So far, here's what we've accomplished:
- Chose a topic & address for our business
- Built a website & started publishing content
- Learned how to get traffic to our website
- Found some affiliate programs and products to monetize our traffic
It may seem underwhelming, but this is the basics of how I make money online, and how affiliate marketing works. You could continue to grow traffic and sales with just these lessons.
Making money in affiliate marketing is that freakin simple
Your Main Tasks Moving Forward
Honestly, at this point, you could do just two things every day for the rest of the year and be making good money by the end of those 12 months: 1. Research 2. Write
The fuel for my niche websites has always been content. The more content you write, the more traffic you get. It doesn’t matter if an article gets 1 or 100 visits a day, it’s still increasing daily visit rate. Do nothing but research keywords and write for a few years and it's almost guaranteed that you'll have several thousand visitors every single day.
Here's a snapshot of two of my affiliate websites:
200,000 monthly page views in 6 years!
150 monthly page views in 4 years!
No Matter What, Traffic = Money
Let’s say you write content for an entire year and make $0 but have 2,000 visits a day to your website. You can absolutely sell that website for a tidy profit, or even just put some Google Adsense on there and start making money that way.
Another option: Get an autoresponder service and starting to collect emails, then send out some affiliate promotions in your emails.
It’s virtually impossible to have a website with traffic that doesn’t make money in some way or another.
Two Main Mistakes I See Newbies Make
1. Sometimes it takes a really long time to see results. I wrote for One More Cup of Coffee for 5 months before I got over 100 visits in a single day. Almost a decade later, I get several thousand visits a day.
While I was grinding for those 5 months, it seemed like forever. Now, I see how that time of stress and hard work as worth it. I use that same concept to fuel my daily work.
Most people will quit out of frustration or boredom. Don’t be that person.
In all honestly, how long is a year? Can you dedicate just a single year of your life to trying to figure out this online business thing? Is your time so precious that you can't risk a bit of it to better yourself?
Starting an affiliate business is not that hard compared to any other hobby you might pick up. Guitar. Baseball. Weight lifting. Woodworking. Gardening.
You're just gonna suck for a while, but you'll get better over time if you take action ever day. Even just 30 minutes a day counts for a lot!
The big difference with affiliate marketing and any other hobby is that it pays. You can be a crappy affiliate marketer and earn an extra $500 per month. A great affiliate marketer can earn six figures no problem.
High school kids and grandparents can do it. You can do it it too.
2. Buying stuff won't get you faster results. Any program, PDF, or mentorship that claims to be able to skyrocket your earnings in a week or supercharge your website with unlimited traffic is a straight up scam.
Some of these guides are tricks that worked one time, so now the guy sees himself as an expert. You know what works all the time? Writing content that people want to read.
A lot of the other garbage people sell online just uses flowery language and high quality videos to deceive you. A phrase like “Earn unlimited money from YouTube starting today!” could just be a two minute clip on how to add affiliate links to your YouTube video descriptions. Technically, it's true. There is no limit to what you can earn from affiliate links on YouTube. The deception is clear though.
Lastly, there's just a lot of scams out there, some of which could damage your website. Backlink packages, traffic from Indian click farms, blog networks, traffic exchanges – they're all junk aimed at making you feel like things are happening too slow for you.
The process is gonna be slow. Every single shortcut I've taken in the past has screwed me. Please learn from my mistakes.
Support Means A Better Chance of Success
Going it alone is going to be tough. If you got through these lessons already, then you know that although starting an affiliate website is exciting, it's also challenging. There are times where you just can't figure something out.
This is exactly why I recommend the Wealthy Affiliate community above all other products I’ve ever reviewed. There’s no other place online that you can get such helpful, friendly, and fast support while building a niche business.
The technical part of building a business is pretty simple. Build a website. Get traffic. The tough part is knowing where to turn when you get stuck. Having a group of people support you and help with the tough questions was an invaluable resource to me as a newbie.
On top of that, there's just only so much I can teach you by myself. I created these tutorial in 2013, then revamped everything in 2019. It was a lot of freakin' work guys, and I've just scratched the surface.
What about paid ads with Facebook and Bing? What about creating logos and customizing images for Pinterest?
How do you optimize YouTube videos for search engines? Is Twitter worth my time? Why won't Search Console verify my sitemap?
There are 1,000+ member-created training videos available to Premium members of the community to help you out with this stuff. I've got more that fifty I created myself, and there are even more prolific members with hundreds to their name. This is just the extra stuff though!
The main thing with Wealthy Affiliate is that it's all you need to run your business. A Premium membership includes hosting, so for $49/month (+$14/year for a domain) you can run your entire business. Compared to a brick and mortar business that's just insane. A restaurant loan from a bank is gonna roll in at about $200,000 or more!
Even if you look at other ways to build your affiliate site online, having everything bundled makes it a lot cheaper and simpler to run your business.
If you are starting to take this online business thing seriously, and want to do it right the first time around, Wealthy Affiliate is what you need. I could not have achieved the level of income and success that I have today without them, and they are still my #1 affiliate marketing resource.
What's Next?
In Level 1 of the training, the order of events was important. You needed to pick a topic before you bought a domain – that type of thing.
Now that your website is set up and you know how to generate content, the rest of the training is à la carte, meaning you can pick and choose what to do next. I've created Level 2 (check the menu bar) training from the most important “next steps” to affiliate marketing.
Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. My name is Nathaniell and I'm the owner of One More Cup of Coffee. I started my first online business in 2010 promoting computer software and now I help newbies start their own businesses. Sign up for my #1 recommended training course and learn how to start your business for FREE!
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