketing difficulties such as getting customers in front of your products.

Top affiliates will often build large email lists of subscribers and market products to their email list. So they need to be good communicators in order to communicate according to the needs of their target audience.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Problem Solving

If you’re good a working on your own initiative, can find answers to your own problems and overcome them, this is a useful skill for affiliate marketing. Whether you are having a technical issue such as tracking sales on your website, or setting up your sales funnel or website, a good affiliate will be self sufficient and be able to search for solutions without needing constant supervision and help.

The main thing to remember with affiliate marketing is that it is a performance based business model. So good time management and activity management is vital. It can be easy to spend time on the wrong activities without moving your affiliate business forwards. Good affiliates can set their own schedule to move things forward off their own back.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Goal Setting

Goal setting is a useful skill but if you haven’t done any goal setting activities it is easy to learn. It’s easy to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of an affiliate business and get distracted by small menial tasks (which don’t necessarily move the needle on your income). So being able to set specific income and action goals over various timeframes and hold yourself accountable to get things done is a useful skill for an affiliate.

Goal setting helps you frame your affiliate business in a meaningful way and motivate yourself; another useful skill for an affiliate, self motivation. Affiliate marketing is a difficult business model if you’re new to it and many affiliates will quit before they give it much of a chance.

Skills Needed For Affiliate Marketing – Marketing & Communication Skills

While affiliate marketing can allow you to sell products and services without the “hard sell”, and without dealing with customers directly, you still need to learn some skills to sell affiliate products. Marketing can take the form of blog posts, paid advertising, email messages, video or social media posts. You can become a content creator or run paid advertising to drive targeted visitors to your products and services.

A good marketer is good at communicating to their audience. This can be via email message, video advertising, blogging or some other means. Anyone can learn marketing skills from scratch and build a profitable affiliate business however.

Highly Motivated

Most top affiliates are highly motivated. This is pretty important because affiliate marketing does take some time and effort.

Most of the affiliates who succeed in their affiliate businesses therefore have a strong reason to overcome the difficulties and succeed. Often this is the desire to improve their financial situation, escape the 9 to 5, or spend more time with their family.

Summary

While anyone can learn affiliate marketing from scratch, there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. For the best chance of success, you need a strong desire to succeed and a big enough reason to keep going when others quit. Good goal setting, communication and marketing skills are also essential along with good problem solving skills.

A good entrepreneurial mindset is also a useful thing for affiliates to have.

If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate you can find training resource course here.

How To Sell Your Skills Online

Wondering how to sell your skills online? Whatever skills you have, there’s people who are willing to pay to learn them, or learn from you. There’s many ways to sell skills online too; here’s some of the strategies you can use:

Create a course, using sites such as teachable.com or udemy.com
Build a blog using your knowledge or a YouTube channel; sell affiliate products to your audience
Create an ebook/digital download/pdf product and sell it on a website
Work as a freelancer selling your skills – use Fiverr.com or Upwork.com for example to build a profile
Tutoring one on one – Teach classes in your local neighbourhood. Get found by using Google My Business to advertise your services
Promote yourself through Q and A websites – Quora.com offers a platform for experts to share information in their field of expertise.
Write a book – writing a physical book has a double fold benefit when selling your skills online. Not only can you sell your book but it helps you grow your authority and status when trying to sell online and grow your brand. You can even self publish with Amazon self publishing.

How To Sell Your Skills Online – Creating A Course

If you have a specific skill you can sell it by creating a course through one of the many online course creation platforms. Checkout teachable.com and udemy.com for course creation resources.

Course creators will often create and upload a number of videos to create a training resource of some kind. You can also add downloadable documents to this and written information. Once created and set up, you can attract an audience when using one of these sites. For example, people can find courses on Udemy.com with a simple search and there’s all kinds of courses you can buy:

Having your course on one of these sites can definitely help you with promotion.

If you’re not up for creating your own course, you can find a course you would like to promote and join an affiliate program.

How To Sell Your Skills Online – Existing Products & Your Knowledge

Another way to sell your skills is through building an online resource and selling someone else’s product from it. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you earn commissions from selling other people’s products online.

By finding a product which aligns with your skill (or knowledge), you can attract an audience by creating either a blog or a YouTube channel for example. Upload content based around your skills and knowledge to attract an audience.

To sell affiliate products from your blog/channel, you need to join an affiliate program and place your affiliate links within your content. Bloggers often use other people’s products to monetise their blogs with, the same goes for YouTuber’s.

Building an online resource based around your expert knowledge is a great way to sell either your own product, or someone else’s using the affiliate model.

Create An Ebook & Build An Email List

Creating an ebook is one of the simplest ways to sell your skills online by creating a “digital asset” based around your knowledge. You can either sell your ebook directly from a website or use it as a freebie giveaway to build an email list with.

Email lists are a great way to build an audience to sell your products/affiliate products to. If you create a course, offer an ebook on your website to build your email list. Then sell your course through your email marketing messages.

Grab my ebook here “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” and learn one of the best methods I’ve found to selling your knowledge online.

Freelancing – Upwork.com Fiverr.com

Have a look at both upwork.com and fiverr.com if you want to find people who are selling their skills online. You’ll find a heap of freelancers with a huge range of skills. To become a paid freelancer on either site you’ll need to create a profile and build up some reviews to attract jobs.

This can take some time and effort and there’s plenty of competition with some insanely low prices, so it can be tough even getting a paid gig. To make this work you’ll need to stick with it for a while and build up a reputation to get enough work.

Summary

There’s many ways to sell your skills online whether you want to go freelance, or create some kind of digital products to sell automatically.

Most of these strategies will take some time and effort to get the ball rolling. The beauty of online strategies though is that you can build up your online income in your own time around a job.

You can also do a few of these. Start by creating a digital product you can sell. Then automate the process. To learn more about selling products and services online checkout this online video course and download my ebook.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet

Wondering how to sell stuff on the internet? There’s plenty of strategies you can use to do this. You can sell stuff you own, from around your house. Use eBay to list an item or even Facebook Marketplace allows you to do this. Or if you want to sell in greater volume you can create a listing on eBay and sell multiple items through a single listing. If you have something of your own to sell, you can do it numerous ways; from your own website, on an auction website, through a social media platform and so on.

But what if you don’t have anything of your own to sell? Affiliate marketers sell other people’s products online using a variety of methods: blogging, paid marketing, social media marketing, video and content marketing and email marketing. The beauty of selling someone else’s product is that you don’t have to deal with anything physically yourself. Affiliate marketing and drop shipping for example are both business models which let you sell something you don’t own through a website or email list.

By using a unique affiliate link, affiliates sell other people’s products simply by recommending them online. The product delivery and customer services is taken care of by product owners. This leaves affiliate marketers to focus on the advertising of a product or service; without having to actually provide it themselves.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best methods used to sell stuff on the internet. By using an email autoresponder, affiliates can sell in bulk to thousands of people simultaneously, through email messages.

To use email marketing, you start by offering something of value to a potential customer, such as an ebook. This is known as a lead magnet. Checkout my lead magnet on this website which is my ebook “affiliate marketing for beginners“.

To access a digital “giveaway” the website visitor opts in to the email list. You can then follow up with a series of automated email messages. See also the power of email marketing.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – Blogging

There’s an estimated 600 million blogs on the internet. So why are so many people blogging? The answer is that blogging is a great way to attract an audience whom you can sell to.

Bloggers write posts which get found online either through the search engines or from another website or social media platform. When you visit most blogs, you’ll see a popup with some freebie giveaway. That’s email marketing working it’s magic.
The blog is used to attract an audience and the email marketing system is used for selling of products and services.

You can blog on any topic online and sell affiliate products which are aligned with your target audience.

How To Sell Stuff On The Internet – PPC: Pay Per Click

Pay per click marketing is often used to sell stuff online through a website or landing page, connecting a paid promotional advert with an email marketing service. Paid advertising can also be used to send a targeted audience directly to products online, too. But it’s often used in combination with email marketing because it gives the marketer a longer period of time to sell to their subscriber.

On a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes and they are usually gone forever after that. But once on an email list, the marketer can follow up with email messages for weeks, months and even years. Pay per click marketing allows someone to test the water of an advertising campaign, without spending too much.

When an advert doesn’t produce a sale, the marketer will cancel that particular campaign. Once they find an ad that works, they will scale up, adding more marketing budget to that particular ad.

Selling Digital Products On The Internet

One of the best things to sell online is digital products. Digital products can be accessed online or downloaded instantly, making them incredibly low cost product to deliver. Whereas physical products incur manufacturing, handling and delivery costs, digital products don’t have that problem. Once a digital product is created, there’s very few costs attributed to their delivery – except advertising.

That’s why many digital products pay affiliates much larger commissions for their sale than is possible with physical products of a similar value. A typical physical affiliate product commission runs from 1% to 10%. Whereas a digital product will often pay between 30% and 40% commission.

Access a training resource to learn how to sell online here.

How To Sell Information Online

Wondering how to sell information online? So much information online is completely free. So how can you get paid selling information? There’s a few ways you can get paid selling information. Here’s a quick overview:

Write and sell an ebook from your website
Create content on Substack and charge for views with a subsciption
Build a blog and monetise with advertising (e.g. Google Adsense), or affiliate marketing
Build an email list and promote affiliate products through it
Create a digital product and have other people promote it for you through Clickbank for example.
Use Teachable – share what you know and build an online course to sell

How To Sell Information Online – An Ebook

An ebook is one of the simplest ways in which anyone can sell information. Create your book and upload it to your website. Then create a sales button using Paypal and a sales page on your website. You can then have your ebook page automatically show up when someone completes checkout on Paypal.

To set up the actual sales process when selling an ebook is relatively simple and straight forward. You can check out the process in more detail in this article: selling ebooks from your own website.

You can also upload it to Amazon using Kindle Self Publishing, which can give you more reach. Once you’re all set up, the main problem when selling an ebook is attracting traffic to your website. This is one of the main issues whatever strategy you are using; be it affiliate marketing, selling your own course, building your own email list or attracting customers to your Substack subscription blog.

How To Sell Information Online – Traffic

Traffic is the key, whatever method of selling information online you are going to choose. There’s multiple platforms which will help you set up a “payment gateway” for your content. That’s the easy part. But still, you’re going to need traffic when your “digital shop” is up and running.

If no-one can find your digital store, nobody is going to buy your information. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s a vast competition in the online space. To get a slice of traffic, you’re going to need to get your own content in front of people/run ads.

If you’re selling an ebook, for only a small amount (e.g. $7) it’s going to be difficult making a profit when you’re only getting $7 per customer, especially if you’re using paid advertising. You have to make a sale for every $7 you spend, just to break even!

To get people to find your ebook for free, you’ll need to create content to attract them (for example though blogging). But if you’re creating similar written content for free, who in their right mind is going to pay $7 for your ebook!? So what’s the answer?

– Affiliate Marketing

The answer lies in selling other people’s products with a model known as affiliate marketing. With an ebook, you can maybe charge a few dollars but not much more. So it’s going to be tough selling it, especially if you’re attempting to use paid advertising.

Spend more than the cost of the ebook without making a sale, and you’re running at a loss. In addition, many affiliates are giving away ebooks like they’re going out of fashion. You can grab mine here! Why pay when you can get an ebook for free somewhere else?

affiliate marketing - selling information online

However, ebooks are great lead magnets. A lead magnet is a term for something valuable which can be given away to generate an email list and build your email list.

Building An Email List

An email list is one of the best tools you can get to help you sell information online. By building an email list of subscribers, and delivering value driven messages to your list, you can build trust and develop relationships. Many affiliates will even build their email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

You can then promote products to your list, which are worth far more than your ebook would fetch.

Ideally find products which are aligned with your ebook. That way, your subscribers are more likely to be interested in it. Information products typically pay far more than physical products to affiliate marketers. For example, a physical product can pay between 1% and 10% commission (an item from Amazon’s affiliate program, for example). But an information product (or digital product) can pay a lot more – typically 30%-40% commission.

If you choose high value and subscription based information products to sell, you can earn ongoing commissions from each customer. They can also purchase products from a range and allow you to earn from multiple sources. See also benefits of an affiliate business system.

Best Info Products To Sell Online

The best info products to sell online are arguably those which pay the most. They are typically those which offer the greatest value to their customers. What problem would you pay the most to have solved for you by a product/service?

Another income? To be able to quit your job? To be financially/geographically free? Income and lifestyle are the problems which people will pay the most to change. So if you can offer a solution to these kinds of problems, people will likely pay more for them.

For example, people will pay a lot more for a business mentorship program than they would to learn how to play the guitar. The value they get from building a successful online business is far greater (in monetary terms) that the skill of learning the guitar.

So although a learning guitar online course would still sell to the right audience, you’re limited as to what you can charge for it. Learn more here.

Most Profitable Websites To Start

What are the most profitable websites to start generating an income from? There’s several ways to approach this question. Firstly, if you want an already earning website, you should head over to Flippa.com where you can buy existing websites which are already profitable. But expect to pay $10,000 and above for an income generating website which is already profitable.

If you’re still here, perhaps you’re not looking at spending that kind of cash?

To build a website which becomes profitable is much cheaper. But you’ll need to either put your back into creating a lot of content or pay to advertise it. To get that money back as quickly as possible, you’re going to need a great product to sell from it. If you don’t have a product or service of your own to sell you can use the affiliate marketing model. Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to generate an income from a website.

But before we delve into affiliate marketing, it’s probably worth thinking about what your website will do for its visitors. Before a website can be profitable, it needs to provide some kind of value, otherwise nobody would buy from it.

Most Profitable Websites To Start – Affiliate Websites

Have a look at a website which was created by Martin Lewis to help people with their finances. Most people have heard of Moneysavingexpert.com, Martin’s site. The key to the site’s success is this: it helps people solve major problems. The bigger the problem, the more people will pay. The website moneysavingexpert.com is an affiliate site which helps out millions of people worldwide but it’s also an affiliate site which makes money through product referrals.

Websites which are profitable attract an audience by helping them solve problems and offering products as a solution. In the case of Martin’s site, the products might be a lower interest credit card option, a loan, mortgage or discount mobile phone offer. But they are products none the less, which help people!

Most Profitable Websites To Start Earning From

Many successful websites are built from someone’s knowledge, such as Martin’s knowledge of saving money and finding deals. Think about the knowledge you have that someone might pay for. This can be a good place to start when coming up with an idea for a profitable website. If you can’t think of a sellable skill or knowledge you have, then think about a big problem and look for an affiliate product which solves it.

One of the biggest problems in the world is employment/income. So if you could solve the problem of making an income online, buy helping people in some way, that could be a good place to start. That’s why one of the most profitable niches to use is the online money making niche.

Other popular niches which can be profitable are the health and wellbeing niches, gadgets and technology, home and garden, hobbies and pets. See also best niche for affiliate marketing.

Earning From A Website

To earn from a website you need to offer something of value to your visitors which they are going to buy. With Martin Lewis’s website, people buy phone contracts, mortgages, credit card balance transfers and other discounted items. But his website is built to help people overcome their financial difficulties using his knowledge.

To earn from a website, you need to offer some value which will genuinely help people and deliver a solution which they are going to pay for! This process involves building the website, attracting the right traffic to the website and then of course selling the product/solution.

The most profitable websites to start earning from begin with solving the big problems. They offer a solution which people are more than happy to pay for. The bigger the problem, the more people people will pay for a solution. For example, with a high ticket offering in your “digital shop” such as an online business mentorship for example, you can earn considerably more per customer than for a cheap low value item.

Problems such as saving money or making money are two of the biggest problems which can be solved from a profitable website.

Learn how to earn from a website from scratch, even with no experience or any products of your own to sell:

Start here.

Online Skills To Learn To Make Money

What are the main online skills to learn to make money?

YouTuber’s are able to make tens of thousands of dollars a month, just through creating content online. Some marketers run advertising campaigns spending tens of thousands each month in advertising budget. But how do they turn this website traffic into profit?

In many cases the answer is by selling someone else’s products through their content/advertising. Affiliate marketers are able to make a commission through the sale of other people’s products and services online. They don’t need to personally own the product/service, so it’s a great business model if you can garner enough interest in your content or buy enough customers and turn a profit.

Online Skills To Learn To Make Money

So one of the main skills then to make money online is marketing. Marketing can be summed up as the interactions with a potential customer online or offline through your advertising materials. This could take the form of a blog post, a video, a written advertisement or a video advert.

It could be a pop up on a website, an ebook, an email message or any number of other marketing tools you might find online. Marketing isn’t limited to the online world, but many online marketers focus solely in this space without doing any offline advertising.

Before starting building a YouTube channel, a blog or an email list though, it’s a good idea to start out with your niche. Your niche is an important building blog for any online marketer because you’ll likely be spending a lot of time there; creating content for your customer avatar. The “customer avatar” is they type of person who will consume your content, lap up your advertising and become a loyal customer of your products/services.

Online Skills To Learn To Make Money – Communication

A good communicator makes for a good marketer, whatever means they use to communicate their marketing message. That could be via a video, a blog post or an email message. Online marketers use multiple means to get their marketing message to their target audience. Here’s a few of the most popular ways in which affiliates get products in front of their audience:

Blogging – blogging is a cheap method of attracting an audience online. As your content grows so does your audience.
Video marketing – YouTube/TikTok are both popular marketing methods used by online marketers to generate income. They first create content for their audience to digest while selling affiliate products through their videos and subscriber list
Email marketing – whether you have a blog or a YouTube channel, most marketers will also build an email list of subscribers. This is a pretty important step for generating an income online. Get an email autoresponder here for free.
SEO – Some marketers will focus on Search Engine Optimisation to get their content ranking on the search engines and get free organic) traffic.
Social media channels are also used for marketing purposes. You’ve probably seen advertising posts on YouTube or Facebook for example, promoting products and services.

– Aligning High Value Products To Your Niche

Another useful skill for affiliate marketers is the skill of choosing the right products for their audience. If you’re going to create content around a certain topic/niche, you’ll be attracting a specific type of person. So aligning a high quality product with your marketing materials is vital for success when making money online.

If you were to try and sell something online which is a bad match for your audience, you’ll likely find there’s nobody interested in buying. But if you’re online presence attracts a certain type of shopper it makes sense to offer something relevant to their needs.

This is something many would-be affiliates get wrong in the first instance. They misalign their products with the type of content they create. So getting clear on your customer avatar and your specific niche in which you will be creating content is paramount. You wouldn’t sell tyres from a florist, or lamps from a garden centre. But it’s easy to misalign a website with a product without giving it much thought and trying to sell the wrong kind of product to the wrong audience.

– Content Creation

There’s lot of ways affiliate marketers create content. It can be written content on a blog, or an email message, video content in an advert or YouTube channel, memes, images, pdf documents, ebooks, infographics and so on.

These are all forms of content creation which can be used to attract an online audience for the purposes of making money through either selling products or advertising space.

Content creators will have a topic they talk/write about and they upload content on a regular basis to a YouTube channel or website that they own.

Over time as their volume of content grows, they earn money from either selling products, advertising clicks or both. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.

Google Adsense, for example is one of the first port of calls which content creators will take to monetise their content. However, you will need a huge volume of content simply to earn a tiny amount with advertising clicks. It can be better and more lucrative to align your content with a specific product by joining an affiliate marketing program which has that product in their inventory.

Summary

The two main ways in which online marketers monetise their content online are through affiliate marketing and advertising. Marketers usually pick between content creation or paid advertising.

They will often use their marketing method to build an email list of subscribers through some freebie giveaway. They then follow up with their email list, delivering messages which help them in some way, and promote affiliate products to their list.

One of the fastest ways to earn money is through using PPC (pay per click) advertising to build an email list and then delivering value driven messages to subscribers, offering some product which can help them.

If you’re interested in learning some of these skills to earn an income online, you can learn more here.

Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

Can you really do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget and how does doing it on the cheap affect your chances? The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get started for absolutely nothing. All you need is to join an affiliate program and find a means to promote your affiliate link for free. Doing everything for free does come with a number of limitations. However it’s definitely a possibility for those who can’t afford large marketing budgets or high ticket product ranges.

If you have a little cash to spare, it’s well worth getting yourself a domain name that you own and getting your own hosting. This will only set you back a few dollars a month. A domain name can be bought (I use this site) relatively cheaply (Less than $13 a year) and a hosting service can be bought for $3-$5 a month.

The next investment that’s worth your money is an email autoresponder. You can get access to one for free here which gives you up to 500 subscribers for nothing!

Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

If you don’t have the cash for a website of your own at least get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing. An autoresponder allows you to collect email subscribers from a website, whether you own the website or not. Collection of email addresses puts you in greater control of your traffic: the number one issue for many struggling affiliates.

Without a website of your own there’s a few strategies you can still use. See also how to promote affiliate links without a website. YouTube for example is a great option if you’re on a tight budget. Many YouTubers have build a huge following simply by upload content that they have created. Building a YouTube channel does take some time and effort, but it’s worth it when you can attract a following to promote your affiliate products to.

Free blog sites are an option too, if you’re shy about getting on camera. Hubpages.com WordPress.com, Medium.com and Blogger.com are all places you can go to get your content online and attract a following for the selling of affiliate products.

Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget – Target Audience

The main thing you’ll need to do to attract an audience for affiliate marketing on a budget is to create content. The main two ways to make affiliate sales online are paid and organic marketing. Organic marketing notoriously takes a lot more work and time. There’s also other methods which you can use such a social media methods. See my post on unpaid social media marketing.

If you’re going to go down the content marketing route, it’s well worth spending some time on defining your target audience or customer avatar first, before you start. Creating content is time consuming and it can be demoralising when a lot of work doesn’t amount to much.

To make the most of your content creation strategy, it’s a good idea to know who exactly you’re marketing towards. This will save you a whole lot of time and effort, wasting content on the wrong audience. Visit my post on the customer avatar worksheet pdf and work your way through it.

When you know very well the type of person who will buy, you’re already a better marketer. It’ll shave years off your journey!

– Choosing Your Niche

If you’re on a budget, it’s probably going to be a good idea to get good at building content – either written on in video format. To create and upload video upon video or blog post upon blog post, potentially for months, is a tall order. You’ll need to have at least an interest in your chosen topic for this to work, and ideally a passion for it.

A while ago I chose a topic I was uninterested in and for 6 months wrote blog posts on it. Before I lost the plot, I completely abandoned the site and it soon fell by the wayside. It wasn’t a total failure because I learned not to choose a topic I had zero interest in, (just because I though it might make some money)!

“The man who likes to walk will go further than the man who wants to get somewhere”! The same applies to content creation. Choose a topic you love and can get passionate about. Otherwise it’s going to be a much harder journey and you’re more likely to quit en-route.

Imagine upload videos or blog posts in your chosen topic for several months on a regular basis. If this makes you feel good, then it’s the right topic. Otherwise you might want a rethink. That’s how long it is likely to take; with over 600 million blogs on the internet and 113.9 million YouTube channels (in 2023) to compete with.

– Product Choice

Product choice has a great deal to do with your success as an affiliate and particularly when you’re going the organic route. If you can afford some paid advertising, to get traffic more quickly, it’s worth doing. But use a budget you’re happy to learn from, rather than earn from because initially you’ll likely spend budget without getting a return (other than data and knowledge).

There’s a vast range of products you can choose to promote as an affiliate and some affiliate programs do require you to already have a following. Whether that be a high traffic website or a large list of subscribers/YouTube subscriber base etc. But most programs will be happy to let you join them without any such requirements.

high ticket products - affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget — High ticket products like this Golf Cart Hovercraft pay much more than most affiliate products!

Amazon is the go-to website for new affiliates but Amazon’s commission structure is fairly low by industry standards. For example, some of their products pay as little as 1% commission on a sale. With organic marketing, you’re likely to start out with the odd sale, sporadically.

So when that sale amounts to very little, it can be difficult staying positive about your affiliate business. But if you choose digital products, you can earn more like 30-40% commission which can be more worth your while.

In addition, you can also promote subscription digital products too. These are definitely worth considering because they can pay recurring commissions from each sale. Checkout also my article on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

– How Does A Budget Affect Your Chance Of Affiliate Success?

Doing everything on the cheap will definitely affect your chances of success with affiliate marketing. If you can, invest in a training and education program which “plugs” you in to a community too. You can access one here.

Having like minded people to hold you accountable will definitely help you succeed online. It can be tough maintaining the drive to keep going when results don’t come quickly, especially with content creation.

When you start looking for results in your business, you stop working on it. If you doubt yourself, this effects your motivation and drive. You can’t always be on “top” form, however high your motivation is on any given day. So make habits out of doing the work to keep the momentum going. See also the the power of micro habits which is a useful post for content creators.

Summary

If you’re starting out as an affiliate I would recommend you get your own website and hosting and an email autoresponder at the very minimum. Then create content on your website or build a YouTube channel which helps your audience in some way.

Promote products through your channel and build your email list by offering some freebie giveaway on your website/channel such as an ebook you’ve created (here’s one I made earlier!).

Content marketing is a slow method of getting traction as an affiliate compared to paid advertising, so expect to be working for some time before you break through and start making those sales. To speed up your journey considerably get an email autoresponder and build an email list. Use subscription affiliate products and high ticket products which pay you recurring commissions and large one-off commissions respectively.

Those are some of the best ways I know to do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products. If you know any other methods I’d be grateful for your comments!

Access more training and resources through this course.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home

There’s lots of people wondering how to make money online from home so here’s a short beginners guide. While there’s plenty of ways to earn online one of the simplest and most popular ways is through selling other people’s products and services; a business model known as affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program, get your unique affiliate I.D. or affiliate link, and promote it online to earn commissions on products you sell. One of the most popular affiliate programs available is Amazon’s.

Yes, Amazon that popular website which you’ve probably already bought from, has an affiliate program. When you join the program you can access an affiliate platform where you can create an affiliate link to over 12 million products on the site.

But before you rush off to Amazon, you’re going to need some help in the actual promotion of your affiliate link. This is the “crux” of the affiliate marketing model; getting your affiliate link in front of the right audience, and in large numbers.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – The “Right” Audience

It’s worth noting too that Amazon isn’t the best paying affiliate program. Some products on Amazon pay as little as 1% commission, so you’ll need to sell a lot of them, and very cheaply, in order to make a profit.

However, there’s other products and services which pay much more; such as digital, subscription and hight ticket products. For more info find the form on this website and sign up to the free video series. You can also download my free ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” too, just click here for access.

target market - who to find for your products

Anyway, I digress! Back to the right audience. When you’re selling an affiliate product online you need a strategy to get your affiliate link in front of as many people as you can. But most people online aren’t going to want the toaster, or dinner set you’re promoting, for example. In fact, the bulk of online traffic wants something totally different and most are browsing for information, not products. So finding the right “slice” of the online marketplace to put your affiliate link in front of is paramount to earning online through affiliate marketing.

To do this we can zone in on what we affiliates call the customer avatar or target audience. The target audience is the small slice of the online marketplace who is actively looking for what we are selling. So for example, product reviews are a good idea for affiliates because they attract people who are looking for a specific product, which we can then sell though our affiliate link.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – Choosing A Marketing Strategy

There’s many ways to sell other people’s products online with affiliate marketing. Some affiliates choose blogging, others use video. Some use paid marketing and build a large list of subscribers. But most successful affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they promote their products to.

Having an email list is one of the most important things for affiliates because it allows them to collect a large number of subscribers who have shown an interest in their topic/niche.

A list also puts the affiliate in greater control over their traffic, which is necessary to attract buyers for your products. You can use a website to collect emails by offering some free information to your website visitors. Some affiliates use specific landing pages to collect email subscribers and this is a good idea.

A landing page is a specific web page built specifically for the purpose of collecting email addresses. It’s much more efficient than a normal website because there’s less choice for visitors. They either sign up or leave, whereas on a website, they can browse around.

Generally an affiliate will choose a marketing strategy which suits their available time and resources and their budget. Here’s a few strategies:

Content marketing : blogging, video blogging
PPC – pay per click marketing – using a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords
Social media marketing – sharing content on social media, pasting your affiliate links in your profile etc.
Paid social media marketing – using a social media platform to run paid ads
Email marketing – list building lets you collect emails from a landing page/website using a free giveaway such as an ebook

How To Make Money Online For Beginners – How Long Does It Take?

If you’ve read this far you’re probably asking how long this is going to take to make any money from selling other people’s products. The timescale will differ according to how much time you can put in and your marketing strategy. With a large budget and if you’re using high ticket affiliate products, you can start generating leads and sales very quickly, within a few weeks with a paid marketing strategy. But if you’re choosing another route, such as blogging, you’re in for a longer journey.

Blogging or any other content creation strategy involves creating a lot of content and building a digital “asset”. Once built such an asset can generate free leads and sales without paying for traffic. However it can take several months to get to this stage and the time will depend on your input and the relative competitiveness of your niche.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, although many promote it as such, so you should expect to work at it consistently for several weeks or months before you can see sales dropping in. Once you have put that work in though you can benefit from the automation of online selling, according to your marketing strategy. With a scalable strategy (e.g. paid marketing) you can build a large 6 figure enterprise quite quickly with enough investment capital. If you’re only looking for an extra income you can do this too, even with only a few hours each day.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn an income online through the selling of other people’s products and services. Anyone can become an affiliate and earn an income this way. Simply join an affiliate program and get some training. Training is well worth your time if you’re going to take affiliate marketing seriously. It’s the best investment you can make on this path because everything you do will be based on what you know (or don’t know) about how to successfully market a product online.

Access my free ebook here and a free video series to learn more.