Timothy789, Author at Digital Marketing Mentors Online

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products

If you’re wondering how to make money selling other people’s products this one’s for you! Anyone can become an affiliate and sell a product online for a share of the profit. Affiliate marketers are third parties who promote products and services worldwide over the internet.

You don’t need any products of your own to become an affiliate either. One of the most well known affiliate programs is Amazon’s. Amazon’s affiliate program lets anyone earn commission through promotion of any one of thousands of products available on Amazon’s website.

Once you’ve joined a program, you will get access to an online portal, or back office. Here you’ll find resources to help you make sales such as banners, images and other marketing resources. It is through your unique identifying link, or affiliate link, that you receive credit for online referrals.

When a sale is attributed to your efforts and made through your link, you earn a portion of the sale.

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products

Affiliates use all kinds of marketing strategies to find customers to sell to. Some affiliates are bloggers, some use videos and others build huge email lists of subscribers and sell products through their emails. Some affiliates will use paid marketing methods, and others use free, organic strategies.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models because anyone can use it from anywhere in the world. You can get started relatively cheaply and most affiliate programs let you join for free. The downside is that the low barrier to entry for affiliate marketing means there’s a lot of competition. There’s a large drop out rate with affiliates and around only 5% of affiliate marketers stick at it.

The main problem for affiliates is marketing. It’s easy to join a program and get your affiliate link. But to place that link in front of a buying customer requires more skill and effort. So it’s worth investing in training and education for the mastering of this skill.

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Types Of Product

There’s more than just one kind of affiliate product you can sell and although many new affiliates will flock to Amazon because it’s well known, it’s not the best program.

Amazon pays relatively small commissions to affiliates. If you successfully sell a product from Amazon, you could earn as little as 1% commission. So for all your efforts, if you sell a $100 item you may only earn $1! Some products will pay more though and Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 20%. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

There’s many other affiliate programs you can find online. Clickbank for example is often another stop for affiliate marketers who are finding their feet. Clickbank.com is a digital product marketplace and you’ll find digital products in most niches. The advantage of digital products is that they pay much more – typically from 30% to 40% commission. So choosing to sell them can be more lucrative if you are successful.

The most lucrative affiliate programs offer high ticket commissions and recurring income affiliate programs are good for affiliates. A recurring income program is a product which carries a subscription such as a software or a membership product.

Popular Marketing Methods For Affiliates

Depending on the types of product you choose to sell as an affiliate, and your marketing budget, there’s several ways you can sell. Most top affiliates will build an email list and use paid advertising to build their list using a landing page and a paid marketing platform; such as Google Adwords or Facebook.

email marketing - why it works for online referrals

This is definitely one of the fastest ways to build an affiliate business, if you have the capital to invest. But there’s cheaper ways to do it too; such as blogging and content creation. Some affiliates will create video or written content, like this blog post, for example. When they start to attract larger numbers of visitors to their content, they can monetise that traffic through selling suitable affiliate products for their audience.

The target audience in affiliate marketing is one of the most important things for beginners to grasp. The target market persona for one particular product will differ to another, depending on the product you sell. So it’s important to understand who you’re aiming your marketing at, so you don’t waste time/resources attracting the wrong audience for your products.

Traffic & Sales

One of the biggest barriers for new affiliates is finding a strategy they can stick to and which brings in traffic. Blogging, for example can be frustrating in the beginning because there’s so much competition. In a competitive niche, it can take much longer to get traction. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, you can imagine new bloggers struggling to get traffic to their websites.

Paid marketing is much faster, but again competitive. The competition for advertising pushes up prices. With your own email list you can step out of the competition in either organic traffic or paid traffic and communicate directly to your subscriber list. This is why it’s so important to build an email list as an affiliate. With an email list you can build trust with potential customers over a longer timeframe than is possible from only a website.

With so many marketers pushing sales online, it’s a buyers market. Trust is a valuable asset in the online world which is why it’s important to build trust with your email list by offering value in your messaging.

Learn more about affiliate marketing and get started here.

Autopilot Money Making Websites

Autopilot money making websites operate around the clock 24 hours a day 7 days a week. How do they make money? By selling other people’s products and services with a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates link to products and services around the world. When they make a sale through one of their affiliate links, they earn a commission. All of this can happen completely hands free. Products are delivered by the manufacturer and the referrer (affiliate) gets paid for delivering customers.

In order to get visitors on a website though there’s a few things which affiliates do. You can’t just build a website and expect visitors for free. It doesn’t really happen like that. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and getting your website found is one of the biggest challenges for affiliate marketers.

Autopilot Money Making Websites – Traffic

Traffic is difficult to obtain which is perhaps one of the reasons why 95% of affiliate marketers quit. There’s two main ways to bring targeted visitors to a website. You can either pay for it using PPC (pay per click advertising) or get your traffic for free by creating content (like this article). See also PPC vs organic traffic.

To get a slice of organic traffic you need to create content. Once your content gets found on the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) you can start to see visitors coming to your website in growing numbers organically. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

Paid traffic is faster and more scalable however, and many affiliates will use pay per click advertising. Of course in order to build your autopilot money making website using paid marketing, you need to pay less in advertising than you make in commission.

Autopilot Money Making Websites – Sales

Turning traffic into sales can be done through placing affiliate links on your website. When someone clicks on your link and subsequently makes a purchase, you earn a commission. You can place contextual links within your content, place banners or advertising and collect email addresses from your website. Email marketing is a large part of selling from a website and most affiliates will build an email list. See also email marketing for small business owners.

Why build an email list? Email lists are used for the building of a longer term relationship with potential customers. From a website, a visitor only sticks around for a short time; usually only a few minutes.

After that they are gone, potentially forever. By offering a value giveaway on a website you can collect email addresses and build a large list of subscribers. Automated messages can be delivered to your subscribers over months and even years.

From these messages you can build trust by delivering value. Online shoppers are much more likely to buy from someone they trust and most online purchases happen after several touch points between the customer and the marketer. (See also how many touch points before a sale).

Choosing A Product To Sell Online

There’s literally thousands of affiliate products you can choose from to monetise a website. Most people are familiar with Amazon which has it’s own affiliate program. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and start promoting their products from a website.

Your product choice will depend on a few things. How you get website traffic, your particular topic of interest and what you earn from your products all have a bearing. So if for example you’re creating an information website on the topic of fitness, you’ll want a fitness related product to sell in order to monetise it.

You can also monetise a website through using advertising too. Google’s Adsense program, for example, is a popular choice and you can place text advertising on your content. When someone clicks on your ads, you earn a small amount. See also Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing.

Turning Visitors Into Leads Into Sales

Traffic generation can be a major hurdle for affiliate marketers. So it can take some time learning strategies for getting people to your website. Once you start attracting traffic to your website your job isn’t over! You need to turn those visitors into leads and then turn your leads into affiliate sales. This can happen automatically once it’s all working, but first there’s some work to do!

Firstly look at your product and decide who you are wanting to attract. This means understanding your target market persona – the type of person who will buy from your website. If you’re a content creator (like me) you’re going to want to choose a topic you enjoy writing about. That way, it’s a whole lot easier to create content to bring in your target market. Or, you can use paid marketing if that’s not your bag! Send people directly to a landing page and start building your email list.

To build an email list you need something of value to offer your website visitors. On this website for example, you can access a free video series and learn more about this topic and building your own online business.

Email Marketing Is The “Key”

Email marketing is the key to selling from a website and although you can sell a product directly from your website, a list is much better. With an email list of subscribers you can collect tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers to sell affiliate products to. On a list, you have a greater opportunity to sell because you can interact with your subscribers over a much longer period of time than is possible on a website.

Anyone can build an email list from a website and sell affiliate products to their list. This is a skill well worth learning. Once you have learned how to do this and successfully sell an affiliate product once, you can rinse and repeat over and over and of course automate the process to boot!
Learn how to get started online with affiliate marketing here.

building an online business from scratch

Automated Marketing For A Small Business

There’s a few ways to use automated marketing for a small business. By using multiple marketing methods you can attract customers from many sources. For starters you can create a website. Building a website in a specific way can help you get free traffic and an affordable search engine ranking. This is particularly useful if you have a locally based business. You can target your city name in your website domain and more easily rank near or at the top of Google.

Another simple strategy to use if you haven’t already done it is to get a Google My Business listing (formerly Google Places).

Google offers locally based businesses a completely free listing which shows at the top of a relevant search query. If you’ve ever looked for local businesses in your area, you’ll see the top results are locally based and have a free listing. All you need to do is fill out the details and verify your address.

google places listing (google my business)

Automated Marketing For Small Business

Now, with a website and a Google My Business listing you have two ways to attract customers. You can optimise your website for your main keywords. This can give you more chance of ranking at or near the top of Google’s listings. This is done through both on-page and off-page SEO. See search engine optimisation in digital marketing.

A prominent Google business listing can bring in free customers for years, so it’s definitely worth doing. You can also use some paid advertising and start at a very low budget. Checkout Google Adwords or Microsoft Ads to get started.

With a paid advert, you specifically target search queries which are relevant for your business. So if you have a cake shop for example, you could show your ads only when this search is performed in your local area, saving you heaps on ad budget and sending you targeted visitors.

Automated Marketing For Small Business – Email Marketing

Once you have a website you can start sending targeted visitors to it. A “targeted” visitor is someone who is very likely to buy from you. Learn more about customer avatar and target audience here.

Many visitors won’t take any action on your website, at least not on their first visit. So you might see a lot of website visitors, but few of them become customers. A visitor needs several touch points with a website before they make a buying decision. That’s why it’s a good idea to offer something on your website to give your visitors in exchange for getting them on an email list. This is typically something like a discount code, ebook or free piece of digital information you can send them.

An email messenger service allows businesses to automate delivery of messages and keep in touch with their subscribers. It gives you the business owner the ability to build a relationship via email, and let potential customers know about your offers. See also email marketing for small business owners.

Automated Marketing For Small Businesses – Blogging, Sharing, Syndication

While blogging is a lengthy process when you’re doing it, there’s a huge potential to automate blog post syndication once you’ve built some content. Plus, if you build content wisely, you can get found through the search engines and attract customers for free. If you can find low competition long tail keywords, and rank for them with your content, you can attract free traffic through the search engines: Google, Bing, Duckduckgo.com etc.

Once you’ve built content, you can use plugins such as Revive Old Posts and post planner to syndicate content automatically.

Social media share buttons are also another way you can get your visitors to share your content as they see it. Once set up there’s nothing left to do; people can share to social media any content which they find valuable.

Facebook Page

Building a Facebook page is free and you can target specific keywords for your page for greater coverage. So if you have a pie shop in Wolverhampton, you can use those keywords within your page name, if they aren’t already taken.

You can use your business page on Facebook to connect with people and share content. This can be automated using an email marketing service such as Aweber, too. You can also use some paid advertising too, in the form of an advert or through boosting a post. Here’s a page I recently set up to help attract traffic for this website:

automated marketing small business — Visit this page here

People use Facebook search feature to find information and for local business search. So you can set up a page which helps people find your business.

Summary

There’s other strategies you can find through the many social media platforms online too. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter and so on all offer opportunities to add another stream to your advertising. Start with the basics and learn a single strategy first. Once you can successfully bring in customers from that source, add another one.

Over time you should have a few good sources to attract traffic to your website and bring in new customers.

Search Engine Optimisation In Digital Marketing

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in digital marketing is the optimisation of online content to get free traffic for your website. Search engines crawl websites and score them according to their content, backlinks, domain authority and a number of other criteria.

To optimise your website for certain keywords, there’s a few things you can do. Make sure you have content targeting those specific keywords you want to rank for on Google. Certain keywords are more competitive than others, so it’s not possible to rank for every one of your chosen keywords. This is why many bloggers will find low competition long tail keywords for their content marketing strategy.

In a particularly competitive topic, there’s going to be more websites competing for certain keywords. Since not everyone of them can rank (at the top of Google) for the same keyword, it’s a good idea to look at keywords which offer less competition so you have a greater chance of ranking your content.

Search Engine Optimisation In Digital Marketing – Things To Optimise

There’s a few simple things anyone can do to their website which will help in optimising. For search engines, some key content elements to optimise for are:

Title tags
Meta description
Header tags
Image alt text

Your off-site SEO too has a huge factor in your domain authority with Google (and other search engines). Long standing websites often have tens or even hundreds of thousands of backlinks, from other websites within their niche. These are one of the most important ranking factor which Google bases your SEO on. Other off-site (or “off page” SEO) factors are things such as social media presence, ratings and reviews, podcasts and off-site content marketing.

A useful plugin to help you crease SEO friendly content on your website is Yoast SEO. It’s a free plugin for WordPress users.

Search Engine Optimisation In Digital Marketing: SEO Vs. PPC

The two main ways of getting traffic to a website are through either organic marketing (SEO) and paid marketing. With organic marketing you create and optimise content on a website.

With PPC you run paid advertising sending visitors directly to your website, paying for each click on an advert you create. PPC (paid marketing) is relatively instantaneous. You can set up an run an advert in the same day, bringing in traffic to your website almost instantly. But with SEO, it takes much longer. With SEO you create and optimise quality content on your website in order to attract the attention of the search engines for your chosen keywords.

If successful, your website can appear on Google for your chosen keywords. How successful you are will depend on a few factors including the relative competitiveness of your topic and keywords, your domain age and the number of backlinks you have from other websites in your niche.

A good content marketing campaign will usually require the building of high quality content which attracts your target market persona in your particular field. A PPC campaign can easily be turned on and scaled up. You can see almost immediately whether a campaign is bringing in paying customers. An organic approach is much slower, and results will vary from one topic or niche to another.

Keyword Research

To find keywords within your niche which are relevant for your potential customers, you can use Google’s keyword planner tool. This tool will give you ideas for content within your particular topic or area of expertise. Start by typing in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. This is the main keyword which best describes your business, or the services you offer. So for example, I might use the keywords “digital marketing” for my “seed” keyword.

Once you type this into the planner, you’ll see a number of other keywords which relate to your seed keyword. The longer tail keywords which come up are typically the ones which have the least competition on Google. A strategy used by many bloggers is to target long tail keywords which have lower competition than the rest. When you do this for your content strategy, some of the content you create will rank on Google, (depending on how competitive your keyword terms are).

Building Backlinks

One of the main ranking factors use by Google is your backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites outside your own. If you build high quality content as part of your content marketing strategy, over time people should naturally link to your content.

A natural link profile tells Google that your content is of high quality, and therefore your domain authority will rise. Poor content will be linked to less. People will click away from your blogs and Google sees this! So write high quality content for your visitors, not just for the Google bots which crawl your site.

You can also build your own backlinks to help with your link profile. To do this, you can reach out to other website owners in your niche and ask to offer guest posts. A guest post gives you the means to exchange a quality piece of content for a backlink. You can also leave blog comments and even create content outside your own blog on blogger websites such as Hubpages.com.

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners

What’s a good digital marketing strategy for beginners? There’s lots of digital marketing “tactics” you can use. But a good digital marketing “strategy” is to incorporate a number of tactics which bring in customers to your business. You can use paid marketing strategies or free strategies, or a combination of the two. But before you even start with a tactic or strategy, it’s a good idea to identify your target audience. The target audience persona is a good place to start here.

Once you start advertising, or “marketing” online, you have access to a global audience. Most of that audience isn’t interested in what you have to offer. So to save budget, time and effort, it’s vital to understand who will be most interested in your products and services.

The thin “slice” of the online marketplace who is most likely to buy from you is your target audience or customer avatar. The “customer avatar” is very specific to your particular business. Once you understand who this is, you can target your marketing materials towards a smaller section of the online marketplace. These people are much more likely to be interested in your business.

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – A Website

A website is always a good place to start if you haven’t already got one. You can even build a niche website which is more targeted towards your customer avatar. A niche website (built in a certain way) can give you free traffic from the search engines much more quickly. Checkout my blog post on affordable search engine ranking.

Once you have a website you can build more and more content on it to attract more traffic for free from the search engines. One tactic which bloggers use is to find low competition long tail keywords. Build content for those keywords targeting your customer avatar through blogging.

Over time and with some useful content you should find visitors coming to your site from the search engines: Google, Duckduckgo.com, Bing etc.

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Google Business Listing

Google offer a free business listing too which is used for locally based businesses. So if you have a physical address which you can prove is yours, you can add a listing. This is definitely worth doing because it allows you to send free traffic to your website.

You’ll find local business listings usually at the very top of Google search page. Here’s what came up with a search for local shoe shops in my local area:

Google My Business free business listing

Besides the paid listings at the very top, Google “places” listings often rank very highly in the search engine results pages (SERPS). So if you have a locally based business this is a no-brainer! Get one, it’s free. Here’s the link for creating a Google My Business listing.

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Paid Ads

You can also run some paid advertising using platforms such as Bing (Microsoft) or Google Adwords. Both these platforms allow you to target your advertising specifically to searches which match your customer avatar criteria. Use only searches which are relevant for your business and choose a budget your can easily afford.

You can run very low cost advertising campaigns for less than $1 a day while you’re learning. Be careful not to spend money on advertising to people who don’t fall into your target market, which is easily done. You can quickly burn through your marketing budget, and waste clicks on people who aren’t a good fit for you. Start with a small budget while you’re learning.

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – A Facebook Page

Anyone can create a free Facebook Page for their business and drive traffic to it from Facebook. This can be done through sharing of your blog posts, paying for your posts to be boosted and asking friends to like your page. You can also get found organically if you name your page well. Choose good keywords to name your page, relevant for what a potential customer might look for. As you improve your page you can add this to a list of sources of website traffic.

To create a Facebook page, head to your Facebook and use the tab on the left drop down menu.

Fill out the fields and build your page filling in all the information required:

Digital Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Email Marketing

Email marketing is definitely a good idea to grow your business. Offer some benefit driven giveaway on your website, such as a free ebook. To access your giveaway, website visitors opt in to your email list. As you build your subscriber list, you can automate messages to build trust with them and showcase your business services and products.

A good email follow up series helps subscribers with a specific problem they might have and also leads them to your products. On a website, a visitor will leave within a few minutes so getting them onto your list is great for business. Once on your email list you can keep in touch with them indefinitely, so long as they maintain their subscription.

Retargeting Your Website Visitors

Retargeting your website visitors can be done fairly cheaply and on a budget you choose. This works by following your website visitors off your site and advertising to them directly on another website which has advertising enabled.

You can set up a retargeting campaign using an advertising platform such as Microsoft Ads or Google Adwords, Facebook or YouTube. Place some code on your website which allows you to collect data from your visitors. Then build a “custom audience” which targets only those people who have already interacted with your website.

Retargeting is a great tactic because it’s cheap and your visitors are super targeted because they have already shown an interest in your business.

Collecting Leads Directly From A Landing Page

A website is good for free traffic, especially if you’re prepared to build some quality content which targets your specific customer avatar. However, another way to advertise your business is through email marketing. The fastest and best way to build up an email list is through the use of landing pages. Why use landing pages? On a website, there’s lots of distraction.

Visitors can browse around to their heart’s content. But a landing page is designed specifically to collect a visitor’s email address. So particularly if you’re using paid advertising, landing pages are better because you can optimise them for performance. When you’re paying for traffic, you want to make the most of it.

Once you capture an email address, the lead is more likely to turn into a sale than a random website visitor who leaves after a few minutes, never to return! Landing pages are super fast and built to give you the lowest possible cost of lead. When you test and measure landing pages they can help you build a large email list very quickly, which is used to advertise your business.

Running A YouTube Ad

YouTube can be used in a couple of ways. You can either build a channel of videos are drive traffic organically, which takes some time. Or create a single video and use it to run an advert, sending people to your landing page.

Checkout the free video series here

Either way, YouTube is another potential source of traffic for your business. So it’s worth uploading videos on a regular basis, to build a catalogue of content to attract your target audience. This can be done in the same way as with blogging, only with video content instead.

Summary

So there’s a few tactics you can employ to build your business up using digital marketing. Ideally stick with a tactic for a while until you’ve mastered it. Then move on and build another one. Depending on your marketing budget and available time, you may want to select the cheaper marketing methods first, such as blogging and using Google My Business for a free business listing. Once you have built some free infrastructure into your business, you can move on to using some paid advertising too if you like.

Free marketing methods tend to be slower than through using paid advertising. Organic marketing such as blogging can take some time before you see the fruits of your efforts. So if you don’t have the time, using paid ads and build an email list.

For more information on online marketing and building an online business from scratch, checkout this video.

Landing Page Testing

Landing page testing is done to optimise landing page performance and lower the cost of acquiring a lead. Landing pages can be preferable to websites because you can better control the outcome of activity.

On a website there’s a lot more choice for the visitor. They can click around, browse through your content and get distracted. But a landing page is designed with only one thing in mind; to capture the email address of the visitor. A visitor on a landing page has only 2 options; sign up to your email list or leave the page.

They are “squeezed” into a decision – which is why landing pages can be known as squeeze pages.

By testing and measuring different landing pages against each other, you can discover ever better landing pages which give you a better cost per lead.

Landing Page Testing – Split Testing

Here’s an example of an A/B test running similar landing pages. There’s only one minor difference in this split test; background colour:

By using an A/B split test you can compare and contrast slightly different landing pages. This lets you see which one is better at converting visitors into subscribers.

Initially, you might use radically different pages to get a broader idea of which one will perform. Then, as you “zone” in on a good converting landing page, you can split test smaller elements to increase your opt in rate.

By doing this with several different elements, you can find the best performing landing page overall. Elements to test are typically the headline, images, form placement (to the right is best) and the main benefits of signing up.

Landing Page Testing – Benefits Not Features

What are the benefits of signing up to your email list? A benefit is the outcome a potential customer wants. Features on the other hand are more vague. Visitors aren’t interested in the features, only the benefits. Therefore, a well presented benefit driven headline will perform much better than one loaded with features.

For example, the benefit of buying a landing page builder (get one here) is you can get a lower cost per lead and build a more profitable business. Features might be the load speed of the pages, the user friendly dashboard and so on. but the customer isn’t really interested in those things.

They are opting in because your offer can help them in some way. By focusing on what you can do for them, you’ll come up with better headlines. Focus on benefits not features!

Benefits Of Testing

The benefits of testing landing pages is that you’ll ultimately come out with a lower cost per lead and a more profitable business. In the first instance though you may find your opt in rate is quite low. You can test elements such as your targeting, colours, images, form placement, titles and bullet points etc.

You’ll need to spend money on sending targeted visitors to landing pages to get some data. Over several thousands of visitors, you can improve your opt in rate. Some marketers even get their opt in rate to upwards of 50%. Initially though you might find only a small percentage of people opt into your list.

By comparing an contrasting different targeting, images, headings and colours, you can improve your opt in rate dramatically.

Target Market

One of the most important elements of testing your landing page is the advert which sends the visitors to it! To understand your target market better, you can get to know your customer avatar. The customer avatar is the type of person who is going to be most interested in what you have to offer. They will buy your products and become a fan for life!

You can understand your customer avatar better by knowing who your best customers already are and target their demographics. How old are they? Where do they live and where do they hang out online? What are their interests and what are their pains and problems. When you understand your target audience well, you can get clearer on your messaging which will appeal to them on your landing page.

Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords

Bloggers find low competition long tail keywords because they are much easier to rank for on Google. With two and three word key phrases, there’s so much more competition. So getting ranked can be extremely difficult, especially in a competitive niche. By finding longer tail keywords you’ve a much better chance at getting your content found on the first page of Google.

So how do you find low competition long tail keywords then? You can start with a keyword planner such as Google’s. Access here with an Adwords account. Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and it will show you terms related to yours. Here’s what came up when I searched for ideas for this article:

The planner gives you ideas currently being searched for on Google. It also shows you the monthly search volume for these longer tail terms. The term I used for this article “find low competition long tail keywords” gets 30 monthly views, according to this tool (see pic above).

Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords

Once you have identified a keyword you want to use which is 3 or more words long, you can check on Google to see the relative competition, according to Google. Type the keyword into Google as a normal search like so:

You should see a number appear at the top of the page which denotes the number of competing websites for this particular term. Scroll through the results and see which websites appear. This can give you an idea of the top ranking sites for your chosen term. Next type in the term again, this time in quotation marks like so:

Another number will appear at the top of the page denoting the number of specific web pages which compete for the term you’ve used. In this case it’s 10,700; a relatively low number. Less than 10 million for an open search and less than 20,000 for a phrase match search is pretty low. As you try more terms you should get a feel for the more competitive ones.

Let’s look at another example using a shorter phrase to see the difference.

Find Low Competition Long Tail Keywords – More Competitive Phrases

A similar shorter term phrase is “long tail keyword research” which gets considerably more monthly searches than the previous example:

“long tail keyword research” as a keyword gets around 1000 monthly searches! So you might think this would be a good keyword to go for as a blogger. However, on quick inspection on Google, you can see that it’s much more competitive because of the number of competing websites for that specific term:

Although a normal Google search brings up only 8,420,000 websites, the phrase match search shows 137,000 pages. Considerably more than the previous example which had only 10,700 pages competing for the term. So in this example, you can see that it’s going to be much easier to rank the keyword “find low competition long tail keywords” than it is to rank for “long tail keyword research” on Google.

But It’s Hardly Any Traffic!

I know you’re probably thinking that the keyword I chose for this article only gets 30 monthly searches! So even if I ranked top of Google (which might not happen), I’ll only get a share of those 30! This amounts to less than one hit a day, even if you’re at the top! So why bother?! Wouldn’t it be better to go for the 1000 monthly searches using the keywords “long tail keyword research”?

Although there’s more traffic for this term, your chances of getting even on the first page are considerably smaller when you use competitive terms. It’s much better getting a small amount of something, than no amount of a lot!

Bloggers create content and then float that content out into the world! The more content they create, the more those little trickles of traffic add up. As your site authority grows, you stand more chance of getting found for the more competitive terms.

But initially, it’s going to be better to find low competition long tail keywords. Unfortunately those terms tend to get less traffic. But that’s simply the way it is. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and if you chase after the most competitive terms, you’re going up against high authority websites which have hundreds of thousands of backlinks and a huge standing with Google.

Summary

Finding low competition long tail keywords is easy. Simply use Google’s keyword planner and type in your main search term. This brings up a number of search terms which are already being searched for on Google. Look for the ones which attract less traffic as they are usually going to be the longer tail keywords with much less competition.

Write a lot of content and make an improvement on the content which is already ranking. Use an SEO tool (I use Yoast SEO) to help you write SEO friendly content. This should help you rank your content. Don’t rely on a ranking and make an effort to promote your content as much as possible through social media, building backlinks and sharing your posts through your email list.

If you keep doing this and keep building content, something will eventually stick and you’ll start receiving free traffic from the search engines. If not from Google, don’t forget other search engines rank your content too – duckduckgo.com, Bing, Yahoo etc.

Make an effort to create high quality content which will stand the test of time. As a blogger, it’s the long game. If you want it faster, use PPC – see PPC vs organic.

Affiliate Marketing For Digital Products

Why use affiliate marketing for digital products? Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties can earn commissions selling other people’s products and services, mostly online. Digital products are popular with affiliates because you can earn considerably more from a sale with them than their physical counterparts. A typical physical affiliate product will pay between 1% and 10% commission. A digital product on the other hand will pay between 30% and 40% commission.

So for the same valued product at say $100, you can earn as little as only $1 for the sale with a physical product. With a digital product you can expect to earn from $30-$40 for the sale. When much of the work is the same, it makes total sense to choose the better paying product, as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Marketing For Digital Products – Subscriptions

Another key element for top earning affiliates is to choose products which pay out recurring commissions. A physical product will only pay you once for the referral. But with digital items (which carry memberships or a subscription), you can continue earning if there’s an ongoing payment scheme involved in the purchase.

Software products such as business tools, training and education resources tend to offer recurring payments for affiliates. These are a good choice because they are necessary for online businesses. Things such as email autoresponders, software for online businesses and training and education tools often carry memberships and are essential for some businesses.

Affiliate Marketing For Digital Products : Selling A Digital Product

With a physical product selling can be fairly straight forward because the customer generally knows what they’re getting. So you can sell a physical product from a website directly. But digital product can be a little more obscure. This is why a lot of affiliates will build an email list in order to sell their digital products.

With a website, the visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. Once they leave your website, they are gone forever. But if you can get them on your email list, you can build a relationship, give value through your messages and give them more information about the value of your product/s.

Email lists are used to nurture, engage and build trust with potential customers over a longer timeframe. This just isn’t possible on a website. They are particularly useful for the sale of digital products because you can offer more information about your products to those who are unsure of the value or need for such a product.

Sale Of Digital Products

Digital products can be sold globally too, which is another reason they are so appealing. Not only can affiliate earn over twice the amount from the same valued product, but there’s no limit to where you can sell them.

Someone on the other side of the world can find your website and buy something digitally, all completely online. No postage, no international shipping costs, far fewer manufacturing costs. Hence why affiliates earn more from the selling of digital products.

With a website you can automate sales to an unlimited number of customers which makes digital products one of the best business models you can use with affiliate marketing.

How To Sell A Digital Products

Affiliates use several different marketing techniques to sell their affiliate products and not all affiliates use the same strategies. Most however will use online strategies and send customers to products through their unique affiliate links. Affiliates use digital marketing techniques such as landing pages, advertising platforms, blogging and content creation or social media strategies to bring targeted customers to products and services.

One strategy used by affiliates is to use an advertising platform such as Google Adwords to set up adverts targeted towards specific keyword searches on Google. When someone clicks on the advert, they are take to a landing page where they collect the visitor’s email address. They then follow up with an email marketing campaign. This strategy can be easily scaled up to a large number of subscribers with a large enough marketing budget. See also PPC vs organic marketing.

Affordable Search Engine Ranking

If you’re looking for an affordable search engine ranking, in this article I’ll explain a ranking strategy I use to get completely free traffic from the search engines. Now keep in mind you can’t rank for any given keyword.

Many keywords have thousands upon thousands of competing websites for them. Especially in a competitive industry/niche. So ranking for those specific terms will be exceptionally difficult. It will require building of thousands of back links from authority sites and building up a site over time.

However, there’s a clever way you can build a site which gives you a good chance of getting ranked on Google, and other search engines. It’s known as a keyword domain name website.

Affordable Search Engine Ranking – What Are Keyword Domain Names?

A keyword domain name is a domain name which has a specific keyword in it. This site, for example, has been built around a specific keyword with Google search in mind “digital marketing mentors“.

Now you can’t just pick any old keyword, build a site around it and rank on the first page of Google. For starters, the most searched for keywords will have far too much competition. Secondly, those domain names have already been taken! Top terms such as “make money online” which have the largest number of monthly searches are far too competitive.

However, if you “niche down” and find a term which relates to your business but which offers much less competition, you have a chance of ranking your website on the first page of Google!

To do this you need to type your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner. Look at some keywords to build your site around.

Affordable Search Engine Ranking – Researching Keywords To Build A Niche Website Around

Your niche website will ultimately be built around a specific keyword of your choosing. This choice is an important one because it will largely determine whether you rank for that particular term on Google, (and/or the other search engines).

Head to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword. So if you have a business selling gadgets, you would type “gadgets” into the planner.

Here’s some of the results which came up for this search:

If we choose a keyword from this list, we can compare the relative competitiveness on Google with a quick search:

keyword research for niche website building

This search brings up a number of the top of Google (on a desktop computer/laptop). You can see it in the image above: 270,000,000. Next, do a phrase match search for the term in quotation marks like so:

finding a low competition keyword for a niche website

Again, you see a number at the top which denotes the number of competing web pages for this particular term. This term is far too competitive, so we need to look for something with less competition, so we have more chance of ranking our website and getting free traffic!

Finding A Long Tail Keyword Which Can Rank

You can browse through the keyword planner and look for less competitive keyword phrases which would make a good name for your website. Look at the longer tail keywords which have fewer monthly searches.

These are the ones which have less competition on Google. Although they get less traffic than the competitive terms, they also have fewer competing websites. So if you build a website around the term, you have a much higher chance of getting ranked and therefore getting free traffic from your niche website.

Here’s an example of a keyword I spotted in this niche “inexpensive gadgets for guys”:

Looking on Google, you can see this term is far less competitive that the last example:

I’m fairly confident that if you built a site around this term, you would get a slice of the traffic. Still you need to consider how much it’s worth building a site for a keyword which only gets 140 monthly views. This might not be enough for what we want. Even if we rank our site at the top of Google, we still only share those searches with the other top 3-4 websites which rank. This only amounts to a couple of hits a day on our website – if we rank!

Here’s a better one which gets far more monthly views “tech gifts for men“:

This might be more difficult to rank a site for, but you can see for a phrase match it look fairly uncompetitive. However, you’re still going up against bit companies when you look at a basic Google search (GQ Magazine and John Lewis are the top results):

Buying A Keyword Domain Name

Once you have chosen a good keyword, look on Namecheap.com for a domain name with your keyword in it. Ideally get a .com if you have an international business. If your business is local, look for the local domain name suffix which is most appropriate to your country. So for the UK where I am, if I had a locally based business it would be .co.uk.

If you can’t get your exact domain name, look for one with something added at the end, rather than the beginning. With this site for example I added “online” to the end of the domain name.

What’s Your Niche?

By finding a good keyword phrase within your niche and which fits the search criteria of your target market persona, you can ultimately build a website which brings in customers completely for free (apart from the domain and hosting cost of course)! Of course there’s some work to be done on your website too once you have built it. Use an SEO plugin to help you create some content on your site which targets your customer avatar.

You can use this same strategy to build content into your website which attracts more searches too. Simply look for the low hanging fruit in terms of uncompetitive keywords. Create content around those keywords and hey presto, more traffic!

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Increase E-commerce Conversion

There’s many ways to increase e-commerce conversion. The first one which springs to mind is to get more eyes on your website. Without a good volume of website traffic it’s going to be more difficult to sell. But there’s other things to consider too such as your email list. By getting website visitors to join an email list, you can increase your conversion rate.

On a list you get the opportunity to get in front of your subscribers a lot more frequently than is possible only from a website. Most website visitors leave without having taken any action and it takes around 6-8 touch points before many website visitors will actually make a purchase.

So by offering a good value driven “giveaway” on your website, you can encourage more people to join an email list of subscribers. You can nurture your email list by giving them value driven email messages, and information about your products/services.

Increase E-commerce Conversion – Optimise

Most website visitors will click away when they have to wait more than a few seconds for a website to load. So if you have a problem with loading speed on your website you could be losing thousands of potential customers.

There’s plugins you can use to help optimise the speed of your website. Checkout this article on the 7 best wordpress plugins for speed optimisation.

Optimising for mobile is another important thing you should do, since many website visitors now browse using their phones! If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, they are more likely to click away and find a website which works better for them! Again, money on the table!

There’s tools and software which allow you to see how your website visitors interact on your website too. By altering the navigation on your site, you can create a better flow through to your most important (and best selling) pages. See website visitor tracking for some available tools.

Increase E-commerce Conversion: Send Abandoned Cart Emails/Retargeting

When someone decides to drop a purchase and abandon their shopping cart on an e-commerce website, you can track it and follow up with an email. Here’s one I received a while ago after leaving a cart on a website for AVG (website antivirus protection).

Notice the handy button in the email to “complete my order” so I can pick up where I left off! User personalisation can be set up to work completely automatically too.

If someone has watched one of your videos, but not another, you can tailor make an email (once you have it) which talks to their position through your sales funnel/sales process. Personalising emails like this means you get more engagement with potential customers who are moving through your sales systems.

Retargeting can also be used for website visitors who have left your website. You can set up a retargeting campaign which reengages them on another website through the use of cookies which “follow” them off your site, and advertises to them on another.

Increase e-commerce Conversion – Customer Reviews/Guarantees

Use customer reviews where your website visitors will see them clearly. A good list of customer reviews helps new visitors trust your company more. Most online shoppers won’t buy immediately from a website they don’t know and trust. Amazon is favoured by shoppers because it’s a trusted brand. But to get people to trust you is more difficult if they don’t know you.

where customers most shop online — https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirimasters/2019/03/20/study-89-of-consumers-are-more-likely-to-buy-products-from-amazon-than-other-e-commerce-sites/

Offering a guarantee builds more trust online too, so make sure your website visitors are aware of your guarantees, and they are protected if they want a refund.

A/B Testing/Opt In Offers

Marketers who build huge email lists of subscribers to deliver products through email marketing will have tested their web/landing pages to optimise for opt ins. Your opt in rate is a factor you can test and control. So it’s a good idea to look at your email opt in offer. What does someone get when they sign up to your email list and is it worth it? How does your website communicate the value in your offer?

By testing different web pages and opt in offers you can build an understanding of which ones work the best. Here’s an example of a cross testing of a landing page (pic above). By testing one against the other over a similar number of visitors, you can optimise for opt ins. Changing elements of landing pages such as colour, headings, benefits and position of opt in form (the right works best) all have an effect on your rate.

Provide A Live Chat Service

A live chat helps answer customer questions and engage potential customers. You can use a “bot” very cheaply and many marketers do so because it increases their conversion rate. Checkout the 10 best WordPress chatbot plugins for websites.

Email receipts & Trust Building

Usually when someone buys something they expect to receive an email receipt. You can use this as an opportunity to showcase your other services and/or products. Buying customers are much more likely to repurchase, particularly if they’ve had a good experience. You’ve proved they can trust you.

Trust online is earned not given. One of the best ways to build trust with potential customers is through email marketing. By sending emails which are value driven and offer some useful information, you are building trust with your potential customers, whether or not they buy from you.

Get to know your target market persona so you can deliver value driven emails which talk to them. If you know their pains and problems, you’re much better able to communicate to them in a language they understand.

Use More Opt-In Options

You can increase your email conversion rate from a website by offering more ways for your website visitors to sign up to your email list. Use pop-ups, email forms, drop down menus and direct links to landing pages. Make sure each page of your website has an offer on it whereby visitors know they value you give through your email list.