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!

The Power Of Email Marketing

One way to understand the power of email marketing is through the numbers. Imagine having a list of 100 subscribers and just 1% of your list makes a purchase from you. Not that great; only 1 customer! But with a list of 100,000 subscribers a 1% conversion means you’ll be making 1000 new customers! Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or own your own business, the power of email marketing cannot be denied.

Affiliate marketers should definitely build an email list of subscribers. An email list can massively improve your sales figures. If you’re a blogger, a list can help you turn your visitors into sales. Or, you can build a list through using paid marketing strategies and sending people directly to your landing page.

The Power Of Email Marketing

Anyone can build an email list from a website using an email autoresponder. An autoresponder lets you collect subscriber’s information on a website and send out automated messages as often as you wish. Aweber is a good autoresponder to purchase for affiliates.

By sending out messages which offer to help, inspire and educate, you can build a relationship with your subscribers. Over time, you can turn “cold” subscribers into “warm” subscribers, who are more likely to make a purchase from you.

To encourage people to subscribe to your email list, you can offer a legitimate “bribe”! This is usually something desirable which is useful for your visitors. I use ebooks on my website and also offer a free video series for people considering building their own online business. You can access the video series through this link. Here’s a ebook lead magnet I created – “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners”.

The Power Of Email Marketing – Why Build A List?

It is of course possible to make money from affiliate marketing without a list. Affiliates sell products online through banners and links on blog posts, through YouTube videos and social media. Why would you need a list? Although it’s possible to do affiliate marketing without one, a list can massively multiple your success as an affiliate. Take blogging as an example of an activity an affiliate might do.

With blogging, you create content, much like this article, and share it around the internet. Over time, more people should come and visit your blog as your “digital footprint” of content grows in size. Then, you make sales based on the affiliate links on your blog. With a blog though, most visitors won’t purchase anything. 99% of your blog visitors will have a look around and leave without taking any purchasing action.

They are typically on your site for less than 10 minutes. So they only have a 10 minute window to get excited about what you’re selling and make a purchase!
If, however, you get them to sign on to your list, you can build a relationship with this person over months, years and even decades. People on a list can make a purchase years after signing up to it!

Since you can automate your email messages and send out live emails whenever you like, it’s a no brainer to get a list if you’re serious about building an online business.

The Power Of Email Marketing – Compounding With A List

A list compounds your efforts as an affiliate marketer. Many affiliate marketers quit before even reaching 1000 subscribers on their email list. This is a massive mistake. At first, there may be little or no results from having an email list; especially when you have less than 100 subscribers. But as your list grows, your results will compound over time.

If you are getting only 0.5% of subscribers making a purchase, you might not see a sale until your list grows beyond 100 subscribers. But with 1000 subscribers you should see 5 sales. at 10,000, you’ll see 50, at 100,000 you’ll see 500, and so on. There’s no upper limit with building a list.

If you’re not getting this kind of percentage, you might have a problem with your lead quality or your list messaging. You can access a pre built sales funnel with pre written emails through this online business platform and training program.

Marketing For List Building

To build an email list, you need to get an autoresponder and set up a new campaign. Once you’ve done this, place your form code on a website or landing page. You will see I have a form on this website, where you can enter your name and email address. If you sign up to it, you’ll start receiving emails from my automated email follow up series.

To get people on your email list, you can do a few things:

Pay for traffic
Create content (like this article) and share it.
Post content around the internet – social media platforms etc.
Upload videos to YouTube and link back to your website

Content creation is much slower than paid marketing. To get traction from blogging, and creating videos does take some time. See how long does it take to make money blogging.

With paid marketing, it’s different. You can have traffic flowing to your landing page very quickly if you use paid marketing. You should use a landing page if you’re going down the paid route, not a website. The reason for this is because on a website, your visitors are less likely to sign up – since there’s much more for them to do. On a website, they can look around and browse your content. On a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave. Here’s the landing page for one of my ebooks. As you can see, it’s just one web page and there’s not much you can do except sign up or leave the page.

Targeting Your Subscribers

Before you start building your list it’s important to know what kind of people you want on it. Unless your lead magnet is aligned with your product, (or range of products), you’ll get people who want your freebie giveaway, but don’t want your emails or products. The quality of your list is pretty important because with a poor quality of subscriber, you won’t make any sales. To qualify your subscribers, you should make it clear what they are signing up for. That way, people who don’t want your emails won’t sign up!

But you need to make an enticing offer which attracts the right kind of people for your products. So choose a lead magnet which works well and draws in the kind of people who will also be interested in the products you’re promoting.

If you’re using paid marketing, you’ll be spending money getting visitors to your landing page. So you don’t want to spend it on the wrong kind of visitors. Getting this right is an art, and it takes practice. But it all starts with knowing who you want on your list; your customer “Avatar”.

Customer Avatar

Your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. They are the person who signs up to your list and your “offering” (product) is exactly what they desperately need, and want.

You should be able to accurately describe who your customer avatar is before setting up your marketing, or creating content. That way, everything you create, and for every advert you run, you’ll be focusing on bringing in the right person to your email list.

Things to know about your customer avatar are:

Where they live
How old are they?
What is their family circumstances?
Do they have children?
Do they own a house or rent ?
What are their interests?
etc.

Of course the details you need to know about will depend on what you are selling through your list. But ultimately, the more you know about your customer avatar, the better. There’s several marketing platforms you can use to drive targeted traffic to your landing page:

Bing
Yahoo
Adwords
Facebook
YouTube
etc.

Some platforms let you target search keywords with your advertising, others use different types of targeting. Choose these carefully to avoid wastage and track everything so you know which adverts bring in your best customers. Over time, and by collecting data, you’ll get better at knowing which adverts produce the most profitable customers.

Customer Journey

It’s also important to keep an eye on the customer journey when building an email list and follow up emails. Remember why someone joined your list. If you offered an ebook about blogging, stay on topic with your emails. Being congruent in your email messages will keep people on your list more engaged with you.

If you offer something as your lead magnet, your emails should reflect the reason they signed up in the first place. If they don’t you’ll find more of your subscribers are less engaged, don’t open your emails or unsubscribe.

Think about they types of emails you really want to open. They are usually covering topics you’re really interested in, and coming from people you like and respect. So try and offer a similar kind of message with your marketing.

If you want to start your own online business, you can access a product range to earn from, and ready made email templates, access through this online business community.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links?

You’ve just started affiliate marketing and wondering where to promote affiliate links? Those long, ugly links don’t look that attractive either do they!? So why would anyone want to click on them, right? A good place to start here is to ask this question: why would someone want to click on my link?

There’s millions of places you can put your link, but you want to put it somewhere where someone will actually click, and buy something, don’t you? Otherwise, you could spend months or even years pasting your link around the internet for nothing!

The key to knowing where to promote affiliate links is answering this question: why would someone click my link, and is their intention to purchase?

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Link Shortening & Cloaking

If you’ve just joined an affiliate program, chances are good that you have a long ugly link that looks something like this: https://3fb99fgcr-jtfr9qs8fjsbr33z.hop.clickbank.net/

However you dress it up, it’s not tempting to click on a link like this. So one thing you can do is shorten your links with a link shortening tool. Here’s some link shortener websites:

TinyURL
ShortURL
Cutt.ly
Bitly
Ow.ly
Buff.ly

Many internet users are reluctant to clink on long links. According to a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, short links attract over twice as many clicks as long links. It’s also harder to remember long, messy links, so people are less inclined to share them.

Link cloaking can help you track your sales too, and prevent other affiliates from hijacking your affiliate commissions.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Buyer Intent

Now that you’ve got your affiliate links nice and pretty, you’ll want to know where to promote affiliate links! Affiliate links can be promoted in a number of ways: through social media, via paid advertising, from an email list, on a blog, on YouTube videos.

You can even go through your social media profiles and paste your link into each profile. But what you really want is to put your link somewhere where people will click and purchase your products. You don’t want inquisitive “tyre kickers” either, you want hungry buyers!

An affiliate link on a social media profile doesn’t attract a log of buyer traffic. Firstly not many people will see it, and even if they do, why would someone click on your link anyway? Especially if it tells them nothing about what that link leads them to.

Having an affiliate link in your Facebook bio doesn’t guarantee this result. You need to drive targeted buyer traffic towards your affiliate link. There’s several ways to do this and you’ll need to choose a strategy which is right for you, your products and your style of working.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Hungry Buyers

Where do hungry buyers hang out? If you want to buy someone, where do you go? To the shop right? But before you go to the checkout and physically make that purchase, you might want to learn a little more about your product first. You’ll want to check your product is the right one, and that you’re not missing out on anything which might be better, or cheaper. Where can you find this kind of information? A product review website!

A review website is a good place to put your affiliate links. But in order to do this you’ll need to create the website. One of my first online sales came from a review article I wrote on a free blogging site called hubpages.com. You can also blog for free on WordPress or Blogger.com.

Free blog sites are a good place to start out and learn about blogging, but they can limit what you can do. Building your own blog website is a better idea if you want to take your affiliate marketing business seriously. Free sites are free, but they do limit you in terms of the links you’re allowed to post and from the traffic you can attract. Search engines don’t tend to rank content on free blog platforms as well as they do for owned websites.

Building Your Own Blog Site

Building your own blog website is a cheap method of attracting buyers for your affiliate products. By creating lots of content, which attract the right kind of buyer traffic, you can lead people to your products through your content. Blogging does take some time though, see how long does it take to make money blogging. But it’s a solid strategy to build a steady stream of traffic to your affiliate links.

If you just paste your links on social media accounts, there’s really no incentive for people to click on them because there’s no context for “passers by” to purchase something. But if you create a resource which is specifically for your target audience, you can collect a “showroom” for interested buyers. See why target market is important.

Once built, you can keep adding content to your website which is relevant for people who are interested in your product or service. Once you have this content, you can share it on social media platforms and link to it in your social media bios and other online profiles. This is much more relevant for “passers by”on your profiles because it offers them some information, rather than a ambiguous and messy link.

Where To Place Your Affiliate Link – Domain Forwarding

If you’re a super lazy affiliate and don’t want to build a blog, another strategy is to use domain forwarding. Find a product you want to promote and grab your affiliate link. I’ll use this product from Clickbank as an example. This is a text to speech artificial intelligence voice over product for video marketers.

This is what my affiliate link looks like having just created it on Clickbank: https://0fa6b9kms0bzlw9cwas7n2ud75.hop.clickbank.net/.

It’s a bit messy and unattractive, and I could use on of the link shorteners to make it look more pretty! But that wouldn’t give it any context. To tidy the link and give it context you can purchase a domain name which is suitable and simply forward your domain to the affiliate link. Hey presto, you now have a domain name you can share on your profiles around the internet. It’s much more attractive than the messy link, and there’s an instant context for your link.

To find a suitable domain name, I’ll look on Google’s keyword planner first to see what people are already looking for when it comes to AI voiceovers.

A good domain name which is used for forwarding to an affiliate link should sum up the purpose of the product in a few of words. This one might be suitable and is only £6.66 per year.

Once you’ve purchased your chosen domain name simple access your domain management system and forward the new domain name to your affiliate link.

Once you have your new domain name, you can share it in your emails, paste in throughout your social media profiles and it gives context and looks pretty!

Using Your Email Signature For Links

Here’s a clever strategy I use to share links to my website (which contains many affiliate links). If you build a website, it’s much more likely that someone will visit it than if you only link to a single affiliate product. Here’s an article sharing how to get traffic to your website free, once you’ve built one.

But if you have cloaked you link, or forwarded a domain name to a link, here’s a simple hassle free way to share it. Go in to your email account and under the settings tab find the email signature which you can add to every outgoing email you send.

Then simply add your name, and your link to your signature. Make sure you make the link clickable too. In Gmail, it looks like this:

using email signature to promote affiliate links

It’s well worth doing a domain name forwarding option if you’re going to do this. It adds more relevancy to your link and people will know what it’s about.

Use An Active Profile

You can as mentioned post your links on your account profiles wherever you spend time online. Inactive profiles won’t get the same number of people visiting them as your active ones.

When I first became an affiliate, I used eBay quite a bit as I used to buy and sell on the site. You can update your profiles on eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and whichever social media platform you are connected to to link to your affiliate products. Just don’t expect too much if you’re not actively building an audience or a following on them.

Here’s my eBay profile with a link to one of my articles on another website:

Building An Email List + Driving Traffic

Don’t expect to make a fortune by just posting your affiliate links and then sitting back! Sadly, that doesn’t really work very well. In order to make money through affiliate marketing, you need to drive traffic. The best ways to drive traffic are using paid advertising and by building an email list of subscribers. Top affiliates work hard at driving traffic to a landing page where they build a list of email subscribers.

Once you start getting subscribers on your list, you can create email messages to help them and build a long term relationship with them. As you build trust, and your list grows, you should find you can promote products to them if your focus is to help them and offer them the right products for them.

Paying for advertising can get expensive though so if you’re just starting out as an affiliate, it’s a good idea to learn the cheaper strategies for building traffic to your website.

You can still build an email list through blogging, but it will take much longer than by using paid marketing. You can start building an email list once you purchase an email autoresponder and learn how to drive traffic.

Once you have built a blog/website, you can attract people to sign up to your list by creating ebooks or using a “hook” provided through your affiliate product owner. Here’s a bit using selling ebooks as lead magnets.

Paid Marketing And Affiliate Links

Using paid marketing with your affiliate links is very difficult due to advertising regulations. Google Adwords would seem to be the perfect solution for affiliates since it is for targeted advertising. However, since you can’t control the website where you’re sending traffic, and it’s a third party site, Google doesn’t approve! To get round this problem, you can create a Google compliant website and collect subscribers information on your site.

Then, market your affiliate products through an email list.

If you drop affiliate links on your site, this can be a reason for an advert disapproval. Google considers these links as bridging, and may ban your advert from running. There’s a long list of requirements from advertisers – read Google advertising policies here.

However, if you’re using organic marketing on your website, this isn’t an issue, although affiliate links can affect your SEO (search engine optimisation). Here’s another reason for organic marketing although it’s much slower than using paid marketing.

Access Training And Get Support

I started out as an affiliate several years ago and it’s can be tough, especially if you go it alone. It’s well worth paying for training and support if you’re serious about earning an income as an affiliate marketer.

Access a free webinar for some key tips from Stuart Ross, who has been an affiliate and 8 figure entrepreneur in the online space for many years:

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE!

Wondering how to get traffic to your website free? There’s a number of strategies you can use to get free traffic to your website. Free traffic strategies are notoriously slow however, but over time the work you put in compounds to make a big impact. If you work steadily on a number of free strategies, you might not see the impact immediately. You’ll be tempted to stop what you’re doing, and look elsewhere. But resist this temptation and keep going.

To get traffic to your website free does take some time and effort. But once you start seeing the traffic, leads and sales coming in, you’ll want more! Free traffic isn’t as fast or scalable as paid traffic. But once you find a strategy that works for you, you can add it to your daily habits to help build your business.

Get Traffic To Your Website Free – Blogging

The first strategy I’m going to share is blogging. Blogging is a good strategy because it’s free! If you can find something you’re passionate about, and love to write about, so much the better. But don’t wait for the inspiration to hit before you start blogging. Start writing to get the wheels in motion. Once you start and make it habitual, it’s much easier to maintain the momentum needed to get traffic to your website free.

Keyword Research

To find blog titles, you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Look for keywords within your niche and which have traffic already. Then, look on Google to see the relative competition for these keywords. As you can see in the image below, typing in a “seed” keyword brings up other keywords which are being searched for on Google.

Choose a long tail keyword which doesn’t have so much competition. You can get a general overview of your competition for keywords by looking on Google doing a simple search on a desktop computer or laptop. Try the search with and without quotes, i.e. “affiliate marketing tips for beginners” and affiliate marketing tips for beginners.

I wouldn’t recommend using this keyword actually since there’s a huge amount of competition judging by the number appearing under the search query. Lets try something else which is less competitive in the same niche. Here’s another long tail keyword with considerably less competition on Google:

Of course affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive niche, so you may find another niche less competitive. Through trial and error you’ll find long tail keywords which you can get some free traffic from, if you keep at this strategy for some time.

Remember too, that other search engines can give you traffic as well. If each article only brought in a couple of searches a month, but you write 1000 articles, you’ll get 2000 hits every month for free! This adds up the more you do it, but at first can feel like it’s getting you nowhere. So keep you eye on the long term with this strategy.

Make sure you use an SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin as you write your articles too. Checkout this article for more on this strategy.

Get Traffic To Your Website Free – Niche Website Building & Keyword Domain

Another strategy you can use to get traffic to your website free is niche website building. This is a similar concept to the one described above, but you’re going to be building a website from scratch.

Once you have settled on the topic of your blog, use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords in your niche. Decide on a keyword which encompasses the idea of your blog in a keyword or phrase. If you look at this site, it’s called affiliate marketing mentors online.

This keyword has been carefully chosen because I wanted to target the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors” with my website. Have a look at the monthly traffic for this keyword:

And have a look at the relative competition on Google.

Now have a look at the phrase match competition for this keyword:

Even if I get only a fraction of the monthly traffic for the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors”, it’s still free traffic. Plus, if you use the previous strategy I mentioned to build out your blog you can target other relevant keywords based on your main theme.

Having the keywords in the domain name can have an impact on your site. Just don’t rely on this doing the work for you; you must create some awesome content too! Have a look at the article “Create Free Website and Earn Money, which talks about this concept in more detail.

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE – Snip.ly

Snip.ly is a great tool to get traffic to your website free! With Snip.ly you can create “snips”, or pop up adverts for your own content on popular articles and content online.

There’s a few ways you can use Snip.ly to get traffic to your website free. One strategy is to use it in combination with Buzzsumo.com. Buzzsumo is a website which shows you the trending articles and content on social media websites. You can type any keyword into Buzzsumo, and it will give you the top performing articles, or videos which are being shared and going viral.

You can then pick the article which is relevant to your particular niche, use Snip.ly to “snip” your advert onto it, and then share your new url “Snip” on social media. Each time someone shares your snip, they’ll be passing on your advert too.

Here’s an article which is particularly relevant to the current times which I’ve added my Snip.ly “snip” to and shared on Facebook:

To find this article, I searched for “fitness motivation” on Buzzsumo.com and the article came up as one of the most shared articles on social media. Snip.ly links can be shared all over social media.

Make A Habit Of Sharing “Snips”

Of course most visitors won’t click on your advert. But if you choose relevant content for your target audience, they are more likely to do so. Plus, if you choose articles which are going viral, or being shared a lot, your chances of getting free traffic to your website, and even leads to your email list are greatly increased.

Again, this is a strategy which can be used as a daily habit. Once you get used to doing this it doesn’t take very long to create a “snip” and share it. If you already spend time on social media, it can be worth “snipping” everything you would normally share anyway, if you regularly post and share on a platform.

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE! Quora

Quora is another great platform to get free traffic to your website. With Quora, you can answer questions which are relevant to your website niche. You can use the search bar on the top of the Quora platform to type in your relevant keywords.

Once you find relevant questions, you can’t just post links to your website. Quora will probably delete your answers if you only attempt to get your links placed without adding any value to the site.

Quora doesn’t allow direct affiliate links either, so if you’re an affiliate you can’t link directly to your products through Quora. But if you answer questions and give some value, you are allowed to link to relevant resources. Those resources can be your website – providing it adds to the answer and that you’re not obviously spamming the site for free traffic! See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Quora’s links are no-follow which means your links don’t count towards SEO (search engines optimisation). Google doesn’t therefore recognise your backlinks as a ranking signal. However, Quora can be a great place to add value, and drop links back to your content, where appropriate. It’s another tool for your free traffic “box”. Make a habit out of dropping links as you answer questions on Quora. Be careful not to be a spammer and make sure you give some real value in your answers first though. Otherwise your efforts will be for nothing (if Quora deletes your answers)!

Free Traffic From YouTube !

YouTube is yet another platform where you can find traffic for free to send back to your website. I have videos which are years old and they still give me traffic even though I haven’t focused on (organic) YouTube as a marketing strategy very seriously, or for very long.

With YouTube, you want to create great content which will help your potential customers in some way. You can use YouTube in a similar way as the blogging strategy mentioned above. To find keywords which are already being searched for on YouTube you can type in your main “seed” keywords into the search bar. The drop down menu will show popular searches relating to your main keyword.

Identify a keyword you want to create a video for, and once you’ve recorded it, upload it to the site. Tag your video with the keywords you want to to show up for and add as much content as possible to your description under the videos you upload.

Here’s one of my videos I uploaded several years ago, showing up under the keyword I targeted:

Of course there’s thousands of videos on YouTube already so it’s a good idea to find the long tail keywords which offer less competition than most.

Here’s the video, in which I’m talking about the previous (Snip.ly) strategy I mention above:

“How To” videos are a great place to start if you are wondering what content to create.

Get Free Traffic From Facebook

Facebook is another great platform where you can get traffic to your website free. To use Facebook for free traffic, you can offer an enticing image on your Facebook profile which shows the main reason why someone would want to visit your website. I have an image of an ebook on my Facebook profile which visitors can access if they click on my profile link. Here’s what it looks like:

You can also change your profile background to something which is relevant to your website niche and place links to your website in your profile.

To find people who are relevant for your particular business, you can join the various Facebook groups. Ideally write down a few ideas of the kinds of people you would want to attract.

This is your customer “avatar” – someone with the ideal traits and characteristics of your perfect customer. Once you know what kind of person this is, where they live, how old they are and so on, you can look for them by joining the groups on Facebook where they are likely to hang out.

Use the group search tool on Facebook to find relevant groups and join them. Once in, you can interact with other members and develop conversations and relationships.

Don’t shove yourself at people and spam them though, as it’s a massive turn off for most people. Just get to know people, join in and genuinely help and interact. Over time, you’ll build relationships and add new friends. As you do so, people will see your profile and your links. Those who are genuinely curious will click on your link and visit your website.

Getting Free Traffic Using Postplanner

Postplanner is a social media tool which lets you post your content on social media channels automatically. Although not completely free, it’s well worth joining at the minimum rate of $3 a month if you’re going to use it. At the higher plan costs you can syndicate content out to 30 social media accounts, and automate the process.

But if you just want to use the tool for a single social media account, you can still get almost free traffic to your website using it.

I use postplanner to syndicate older content which I’ve created. You can even queue up your content to post automatically for months if you have enough of it. You can even use the cheaper plan, and copy your posts across manually to your other social media accounts, if you have the time.

Auto-posting Your Content Across Social Media

While we are on the subject of auto-posting content on social media, there’s a great little plugin offered by Nextscripts.com (SNAP), which allows you to post your content throughout your social media platforms automatically as you publish them. SNAP stands for Social Networks Autoposter For WordPress. It’s a great plugin and although there’s some setup involved to connect it to your social media platforms, once you’ve set it up, it’s done forever!

Whenever you post something on your website and publish it, SNAP syndicates it automatically across your social media. It’s a huge time saver if you’re doing your sharing manually.

Mindset For Your Free Traffic Strategies

Hopefully now you have some ideas to get traffic to your website free! There’s a few here but there’s many others. The key is to pick a few strategies which work for you and keep doing them for the long term. Small amounts of activity simply won’t have a massive impact when you’re using free strategies. You need to keep up the work and maintain several weeks or months of consistent effort before you can reap the rewards.

Keep a diary of your activities each day and don’t look for results too early. Otherwise you can become discouraged and doubt what you’re doing will work.

Reward yourself for the small wins such as hits on your website and leads. Make sure you collect your visitor’s emails and build an email list. Building a list is the best way to make the most out of your website visitors. Once on your list, you can follow up with your visitors via email. This allows you to keep in contact with someone who would otherwise have only have spent 10 minutes on your website, and then left.

Remember free traffic is a long term strategy. You need to keep putting the work in and create habits out of the strategies. Initially, you’ll only see small effects. Over time, you should learn which strategies you’re leaning towards and those that have the most impact. Remember Pareto’s principle which states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of their causes.

As you learn from your data, and track your website visitors to know where they came from, you should be able to determine which actions have the greatest impact for you. Then, you can focus your efforts on those particular actions which you are getting good at and which work best for you.

For more help and training, access a number of online marketing trainings and resources and a group of online business owners. Click the image below for more info.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?

How long does affiliate marketing take? To make money with affiliate marketing does take some time. You should expect to work hard at affiliate marketing for at least 6 months before you’ll see any tangible results financially. But there’s a few things to consider too.

You can’t really put a timescale on it because there’s so many variables. It’s a little like joining a gym and asking how long it will take to get six pack abs! It depends on your current body shape, diet and levels of discipline.

Just joining a gym won’t get you six pack abs. You’ll need to apply yourself to a training program and a diet which supports that training. What other habits will stand in the way? Perhaps you like a few drinks on the weekend? Or you have an ice cream addiction.

In this case, you could be slowing down your six pack progress without knowing! How important are six pack abs to you? Would it be “nice” or are you doing it for an important acting role? Everyone’s motivation is very different and your mindset has a huge bearing. I’m certainly not fussed about putting in the work for six pack abs! But building an online business and making money from affiliate marketing massively motivates me!

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?

With an exercise program you can break down the variables in much the same way as you can in building an affiliate marketing business:

How motivated are you to get six pack abs/ make money with affiliate marketing?
What current habits are likely to slow you down or compete with your new habits?
Who around you is supporting you and cheering you on?
Which friends or family members would rather talk you out of it?
What competing activities/habits will be likely to slow down your progress?
How much time every week will you commit to your long term goal?
Which actions will you do on a daily basis no matter what you feel like?

Affiliate Marketing Fast Or Slow Lane?

Affiliate marketing is not all that cut and dry either! It’s not like a gym where you can see all the exercise equipment and pick your time slot. Affiliate marketing is a big industry and there’s many different avenues you can go down to create an income with affiliate marketing.

Some products will pay only 3% commission should you make a sale. Others will pay you 40% or even 100% in some cases. Which products would you choose based on this knowledge?

The value of products is another consideration too. Would you rather promote a $10 product and earn 3% commission, or a $2500 product for a 40% commission? Assuming all other things are equal, and the same work is involved, you would surely choose the higher ticket product.

Marking your products can be done differently too. Would you rather spend 10 years building content or 6 months running advertising campaigns? If both actions led to a regular income online, all other things being equal, which would you choose? But what if running advertising campaigns involved more risk and investment?

Would you rather sell products which gave you a recurring income, or products which only paid once? For the same amount of effort, of course the answer is the recurring income product which pays recurring affiliate commissions.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take – Knowledge

Looking at the questions above should give you an idea of how you want to do affiliate marketing. Which direction you choose to work in, and the products you use will have a bearing on the time it takes to make money with affiliate marketing. Your knowledge will also have an impact. Ideally, you could download the knowledge from top affiliates straight into your head – like how Neo learns Kung Fu on the film The Matrix!

How Long Does if take to make money with Affiliate Marketing

But unfortunately it takes a little longer to do this in reality! If you surround yourself with affiliates who are on the journey and more importantly, ahead of you in affiliate marketing, you will learn much faster. Go it alone, and you could have a long, difficult journey ahead of you!

Much of the early actions you’ll be taking on your affiliate journey are based on what you know, or think you know. So you can see how important your knowledge really is, when you consider that it is the foundation of everything you do as an affiliate. Another analogy: a rocket heading to the moon can veer off route by hundreds thousands of miles with if only 1 degree off course.

As an affiliate, you want to continually correct your course, as a rocket does. If you set off in high hopes all by yourself, it’s much easier to veer off route and get lost!

Marketing Strategies – Fast & Slow

Your marketing strategy will also have a massive bearing on your journey time with affiliate marketing. With paid marketing, you can get your business running quite quickly, although it will cost you more in marketing budget, and product investment.

With blogging, you can save money by not paying for advertising. However, your journey time will be considerably longer than if you were to use paid marketing. You can of course use a combination of the two, according to your circumstances and budget.

One of the fastest strategies, for those with money to invest, is to use a high ticket product range which includes multiple earning strategies:

High ticket digital products which pay 40% commissions on sales you make
Recurring commission affiliate products – earn ongoing commissions for each sale you make
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals.
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
A range of products – earn commissions from products bought by your existing customers

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this model.

With a model like this, you can more easily afford to use paid marketing strategies and still earn a profit. For smaller products, which carry lower levels of commissions, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and come out with a profit. Paid marketing is fast and you can scale it up when you have a profitable campaign. Just turn up the budget to make more sales!

With cheaper marketing strategies like blogging, for example, it’s not possible to scale in the same way. You need to create more content which takes time. If a blog post works well, however, you can run paid advertising to it, to generate more sales.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Warning: another analogy! If you plant a Chinese Bamboo shoot, you might be forgiven in thinking that it’s dead, and give up! In fact, the Chinese Bamboo tree does nothing for four years. So you can water it and fertilise it, and nothing will show – for four whole years!

But in a six week period the Chinese Bamboo tree grows to be 90 feet tall! It has also been measured to grow 48 inches in a 24 hour period!

I’m not saying your affiliate business will take five years, but it could do depending on the marketing strategy and products you choose to promote. Some affiliates get their businesses to phenomenal levels within 6 months – given the budget, investment and mindset. Others can take years if they have a different reason, or aren’t prepared to make the financial investment.

I like blogging, which very much is similar to the Chinese Bamboo Analogy.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take – Your “Why?”

Your “why” has a lot to do with how fast you can build a profitable affiliate business too. In the community I’m in, I know members who have built their businesses inside of a year and left their jobs. Their “why?” was to get the hell out of a job they hated! It was a burning desire they were reminded of every day! So they had a huge motivation to make their affiliate businesses work as quickly as possible.

They also were employed too, which meant they could invest in building their business model quickly, alongside their jobs. My situation was a little different and I had a couple of part time jobs, but little income. So I focused on using my spare time for blogging instead of investing in paid marketing – which is notoriously slower. A longer route but more suited to my circumstances.

Get Started

If you’re ready to start your affiliate marketing journey today, you can access a free video series by clicking on the image below.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

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

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

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

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

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

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

Affiliate Marketing – My Journey

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

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

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

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

Making Affiliate Marketing Easier

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

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

A Marathon Not A Sprint

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

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

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

How Affiliates Should View Failure

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

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

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

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

Blog Niches That Make Money

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

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

Blog Niches That Make Money

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

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

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

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

Blog Niches That Make Money – Traffic

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

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

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

Micro Blog Niches – Delve Into A Sub Niche

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword Domain Names

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

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

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

Choosing A Topic

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing?

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

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

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

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing?

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

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

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

How Difficult Is Affiliate Marketing – The Hard Way

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

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

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

The Easier Way

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

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

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

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

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

Pareto’s Principle

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

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

Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

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

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

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

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging?

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

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

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging

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

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

how long does it take to make money blogging?

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

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

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Products

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

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

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

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

Types Of Affiliate Products

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

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

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

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

Finding Recurring Commission Programs In Your Niche

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

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

Picking A Niche To Write About

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

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

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

Generating Traffic To Your Blog

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

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

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

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

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

Monetising With Email Marketing

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

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

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

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

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

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

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Summary

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

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

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

How To Sell Other People’s Products

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selling Online

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

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

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

This comes down to knowing your target audience.

Why Is Target Market Important?

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

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

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

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

Using Websites To Sell Other People’s Products

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

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

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

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

Building An Email List To Sell Other People’s Products

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

email marketing - selling other people's products via email

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Paid Marketing To Sell Other People’s Products

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

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

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

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

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

Business Coach For Online Business

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

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

Business Coach For Online Business

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

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

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

Business Coach For Online Business – Why You Need One

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

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

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

Breakthroughs I Made Online

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

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

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

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

Fear Vs. Action

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

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

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

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

Business Coach For Online Business – Free Marketing

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

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

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

Proud Of Your Business?

“Are you proud of your business, Tim”?

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

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

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