If you’ve tried earning income online you’ll know how frustrating it can be, but what if there was a way to earn more money with less effort? Well, read on because there is….
When I started out looking for ways to earn online, I began with blogging. My first sale came from a software product I had bought which helped me build websites. I wrote an article reviewing it and someone bought it! I was over the moon, I knew now that I’d made a single sale online, I could make many more.
But my method of selling wasn’t scalable, and only a handful of people saw my review. Soon after that, my account on Hubpages.com (a free blogging site) was suspended and I lost my content. However, I had gained a valuable foothold on my affiliate marketing journey, and the first sale is an important step forwards. If you know with certainty that it’s possible to sell a product online, you have already put yourself in front of many struggling affiliates whose doubt and scepticism holds them back!
How To Earn More Money Online With Less Effort – Paid Ads + High Ticket Items
While content marketing can take months and even years to gain traction with, there’s a faster and simpler method: using paid advertising. While paid advertising can be prohibitively expensive for smaller items, if you choose to promote high ticket affiliate marketing products, your return on investment is much larger. In addition to using high ticket items, it’s also worth choosing subscription products too.
Subscription products pay you a recurring income. So when you make a sale it’s compounded effort. You continue to earn from the membership for the lifetime of the customer.
So for a simple comparison say you promote a low value product from Amazon at $100. A physical product will pay out 10% as a maximum (sometimes less) to the affiliate. So you can only make $10 per item for referring that particular product. This means, if you’re paying for advertising, you must spend less than $10 to make a profit per item! However, if you choose a high ticket item which pays $400 for a sale (plus recurring income from a subscription) there’s much more leverage. You now have up to $400 to spend on advertising to make a sale, rather than $10 to come out on top!
As a beginner in affiliate marketing you can expect some of your ad campaigns to hit, and others to miss. But with only $10 it’s going to be much more difficult finding a winning advertising campaign that’s consistently profitable.
How To Make More Money Online With Less Effort – A Scalable Strategy
With paid advertising you have a scalable strategy. Whereas if you are planning on blogging to sell your affiliate products, prepare yourself for a very long journey! Both strategies of content marketing and paid advertising have their merits however. With content marketing, you can gain traction over a long period of time. When you do, it is the content which is working for you, bring in sales organically. But this can take a long time. Plus, when it happens, it’s much more difficult to scale up.
With a paid advertising campaign, there can be some learning involved initially. It can take some testing before you hit upon a campaign which works. However, when you do, you can simply scale up by increasing your advertising budget. This just isn’t as feasible with content marketing.
So, to make more money online with less effort, focus on a strategy which is scalable. Once you find a campaign which works, you can run it consistently on complete autopilot. With content marketing, you always need to create more content and it can take months or years!
How To Make More Money Online With Less Effort – Use An Email List
For a long time I didn’t have an email list. It was only after a couple of years of struggling as an affiliate did I get the good advice to start building one!
If you don’t have one get one here free.
There’s some really, really good reasons why you need a list to become successful as an affiliate marketer.
Here they are:
- Selling directly from an advertising campaign is sometimes disallowed by marketing platforms
- Many people don’t buy on their first time seeing a product/website – so they will bounce and you’ll waste your ad budget
- It takes 6-8 “touch points” with a product/website before a customer will buy
- Running paid advertising is expensive so it’s worth collecting their details for your list, giving you more opportunity to sell over a longer timeframe (even months or years after they subscribe)
- Having someone’s details means you can follow up with them and send them to a product multiple times
- You can build trust through your email messages – much more difficult on a website or with a single interaction
- Organic marketing takes a long time and a lot of effort, paid marketing is expensive, getting someone on your list puts you in greater control of your traffic
Build “You” First – Start With The Foundations
The foundations of your affiliate business is your understanding of how it works. Unless you pay some attention to your online business education, your business is going to be flawed from the start.
Imagine building a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage! How long do you think it will last? It may sound silly, but that’s what most people do when they attempt to build an online business without any experience of business.
The foundations of your affiliate business is you – your education. To get a good foundation:
- Start with a step by step course/program
- Make good habits out of working on your business daily
- Build your knowledge as well as your business
- Keep learning and growing, but shift to doing once you have some knowledge
- Get started as soon as possible with a marketing method and stick to it for several months until you’ve mastered it!
- If you’re struggling, return to the basics – foundational learning and development.
Summary
So there it is! That’s how to earn more money online with less effort. Keep in mind that whatever you do it’s going to take time and effort. But that effort is better placed when you have a solid foundation and you choose a scalable marketing strategy and a business model which supports long term growth.
Lets have a quick recap for those who skipped to the end!
- Use high ticket and subscription items – which gives you more leverage and more room for error when you’re learning
- Use a paid marketing campaign which is much faster and more scalable than using content creation which can take months or years and isn’t scalable
- Build an email list (get an email autoresponder here for free) – an email list gives you more control over your traffic plus you can create multiple touch points with customers, build trust and sell over a longer period than is possible from a website alone
- Start with your education – invest in “you” because you’re the foundation of your business. A business will never grow beyond the thinking of the person who runs it! Access an online training resource here.