Making money online is one thing, but making consistent money online is definitely something else. To make a sale online alone is an achievement. Once you’ve achieved it, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. It gives you belief and confidence that affiliate marketing can in fact work to give you an income.
Once you’ve made a single sale online, you can simply repeat the process you’ve undertaken to repeat the success, again and again. But what if your success was a fluke? What if you posted your link online somewhere and got lucky? If that’s the case it’s going to be very difficult to repeat it.
To earn consistently online you need to make the process of selling reliable, predictable and sustainable. There’s a few solid tactics you can use too, which make this outcome much more probable.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – My Journey
When I started out online I struggled to make any sales. My marketing tactics weren’t reliable and so when I finally did make a sale, it was a “one-off” which happened as often as a blue moon!
Because it was an organic sale, it wasn’t very reliable. A random person had found an article I had written. But before long the article was gone from the search engines, and from the social media feed I had posted it on. It was a fluke! But even though I had “fluked” a sale, it gave me hope!
In 2014 I found a group of affiliate marketing mentors who taught me a few things. The way I approached affiliate marketing completely changed and I was able to start generating sales much more consistently. Here’s some of the strategies I implemented.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – Build A List
I didn’t have an email list as a beginner affiliate and all my effort went into building niche websites (most of which failed to attract any traffic). With an email list you can build on something tangible. An email list gives you more control over your traffic.
By building a list there’s a couple of important advantages it gives you as an affiliate:
- You can interact with your subscribers multiple times – (more difficult from a website where most people leave within a few minutes) (See how many touch points before a sale)
- You extend the time period where someone can buy from you (I’ve had subscribers buy products from me even years after joining my list).
- It gives you chance to build a long term relationship and create trust by delivering valuable messages which genuinely help your subscribers.
Getting traffic online is the major sticking point for many new affiliates and it certainly was for me as a beginner. You either pay for it with paid advertising or you work for it building content. Either way, it’s going to cost you: time or money. But with a list, you are building a digital asset you own and control.
How To Make Consistent Money Online – Sell Recurring Income Products
When I started out, I promoted the products I would buy online. These were generally low cost items such as books from Amazon and trinkets from eBay! Unfortunately, you can’t earn much in the way of commission from low cost physical products (unless you sell in bulk). Amazon pays affiliates as little as 1% commission on it’s products. So if you’re selling a $10 item you can earn as little as $0.10 cents from a sale.
I learned that in order to make affiliate marketing pay, I had to find high ticket products which paid a lot more. Digital products have a much higher rate of commission (30%-40% typically) and certain high ticket digital products sold for over $1000. They would pay you $300-$400 per sale.
You can also sell subscription affiliate products which payout recurring commissions. With a subscription product, each sale contributes to your monthly income which grows over time. It’s one of the best ways to earn consistently with affiliate marketing.
Use Paid Marketing
For a long time, and even now I use organic marketing to find customers for my affiliate products. But organic marketing is a difficult way to build an affiliate business. It can take months or even years to start getting the traction which you need to build a consistent income using only organic traffic – even with a list and subscription products.
My sales were always very sporadic because of this, and I couldn’t control the rate at which I attracted customers. With organic marketing you can control the rate at which you create content (and promote it), but the traffic is kind of out of your hands.
With paid marketing it’s different. With paid marketing you can “turn on” your traffic almost instantly. Plus, you can scale up, and increase your numbers of visitors by turning up your marketing budget. Paid marketing is like a tap where you control your traffic. Organic marketing is different; organic marketing is more like sowing seeds for a future crop! It takes much longer and as such many frustrated affiliates quit with trying to do everything organically.
Use A Product Range
Paid marketing is expensive of course and so you can’t very easily promote low value products and still be profitable. That’s why you should use a product range instead. A good product range offers multiple products within a product “suite”. It means you can refer customers to a low value product and the sales system automatically offers them higher priced items.
Such as system has low, mid and high ticket offers and subscription products. Because of this you can earn considerable more per customer than you would from a standard affiliate product.
Some customers will purchase high ticket items, which give you a large pay day. Recurring income products give you a more stable income more quickly and you can reinvest some of this profit back into your marketing budget at zero risk!
Be Consistent In Your Efforts
As a beginner affiliate I would create a website and then sit back “hoping” that it would come to fruition all by itself. It didn’t! I would throw myself into another project desperate for “it” to work. But the problem was I wasn’t working consistently. I was throwing out blogs and websites hoping that “they” would simply work by themselves!
I would write a bunch of blog posts and then get frustrated because they weren’t “working”, so I would quit. A month later a sale would pop in from the work I had done previously. Only then did I believe in my strategy and get back to work. But a month had gone by with me doing nothing because I was sceptical, doubtful and procrastinating.
Once you find out the right strategy you can employ to get the results you want, stick to the path and stay consistent in your efforts. Don’t quit!
Summary
Consistency online is something which every affiliate wants but few actually attain. Initially there’s going to be a lot to do without much reward, too. But over time if you stick with it and don’t quit, you get closer and closer to an automated business which is profitable without having to do very much.
The main things I learned which changed things for me and allowed me to get more consistent in my sales were:
- Building a list – a list of email subscribers puts you in control of traffic and allows you to build a digital asset
- Using subscription (and high ticket) products – subscription products give you a recurring income when you make a sale.
- Use of paid advertising – paid advertising is much faster and more controllable than organic marketing (which is slow and unreliable).
- Finding a high value product range to sell – which gives you multiple income streams and greater access to use of paid marketing tactics
- and of course being consistent in your efforts is a major “key” too. It’s easy to work like an ox for a week and then take a week off. Affiliates who make daily habits out of working on their businesses are the ones who are successful!