Category: Affiliate Marketing Mentor Blog

Here’s my affiliate marketing mentors blog! I’ve been an affiliate marketer since the early 2000’s and I ran into a lot of problems which, perhaps you have too?

I tried all sorts of strategies at first from building niche websites, running Google Adwords ads, blogging and using free blog platforms such as Hubpages and Blogger.com.

The struggle was pretty real but I was determined to make affiliate marketing work for me because life was so difficult in the many jobs I juggled to keep the wolf from the door!

In 2014 I found a community of online marketing mentors. I decided to start agains from scratch and “empty my cup”. It was tough and it’s hard to let go of thinking you know something when you really don’t!

I don’t consider myself an affiliate marketing mentor, although I hope that this website helps people who are learning. No, I’m still, and always will be a student, which means I can keep emptying my cup when it gets too full of the idea that I know something. The online world changes a lot and very quickly. So just when you think you are getting somewhere, everything is different and you’re starting all over again!

Welcome to affiliate marketing mentors!

Online Selling System

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

Online businesses use these basic elements:

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

Online Selling System – Affiliate Marketing

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

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

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

What Is Online Selling System?

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

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

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

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

Products and Sales Funnel

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

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

What Products?

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

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

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

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

Email Marketing – Why Build An Email List?

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

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

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

Best System For Selling Online

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

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

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

Online Selling System Summary

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

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

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

Topics For Blogging For Beginners

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

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

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

Topics For Blogging For Beginners – Your Product

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

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

Topics For Blogging For Beginners – Google’s Keyword Planner

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

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

Topics For Blogging – Use Popular Trending Articles

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

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

Your About Me Page

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

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

Using YouTube For Inspiration

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

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

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

Long Tail Keywords Benefits

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

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

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

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Niche Websites

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

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

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

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Conversion Rates

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

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

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

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

Long Tail Keywords Benefits – Content Ideas

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

Long Tail Keyword Finder

Anyone can use a long tail keyword finder in order to find keywords for their blog posts. I use Google’s own keyword planner which is a free tool. All you need is an Adwords account to use it.

Many bloggers target long tail keywords with their articles because there’s a greater chance they can rank their content for them. Shorter phrases tend to be much more competitive.

Here’s how to use Google’s free keyword planner to find those long tail keywords and how to check their relative competition against other content.

Long Tail Keyword Finder – Google’s Keyword Planner

Sign in to your Adwords account and click on the “tools and settings” tab in the top right hand side of your dashboard. If you have an account you should find the keyword planner here.

Click on the keyword planner tab in the left had column (see below)

Next type your main “seed” keyword into Google’s Keyword Planner. You should be offered a number of keywords which are being searched for on Google. Usually you’ll be shown the most competitive keywords first, in order of the most monthly searches. So, if your main keyword was “buy shoe laces” you would type that keyword into the planner and see what comes up. You’ll see the most competitive keywords which relate to your “seed” keyword come up first.

Click on the Avg. monthly searches tab above the search results number column. This will tab/scroll the average monthly searches from most to least. Keep clicking it until you see the lowest monthly searched in the column. It should show between 10 and 30 monthly searches in each row (see below).

Scroll down to the bottom of the chart and you’ll see the scroll bar. Click on the right arrow and you can then scroll through the search results in order of least searched for keywords towards the most searched for results. As you do so, you should find the long tail keywords which offer the least competition in the search results.

Long Tail Keyword Finder – Finding Those Keywords With Less Competition

As you scroll through the keywords which have fewer monthly searches you should see some nice long tail keywords. Ideally we want to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. To determine this we can type the keyword we choose into Google to see the relative competition. We’ll use the example of “lazy elastic shoelaces” from the above “buy shoe lace” keyword example. “Lazy elastic shoelaces” has 170 monthly searches (according to the planner).

Once we find a long tail keyword (3 or more keywords) which we want to target with our content, we can head over the Google and type it in. Type it into Google to see results using both open search and phrase match (using “” quotation marks around your keywords). You should see a number come up while doing this at the top of the screen underneath the search bar.

low competition keywords — Google open search

lazy elastic shoelaces — Google “phrase match” search

These numbers should give you an idea about how competitive your keyword phrase is. You can also look at the results under the open match to see the competing websites for your particular search query. If there’s a number of high level domains ranking for your search term, it might be tough to rank for it. However, if you see videos and question and answer sites, it might be easier to rank.

Example

Here’s a video using the example seed keyword “yoga mat”. As you can see, there’s lots of long tail keywords which appear using this search.

Ideally find the keywords which offer the least competition during a Google search. This can take some time and research, and the more you do it, and create content for the keywords you find, the more you’ll know.

Of course some of your content will rank and much of it won’t, depending on the keywords you choose. But over time, you should get to know which keywords are more likely to offer you the best opportunity of free traffic.

Creating Content

Once you find a good long tail keyword which offer the least amount of competition on Google, it’s time to write a good quality article. Ideally use a good SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin to help you write search engine friendly content. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Write at least 1000 words to give you the best chance of ranking your content. You can also find share plugins to help you syndicate your content throughout social media in the link above.

Keep creating content and putting it out there! Over time, some if it will find its way to the top of the search queries. Even if you don’t manage to rank on Google, don’t forget your content will rank on Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and other search engines. So it’s worth putting the effort in and sticking to a good consistent blogging plan.

For more on this strategy download my free ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit“.

SFM Affiliate Marketing

What is SFM affiliate marketing? SFM (Six Figure Mentors) is a training and education program for affiliate marketers. The SFM also offers training for e-commerce and other online business strategies. So you don’t have to use SFM to become an affiliate. It offers an education for any business owner wanting to develop their online skills. (I personally learned how to market my martial arts school after joining the SFM in 2014 – as well as becoming an Six Figure Mentors Affiliate).

However, The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program offers a number of benefits compared with other affiliate programs.

With most affiliate programs you only get paid once. But through the SFM’s affiliate product range you can benefit from:

A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
A ready made sales funnel – follow the step by step setup modules
A range of products – not just a single affiliate product
Membership products which offer recurring commissions (subscription products)
One of the highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commissions.
High ticket products – available at various investment levels
Multi-tier commissions – available at top tier levels

SFM Affiliate Marketing – One Time Sales

The SFM affiliate marketing system offers multiple payment strategies through a digital business system and product range. This is one of the best benefits of joining the SFM. Most affiliate programs will pay only once, unless you use subscription affiliate programs.

Once you’ve made a sale, the affiliate vendor gets a new customer and you get a single commission. But what if your customer goes on to spend again with that company? Most affiliate programs will only reward you for the initial referral. But SFM is different in that they offer lifetime commissions from each of your referrals. Should your customer purchase another product from the range, you get the commission again because you referred that particular customer.

Membership commissions are super valuable for affiliate marketers because they give you an income, not just a one-off payment. Most affiliate programs only pay once. So you need to keep finding new customers in order to keep getting paid.

High Ticket Items

With high ticket affiliate marketing, you earn far more than with the average affiliate sale. Many affiliates (myself included) start out selling low cost products from Amazon or eBay. They only make a pittance when they make a sale. A $100 product from Amazon for example might only pay $1 to an affiliate who refers the sale! At the most it’s $11 as Amazon’s affiliate commissions range from 1% to 11%.

But with high ticket items you can earn a lot more. High ticket items are generally priced at above $500 and can even range to $20,000. With digital items you can earn far more than with physical items too. A digital product can pay out from 30-40% commission. Compared to physical products that pay 1-11% that’s quite a difference.

SFM offers a range of high ticket coaching and mentoring programs and offers some of the highest payouts in the affiliate marketing industry. The programs offer 1 on 1 affiliate coaching and mentoring, software, tools and training resources.

SFM Affiliate Marketing – Why Mentorship Is So Valuable

As a beginner affiliate I couldn’t comprehend people spending so much on products online. I assumed that a lower price meant more people would buy. But as an affiliate you only earn money when you make a sale. Whether someone purchases a high value product or a low value product is almost immaterial to you if you’re doing the same activities to make both sales! So it makes more sense to sell high valued products as an affiliate. Especially if you’ll be doing the same things online to make those sales!

Access this free webinar run by SFM co-founder Stuart Ross

Mentorship programs are some of the most expensive but also the most valuable products you can find online. Why do people pay so much for mentorship and coaching products for online business? It’s simple! Those products can help them earn online and build a scalable income. This kind of education is life changing.

Much of affiliate marketing coaching is the process of changing your thinking to create the best outcome for your online business. Limited thinking, doubt and indecision, procrastination and lack of focus are just some of the barriers to success most will encounter with building an online business. Coaches and mentors help keep you on track and hold you accountable.

Recurring Revenue Products

The SFM affiliate marketing business system has a built in recurring income stream from membership subscriptions. See also SFM Digital Business System. This is one of the best things you can do for yourself as an affiliate – using recurring revenue affiliate programs to earn ongoing income from previous sales.

A regular sale is just a one-off commission. In the early days of affiliate marketing, any sale is exciting news! Your first sale online is definitely a reason to celebrate. But with recurring income sales, you are building an income from each one. Even with only small income trickles from subscriptions, you can build a dependable income from affiliate marketing much more quickly.

With sporadic, one-off commissions, it can be more difficult to replace an existing income.

Automated Up-Sells

You know those up-sells right? You have just bought something and you’re given something else to buy immediately afterwards! Although this can be annoying for some, it works! That’s why McDonald’s ask you if you want fries with that at the till! Burger King always asks if you want to “go large”!

In the online world, these kinds of up-sells can be automated by popups and sales pages. A buying customer is much more likely to buy again than someone who hasn’t purchased anything! Plus, if you have a happy customer, they are going to buy from you again. With The SFM affiliate marketing business system, you get these working for you, not against you!

As members join through your sales funnel, you can benefit from automated up-sells plus a built in sales team who deal with customers directly. So even if you’re not a “salesy” type of person, this automated business system can work for you. You only need to send people to a website landing page, and much of the hard lifting is already done for you by the automated follow up within the business system.

Access Mentors All in here to begin your journey with the SFM.

Organic Affiliate Marketing

Organic affiliate marketing works through creating lots of content. Over time, as your content grows so does your audience. Through using SEO (search engine optimisation), sharing content through social media profiles and other tactics, an organic marketer can build a huge audience. If they’re lucky they can also go viral with some of their content. If this happens, they can experience a dramatic rise in their traffic suddenly.

But for most organic marketers progress is slow and steady, and traffic can rise exponentially once they reach a certain point. As their content grows and gets more exposure, traffic can rise more quickly. But this can take months or even years.

A good an analogy I like is that of the Chinese Bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period of 4-5 years before the shoots appear above the surface of the soil. This is similar to organic marketing, and it can take a long time for an organic marketer to see the results of their activities.

Once a Chinese Bamboo starts growing beyond the surface of the soil, it can grow to 90 feet tall within 5-6 weeks! The same is true of organic affiliate marketing. Most affiliates who go down this route will quit because they don’t see any results. But for those who stick at it, there’s exciting news if they maintain their activities over the longer term.

Organic Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

One organic affiliate marketing method is blogging. Bloggers create written content on a website; known as a blog (web log). Bloggers can often write content for several years before they see the fruits of their labour. Looking at the image above you can see how most affiliate marketers earn under $20,000 a year from their efforts. Only the top 2.16% earn over $40k a year. Often this tiny minority of affiliates have been at it for years!

Not all affiliates use organic affiliate marketing methods though. See also affiliate marketing with paid ads. Paid advertising can make affiliate marketing more attainable in a short time span. See how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing. But organic affiliate marketing offers a more affordable strategy, even though it means a longer journey.

I’m a blogger and have been blogging for several years. Blogging is definitely a long term strategy and it’s take a while to build a consistent affiliate business out of blogging. You can speed up your success though through using recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate programs.

My Blogging Strategy

Many bloggers choose a topic and continue to write in that area for several years. This is great if you pick a topic you love, but pretty difficult if you have chosen something which is unfamiliar to you. For that reason, I would always advise new affiliates to choose a topic they at least have an interest in. That way, you can continue writing content for long enough to gain traction from.

I find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty and write articles based on my keyword research. I’ve also built a few niche websites which gain the attention of the search engines due to keywords within their domain names. Whatever strategy you use, be prepared to work hard at your blogging for some time. A small amount of traffic will only bring in a small number of subscribers and sales. You should always build an email list from a blog. This helps you to build a relationship with your subscribers over the longer term. See the power of email marketing.

Writing content is just one part of the story too. You also need to promote your content so it gets the coverage it deserves! You can do this through using SEO – (search engine optimisation), sharing on social media sites, using plugins and through syndicating out to various platforms. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of the plugins I use.

Organic Affiliate Marketing – YouTube

You can use many other platforms for organic affiliate marketing too. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube are just a few. See also unpaid social media marketing. Many organic affiliate marketers use YouTube and build video content in much the same way bloggers do.

By titling and tagging your videos with relevant keywords, you can attract free search traffic from the site’s visitors. However, like Google search, YouTube is pretty competitive and there’s thousands of marketers doing the same. So you need to create a lot of content in order to generate enough visits to earn a good income.

You can also pay to use platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but organic affiliate marketing involves creating content and getting free traffic over the longer term.

Organic Affiliate Marketing – Quora

Quora is a question and answer website which can be used by affiliate marketers to build up a back log of answers and links.

By finding questions which are relevant to your website content (or YouTube content), you can provide useful content and link out to your resource as part of your answers. Over time, if you provide value in your answers (and your links are permitted by Quora), you can build a source of visitors who visit your content.

Quora doesn’t like spamming though so your answers will have to be valuable. You can’t simply spam your links because you’ll likely get flagged up as a spammer. But if you provide some good content on Quora, you are allowed to link to resources which are relevant and useful for the answers you provide. Do this often and you will build up a history of content which leads people to your affiliate website. Again this is a “slow burner” and you should expect to make this a habit if you are to benefit from it. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Summary

Organic affiliate marketing takes time and dedication. Expect to make habits out of creating content, sharing it and linking back to it from other websites and online resources. Over time, if you dedicate yourself to it, you’ll improve and older content can generate website traffic as well as new content.

With consistency, the traffic your content draws to your affiliate products can compound and grow exponentially. Like the Chinese Bamboo tree, this is likely to happen over a long period of time. You need to get through the hard work and see some small “shoots” peaking above the “soil” – using the analogy of the Chinese Bamboo tree. When you see results, it can give you a massive motivational boost. Before this happens, maintaining your directly can be tough, especially when no results are showing. James Clear explains this in his book Atomic Habits perfectly with this illustration:

The “Valley of disappointment” is a good analogy for the lack of results in the early days of organic affiliate marketing. But if you stick with it, you should see an exponential growth spirt over time.

Affiliate Marketing With Paid Ads

If your’e fed up creating content perhaps you’re wondering about affiliate marketing with paid ads? With paid ads you simply need to put your adverts in front of a buying audience. Then, send them straight to your affiliate products. Simple right? Unfortunately not. Most affiliate programs don’t pay enough to give you the “playroom” to run adverts and test and measure them. Your first ad campaign is likely to fail and only a small percentage of your advertising will work.

This generally means you’ll need to run several adverts before you find one which produces a sale. If you’re only making $40 on a sale, that gives you very little room to learn marketing.

Affiliate Marketing With Paid Ads

Marketers will spend tens of thousands of dollars learning how to run advertising to affiliate offers. With a low value item, this is so much more difficult because your profit margin is very small. With a high ticket sales funnel however, things are very different.

A high ticket sales funnel offers more potential for large commissions coming in. This means you can afford to spend more while learning marketing and more in general once you have a winning advert.

With low value physical products, for example, you stand to make considerably less than with a high ticket digital product. See affiliate marketing business models. With a product suite, such as with The SFM Digital business System, you can benefit from:

High ticket digital product sales – offer high price and high levels of commission (see what is high ticket affiliate marketing)
Recurring commissions – from memberships and software products (see recurring income affiliate programs)
Multi-tier commission – from sales made by your referrals (see multi tier affiliate program)
Up-sales – using a range of products up-sold by a built in sales team.

With a business system like this, it is far easier doing affiliate marketing with paid ads. Trying to sell low value items using paid marketing is pretty difficult if not impossible. There’s simply no room for learning which adverts work and which don’t when you can only make $40 for a sale. But with high ticket products and the ability to make upwards of $1000 commissions, things get more achievable with paid marketing.

Affiliate Marketing With Paid Ads – Testing & Measuring

Running paid advertising can be done on a low budget. But you’ll want to scale up eventually when you find a winning advert which produces a regular profit. This can take a long time and a lot of testing and measuring.

As a beginner, I tested a number of adverts and most of them simply didn’t work. With products from Amazon, for example, you can only make between 1% and 11% commission. This means you’ll need to run adverts on a tiny budget and hit a home run first time out! You can’t afford to run multiple campaigns to quickly determine which adverts work and which don’t with low value products.

collecting data for paid advertising — Learning affiliate marketing with paid ads is best done with a high value sales offering which enables you to earn from multiple earning strategies: high ticket, subscription, multi-tier etc.

But if you use a high ticket product, and can earn $1000 for a sale, you can afford to spend at least that to break even and make your money back. Once you’ve done that, you’re in a better place to learn from your data and run those campaigns which have worked the best.

With a low value item from Amazon, which sells for $100, you can only make $10 a sale! So your budget for advertising is severely limited by what you can earn.

Starting out affiliate marketing with paid ads is tough. You need the data to show you what works and what doesn’t work. But collecting this data costs money. A high valued sales funnel gives you more ability to earn larger amounts when you make a sale than a low value offering.

Paid Marketing – Work Involved

Affiliate marketing with paid ads still requires work. It’s still not a “get rich quick” ticket! But what paid marketing can allow an affiliate to do is quickly determine whether an advertising campaign works or not, and to scale up more quickly and efficiently than when using content marketing as a strategy.

With content marketing, you can create a lot of content which doesn’t do very much. Then, a single piece of content might go viral, or attract the attention of the search engines. This can have dramatic effect on your affiliate business. But it’s still not scalable. Repeating a success with content marketing is much more difficult than to do so with paid marketing.

With paid marketing, once you have achieved running a campaign which produces more income than it costs to run, you can scale it up and increase your profit simply by spending more.

free video landing — Access a free video series and learn about the different online business models which are best for paid marketing

For example, if you spend $1000 on advertising, and make $1250 in commissions, increasing your budget to $10,000 should make you $2500 in profit, all things remaining equal. Of course the numbers should tell you the percentage of your advertising budget which you are likely to make back. In the early days of advertising, it’s likely you will spend more than you earn. Only by tweaking your advertising, and testing and measuring will you learn to make a profit.

This is why it is so difficult to make profit through selling low value affiliate products. There’s no room for error and in the first instance, you’ll likely be running at a loss, even if you use a high ticket program. With low value physical products, it’s probably not worth attempting to run paid marketing to sell them. With products which offer back-end sales, subscriptions and high ticket commissions, it’s much more achievable using paid marketing and earning a profit.

For more information on high ticket programs, training and mentorship in using paid marketing, click here and access the free video series.

Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress

Here’s my recommended best free blog plugins for WordPress. I’ve been a fan of WordPress for several years now and there’s a few plugins I wouldn’t do without! They help me write posts for SEO, (search engine optimisation), get shares and syndicate posts throughout my social media platforms. I also use a plugin which offers a free webinar on this site, you’ve probably already been annoyed by it! But this has made me many sales so I’m going to recommend that too!

Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Yoast SEO

If you’re a blogger like me, you’ll appreciate the need to write with SEO in mind. Without it, your rankings will likely suffer. The SEO plugin I use is Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO has a free version and a “premium” version too. I use the free version although I’m sure the paid version is worth the money if you were to upgrade.

The free version gives me everything I need at the moment and helps me write with keywords in titles, images and body text. It also reminds you of your focused keyword and offers a number of SEO factors which it analyses in your posts.

The green lights are a great visual reminder to keep up your SEO and to write good, long articles.

Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Revive Old Posts

Revive Old Posts is a plugin I found not too long ago and it’s awesome! It lets you queue up older posts you have in your blog archive and schedule them across your social media platforms automatically.

You can also automatically post new content as it gets published so you don’t have to manually post to social media. The free account gives you two social platforms which you can post to – I use Facebook and Twitter. More functionality comes with the paid version and you can access more social media accounts. However, I’m just using the free version at the moment.

Revive Old posts has definitely made a difference to my blog traffic and I often see clicks coming from automated posts going to Facebook and Twitter platforms. It’s particularly good if you have a bunch of old content which you’re not doing much about. Just set it and forget it and it’ll send out your old posts on a regular basis to your social media.

Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Pop Up/List Building – Icegram

I love this plugin – it has superb functionality and is incredibly useful. It lets you place pop-ups and drop downs to help you build your email list, or promote something to your audience.

There’s a tonne of pre-built landing pages which you can choose from and then just edit to your requirements. Download Icegram for free here. Again there’s a pro version and a “Max” version but the free version works fine and the functionality is great for a beginner.

Social Media & Share Icons

There’s many social media share plugins available for WordPress. I’ve tried a few of these and this one seems to work well. It’s called Ultimate Social Media Icons By UltimatelySocial. You can access it here.

A social media share icon lets your visitors easily share your content throughout social media, so it’s a good idea for getting your content out there. It only takes a few minutes to plug this into your site, and you could be getting a tonne of extra traffic because of it!

Again there’s a premium version but I’ve found the free version to work well for my purposes.

Cookie Consent Banners

You’ll need a cookie consent banner if you haven’t already got one for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). It only takes a few minutes to download and install and you’re good to go! Here’s one I use by WebToffee:

Statcounter – Count Visitors On Your Blog

I use Statcounter to keep track on website visitors. It shows you where visitors came from and which pages they left on, plus a whole bunch of info on your blog activity. There’s an upgrade version as with most of these plugins but the free version works fine!

Really Simple SSL – Website Security

Really Simple SSL is a plugin which makes your site more secure. SSL / HTTPS is recommended for all websites on the internet. However, it is absolutely required for all websites that collect user information like login details, payment information, credit cards etc.

Either way it’s a good idea, especially if you’re selling something from your site. It shows website visitors your site is secure. On certain browsers an insecure site (which shows http instead of https) will flag up a warning, which may deter some visitors to your site.

With Really Simple SSL you can turn an insecure site (http:) into a secure site (https:), within a few minutes.

Push Engage – Web Push Notification Plugin

Pushengage is web push notification plugin which lets you keep in touch with visitors who have opted in on your website.

Cloudflare – Web Speed Optimisation

Cloudflare’s plugin for WordPress automatically refreshes the Cloudflare cache upon making changes to your website appearance. This means that you can focus on your website, while the plugin takes care of ensuring that the freshest content is always available to your visitors.

Summary

There’s lots of plugins you can use on your WordPress site. Just be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins as it can have a detrimental effect on your site speed, which is an important factor to getting traffic from the search engines. See best site speed plugins.

Here’s a rundown of the plugins I’ve recommended in this article:

Yoast SEO – helps you optimise content for the search engines
Revive Old Posts – automatically syndicate new and old content via social media
Icegram – popups and drop downs to help you build an email list
Ultimate Social Media Icons – helps you share your content on social media
Cookie Consent Banners – For GDPR – date protection laws
Statcounter – count visitors activity on your site
Really Simple SSL – make your site secure
Push Engage – send push notification to website visitors
Cloudflare – speed up your site

If you’re a blogger, checkout my other posts on blogging such as blogging away debt! See a list of posts on blogging here.

How Do Blogs Earn Money?

How do blogs earn money? Blogs earn money in several ways. Most bloggers use a business model called affiliate marketing, if they don’t have their own business or product/s. What is affiliate marketing? With affiliate marketing, you can refer website traffic to other people’s products and services and earn a percentage of the profit. Bloggers can link out to affiliate products and programs which offer things like physical products, training and software products.

The other way bloggers monetise their blogs is through advertising. Google Adsense is one of the most popular advertising platforms which lets you do this. Simply join Google Adsense and connect your blog to your Adsense account. You’ll be able to place code on your website which is turned into appropriate advertising for your visitors. When they click on your adverts, you earn a percentage of advertising revenue.

You need a lot of visitors to make advertising pay though since each click is only worth a tiny amount – usually less than $1 (or £.075 pence).

How Do Blogs Earn Money?

Bloggers also use email marketing to connect with more people who have visited their blog. Selling an affiliate product is quite difficult directly from a website. Most people will need to see a product several times before they buy. So selling directly from a blog can be tricky. But with email marketing, a blogger offers something for free from their website, in exchange for a visitor’s email address.

I offer a few giveaways on my site, for example. Here’s an ebook I wrote to help people learn how to make money from a blog:

This ebook is used as a lead magnet. When a website or blog visitor signs up to an email list, they usually do so through a “lead magnet”. Once they sign up to an email list they become a lead. On a website, someone only has a few minutes to decide whether to buy an affiliate product from the blogger, or not. But once they have signed up to the blogs email list, this time span is greatly increased.

Once on an email list, the subscriber will receive a number of automated email messages which help them with their particular interest/problem. Bloggers usually use their list to build trust, provide value and sell affiliate products.

An email list is a great way to monetise blogging, when used in conjunction with a good affiliate product which is a good match for the subscriber/visitor.

How Do Blogs Earn Money – Traffic

Blogs need traffic to make money through Advertising or affiliate marketing. What is traffic in affiliate marketing? Traffic refers to your visitors who come to see content you have created. To get people to your blog there’s a number of activities you need to do as a blogger. It’s not just about the creating of content, although that is a large part.

Bloggers create hundreds and thousands of posts in order to gain the attention of the organic search engines. If they accomplish this, they get free traffic, and make money through advertising and/or affiliate sale. If they have their own business or product, they might use a blog to attract customers to sell their own product or service.

No Traffic = No Money!

Without traffic, even with the best products on your site, you won’t make any money. Getting traffic to make enough money to be a full time blogger is a commitment. Not all bloggers manage it and everyone starts from having no traffic at all. Bloggers craft their content and share it as much as possible in order to help put content in front of potential customers. They might use:

A keyword planner to help them find search terms which are already being looked for online
Plugins to help them optimise their content and get more shares on social media
Share plugins which automatically syndicate content out to their social media platforms
SEO services who build links for them to generate greater SEO (search engine optimisation) power in the view of the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.

Keyword Research – Finding Long Tail Keywords With Low SEO Difficulty

Bloggers use a variety of different strategies and some will simply write content regularly in their subject area to build up a content library. Some bloggers will deliberately target long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty can be done using Google’s free keyword planner.

With the planner, you can type in your main “seed keyword”. The keyword planner will then give you a number of ideas of keywords which are already being searched for on the internet. By finding the long tail keywords, you can target articles written on a blog which are more likely to show up in the organic search results. If successful, this can mean you get free traffic, although this strategy will be a little hit and miss at times.

Often the long tail keywords being searched for online have much less competition than those which have more searches. Shorter keyword phrases often have millions of monthly searches online. But these kinds of keywords are incredibly competitive and a new blog especially will struggle to rank for them even in the top 10 pages of the search results.

So it makes sense for bloggers to target the longer tail keywords which have 4 or more keywords in them. “Do blogs earn money” for example, rather than “blogging” will have more chance of getting found in the organic search results.

Summary

Blogs can earn money through an existing product/business which the blogger owns. If a blogger doesn’t own their own business or product, they can monetise through advertising (e.g. Google Adsense) or through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets a blogger send visitors to a third party product/service and earn a percentage of the profit.

Sales can be generated directly from a blog through linking to third party affiliate companies. Alternatively, many bloggers build an email list of subscribers and promote products through their list. See the power of email marketing. An email list allows a blogger to build a longer term relationship with their subscribers and showcase a product in more depth. From a blog, visitors only have a small “window” of time to make a purchasing decision. But once on an email list, this time period is dramatically increased.

Traffic is key to making money from a blog and then bloggers need to convert traffic into leads and sales. Without traffic a blogger won’t make any money and this is often the hardest part of earning money from a blog. See also blogging away debt and Blogging QnA.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What is affiliate marketing, and can you do it too? Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model in which “affiliates” recommend other people’s products and services on the internet. When an affiliate makes a sale (through their unique affiliate link), they earn a commission.

Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote other people’s products and services. One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that anyone can do it from anywhere. They only need a laptop and internet connection. The key to being successful as an affiliate marketer is finding a strategy which works for you.

Affiliates do all kinds of things to generate sales. This can include blogging, video marketing, paid advertising, off-line advertising or building an email list of subscribers. Some affiliates build YouTube channels and create videos to attract an audience. Others create content on a blog, or use social media channels to find people who are interested in products.

What Is Affiliate Marketing – Referral Marketing

An affiliate marketer will only get paid when they make a sale. It’s a performance based business model so unless they generate sales through their links, they won’t earn any commissions. You can think of affiliate marketing as a bit like recommending a friend to a nice restaurant. Only, when someone makes a purchase (or goes to the restaurant), the affiliate makes money!

To make sales online, affiliates join an affiliate program and get a unique affiliate link. When a sale is generated through their link, the sale is attributed to that particular affiliate and they earn a percentage of the sale value. There’s many affiliate programs which you can join to make money online. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and there’s thousands of products you can promote.

Once you have joined an affiliate program, you need to promote your affiliate links somehow to generate sales. This can be done in a number of ways.

What Is Affiliate Marketing – What Do Affiliates Do?

Affiliates generate sales by finding customers online and sending them to products and services. This is a skill you need to learn if you want to earn money through affiliate marketing. Here’s a few of the activities which affiliates use to generate sales:

Blogging – this article is an example of a blog. As people find my blog posts they can purchase my recommended products. If they make a purchase, I make a commission
Video marketing – video can be used organically or through paid marketing. Some affiliates will create hundreds of videos and upload them to YouTube. As their channel grows so does their following. If their message is a good match for a certain product/service, they can direct their followers to those products. See how to know your target market.
Paid marketing – You have probably seen some paid advertising online through places like Google search, Facebook and YouTube. Paid adverts pop up and are targeted at specific people according to their interests, location, age and other demographics. These are specifically chosen to target a suitable audience who are more likely to want/need a certain product/service.
Email marketing – most affiliate marketers have an email list of subscribers. They build this through using an email marketing service (autoresponder). (See the power of email marketing).
Offline advertising and other methods – the job of an affiliate is to make sales through their affiliate links. They can do this through any means they can achieve it with. So, nothing is off limits really.

Can Anyone Become An Affiliate Marketer?

Pretty much anyone can learn the skills to sell affiliate products online. You can join an affiliate program and get your own affiliate link quite quickly. What takes more time is understanding the methods which affiliates use to actually make sales through their affiliate links. Most affiliates who succeed at earning money online will have some form of training. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Affiliate marketing isn’t an easy route to riches however. It shouldn’t be treated as a “get rich quick scheme”. But it can bring about huge rewards to those willing to put in the time and effort necessary for success. The affiliate marketing failure rate is fairly high. In part this is because affiliate marketing is so easily accessible. For many other businesses, entry is dependent on high levels of investment: buildings, staff equipment etc. But with affiliate marketing, you only need a laptop and internet connection. This means most people can “give it a go”. But this also means many will quit far too early because they miss the bigger picture.

Difficulties With Affiliate Marketing

If your affiliate business doesn’t produce an income quickly, will you quit or keep learning? Those who learn from their “failures” are generally the ones who go on to build profitable online businesses from affiliate marketing. See also how difficult is affiliate marketing.

An good analogy for affiliate marketing success is the Chinese Bamboo tree. With the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period of 4-5 years before anything shows through the soil. After that, the tree can grow 90 feet within 5 weeks! Affiliate marketing works in a similar way. Initially, growth seems slow. But over time, things can work by themselves without much input once things have been automated.

You shouldn’t expect to make quick money with affiliate marketing. It takes some time and dedication before the results start showing. But once this happens things can really take off and you can ultimately replace pretty much any income over a long enough time period. This also depends on the business model you use and your method of marketing. See affiliate marketing business models for more on this.

Get Started

Most affiliates will have at least a website, landing page and email autoresponder in order to attract customers and communicate their message. It’s worth also getting access to training and mentorship if you’re going to take an affiliate business seriously.

Access an all in one program which offers step by step tutorials, software training and a product range you can sell. You’ll be able to follow the step by step process and set up a website, landing page and email follow up series. You can also access over 10,000 training courses through this program to learn the strategy which is most suitable for your particular situation and circumstance.