Timothy789, Author at Digital Marketing Mentors Online

How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

How fast can you make money with affiliate marketing? Normally affiliates will spend at least several months building their affiliate business before they see signs of sales dropping in.

Depending on how you market your products it can take between 6 months and 12 months before you see consistency. With paid advertising and a high ticket product range (including subscription products), you can build a business faster using paid marketing. This is done by sending targeted traffic towards a landing page and collecting email subscribers. Deliver value driven messages to subscribers which promote a product within a large range of products. With such as system, you can more easily recoup your marketing budget and become profitable.

If you are using low value products this can be more difficult. With a smaller commission your ability to make money through using paid marketing is reduced. In this scenario though you can build traffic in a different way, organically. Organic marketing usually takes far longer than paid marketing; but it’s free and if you have an interest or passion that’s always a good place to start.

How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Theoretically you could join an affiliate program, post your link and make a sale right away. But to make sales consistently usually requires much more effort. If you choose to sell subscription products this can speed things up considerably. With a good subscription product you can earn recurring income from each sale you make. There’s also high value products such as courses and training products which pay a lot more per sale than the average affiliate product.

Physical products tend to pay very little. Amazon, for example, pays affiliate marketers between 1% and 10% commission on sales generated. Digital products on the other hand pay a lot more (between 30% and 40%). With a high ticket digital product range you can earn the most in the shortest time using paid marketing. But even so, there is a period of learning where you should test your adverts out before throwing too much money at a marketing campaign.

The Fastest Way To Earn With Affiliate Marketing

The fastest way I’ve found to earn with affiliate marketing is to invest in a high ticket sales funnel which has multiple products within a product range. You want to be able to earn large commissions for single sales and recurring income from subscriptions. This lets you learn marketing by playing with a larger marketing budget than is possible when selling low valued items. You still need to be careful and test and measure your marketing campaigns before spending too much budget, which can easily be lost.

Within the community I joined the fastest timescale someone was able to replace their income was within 6 months using this method. But they did come from a six figure job and they had a large marketing budget to learn with. If you don’t have money to spend testing out your advertising, it’s going to take longer.

Some affiliates recommend not spending money on advertising at all until you start generating organic sales. Only then would they recommend spending a portion of your earnings on paid ads. But it really depends on the business model you use and the affiliate products you choose to promote.

How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Cheaper Methods

The cheaper methods of affiliate marketing are through using organic traffic generation. This can be done through blogging or uploading videos and building a video channel (on YouTube, for example).

This method of generating traffic can take a lot longer than the other method mentioned here. However, once you start getting traction, you can have a lot of traffic for nothing. This means all your sales are profit from then on. So it’s a strategy well worth pursuing if you have a passion for some topic or niche.

In the top paying niches, such as making money online, wealth and health, dating and relationships and so on, it can be difficult to get noticed. In such a competitive niche it’s going to take longer to get traffic because of all the other competition online. So it can be a good idea to find a less busy niche if you’re going to use the organic route. See also how to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing.

Summary

So, how fast can you generate an income from affiliate marketing? In general it can take between 6-12 months before you get traction as an affiliate. The time is different for everyone and will depend on a number of factors such as your marketing method and the products and niche you choose. You can considerably speed up your journey by choosing to use:

An email list – puts you more in control of your traffic
High ticket digital product range – a range of digital products which offer huge value to the customer
Subscription products – which pay recurring income
Paid marketing – is much faster and more scalable than organic methods

Even using all these advantages the time it takes will depend on your marketing budget and the things you do. Even a large marketing budget doesn’t guarantee success online and affiliate marketing is a performance based business model so unless you make sales you don’t make any money!

For more on affiliate marketing and to join a program which offers all these benefits (listed above) visit affiliatemarketingmentorsonline.com.

If you’re looking for personal coaching and mentoring for your online affiliate business you can sign up to my email list here – reply to any email and enquire about the coaching sessions I offer.

Does Clickbank Work?

Does Clickbank work for affiliates? Clickbank is a digital product marketplace where affiliates can earn commissions for selling other people’s products. With affiliate marketing, when you make a sale, you earn a commission. If you don’t make the sale, you don’t get paid! Clickbank is popular with affiliate marketers because there’s thousands of products to choose from. Whatever your particular topic/niche, you can likely find a Clickbank product which will suit your audience.

Does Clickbank work? Like with any affiliate product, as an affiliate you only get paid when you make a sale. But yes, Clickbank can deliver the goods once you learn how to actually make the sales. Many affiliates do really well through the selling of Clickbank products and can even earn a full time living from Clickbank. But a lot of affiliates fail and end up giving up with their affiliate marketing efforts. The affiliate marketing failure rate is fairly high (around 95%) so it’s well worth getting some proper training if you are going to take affiliate marketing seriously.

Does Clickbank Work – Affiliate Marketing Basics

Clickbank offers thousands of digital products to affiliates around the world which they can promote for a profit share. But like any other affiliate product the success of your marketing efforts is the main factor which determines whether it works for you or not. If you’re starting out as an affiliate, it pays to join a course where you can get some help and support.

To make a living through the sale of other people’s products online (affiliate marketing) takes some dedication and resourcefulness. Most affiliates will quit, so staying the course is paramount to your success. It can be easy to look for a “winning strategy” without laying the ground work to your affiliate marketing business. Some of the most important things to know are:

Who your target audience is – that is, who is most likely to want to buy the product you are selling
How to find them through your marketing
Conveying the value of your products.

With a digital product conveying the value of your offering can be more tricky than with a physical product. Physical products are much more obvious but digital products such as training and education products are a little more obscure. The best way to sell digital products can be through an email marketing list where you can build a relationship with your subscribers. Selling directly from a website can be harder since most visitors only stick around a few minutes.

Does Clickbank Work? – Target Audience

Clickbank works best when you understand how affiliate marketing works. When you understand your target audience, you’re half way there when it comes to selling affiliate products. The online marketplace is massive, but most of the people online aren’t looking for your particular product. To find the small slice of the online users who are looking specifically for what you offer you need to understand who they are and where they hang out online.

Trying to sell everyone your Clickbank product will seldom result in a sale. But determine who specifically is looking for your product, or who will benefit the most from it, and you’re half way there! Your customer avatar is the type of person who you’re trying to target through your advertising/marketing. Their age, location, interests and the platforms they use online can all play a part in you finding them with your marketing. A good place to start is with a product review. People looking at a product review are likely already looking for your product, or one like it. They may have already researched the topic and are about to make a purchase.

Get your marketing in front of these type of online users and you can do very well when it comes to selling your Clickbank products.

Problems With Clickbank

Some Clickbank products are incredibly competitive and there’s hundreds if not thousands of other affiliates trying to promote it too. If this happens and you attempt to write a review to find your target audience, you can come up against a lot of competition online. If many affiliates have written a review, it means your chances of ranking your review (on Googe, for example) are considerably diminished.

The same is true of running advertising in a competitive niche. When there’s a lot of competition, it pushes up the ranking difficulty and/or the price of advertising. So you may need to get a little savvy in your marketing efforts to get your affiliate link in front of the right customers.

The other thing about Clickbank is that it’s a relatively easy platform to place a product on. This can mean that there’s a lot of junk on there! Ideally find a product which has already proved itself on Clickbank and sold many times. Checkout Clickbank gravity for more on this topic.

Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Students?

Is affiliate marketing good for students? Affiliate marketing can be the best option for students for a number of reasons:

It’s super flexible – one of the best reasons for students to learn affiliate marketing is the ability to choose your own working hours around studies
It’s cheap – affiliate marketing is one of the easiest businesses to access. All you need is a laptop and internet connection; something most students already have
You can work from anywhere – no matter where you are in the world, affiliate marketing lets you sell to anyone in the world
There’s choice – whatever your budget you can fit affiliate marketing to suit you. If you’ve not got a large advertising budget you can build content to generate traffic or use other free marketing strategies.

Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Students? Part Time Job vs Affiliate Marketing

Despite all these good points there are affiliate marketing cons too. The biggest one being that affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. So if you don’t make any sales, you don’t earn any money. That’s not great if you’re needing money immediately as a student.

It can take some time to learn affiliate marketing and you don’t get paid straight away. It can take weeks, months or even longer to make affiliate marketing work for you, so you can’t rely on your income from it straight away. At best, in the early stages your affiliate income is likely to be sporadic while you’re learning.

So if that doesn’t suit you, you might be better off with a part time job which actually pays you for your time. The up-side to this coin though is that over the longer term you can generate a passive income from your affiliate efforts. This just doesn’t happen with regular employment.

Is Affiliate Marketing Good For Students? Paid Marketing Vs. Content Marketing

Depending on your situation you may be able to run paid advertising. This definitely makes an affiliate business move faster. With paid advertising you can test and measure and get feedback almost immediately. If you go the route of creating content to drive traffic, you will find it takes much longer to get a handle on making sales.

While content marketing is cheap, it’s also competitive. So you’ll need to stick with it for some time before it will work at all. Paid marketing is also much more scalable. With content marketing, it can take you months before you’re getting regular traffic for all your work.

The upside of content marketing is that you can find you’re making a passive income from all the content you’ve created. With paid advertising, you need to keep running those ads to keep making sales. So if you don’t figure out a profitable campaign with paid ads, it can get frustrating spending money without making any commissions!

Best Practices For Newbie Affiliates

If you’re going to get into affiliate marketing here’s a couple of tips I wished I’d known earlier in my affiliate journey:

Get help
Use a list
Choose high ticket and subscription products

Getting help and support is vital since around 95% of affiliates drop out when nothing happens for them. You’re much more likely to stay the course when you have a cheering section and someone to ask for help. Join an online community here.

Using an email list was the best thing I ever did as an affiliate. Before I figured this out I was wasting so much time and effort trying to sell from a website which had hardly any traffic. A list puts you in charge of your traffic and makes more out of your efforts. Get free autoresponder for affiliate marketing here.

High ticket and subscription products can make a huge difference too. When I started with affiliate marketing I used low paying products and made peanuts. When I switched to high ticket, my commissions took a large leap upwards. Subscription products pay you a recurring commission which makes a massive difference, especially if you’re new and looking for results. When you make a sale of a recurring income product, you get an income, not just a “one-off” commission.

How To Make Money Selling Digital Products

Wondering how to make money selling digital products? Digital products are great for affiliates. They pay more in commissions because there’s no postage or handing costs. Those savings can be passed on to the third parties who promote them (affiliates).

That’s why digital products pay between 30% and 40% commissions, compared with 1%-10% for the typical physical affiliate product. With such a low level of commission, it can be much harder to run advertising and come out with a profit. High ticket digital products especially give you a much larger amount of “wiggle” room for learning paid ad methods.

There’s other ways to sell digital products too – here’s a few of the most common methods of selling products online.

How To Make Money Selling Digital Products – Finding Products To Sell

One of the first places new affiliate marketers will look for products is Clickbank.com. Clickbank is one of the largest marketplaces for digital products. But you’ll also find them on Click2sell and JVzoo.com. There’s thousands of products to choose from too so your choice of product is important as some of them sell better than others.

Ideally choose a product which is aligned in some way with your interests or hobbies. This is important because unless you love your online business it’s going to be harder to work at it. Loving your products is a good place to start. If you don’t love your product, it’s going to be harder to persuade others how great they are too!

Once you’ve found a suitable product to sell, you’re going to need to learn a marketing strategy to get eyes on your product. You’ll need to join the associated affiliate program connected to the product you want to sell. Then you can access your dashboard and get your unique affiliate link. Most programs also offer marketing materials too, such as banners and images you can use in your marketing.

How To Make Money Selling Digital Products – Selling

Selling online is done through various marketing methods such as:

PPC – pay per click marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Content creation – blogging and video blogging (v’logging) are two content marketing strategies. Attract traffic for free from social media and the search engines.
Social media marketing methods allow affiliate marketers to connect with online users and direct them to their products
Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote digital products online
Offline methods – traditional forms of advertising such as banners, newspaper advertisements and so on

One of the fastest ways to sell digital products is through using paid marketing to drive targeted traffic towards a landing page. Here the marketer collects email addresses and automates an email marketing campaign.

Why Use Email Marketing?

Email marketing is one of the best ways to selling online, particular with digital products. Since digital products are often slightly more vague than their physical counterparts, it can be more difficult to convey their value to potential customers. A physical product is different.

You know what you’re getting. But courses and trainings are slightly more obscure in that the customer doesn’t always see the value. With email marketing, you have the opportunity of capturing the email of a potential customer. Then you can follow up with email messages over a long period of time. This time can be used to build a relationship with them and inform them about your product/s.

This is much more difficult on a website where most visitors only stick around for a few minutes.

Finding Your Target Audience For Online Selling

One of the fundamental principles of online selling is finding your target audience. Since most of the online users aren’t going to want what you’re selling, the more specifically you can define who it is you’re selling to, the easier you’ll be able to make those sales. If you try and sell to everyone online, you’re wasting your time!

To define your target audience you need to know who is going to be most interested in buying your product. Many would love to, but can’t afford it. Many won’t see the benefit and some will only be a timid browser of your digital shop! You want specific buyers who already have their wallets out and desperately want what you’re selling. To find these “hot” buyers online you need to understand who they are and what they’re looking for.

For example, a product review is a piece of content which attracts a “hot” buyer. A “How To” guide is something which attracts someone not wanting to buy anything, but wanting some free information, perhaps.

Find High Value Products

There’s thousands of products to choose from, so how do you know which one to sell? High value products are the best since they pay the most. Subscription and high ticket items for example. With a subscription product you can earn substantially more than with a one off sale, which only pays once. Subscription business tools, for example are good because the end user needs them to run a business. So they are likely to maintain their subscriptions for years to come.

Training and mentorship courses too offer high value to people wanting to transition out of traditional employment into the digital business space. So these are good products to promote. Learn more about building an online business here.

With a high value offering, you don’t need as many sales to become profitable either. Low value physical products pay much less than high ticket digital ones. So you’ll need to shift products in high volume in order to make money. With a single high ticket item, or several subscription sales, you can earn a lot more and with fewer customers.

How Much Can We Earn From Digital Marketing?

How much can we earn from digital marketing? In my previous article I discussed how to earn from digital marketing at home, even without anything of your own to sell. This is done through the selling of other people’s products – a business model called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you get performance related pay. This means if you sell something, you get paid. But if you don’t sell, you earn nothing!

Top affiliate marketers can earn tens of thousands of dollars every month. But many affiliates struggle and earn nothing, or very little. The longer you stick with it, the better your chances of success. But there’s a few other things which “tip the balance” when it comes to earning from the sale of other people’s products. One of them is the product/s you choose to sell. The other is of course the method of marketing. Your tenacity and drive is a big factor too. Around 95% of affiliate marketers quit, so you’ll need a strong motivation to succeed.

How Much Can We Earn From Digital Marketing – Products To Sell

amazon - earn from amazons affiliate program

Most new affiliates head straight over to Amazon and choose to sell something off the site. Amazon is a hugely popular site, and well trusted. Most people are now happy to shop from Amazon, and its affiliate program is one of the best known. But Amazon’s commissions are very small. You can earn as little as 1% on a product sale off the website. So if you’re selling low value products such as a $100 item, you’ll earn only $1 per sale. That’s hardly going to make you an overnight success!

The most profitable items to sell on Amazon are the more costly ones or those which pay larger commissions. But Amazon Games pays the most at 20% (at the time of writing) and items are fairly low cost.

So what’s the answer? One answer is to choose high ticket affiliate marketing products which carry larger costs and pay affiliates larger commission percentages too! Here’s an example of a high ticket item selling at $190,000! An 8% commission means you can earn $15,200 from a single sale.

Another answer is to choose affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. These are products which carry subscriptions or memberships such as software or training products. A few sales of a membership or software product can mean a nice monthly recurring income, rather than a “one off”.

How Much Can We Earn From Digital Marketing – Choose Products Wisely

Most types of affiliate products only pay you once. They offer “one off” commissions. But some offer recurring commissions. So often with the same amount of work you can earn a lot more. Choose wisely! If you learn how to sell recurring commission products, you’ll be in a better position to earn more per sale once you figure out a marketing strategy which works!

High ticket products are a good idea too. To earn the same as a high ticket sale, you may have to sell hundreds or even thousands of low valued products, which is much more difficult.

The top earnings in affiliate marketing have this figured out. They choose the best paying affiliate programs which offer high ticket commissions and recurring commission products. Digital products too pay much more than physical products. Typically digital products pay between 30% and 40% commissions compared to 1%-10% for most physical products.

Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy too will have some say in how much you can earn from digital marketing. With a slow strategy, such as blogging, it can take months of work before you realise an income from affiliate sales. But with paid marketing methods you can see results much more quickly.

One of the best ways to sell affiliate products online in through the use of email marketing. With email marketing, you can collect thousands of subscribers on an email list. By sending automated messages out to your list, you can sell many products through just one email! See also email marketing for small businesses.

I’m a blogger, so I create content on websites to attract potential customers from the search engines such as Google. But there’s other faster ways to attract an audience with affiliate marketing. Many affiliates use marketing platforms where they can reach an audience quickly. Google Adwords, YouTube, Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads) are all advertising platforms used by affiliates to drive targeted traffic to their products; either directly or through email marketing using a landing page.

Summary

So, how much can we earn from digital marketing? Well, digital marketers earn a broad range of incomes varying from absolutely nothing all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars every month. How much you earn largely depends on the business models you use, the marketing methods you employ and your dedication to learning the tools and mindsets necessary for online success.

There’s a 95% drop out rate among affiliate marketers so you’ll need to be in the small minority of those who choose to never quit, however difficult it seems. Longer terms affiliates are the ones who tend to make more money and initially it’s much more difficult because you’re up against marketing experts who have built an audience over time. See also affiliate marketing success rate.

Get help and support with a from scratch affiliate business here.

How To Earn From Digital Marketing At Home

How can you earn from digital marketing at home? Digital marketing gives businesses the ability to attract more customers. But what if you don’t already have a business or a product to sell? Can you still use digital marketing to earn an income from home? Yes you can, using a business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers are third parties who use their marketing skills for selling other people’s products online.

An affiliate can earn a living from anywhere using only their laptop and some digital marketing skills. This is why learning digital marketing is a skillset which is always going to be worth pursuing. Once you’ve learned the skill of selling products and services online, it makes you able to earn an independent income but it’s also a very marketable skill, too.

How To Earn From Digital Marketing At Home – The Sale Of Other People’s Products

The concept of affiliate marketing on the Internet was conceived of, put into practice and patented by William J. Tobin. Tobin was the founder of PC Flowers & Gifts who launched on the Prodigy Network in 1989. But it was Amazon.com (Amazon) who brought the concept to a wider audience. It launched its associate (affiliate) program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.

Amazon is still a popular choice among affiliate marketers who can promote any of the thousands of products available on the site for a commission based on the sale. Other affiliate networks have appeared since including websites such as Clickbank.com, JVZoo.com ShareAsale.com Flexoffers.com and so on.

Amazon today might not be your best choice as an affiliate however, since their levels of commission payouts are fairly low.

How To Earn From Digital Marketing At Home – Product Choice

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products to choose from today. Just do a simple Google search for “{any topic} affiliate program” and you should find a product you can promote. This makes affiliate marketing a very versatile business model.

If you already have a website, you can find products to sell from it. Because there’s no need for shipping or handling of products or even dealing with customers, it makes it a very clean business model. You simply refer customers to products online. If they buy, you receive a commission directly from the product owner/supplier. You can also sell globally to anyone in the world from a website, which runs 24 hours a day, none stop!

Some of the best products to choose are those which offer high ticket commissions and recurring commissions. These tend to be higher priced items which carry larger levels of commission. Recurring income affiliate programs are those which carry memberships and subscriptions. These can be information products and software products, for example.

How To Earn From Digital Marketing At Home – Selling Affiliate Products

To sell an affiliate product you first need to join the associated affiliate program and collect your “affiliate link”. This link identifies you as the third party who is referring the product.

Find an affiliate product you want to promote and get your affiliate link. Then learn a strategy which helps you promote it. This is the tricky part and it’s worth joining a training program which can help you learn a marketing strategy such as:

Blogging
Video blogging
PPC – pay per click marketing
Email marketing
Social media marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation

Affiliates who succeed usually get help and support and educate themselves on the best way to promote affiliate products. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s involved:

Choose a product to promote – one which you can identify with and align with wholeheartedly (If you’re misaligned with your product, you’re less likely to succeed)
Define your target customer persona – get specific on the type of person who you want to attract with your marketing
Choose your niche – pick the topic on which you create content, if you’re going to build content
Test a marketing strategy – whatever strategy you choose, there’s a learning curve involved (rinse and repeat)

Summary

There’s a whole bunch of marketing methods which third parties use to earn an income online through the use of digital marketing selling other people’s products/services. This website is an example of content marketing. Through building a niche website and creating some content, you can attract the attention of the search engine results pages (SERPS) on Google. This is one strategy to get an affordable search engine ranking, but there’s many other ways to market a product.

The fastest way is to build an email list of subscribers through the use of landing pages, and paid advertising. With recurring income products and high ticket products, a few sales is all you need to become profitable. Using low value physical products can make your life more difficult however. For more information on affiliate marketing, checkout this video.

How To Increase Website Traffic Through Social Media

How do you increase website traffic through social media? Social media is a great way to interact with people who want what you’re offering. By optimising your profiles, sharing valuable content, and interacting with people on social media, you can drive targeted traffic to your website organically.

You can also use paid marketing on social media platforms to drive traffic towards your business and get your website visitors to share your content on their profiles.

Certain free plugins allow website owners to automatically syndicate their content throughout social media platforms. You can even queue up older blog posts and articles to go out long after you’ve published them. So whatever your budget, you can use these techniques in your business. Let’s start with something simple, vamping up your Facebook profile!

How To Increase Website Traffic Through Social Media – Facebook Profile

Millions of people use Facebook and this means that many of those who fall into the category of your target market persona do so too. Your “target market” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is going to buy from you. Get to know your customer avatar with this customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Once you understand your customer avatar, all your online marketing techniques and strategies will work so much better. Have a look at my Facebook profile below. I’ve set it up in a way to showcase my business for anyone who sees it.

Since many people can view your profile on Facebook when they interact with you, it can be a good idea to use it for your business like this.

Once set up you can interact with people who fit your customer avatar by finding groups where they are likely to hang out.

Join groups and interact and mingle with members in conversation. As you connect, people will find your profile and naturally see your business/what you offer.

How To Increase Website Traffic Through Social Media – Sharing Your Content & Facebook Pages

I’ve written a post on creating content which targets long tail keywords. This is another strategy you can use to get free traffic from the search engines. This can help you increase website traffic organically. You can also use your posts on social media too, to get people back to your website. Simply post them on your profile pages on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media platforms.

You can also create a Facebook page which is specific for my business. A business page can be built completely for free on facebook. Use your main keywords within the page title as this can help you get found when users do a search using the Facebook search feature.

Here’s a Facebook business page I used for this website to help me get found for the main keywords this site is built around:

Once you’ve built a Facebook page for your business, you can share your website content on it and build up your page to attract followers. You can also boost a post using some paid advertising too.

Using Paid Ads On Facebook

Most social media platforms offer the option to run paid advertising which can be used to drive specific users to your website, should they show an interest in your content or be relevant for your business.

To find the ad manager click on the home icon on your Facebook dashboard. Scroll down and click “See all” on the top left and look for the Ad Manager.

Inside the Ad Manager you can set up a paid advert which targets people who are relevant to your business as per your target market persona. Here’s an example of an advert which shows the detailed demographics you can target:

targeting demographics with facebook ads

Syndicating Content Through Social Media

If you’ve created a lot of content on your website, you can use social media platforms to automatically syndicate them out. I use a tool called Revive Old Posts which lets you queue up your blog posts and deliver them throughout your social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

What’s great about this is that you can completely automate the distribution of your content throughout your social media presence.

Share Buttons On Your Content

If you’re a blogger and have some useful content on your website, you can place share buttons on each post which makes it easy for your visitors to share your content on social media sites.

Share buttons are easy to place on your content. Just use a free plugin such as the on I use on this site: Social Media and Share Icons (Ultimate Social Media)

If you like this post – please use the share icon on the page to share on your social media! Thanks!

Summary

There’s lots of ways to use social media to get traffic back to your website and build your business. These are just a few. There’s also other platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, TikTok and so on. The key is to define your customer avatar or target market persona, and find these people on your social media platform. Once you’ve found a strategy which works on one platform, you can move on and find many more!

Some strategies, such as the organic and free ones will take some dedication to get them working. You might need to spend a few hours each day interacting with people for the Facebook groups method to work, for example. The paid advertising strategies can work hands free, once you’ve found a good market segment to advertise to which meets your criteria.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically

Wondering how to increase website traffic organically? With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s some stiff competition, even in the least competitive niches.

So getting found by the search engines is getting tougher by the day. Google is still the most popular search engine but there’s others too which shouldn’t be forgotten: Bing.com, Duckduckgo.com, Yahoo.com etc. If you can create some awesome content in your niche, which has less competition than the most popular keywords, you have a chance at getting a ranking on one or all of those search engines.

But you need to get smart about it. Google won’t give you a top place listing easily. You need to slip between the cracks and find low competition long tail keywords for which you can rank. If you’re successful, this can be a strategy which you can build on. Over time and with effort you can start to see more and more free visitors coming to your website.

So lets have a look at the nuts and bolts of this simple and effective strategy for getting more free visitors to your website.

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Customer Avatar

Before we delve down into keyword research, we need to know who we want to land on our website in the first place. It can be tempting to think that everyone wants our products and services. After all, we’re awesome right?!

But the large proportion of the online marketplace isn’t looking for what we have. We don’t want to waste our time creating content on our website which brings in the wrong kind of visitors. they won’t buy – ever. We want the other kind of visitors – those who will be long term loyal customers who stand to benefit the most from what we have on offer (and who will buy from us). In simple terms we want to find our target customer persona, or customer “avatar”.

The customer avatar is the person (or type of person) who will most benefit from what we are selling. They are our “perfect” customer. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf and find out who they are. Once you’ve done this come back to the next step!

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Keyword Research

Now you know who it is you want to attract to your website, you can start doing some keyword research. This can help you identify the specific searches which are already being conducted by your customer avatar. Head over to Google’s keyword research tool here. Or Neil Patel has one called Ubersuggest. Type in your main keyword (the one which is most specific to your business) and have a look at the related keywords which show up. Here’s a snapshot of some of the keyword research I did for this article:

Now, it’s tempting to think only in terms of the number of monthly searches. But this is a big mistake. The most popular keyword in the image above is “how to get traffic to your website” (1600 monthly views). However, this term is super competitive. If I chose that as the title for this particular article I would have less chance of getting traffic from the SERPS – search engine results pages.

Lets have a look on Google for this term to show you what I mean:

getting traffic to your website for free

Even a phrase match (“in quotes”) search for this keyword brings up a huge number of competing pages. See the number in the image above (168,000)

Compare that number with the one I chose for this article:

using Google to determine the relative competitiveness of a keyword

So, even though my term gets far fewer monthly searches:

I’m still much more likely to get ranked for it because it’s far less competitive than the other term which gets a tonne of traffic! A little bit of “something” is worth far more than no amount of “a lot”!

How To Increase Website Traffic Organically – Compare And Contrast Keywords

So, you can now compare and contrast the different keywords within your niche using Google’s keyword planner/ubersuggest and a normal Google search. Remember too that you want to find buyer keywords within your niche too. Those are the keywords which attract your particular customer avatar. So, to recap; the main criteria of finding keywords for content are:

Longer tail keywords with less competition on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages
Keywords which relate to your business and ideally are, (or could be) “buyer keywords”- keywords which your customer avatar are likely to use.

Once you have identified a good keyword for a piece of content you want to write on your website, you need to create some awesome content for that particular keyword!

Writing Content For Your Website

So, you have your keywords which are going to become the titles of your articles. Next you’re going to actually create some content. A good idea is to look at the top result on Google for your keyword idea.

Read the top ranking article and have a look at the quality of it. You’re going to out perform that article! Write a better article which is longer and has more value in it!

This can take some time but it’s worth putting the effort in. A good quality article will stand the test of time. So if you’re going to do this, it’s worth doing well! I use an SEO plugin to help me write SEO optimised content.

Ideally write for the person reading it, but optimise for the search engines. If you write an article which is full of your keywords, it can be a little off putting for readers. So a plugin can help you find a healthy compromise. Yoast SEO is free for WordPress and reminds you to place your keywords in images, headings, meta tags, descriptions and so on.

I’d suggest writing around 1000 words per article, or longer depending on the topic. But if you’re “filling” with repeat information, it’s better to do a shorter post.

Written Your Post? Sit Back, Pour a Cup Of Coffee And Wait.. Right?

Sorry to disappoint you but, sadly no. Once you have published your content your job isn’t over! You also need to promote your content as much as possible. Don’t rely on Google finding it and putting it up there on the top of the search results. It might never happen. Some of your posts will rank and some will sadly not. But one thing you can control is the effort your put into the promotion of your posts.

Google has a number of ranking algorithms which it uses to determine how it perceives your content. Here’s just a few of them:

Domain age and authority – newer sites have less authority
Backlink profile – who links to your content, what’s their niche, authority and standing with Google? Is your link profile natural and does it imply you have a high quality site?
Content on site (SEO) – what’s the quality and volume of your on-site content
Visitor interaction – Google sees how people perceive your content – do they stay on your content or click away immediately, for example?

You need to get eyes on your content. So sharing it as much as possible will help. Use a social media share plugin on your site to encourage visitors to share. There’s also a number of other plugins you can use to automatically syndicate your content throughout your social media platforms. I use Revive Old Posts which helps me to promote posts automatically. You can also guest post or blog comment on other people’s blogs to get backlinks from other websites within your niche.

Your social media backlink profile is a large signal to Google that your content is share worthy. So this is definitely worth doing as it can significantly boost your SEO. You’ll also get organic traffic this way too, which is also the point of creating high quality content. A good post can even go viral on social media and lead to tens of thousands of website visitors very quickly.

Lead Generation Techniques In Digital Marketing

What are the lead generation techniques in digital marketing, and why collect leads anyway? In digital marketing a lead is an email address from a potential customer. Website owners collect leads so they can follow up with marketing messages over a longer time period than is possible only on a website.

On a website, a visitor is usually gone within a few minutes. On an email list you can send out messages over days, weeks and even months and years. So you can sell a product/service on an email list much more easily than on a website. See also email marketing for small business owners.

pop ups for digital marketing — An example of a lead magnet “pop up” used on a website

To collect a lead from a website you need to offer something of value to your visitors.

Lead Generation Techniques In Digital Marketing – The Lead Magnet

Most websites have some kind of offer to turn website traffic into leads. Some offer discount vouchers, other give away ebooks, pdfs or video training courses through their email marketing campaigns. Giveaway offers for collecting leads are known as “lead magnets”. They “magnetise” website visitors on to your email list.

A good lead magnet emphasises the outcome for the person signing up to it. So if you’re promoting an ebook, for instance, you can focus on the main benefits of getting the book, not the features.

Here’s one of my ebooks I use as a lead magnet. The main benefit of accessing my ebook is to learn “how to generate income from your blog“, which appears under the title. See niche blogging for profit for more on this topic. Some features of the book might be “learn keyword planning”, “SEO (search engine optimisation techniques” and so on. Most people aren’t interested in the features. They are more interested in the benefits. Which is why a clear benefit driven title is a good idea for lead magnets that convert.

Lead Generation Techniques In Digital Marketing – Collecting Leads Through A Pop Up Form

Pop up forms are so common on websites these days. You see a pop up on nearly every website you visit. Why is this? Simple, a pop up form is a great way to collect leads and monetise a website. You can display pop up forms on every page of your website. So every single visitor will see it. Although pop ups are annoying and can frustrate visitors, they work! Even if only a small percentage of website visitors sign up from a popup, those are people who would otherwise have left your website for good, never to return!

Once on your list you can continue to connect with potential customers and bring them back to your products and services time and time again. Most visitors don’t buy on their first visit to a website. It can take several touch points before someone will buy (research shows it’s often 6-8 touch points). Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with potential customers and build rapport and trust.

You can use Aweber, an email autoresponder to build popup forms and place the code on your website. When your visitor lands on your site, the popup will activate.

Lead Generation In Digital Marketing – Drop Down Banners

Another lead generation technique is the use of drop down banners. I have one on this site you will see at the top of the screen. A drop down banner can be used to alert your website visitors to one of your offers or lead magnets.

This is a simple plugin you can get if you’re using a WordPress website called Icegram engage. This plugin can be set up to your specifications to showcase any offer you have. Send visitors to a landing page or opt in page on your website.

icegram engage - turning visitors into leads

Landing Pages

Again, Aweber has landing page functionality which lets you build specific landing pages which are designed to collect leads. Landing pages are much better than normal websites because you can optimise them for performance and they are made specifically for collection of leads.

On a normal website, like this one, visitors can browse around and click through your pages. This gives them more possibilities and more choice. When overwhelmed with choice most people will click away! But a landing page is different. On a landing page you only have two choices: sign up to the email list or leave the page. Landing pages can be optimised and tested, which makes them much more efficient at collecting leads.

Convertri is a great, user friendly landing page software which lets you copy pages, drag and drop placements and cross test landing pages against each other. This function is super useful for marketers who collect leads. It can give them feedback as to what elements of their landing pages need to change in order to keep their costs down and opt in rate high.

Cross Testing Landing Pages

Here’s an example of a cross test for a landing page I built using Convertri:

The two landing pages here are very similar with only one slight difference. One is black and one is white. By cross testing these pages over several thousands of visitors, I can understand which one performs the best. Initially you can try out landing pages which are very different. Over time, you’ll start to find the best performers which give you a cheaper cost per lead.

Free Traffic Websites For Affiliate Marketing

How do you build free traffic websites for affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketers sell other people’s products online for a share of the profit. But one of the main problems for affiliates is getting traffic to their website. It’s pretty easy to build a website nowadays and there’s many platforms which let you do it completely for free. Weebly.com, WordPress.com, Wix.com and others are platforms which let anyone build a website for zero cost!

But what use is that website unless you can attract customers to it? Building a website is the easy part. The hard part is attracting customers in large volume so you can build a business from that website. Not all website visitors are equal either. Many of them won’t become customers. So how can you build a website which attract the right kind of visitors – visitors who will turn into lifelong customers?

Free Traffic Websites For Affiliate Marketing – The “Right” Traffic

Before we get into the building of a website for free traffic, we first need to establish the difference between “any old” website traffic, and the targeted visitors you really want to attract to your business. Most online website visitors are just browsing. But some of them, are going to be specifically interested in the products/services you have on your affiliate website. We are interested in those particular people; the people who fall into the category of your target customer persona.

The target market, customer avatar or customer persona is the specific type of person who is most likely to want what you have for sale. When you understand your target market you’re going to be better at communicating towards them in your marketing. Now we have covered a little about that we can crack on with our free traffic website!

Free Traffic Websites For Affiliate Marketing – Keywords

One way of getting free traffic to a website is by creating some useful content which ranks on the search engines. But, there’s a huge amount of competition out there, particularly on Google. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, it’s a tough job ranking for any keywords, particularly the ones you want to sell your affiliate products with.

Lets say you’re selling a fitness product from Clickbank.com. Let’s use a Yoga product, for example. Here’s a Yoga product I found called Yoga Burn Challenge.

To get free traffic for your product, you’re going to create an information website which attracts traffic for free from the search engines. To start, head over to Google’s keyword planner and type in “online Yoga course”, since that’s a main keyword which is related to this product.

It’s also a potential buyer keyword which could attract buyer traffic to our site. Buyer traffic is different to browser traffic. An example of a browser keyword might be “free Yoga classes online”. That keyword indicates that the searcher definitely doesn’t want to pay for Yoga classes online!

Free Traffic Websites For Affiliate Marketing – Choosing A Keyword

You’re going to choose a keyword to build a niche website around. The top (most searched) keyword is “online Yoga classes”. It gets 27,100 views a month worldwide! However, that keyword is going to be far too competitive to rank our new website. So we need to look deeper to find one with less competition on the SERPS – search engine results pages, so we have more chance of ranking and getting free traffic.

Looking further down the list you can see some longer tail keywords which get less traffic. But, these kinds of keywords are better for our niche website. They give us much better chance at ranking our site, and getting free traffic.

Let’s have a closer look at the keyword “online Yoga courses for beginners” keyword. It gets some monthly search traffic (90 searches). The domain name is free and the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages show fairly little in the way of competition.

Of course this is an example of just one particular topic/niche which you could choose. Ideally find a topic you’re passionate about and know something about. That way, you’re going to have an easier time creating content in your niche. This particular term might not be the best choice because 90 monthly searches isn’t really much. If you consider that even with a top placement on Google of your website, you’ll only receive about 34% of traffic – which is only 30.6 monthly searches. That’s not really enough traffic, even if you’re successful at getting a top ranking.

Ranking Your Website With A Keyword Domain Name

Keyword domain names used to be all the rage around 10 years ago. You could throw up a website and quickly rank for your keyword at the top of Google for your chosen keyword. Today there’s thousands more websites to compete with and Google has changed it’s ranking algorithms many times since then. So it’s much harder to get noticed with a 5 page website. You’ll need to do much better to get your website to rank.

But keywords in the domain name still are a ranking factor. You just need to create some awesome content as well in order to give your site the best possible chance. That’s going to be a lot easier if you choose a topic which you are interested and ideally passionate about. That way, you can build a blog website and you have a much better chance of success.

The above example of the Yoga niche website is exactly the same strategy I used to build this website and many others:

Start with your product/idea/keyword
Do your keyword research and find a suitable keyword
Your keyword must be buyer related, have low competition (on the SERPS) and have a nice volume of monthly searches (shown on Google’s keyword planner)

See also how to get an affordable search engine ranking for more on this topic and how to build a niche website.

Summary

This strategy does work, but it won’t work for every website you build. Some niches are far more competitive than others, so if you choose a keyword which is very competitive, you’ll have a much tougher job ranking your site. Google ranks sites which are valuable. So you need to build an information website which actually offers your visitors valuable information.

If it doesn’t your visitors will soon click away. Google sees this and soon your site will be in the dustbin!

So build an awesome information resource and target some low competition long tail keywords with your domain name and website keywords. You can also build a number of blog posts (using this strategy) which offer great value for your visitors and leads them to your products/services.

This website is an example of a niche website I’ve built around specific keywords. It’s in the early days at the moment and time will tell whether it ranks or not for the main keywords (Digital Marketing Mentors) I’ve built the site around.