Timmo789, Author at Affiliate Marketing Coach

The Power Of Micro Steps In Affiliate Marketing

What are the power of micro steps in affiliate marketing? Sometimes in your affiliate business needs vision and purpose. You need to lay out an idea of what your life is going to become, not just what your affiliate business looks like. But then there’s times when the power of micro steps can really help you too. A micro step is a tiny action which, when performed day after day, week after week and month after month has huge implications for your affiliate business. A few examples of a micro step in affiliate marketing might be:

Watching a training video
Writing a blog post
Recording/uploading a video
Joining an affiliate program
Purchasing a domain name

I’m personally a big fan of micro steps. When I started doing affiliate marketing I wasted a lot of time procrastinating over the merits of whichever direction I should take. I was confused and directionless for some time. The result: zero action. Nothing comes from zero action, that’s certain. Often nothing comes from a micro step either, except the power of a micro step is not in its function to build your affiliate business for you, but to gain momentum in certain direction with purposeful action and intent!

The Power Of Micro Steps In Affiliate Marketing

“A rolling stone gathers no moss”, as the saying goes. Similarly, once you take enough micro steps, you find yourself taking action on a regular basis and gaining momentum. In terms of blogging, a single blog has little power on its own. However once your blog starts gaining volume it has a lot of power to attract your target audience for free! The same can be said of other content generation tactics such as building a YouTube channel or even building an email list for email marketing.

Running your first advertising campaign is an example of another micro step. A single ad might not make your affiliate business, but you’re moving. It’s the momentum you need in the first place to get some traction with affiliate marketing. It can be so easy to get stuck, wondering which action is the “best” to take. The answer is the action you can continue to take over the longer term. So if you have time, create content. If time is short focus on running advertising.

The Power Of Micro Steps – Zooming In And Out Of Timeframes/Goals

A good mentor of mine taught me to “zoom” in and out of timeframes to get clear on where I was going with my affiliate business. This involves visualising the ultimate goal for my affiliate business – what it can do for my lifestyle, for example. Once you’re clear on the purpose of your business, “zoom” back in on the small daily action steps which you can physically do on repeat to bring about the larger long term picture.

This is like goal setting really, only in a more “daydreamy” type of way! With goal setting you write out your long term, medium term and short term goals. Goal setting is a great micro step too and it can help you define your reasons for building an affiliate business.

For example, what’s your long term (10+ years) plan for life? How will your life look like when your affiliate business is performing exactly the way you want it to?

Sitting and planning this, or visualising it is a great motivational tool at your disposal. But once you have done it, focus back on the tiny micro step you can do right now to move you closer to that longer term goal.

The Enemy Of Affiliates Is Procrastination & Doubt

The enemy of affiliate marketing is procrastination and doubt. Self doubt can easily kill your best intentions when it comes to building an affiliate business.

The answer lies in taking action; more specifically it lies in taking specific daily actions which are aligned with your longer term goals and vision for your business. With enough tiny steps, you can achieve anything, whatever your affiliate strategy is! As the saying goes: “even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.

the power of micro steps in affiliate marketing

In the film “Touching The Void” a climber Joe Simpson falls 150 foot into a crevasse and his climbing partner has assumed he has died, so leaves to descend alone. He hadn’t. Joe survived the fall. He then spends three days crawling and hopping back to base camp across the glacier and moraines, despite his broken leg, frostbite, and severe dehydration. He also knew Simon Yates would be leaving basecamp within a few days, and that he wouldn’t survive unless he got to him.

What Joe explains kept him alive was the power of micro goals. He set a goal to get to a certain point on the horizon within a certain time.

The thought of the entire journey down the side of the mountain (Siula Grande in Peru) in his condition was simply too much for Joe to contemplate!

If you’re interested in learning affiliate marketing checkout this site and sign up to the newsletter for help and support and course recommendations.

Affiliate Marketing FAQ

Looking for affiliate marketing FAQ? Here’s a few of the top most asked questions about affiliate marketing and links to the answers.

Affiliate Marketing FAQ #1 – Here’s one of the most asked affiliate questions – “What is affiliate marketing?”

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for product referrals, mostly online. Affiliates join an affiliate program and get access to a dashboard which gives them a unique identifying code, called an affiliate link. They then promote this link to earn commissions based on sales they generate.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn online. You don’t need any products of your own to start but you do need to learn and implement certain skills and strategies in order to make sales.

Affiliate Marketing FAQ – What Do Affiliates Do To Make Sales Online?

There’s lot of different strategies employed by affiliate marketers. Some are bloggers, and write a lot of content on a website. Others upload video content or build email marketing lists using paid advertising techniques. You can also use the various social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Pinterest to showcase content and link to your products.

The various organic methods of making affiliate sales online involve creating content mostly. Affiliates upload hundreds of useful videos or blog posts to their YouTube/TikTok channel or website. As their content grows in volume, the search engines index it. People find the content through the SERPS (search engine results pages) and purchase affiliate products they find on the content.

Some affiliates will use paid advertising platforms such as Google Adwords to send targeted traffic to affiliate products and services. A good example of a popular affiliate website is Moneysavingexpert.com. This site helps people with their financial problems through information geared to help them save money. When they purchase a product through the site, their purchases are made through affiliate links. Each one will earn a commission for the website. See also what do affiliate marketers do?

How Long Does A.M. Take?

Depending on a number of things, it can take several weeks or several months before you learn how to make your first affiliate sale. Many affiliates will quit before this even happens. Depending on how you promote your affiliate products and the products you choose to promote, it can take a long time before you can consistently earn an income as an affiliate.

It takes much longer too if you choose a path of building organic (free) traffic, due to the large number of competing websites and YouTube channels online. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and over 51 million YouTube channels.

To speed things up, you can do things such as:

Choose to sell subscription and high ticket products which pay recurring income and much larger commissions (respectively).
Use an email list – most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers.
Focus on products which you are passionate about and which serve a large consumer need

What Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?

Most affiliate products are “low ticket” which is to say low value. Items sold online for around $100 would make an affiliate between $1-$40 depending on the affiliate commission offered. Most physical products will pay less than digital products (1-10% compared with 30-40% for digital items).

A high ticket items is valued much higher than your average affiliate product. High ticket items can sell for between $500 and $50,000, for example. Here’s an example of a high ticket item selling for $300,000 – the amphibious sub-marine watercraft.

High ticket items are good for affiliates because they obviously earn more per sale. But this also allows them to use more expensive marketing strategies in their arsenal of advertising techniques. A higher value item will offset a large advertising budget more easily than a low value item. So it can be easier to grow and scale an online business by using high value items within your product range.

What’s The Fastest Way To Do A.M.?

One of the fastest ways to build an affiliate marketing business is with a high ticket sales funnel and using paid advertising. With such a funnel and a range of high value and subscription products within a product range, you can more easily use paid marketing to build your business. Paid marketing is good for speed because once you hit upon a profitable campaign, you can simply turn up your budget. With content marketing, it can take a lot longer because you’ll need to build a lot of content and promote it.

Content marketing can take months just to get any feedback. With paid marketing and a large marketing budget, you can see results within a few weeks. The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is through the use of landing pages, an email list, paid marketing and through selling high ticket and subscription items which solve a large problem.

Affiliate Mentor

What is an affiliate mentor and what can one do for you? Before finding an affiliate mentor, I spent some time struggling with affiliate marketing. I tried all sorts of tactics, but later realised I had been wasting my time! If you don’t want to make the same mistake, get a mentor!

A mentor can do a lot for you in terms of your understanding. This in turn will change your thinking towards your affiliate business. When you think small, you act in ways which only create small results. But when your thinking changes, so do your actions. Thought proceeds action so it make sense to learn from someone who has achieved the results you want from an affiliate business: an affiliate mentor.

As Henry Ford once said, if you think you can or you can’t you’re right! A mentor can give you more than just belief, they can also give you the roadmap to a successful affiliate business and the steps to take to get there.

Affiliate Mentor – Why You Should Get One

Without a mentor, it can be easy to veer off route and go down some rabbit hole of unproductive activity, thinking it has a long term benefit. But like many things online, you can do a lot of work and not see a benefit for some time, or at all! So, much of what you’ll be doing is based on your belief. If that belief is wrong, affiliate marketing can be the most infuriating activity you will ever participate in!

For years I struggled with a particular strategy only to realise that it simply didn’t work, or at the best it only produced very poor results. My strategy was building niche websites and attempting to “float” them to the top of Google for free traffic. The problem was this strategy doesn’t work very well. When I took a course teaching me this strategy it was much more viable. But nowadays there’s so much competition on the search engines that it’s much tougher.

Paid marketing is another strategy you can use to make sales of affiliate products. But again, this can be a total waste of money without proper help and direction. You can spend a fortune in paid advertising without making any sales.

Business Models In Affiliate Marketing

My first try at affiliate marketing was with Amazon and eBay products. Little did I know that both my strategy and my products were flawed. When I finally made a sale (which was sporadic and intermittent) it was only peanuts that I would make. All that work for very little income is hard to take. But I took it as experience and carried on. But armed with the right knowledge from the get-go, you can shave years off building an income from the internet.

A mentor can put you in the right direction, give you the best products and services to promote and the best marketing strategies to promote them.

Using paid marketing digital products which pay both high ticket commissions and recurring commissions has been an absolute game changer for me. If only I could go back several years and tell my younger self this!

Paid marketing is far better than spending months or years creating content on a blog to maybe make a few sales here and there. With paid marketing you can test an ad and see whether it works straight away. But with organic strategies you can be at it for months before you know whether your strategy is working or not! You can waste a huge amount of time. Paid marketing is also much more scalable and with a winning advert you can scale up to a global audience. This is much more difficult when it comes to content creation.

Summary

If you’re serious about making it online get a coach or a mentor. It’ll shave years off your time if you’re intending on making a living from the internet.

See affiliate marketing coach for more info or sign up to the newsletter on this website.

Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy

What is the best affiliate marketing strategy? This is difficult to answer because it will be different for everyone. Some people will like blogging, but for others that’s incredibly tedious and too slow. Others will want to run paid marketing and get traction more quickly with paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel.

But for many this is out of their reach financially. To earn the largest commissions online requires investment in a high ticket affiliate marketing product suite. But this gives you more opportunity for faster growth with an affiliate business through using paid marketing. Cheaper routes are more labour intensive and take longer. Blogging, or any form of organic traffic generation can take time. If you’re stuck in a job most of your working week, this will eat out of your remaining leisure time and not suit everyone.

Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy

There’s many affiliate marketing strategies you can use and ultimately your choice of strategy depends on you and how you want to work online. Here’s 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Social media, organic marketing through blogging or v’logging (video blogging) and list building are all good strategies when used right. With organic traffic generation you’ll have to keep at it for some considerable time to get the same results you might expect in a fraction of the time with paid marketing. But results aren’t even guaranteed with affiliate marketing; you’re in business for yourself! No sales equals no commissions! That’s pretty tough for beginner affiliates and something like 95% of newbie affiliates will drop out of affiliate marketing. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

To make your affiliate business work, you need to maintain the necessary motivation and this is key. So whatever your strategy for doing affiliate marketing, you’ll need a long term focus and to maintain the necessary motivation needed to succeed. This is tough when nothing seems to work, but gets much easier when you have some tangible results to work from and egg you on!

Best Affiliate Marketing Strategy – One Which Motivates And Inspires You

If you are heavily motivated by the work you do, no amount of disappointment will stop you from moving forwards! This, I believe is a major key to success with affiliate marketing. Not everyone keeps it up and many drop out before they see consistent results. They lose faith in what they are doing, and stop believing it is possible. So, rather than look at the method with which you do affiliate marketing, it’s wise to look deeper to your motivation levels and driving reason of your “why?”. With a big enough “why?”, you’ll push past your failures and keep going far longer than if you begin an affiliate business on a whim to just simply “give it a go”!

Start With Why is a great book on this topic written by Simon Sinek. He suggests in his book that it is the “why” which motivates anyone to achieve something noteworthy. Without a strong “why” you won’t push yourself to grow beyond the problems inherent in a large achievement.

Some Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Here’s a few basic affiliate marketing strategies you can use as an affiliate marketer:

Blogging
Video blogging
Organic marketing – Search Engine Optimisation
Email marketing
Paid marketing – YouTube, Adwords, Bing, Facebook etc.

Blogging and organic video marketing are slow strategies which can gain traction over time. Paid marketing is much faster and you can build an email list with paid marketing into the thousands within a few weeks of days depending on your marketing budget. But spending a lot on marketing doesn’t guarantee you sales, and you will need to test and measure your marketing efforts before being able to scale up quickly.

Otherwise you can get into trouble quite quickly! Google will eat up your budget very quickly if you’re not careful with it. Spending a lot of money on paid marketing isn’t necessarily for the reckless though. If you’re careful, you can learn which adverts work with only a tiny budget. But if you don’t have money which you’re prepared to invest/spend (and lose) while learning which tactics work, it might not be for you.

Plus with paid marketing you’ll need a high ticket product range. Otherwise it’s much harder to be profitable. Recurring revenue affiliate programs can help too so they are worth considering.

Choose A Strategy Which Works For You

It’s easy to get caught up in the many affiliate marketing strategies, and procrastinate about which to use. Some people have more money and less time, so they should use paid marketing. Others have more time and less money so generally speak they would probably suit content creation better, or a combination of the two.

When I started affiliate marketing I use cheaper methods like blogging and video creation. Only when I saw some regular income from my affiliate business did I start using paid marketing. But that’s not right for everyone and you can grow an income online far quicker if you use paid marketing up front. If you’re unsure of the different affiliate marketing business models, this is a good place to start your research. Or get an affiliate marketing mentor to help guide you and hold you accountable.

If you’re serious about creating an income with affiliate marketing, your mindset is the most important thing to work on. An affiliate with a “I’ll give it a try” mentality is much more likely to quit than someone with a “whatever it takes” attitude. See also affiliate psychology. This is perhaps much more important than your strategy…

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

Are you wondering “why is affiliate marketing so hard?” If so you’re not alone. Thousands of affiliates struggle to make anything from their endeavours online, even though some are succeeding. Affiliate marketing is a tough business and if you haven’t made a single sale, but have worked for some time, this can be incredibly frustrating.

Once you break through that barrier, and have seen even a small success, it can be the light at the end of a very long tunnel. This can be enough to motivate an affiliate to keep going. But in truth there’s a huge drop out rate in this industry. The affiliate marketing failure rate is around 95%. The term “failure” though is perhaps unfair because often these people simply quit.

Deciding affiliate marketing does not work, and quitting is the surest way to fail! Those who choose never to quit, will always be the ones who eventually succeed. So can be be a simple choice which determines who fails and who succeeds?

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard? – The Gym Analogy

It’s pretty hard to get a six pack too, depending on your weight, metabolism, diet and exercise habits. But joining a gym doesn’t guarantee a six pack much like joining an affiliate program doesn’t guarantee financial freedom! It’s what you do with your gym membership that matters. Most people join a gym in January and by March have already stopped going. The same can be said for affiliate marketing.

Sales people also portray affiliate marketing as an “easy path to riches” in many cases. This gives new affiliates false hope. When reality kicks in it can be very demoralising, and this is when most affiliate quit.

There’s huge competition on the internet too. Any affiliate will have to face this when starting out. The beginning of this journey is the hardest part because you’re starting with zero knowledge and zero traction. To get traction to a website, or an email list you need traffic. This is either bought or built with hard work through content creation. One strategy takes money and the other takes time.

To get a six pack, you need to train hard and lose fat. This involves learning about diet as well as going to the gym regularly and working out. If you’re not that fussed over getting a six pack, you won’t go to the efforts required to make it happen. According to your body weight, body fat percentage, diet and exercise habits, this will take some people considerably more effort and focus than others.

The same is true for affiliate marketing. You need a big reason to stick at it when things aren’t going well.

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?

Affiliate marketing is hard for many because they don’t realise what it takes. It’s easy to pull out your wallet and purchase a course – much like joining a gym membership! The hard part is turning up, doing the work and staying consistent; particularly if you have nothing to show for your efforts.

When you have been working at affiliate marketing for some time, you expect to be earning from it. But this doesn’t always transpire as soon as you would wish. So the early few months of learning can be the toughest, especially if your belief is very low in what you’re doing.

If the steps taking your affiliate business forwards aren’t clear, you can spend months and even years in procrastination mode, doing nothing but doubting whether it works of not! To get traction takes consistent effort and a sting belief. If you bought a course, and still think it might be a scam, this is likely to eat into your belief that you can earn money from affiliate marketing.

When your belief is low, you don’t do the work. When you don’t do the work, you don’t get results. See also affiliate marketing does it work?

Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard? The Chinese Bamboo Tree Analogy

The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for 4-5 years. If you are attempting to grow one and didn’t know about this, you’d be tempted to throw it out! But after the gestation period, it can grow 90 feet in 5-6 weeks!

Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese bamboo tree in that the gestation period is where you are learning and implementing new skills. A good example is the email list, which an affiliate uses to built trust and recommend their products and services.

As a beginner, your email list will be built up over time, starting with zero subscribers. Long term affiliates have built up their lists to over 10,000 subscribers in many cases. They can send out emails and make multiple sales from them. But if your email list only has 100 subscribers, how can you possibly create this result? Rather than understanding this, many new affiliates will doubt the strategy works at all and quit.

Overwhelm

Learning anything new is difficult. But learning something from your computer, when you are mostly by yourself is very difficult. It can be easy to jump from one strategy to another, look at different ideas and get confused about your direction. This leads to overwhelm. The internet has a tonne of information on hand at any instant you decide to look. But if you’re learning something new, this can be very confusing.

Once you hit overwhelm, nothing gets done. You can’t decide what strategy to use, which course to join, and so you do nothing! Overwhelm is common among affiliates because there’s so much (often contradictory) information available at your finger tips. If you have joined a number of email lists, you’ll get bombarded with information to your inbox on a daily basis too!

The answer is to keep it simple. Focus only on the step in front of you and not the whole staircase. Affiliate marketing takes time. If you want money now, it’s not a good option. But you can build a good income from affiliate marketing if you approach it like a proper business and treat it as such. Treat it as a hobby, and you’ll only make a hobby wage from it!

Internet Loophole Make Money

Looking for an internet loophole to make money? I found a great “loophole” to make money online several years ago. After attempting Forex trading and buying and selling on eBay, I discovered a business model known as affiliate marketing. You may have already heard of affiliate marketing. It’s a business model in which anyone can promote and sell other people’s products and services online.

When you make a sale through your own unique affiliate link, you earn a commission. No dealing with customers, no delivering products yourself; you’re simply a third party referrer.

Internet Loophole Make Money: Content

Affiliate marketers make money in many ways. Some affiliates will create content much like this article. Others build huge email lists and promote products and services to their subscribers. There’s several ways to do affiliate marketing and you can even choose a path which is suitable for your own unique circumstances.

I chose a path which involved creating content and one of the “internet loopholes” I found to make money online was through content creation. I create content and sell affiliate products through that content. This article is an example of this particular loophole. By finding long tail keywords with low seo difficulty, I can get my content found on the search engines for free. Then, some of my visitors will purchase products which I have recommended in my content. The whole process is completely hands off and sales can come in whether I’m working or not because of the content I’ve created previously!

Over time as my online content grows, it’s working for me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Checkout my ebook for more on this strategy.

Internet Loophole Make Money: Email List

An online business can be quite quickly by collecting subscribers and selling affiliate products to them. This can be done through an email list. With an autoresponder you can collect email subscribers from a webpage. Once on your email list, you can send messages automatically over a number of weeks, months and even years.

With the right product to offer your subscribers, you can find you can make sales automatically through building your list. This can be done through content creation, or paid advertising. Some affiliates also use social media accounts to build an email list and promote products. For more on building an email list see the article “the power of email marketing“.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to earn an income online. Often marketers build their subscribers up into the tens of thousands. One email sent out to such a list can earn the owner huge amounts in affiliate commissions.

Internet Loophole Make Money: Recurring Income Products

One of the best “internet money loopholes” are recurring income affiliate programs. Most affiliate programs pay you once when you refer a sale. But with recurring income programs you can get paid over and over for a number of years! Recurring income programs are memberships and software products which offer ongoing value for customers.

These can be things such as business tools and training resources. If you refer a recurring income product online successfully, you’ll get paid as long as your customer continues to use the product. So it’s a good idea to find products and services which offer huge value online so that customers retain their memberships. See also lifetime commissions affiliate program.

Faster Earning Online Through High Ticket Sales

The fastest way to generate an income online with affiliate marketing is to build an email list using paid marketing. This can be costly through, so you’ll need a good product to recoup your advertising budget and make a profit. There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join online to earn from selling products. But not all affiliate programs are equal. Some pay more than others. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

With the right product range you can earn considerably more than others. A high ticket product range which includes subscription products is the best to use. With a product range like this, you can more easily access paid marketing platforms and make a good return.

Adsense – Using Advertising To Make Money Online

Another strategy to earn income online is through using Google’s Adsense program. With Adsense, you place advertising on your online content. The drawback with this strategy is that you’ll need to create and own a lot of content online.

Since Adsense only pays you tiny amounts of advertising clicks, you’ll need to generate a lot of visitors (traffic) to your content for free. This means creating content needs to become a habit over the longer term. You can also use YouTube to create videos and monetise your content with advertising.

YouTubers often will spend time every day creating content. Over several months or even years, their content will attract an audience. These visitors can generate income for the channel owner through advertising clicks. You can also use a combination of affiliate marketing and advertising if you want to generate an income from content.

Just know that this is a longer term strategy which requires a fair amount of leg work before you can benefit from the passive income. See also internet residual income.

Google Passive Income

Wouldn’t it be great to earn a Google passive income? Well many people already do earn a passive income using Google. Many website owners use Google’s search algorithm to send visitors to adverts and products online. They earn a passive income because they’ve created content which gets found on Google. YouTube is also owned by Google and is another great source for free traffic. YouTubers upload multiple videos to the platform which, over time gives them a steady stream of visitors. Once they accomplish this, they need to turn their visitors into cash. This can be done in a number of ways.

Google Passive Income – Turning Traffic Into Cash

Traffic generation is the tough part of earning a Google passive income. Without traffic, you won’t be able to make any money. More on this later on. But for those who have traffic in the higher numbers, it can be relatively simple to turn that traffic into cash. This is done in a couple of main ways:

Through selling something of your own
Selling your own services – if you have a business of some kind
Through selling other people’s products online – affiliate marketing (see affiliate coaching)
Using an advertising platform such as Google’s Adsense program – see earn passive income by working from home with Google Adsense.

Most owners of online content will monetise their traffic through using one of these strategies. If you don’t have a business, product or service of your own, you can use the business model of affiliate marketing, or Adsense. With affiliate marketing, you promote and sell other people’s products online. With Adsense, you place advertising on your content and earn small amounts every time someone clicks on your adverts.

Google Passive Income – Getting Traffic

As a beginner, getting traffic to your website or YouTube channel is your primary objective. This can take some time and hard work. There’s millions of other YouTube channels and websites out there. To get yours to be seen by Google requires a good strategy and a long term focus. One such strategy is to create content around a certain topic.

With the affiliate marketing model, you’ll need to attract an audience who is interested in what you’re selling. This means your content should be a good match for whatever products you choose to promote. With the Adsense method, (or similar platform), your content simply needs traffic. Adsense create adverts for all kinds of content and you simply place the adverts on your site. Adsense reads your content and automatically uses adverts appropriate for your content or visitors.

The main strategy for getting traffic and lots of it is to create a lot of useful content and share it on a website or through your YouTube channel. Do this regularly and share it as much as possible throughout your social media channels. Over time, older content will generate traffic and newer content will too. This compounds to give you an income that grows exponentially – if you put in the hard work.

Competition On Google & Fighting For Traffic

There’s lots of competition on Google and getting free traffic can be very difficult, especially in a competitive topic. It can be worthwhile researching your topic before starting out. Ideally choose something you have an interest or passion for. That way, it’s much easier to create content and you can sustain your interest over a much longer time period. One website building strategy, which also can work for YouTube too is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

SEO means search engine optimisation. For a website to get free traffic, you need to have Google find it and rank it for your keywords. In a competitive niche this can be very difficult due to the vast competition. But in a less competitive topic area, it can be much easier to get your content found. Likewise, with a long tail keyword phrase (which has many words in it), it can be easier to get found.

Short article titles with a lot of competition are therefore often harder to rank for on Google. So many website owners target longer phrases which contain more than three keywords within them.

Using Free Blog Platforms For Passive Income

Free blog platforms often allow use of Google’s Adsense program and affiliate marketing. So they can be used to generate traffic and earn a passive income. See affiliate marketing without investment. However, Google doesn’t rank free blog platforms as well as it does those owned by the blogger themselves. So it’s far better to build content on a website you personally have built.

Here’s a few of the free platforms you can use to get started:

Hubpages.com
WordPress.com
Blogger.com
Site123.com
Wix.com
Weebly.com

Building A Niche Website For Free Traffic

Building a niche website around specific keywords can help you get traffic too. See also how to build a niche website and get free traffic. This website, for example, has been built around specific keywords (affiliate marketing coach). Although this strategy isn’t guaranteed, it can help you get a ranking on Google and some free traffic.

To use this strategy, you need to find your keyword which you want to attract traffic for. So if your niche is about “window cleaning”, for example, you would look at Google’s free keyword planner under those keywords. The planner will show you other longer tail keywords which are being searched for. Once you find a suitable keyword, you can compare with others to find one which offers low competition and a good amount of monthly searches.

It’s not worth building a site around a high competition keyword because there may be too much competition for that keyword. Similarly, it’s not worth building a site around a keyword which doesn’t get many monthly searches. The keyword planner can help you determine which keywords to aim for. Once you find a suitable one, you can build a website around it. See also this article for more on this strategy.

Summary

It is possible to earn a Google passive income by creating content and getting free traffic. This can be done through YouTube content or written content on a website you own. Google owns YouTube and this can present a less competitive means of accomplishing this than through blogging. Whichever method you use, be prepared for a long stint at creating content without seeing much for your efforts!

There’s plenty of competition on Google and YouTube so unless your content stands out, and you create a lot of useful content, it can easily drift to the bottom of the pile. You’ll also need to promote your content through social media and ideally build backlinks to it in order to boost its SEO score (search engine optimisation).

But if you’re passionate about your topic, and make a long term habit out of creating fresh content on a regular basis, you can eventually earn an income from it. Over time, you’ll start to generate traffic from older content as well as newer content you’ve created. This can compound once you reach a certain point and you can find it generates a nice passive income if you have monetised it correctly.

Affiliate Marketing Scam Or Legit?

Is affiliate marketing a scam or is it legit? Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which the affiliate promotes products and services online. If an affiliate makes a sale through their affiliate link, they earn a commission based on that sale.

There’s nothing nefarious about affiliate marketing. It’s completely legitimate and above board. However, new affiliates might think affiliate marketing is dubious for a number of reasons. Firstly affiliate marketing isn’t that easy. Making sales online requires quite a bit of work and study. Since the barriers to entry for new affiliates is very low, this makes it easy to start. It’s cheap to become an affiliate. But this low barrier to entry means many will “have a go” at it without putting in the required work.

When new affiliates don’t achieve the success they expect, it can be easier to dismiss the whole affiliate concept as a “scam”, rather than accept the reality of it being a tough nut to crack.

Affiliate Marketing Scam Or Legit?

Another reason many might consider affiliate marketing a scam can be the various courses and instructors claiming to be money making “gurus”. Some of these sales people exaggerate earnings which can be made through affiliate marketing. They claim ease of earnings online if you just purchase their course! Of course earnings are never guaranteed, but many affiliates don’t realise this until they have spent their hard earned money purchasing the course which inspired them!

However, you don’t have to purchase training in order to become an affiliate marketer. It’s worth getting educated if you intend to earn from affiliate marketing but trainings and courses are optional. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer through joining an affiliate or “partner” program. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs on the internet. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and start promoting items from the website in order to earn commissions on sales generated.

Learning Affiliate Marketing

Once you have joined a partner program you’ll be able to get your own unique affiliate link. But in order to make sales through your affiliate link, you’ll need to find suitable customers and place your link in front of them. This is what makes affiliate marketing so difficult.

So it’s well worth getting help and support and learning this properly. Without a good understanding of a marketing strategy, it’s easy to flounder as an affiliate. There’s several ways to promote your affiliate links once you have joined an affiliate program. You can create content (like this article), create videos or build an email list. You can use paid marketing strategies too, to get your message in front of prospective customers.

Most successful affiliate marketers build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list. Email lists can grow into the tens of thousands of subscribers. Once your list gets this large, and you learn how to communicate with your subscribers, you can make multiple affiliate sales through automation.

Affiliate marketing is a powerful business model once you learn how to use it properly. But there’s a lot of learning when you get started and many affiliates give up and drop out. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

So, affiliate marketing does it work? Yes affiliate marketing does work. If you successfully promote your affiliate link and someone purchases a product through that link, you will earn a commission and get paid. However, many affiliates will struggle at first because they don’t go the necessary distance to make it work for them. Once an affiliate has made a sale online, they know the procedure with which they have made it happen. But before this can happen, there’s a lot of learning and often struggle involved.

New affiliates will have no content or list of subscribers. As they grow their understanding and learn how to build an email list and market their products, they will encounter some frustrations. Like any new skill, it takes time and effort to learn affiliate marketing. Often this frustration period can mean many new affiliates will quit long before they even have 1000 subscribers on their email list. This is a massive mistake because the beginning months are the hardest for affiliates. Once they have overcome the early hurdles, affiliate marketing can get a whole lot easier (and more profitable) over time.

Affiliate Marketing Courses

To learn affiliate marketing properly, it’s worth investing in your education. Don’t fall into the false idea that purchasing an online course is a guarantee of success. Like with any business, the responsibility always lies with the business owner. If you purchase an online training resource of some kind, consider it an investment in your education, not a guarantee of success.

This is why some new affiliates believe that affiliate marketing is a scam. They purchase training and support, and believe that the price they pay is a ticket to easy money. This is known as an “entitlement attitude” and can severely hamper your personal growth as an affiliate marketer. No one else can do the work for you in an affiliate business, however much you pay and however much help and support you enlist. Courses and business systems can take out much of the hard work of building an online business, but ultimately your success online is down to you and the work you put in.

Often with an online business, there’s an expectation that it will be easy; much easier than a traditional bricks and mortar business. But consider how much you would need to invest in a traditional business just in order to get it up and running. An online business needs the same commitment and drive in order to be successful. Automation and online systems can do the selling for you, but you still need to build your systems and understand how to grow your business.

Affiliate Marketing Scam or Legit?

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which affiliates can promote other people’s products online for a share of the profit. However, there are many ways to do affiliate marketing and it’s not a get rich quick scheme! It takes considerable effort and motivation in order to build an income from affiliate marketing. For this reason, many new affiliates quit and consider it a scam. Be wary of courses which over-promise too. Affiliate marketing is tough, and you’ll need to bring the right attitude to the table if you want to become successful at it.

For more information and a free video series explaining some of the best affiliate marketing business models you can use, click on the image below.

Affiliate Instructor

An affiliate instructor or coach can help anyone who is struggling with their affiliate marketing business. An affiliate instructor can’t do the work for you. But they can shine a light on the problems and difficulties you’re facing to help you to overcome them. Problems can come from a lack of understanding, frustration and many other areas. Affiliate marketing isn’t easy and it’s worth getting help for a number of reasons.

Here’s a few problems which affiliates can encounter when starting out. Any one of these can completely derail your affiliate business:

Lack of a clear direction and focus – procrastination and doubt
Trust issues and belief – doubt and fear derailing intentions
Expectations – wanting something for nothing, not knowing what to expect
Lack of support – family and friends doubting your choices
Lack of money – affiliate marketing is considerably more difficult without investment in help, support and resources.
Not getting clear with your intentions – Focus and goal setting
Choosing a path and sticking to it – not getting shiny object syndrome
Information overload and overwhelm – Take a step back
Being a busy fool – wasting time instead of focusing on meaningful activities
Being stuck in learning mode – watching endless videos but never taking any action to drive your business forwards
Allowing yourself to get distracted – working at home means prioritising your time and learning good time management skills

Affiliate Instructor

A good affiliate instructor has been where you are right now. They can help you only if you’re ready to be helped. When I started out, I went through many stages of overwhelm, doubt and fear and procrastination. I jumped from one strategy to another many times and didn’t get focused until I saw a clear path which was working for me. This was after many years of struggling!

There’s an expression in the martial arts and zen about an “empty cup”. A student visits a zen master and the zen master pours the tea. He keeps pouring tea until the cup is overflowing. The student exclaims “stop pouring the cup is full”. Whereupon the zen master says “you too are like this cup”. “You are filled with your own ideas and theories. Until you empty your cup, nothing more can be added”.

This is true of affiliate marketing also. With affiliate marketing you need to unlearn preconceived ideas about what it takes to become successful. When I started out I was convinced it should be easy. I though I could have success quickly and that I shouldn’t have to work very hard or for long to achieve it. All of these ideas proved to be wrong!

I also wanted to work in a certain way, which I enjoyed. Unfortunately the strategy I wanted to use wasn’t the best strategy. So I struggled for a long time. See how to earn money through blogging.

Once I let go of some of my preconceived notions, many of which came from marketers in the early 2000’s telling me how easy it was, things began to change. I was able to try new things, and learn from old mistakes.

Affiliate Instructor – Making The Uncomfortable Comfortable

There’s many things you can do online to help you build an affiliate business. You can write blogs, watch information videos, create video content, run advertising, build an email list, create ebooks etc. The list is endless.

Some of these activities will help you and some won’t. It’s important to remember that while you are learning, you should be spending 80% of your time studying and learning and 20% of your time applying. Once you are through much of your learning phase, you should spend 80% of your time implementing and only 20% of your time learning.

It’s a common mistake to confuse learning with implementing. Learning feels good but it’s a wise affiliate who knows when they are caught in learning mode. Don’t become addicted to being a perpetual learner at the expense of actually doing things which move your affiliate business forwards.

The activities which feel good online are often those you gravitate towards. But they are also not necessarily the ones which will put food on the table.

Failing Forwards

Affiliates will fail again and again before they make those sales! Expect to fail many times and learn from these failures. No affiliate who is successful hit a home run on their first swing! They will have tried a number of times and failed over and over. Consider looking at a failure in a different light. Without failure, you cannot progress as an affiliate. But failures are only stepping stones to success. Don’t expect your first email, blog post or advert to make you a millionaire overnight!

Affiliate marketing can bring fantastic rewards. But it is the steady steps forward which pave the way to this kind of success: the first website visitor, the first subscriber to your email list. These are the things to celebrate. A journey of a thousands miles begins with a single step!

Affiliate Instructor – My Mentor

I found an online business/affiliate marketing mentor back in 2014. He created a community of like minded people who are learning how to build online businesses from scratch.

You can access his videos clicking on the image below. In this free video series Stuart explains how the different business models of affiliate marketing work, and which ones are more profitable.

When I first started out as an affiliate I didn’t know about recurring revenue affiliate programs or high ticket affiliate programs. So I just promoted products from the likes of Amazon and eBay. Perhaps you’re doing the same? Little did I know that these sites offered some of the lowest commissions in the industry. Amazon, for example pays between 1% and 11% commissions to its affiliates.

So while I was struggling getting traffic to my websites, what was waiting for me when I finally did was a poor return on all my hard work!

Subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing are a complete game changer in that regard. It still takes time and effort to learn how to drive traffic, depending on the strategy you use. But on the other side of the journey is a much bigger reward than with low value affiliate products which offer tiny commissions. Understanding which affiliate marketing business models pay the most can shave years off the struggle.

Summary

I wish I had found an affiliate marketing instructor years before I did! It would have meant a shorter learning curve. But still I wouldn’t have learned from all the pitfalls if I didn’t fall into them! Here’s a few of the ideas mentioned in this article.

Many of the problems you will encounter with your affiliate marketing business are mental in nature. Get your thinking right and your business will move more quickly and in the right direction. It’s worth educating yourself because it will pay you back over time. Work on the wrong activities, or use the wrong business model and you could be struggling for years.

With affiliate marketing you shouldn’t expect it to work straight away. 95% of affiliates quit far too early. Remember it’s a marathon not a sprint. If you’re not prepared to stick with it for the long term, it may not be the right business for you.

You can access a training and mentorship resource by clicking on the image below. It’s the same community I belong to and you’ll find others on the same journey as you as well as coaches and mentors available to help.

Earn Royalties Online

You can earn royalties online using a business model called affiliate marketing. Royalties are a way for creators, intellectual property owners, or landowners to earn money from their assets. To earn royalties online, you need to refer customers to products and services.

Affiliate marketing is essentially a referral based business model in which the affiliate sends customers to another company/product. Royalties are earned in the form of residual payments. Certain products carry ongoing payments for previous referrals. So affiliates can essentially earn commissions for years after the sale is made; effectively similar to royalty payments.

Recurring revenue affiliate programs offer ongoing value from memberships and software products. If they offer a large value to the customer, they will continue using them for years, potentially for a lifetime. If you refer the sale, (and the affiliate product carries an ongoing commission), you’re essentially earning a royalty payment for the referral.

Earn Royalties Online – Create An Online “Property”

Websites are essentially online real estate/property. A good resource website can attract people to products and services long after after it’s been built. YouTube channels are also used in a similar way. Once built, YouTube videos are used to attract an audience and affiliate products can be promoted as a monetisation method.

Another earning strategy can be used from online content too – advertising.

Google Adsense offers a program which can work in a similar way to royalty payments. With Adsense, you place advertising on your online content. When visitors click on your content, you earn a percentage of the advertising revenue – similar to royalty payments.

Content marketers build content online and then benefit from website traffic through their monetisation methods.

Earn Royalties Online – Multi-Tier Commissions

Another way to earn royalties online are through multi-tier affiliate commissions. A multi-tier affiliate program offers commission payments for sales made by your referrals. This means that if you build a huge team of affiliates, their sales will add towards your earnings.

It’s similar to a network marketing business in which you can benefit from the overall success of your own sales and those of your referred members.

A multi-tier commission is similar to royalty income. Even though you’re not directly making the sales yourself, your referrals have brought about the benefit.

If you’re going to build an online business, multi-tier commissions are another factor to consider when looking at the different affiliate marketing business models.

Multiple Income Methods

Within the affiliate marketing model are multiple payment methods. You can earn from one-time sales (OT), recurring commission products (subscriptions (S)) and from high ticket products (HT). See what is high ticket affiliate marketing. Creating content online can allow you to create an automated system of selling from a website or YouTube channel/social media. Over time, as your content library grows, your income does too.

Here’s a video explaining the different online earning strategies you can use just within the affiliate marketing model:

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Content creation is one way to benefit from a royalty type of income from the internet. Over time your older content attracts sales as well as newer content you have created. This compounds to generate a passive income which is similar to royalty payments.

But this isn’t the only way to use affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketers build an email list which works in a similar fashion as content. As more people subscribe to your email list, your online sales can grow exponentially as the number of subscribers grows.

The Six Figure Sales Funnel – offers multiple earning strategies within a product range. See SFM Digital Business System.

A good affiliate product range includes multiple earning strategies: subscription products, multi-tier commissions, high ticket products and one time sales. With such a business model, your income will compound over time as your list grows. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Summary

You can earn royalties online in several ways:

Create a resource you can earn from: a website/blog or YouTube channel
Use monetisation methods on your content: affiliate marketing or advertising (Google Adsense). Adverts on your content earn revenue passively from visitor clicks.
Recurring income affiliate products (subscriptions) generate passive income from sales.
Generate income from sales made by your team – when using a multi-tier program.
A product range with built in sales team lets you earn more passively from up-sells. See SFM Digital Business System.

For more information on the various different online business models, access the free video series by clicking on the image below.