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The Wealthy Affiliate:  

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

by George Kosch, MSc, Capt (Ret’d)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents 

 

Chapter 1: What is Affiliate Marketing and Why You Should Take Notice ............... 5 

What is Affiliate Marketing? ................................................................................ 7 

Should You Become an Affiliate Marketer or Sell Your Own Product? ............ 10 

Chapter 2: The Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle – The Reality Behind the Hype and is it 

Right for You? .................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Affiliate Marketing – The Reality ....................................................................... 15 

How Much Will You Earn? .............................................................................. 16 

What Are Your Goals? ........................................................................................ 17 

Who is Affiliate Marketing For .......................................................................... 20 

Chapter 3: A Quick Set-Up to Start Earning Money RIGHT NOW . Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Your First Automated Income ........................................................................... 21 

Creating a Landing Page ................................................................................. 25 

Chapter 4: Building Your Empire – Setting Up the Essentials ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Creating a Website ............................................................................................ 28 

Domain Name ................................................................................................ 28 

Hosting .......................................................................................................... 28 

Setting Up WordPress ................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Setting Up an Autoresponder ............................................................................. 32 

Creating a Checkout and Sales Page .................................................................. 34 

Setting Up Your Social Media ............................................................................. 35 

Chapter 4: Promoting Your Brand and Building Trust – From Content Marketing 

and SEO to List Building and Social Media ............................................................ 37 How to Succeed on Social Media ........................................................................ 37 

SEO Basics ......................................................................................................... 41 

More PPC .......................................................................................................... 46 

Google AdWords ............................................................................................ 46 

CPA ................................................................................................................. 47 

Creating a Brand ............................................................................................... 48 

Creating Your Logo ........................................................................................ 48 

Should You Create a Personal Brand?............................................................ 50 

Staying On Message ........................................................................................ 51 Chapter 5: How to Create Stunning Content That Gets Shares, Likes and 

Conversions ..................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Selling Directly From Content......................................................................... 53 How to Create Great, Clickable Titles ............................ Error! Bookmark not defined. 

How to Get Shares for Your Content .................................................................. 56 

Chapter 6: How to Write Sales Copy That Really Works ....................................... 58 

Introducing AIDA .............................................................................................. 59 

Working the Emotions: Value Propositions and More ...................................... 60 

Facts, Figures and Social Proof ......................................................................... 63 

Chapter 7: An Introduction to the Most Popular Affiliate Networks And Other 

Options ............................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. 

ClickBank, CJ and More ..................................................................................... 65 

Amazon Associates ........................................................................................... 66 

ShareASale ........................................................................................................ 70 

More Options and Strategies .............................................................................. 70 

Chapter 8: How to Choose Products That Will Bring You Massive Commissions

......................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Your Profits ....................................................................................................... 72 

Popularity .......................................................................................................... 74 

Does it Work for You? ........................................................................................ 76 

Other Considerations ......................................................................................... 77 

Chapter 9: Building and Using a Mailing List to Promote Affiliate Offers .............. 81 

Why Internet Marketing is Ideal for Affiliates .................................................. 84 

How to Build Your Mailing List ......................................................................... 85 

Pop-Overs and Mentions .................................................................................... 87 

Writing Your E-Mails ........................................................................................ 89 

Building a Sales Funnel..................................................................................... 92 

Chapter 10: Advanced Techniques – Flyers, AdSwaps, Influencer Marketing and 

More .................................................................................................................... 93 

Influencer Marketing ........................................................................................ 93 

Real World Marketing ....................................................................................... 95 

Video Marketing ............................................................................................... 96 

Press Releases ............................................................................................... 96 

Advanced Affiliate Business Models .................................................................. 96 

Chapter 11: Safeguarding Your Affiliate Links Using Cloakers and Redirects ........ 97 

What is Link Cloaking and Why You Should Do It? ........................................... 98 How to Use Cloakers and Redirects .................................................................. 98 

Chapter 12: Alternatives to Affiliate Marketing ................ Error! Bookmark not defined. 

Creating a Digital Product ................................................................................ 101 

Marketing ........................................................................................................ 102 

Chapter 13: Your Complete Plan for Affiliate Marketing Domination ................. 104 

Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 106 

 

  

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1:  What is Affiliate Marketing  and Why You Should Take Notice

 

Ever seen videos of people claiming they make ‘a million a day posting a few ads’? If so, then you’ve come into contact with affiliate marketing. Sure, affiliate marketing is not particularly likely to make you that much money unless you’re an absolute pro, and as a general rule, it will involve a lot more work than ‘posting a few ads a day’ – particularly to begin with!

But despite all this, there is truth in the claim that you can earn an awful lot of money doing very little with affiliate marketing. In fact, affiliate marketing is really the only legitimate tool you have to accomplish this kind of lifestyle. Affiliate marketing is simply the very easiest way to get set up with a money-generating business model that provides passive income and that doesn’t see you exchanging time for money.

In other words, whereas working in an office requires you to slave away at a desk in order for you to get paid by the hour; affiliate marketing is something that lets you earn cash while you’re asleep. You need to be smart setting it up but once you’ve done that successfully it will be automated; all that’s left for you to do is to handle a little maintenance.

Does this mean you should sign up to one of those ads on Facebook? Heck no! Whenever you see an ad like this, what you’ve always got to question is: what’s in it for them? If they’re offering to help you earn money online so easily, you need to wonder why they need you at all. Most likely, they’re recruiting people like you to act as ‘grunts’ meaning that you’ll promote their offers and they’ll ‘share the revenue’ with you. This is obviously not the most efficient way to make money online and you shouldn’t touch it with a barge pole! The other possibility is that they’re going to sell you a very expensive course or make you sign up to some kind of expensive program – either of which will benefit you far less than it will benefit them.

The earliest warning sign with programs like this should always be the lack of information. ‘Make money posting a few ads a day’ is very vague and it’s a rather big promise. There’s no explanation up-front as to how this would work and no mention of the word ‘affiliate marketing’.

In this scenario, those people selling the courses and programs have the advantage of information over you. A much better strategy then is to simply learn the basics of affiliate marketing yourself so that you can create your own business model to suit you. All you need to know is what affiliate marketing is, how it works and what the best techniques are for ensuring your success. That’s precisely what you’ll learn in this book. Throughout the course of this mega-tome, you’ll be learning every last thing about how affiliate marketing works fundamentally, the various different techniques used and crucially the various growth hacks and tricks you can use to get ahead of your competition.

Will you be able to make a million dollars a day by posting a few ads? Maybe, maybe not. But what you will have is the knowledge to potentially make that possible and certainly to generate a lot of income on an automated basis. You can’t say fairer than that!

 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

 

So enough beating about the bush! At this point if you’re a complete beginner you probably still don’t know what affiliate marketing is. As we’re not trying to sell you anything, it makes sense to get that bit out of the way first!

(If you aren’t a complete beginner and you do know what affiliate marketing is, then you’re perfectly okay to skip this section. But you will be missing out on some useful information if you do that could help you later.)

Simply put then, affiliate marketing is a type of online marketing where you will be selling a product for commission. This is precisely the same business model as being a door-to-door salesman: you are selling something that someone else made but for a cut of the profit. 

There are a few key differences between being an affiliate marketer though and being a door to door salesman – key differences that make what we do far more appealing and potentially profitable.

The first and most obvious advantage of being an affiliate marketer is that you’ll be selling products online rather than having to do it face to face. This makes the job considerably easier if you’re someone who doesn’t have the ‘gift of the gab’ and it also means you’ll have considerably lower overheads and considerably less work to do yourself. You can simply sit at home and make a very healthy income by sending a few emails and by running a website/social media channel. 

What’s more, is that you will be able to reach a huge number of people compared with a door-to-door salesman because the business is far more scalable. The internet makes it possible for us to reach a gigantic number of people at once and potentially to promote a product to thousands of people every day. Considering that a salesman will have a good day if they manage to get around 10 people, you can see right away that this has a far bigger potential for earning.

 

The Wealthy Affiliate:  

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

Quick Lesson: Force Multiplier

In this case, we can consider the internet to be something known in business as a ‘force multiplier’. A force multiplier is any tool or resource that allows you to amplify your output without having to change your input. 

The most basic example of this would be a hammer. Hammers allow you to multiply the amount of force that is hitting the nail without you having to generate more force yourself. Give a hammer to a painter-decorator or a builder and they can accomplish significantly more in a day than they could before. 

Another example of a force multiplier would be a forklift truck. If you have a business moving palettes, then you can provide your staff with a forklift and they’ll be able to move a huge number more than before without putting in any extra work. In fact, they can probably put in less work and expend less energy and still accomplish more by the end of the day.

In our case, the force multiplier is the internet. This one tool allows you to amplify your marketing message so that it will be heard with hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. 

Throughout the course of this book, we might also find more force multipliers and a lot of the key to our success – to increasing revenue without increasing overheads – will be in learning to make better use of our force multipliers.

Automation takes force multiplication one step further and allows you to generate income without any input. The most obvious example of this would be something like a digital manufacturing line that could product lots of products on its own. We’ll be looking at how to set up automated processes here too.

Very simply, it’s this simple reliance on force multipliers and automation that didn’t previously exist that makes affiliate marketing possible. Force multipliers and automation normally rely on technology. Eventually enough technology may exist that no one has to trade time for money but for now the only tool advanced enough to make this kind of lifestyle possible is the web. Make use of it!

A Word of Caution: While force multipliers amplify your positive input to help you earn a bigger income, they also amplify mistakes. That means that if you make some kind of error, it will be reproduced to a huge extent and can potentially cause far bigger problems than it could in a manual job. This is why it’s so important to set up your automation and your force multipliers correctly and why observation and maintenance are also crucial.

 

So the volume is much bigger when you work as an internet marketer versus a face-toface salesman. This alone means that you could potentially increase your revenue and thereby your profits – but it goes beyond that. Because actually, affiliate marketing gives you considerably more profit per sale and more commission. In fact, a very standard amount for a product creator to share with affiliates is 60%. That means you’re actually earning more than the person who created the product in the first place! Products can be found for a range of prices too – but if you’re selling a digital product such as an eBook then you can expect to make anything from $30 to $100 for a sale. Online courses and seminars can go for a lot more – sometimes as much as several thousand dollars. Better yet, if you can sell membership to a gambling site, a trading site or a bingo site, you can actually profit from that member for the lifetime of their membership! 

All you have to do then is to advertise the product online – which often really does just involve posting ads to Facebook or sending e-mails – and you can profit every time someone listens to the ad. And we’ll be looking at all sorts of tips to ensure that you’re posting in the right places and promoting your products in the right way too.

So you have a bigger profit margin on each sale and you’re now earning a lot more each time someone bites. This is the promise of internet marketing and it’s what makes the whole idea so appealing to so many people.

 

What’s in it for Them? 

 

You don’t really need to know anything else about affiliate marketing to start learning the ins and outs. All you really need to know is that you’re selling products for commission and getting a very good profit for each sale. 

But that said, it’s always good to ensure you fully grasp a concept like this if you want to make the most from it possible.

A question you might have then is: what’s in it for them? Why would a product creator be happy to give away more than half of the profits for what they’re selling?

The answer to this question is simple: it’s all about volume. Let’s imagine for a moment that you’ve created a product like an eBook. This is a digital product meaning there are no manufacturing costs, no delivery costs and no storage costs (which collectively is known as COGS – Cost Of Goods Sold). Each sale of this product is pure profit for the creator. They’ll then do their best to spread the word and to generate as many sales as they can, but there’s only so much they can do as just one person. They might make 100 sales a day but they could always still make more by getting marketers to sign up and help them sell. 

Imagine how good it would be for them if they had a legion of marketers, all promoting and selling their product for them? Imagine the kind of profit they could generate then! Especially if those marketers were full-time marketers who knew all the ins and outs of successful marketing! 

So why offer such a high percentage? Simple: they want to attract as many affiliate marketers as possible and to lure them away from promoting other products and deals. They might lose 10% per sale by offering 60% instead of 50% but if that means they get one more marketer who sells an additional 300 items a year, then that’s still a much better scenario overall.

As you can see then, this is one of those rare business models where it genuinely offers a win-win situation for the marketers and the product creators. You’ll now be earning a huge 60% for each sale and they’ll be maximizing their income!

Of course it’s only going to be truly win/win all around if the people buying the products are happy too. So how do you ensure this? Simple: you make certain that whatever you are selling is genuinely high quality and is genuinely something that people want.  

Now you’re providing value to the end user and to the product creator and you’re earning a lot of money doing it. This is the ideal scenario for any affiliate marketer.

 

Should You Become an Affiliate Marketer or Sell Your Own Product?

 

If you’re savvy and you have a keen eye for business, then you’re probably wondering whether it’s smarter to be selling your own product. After all, we’ve just seen how they stand to benefit by having legions of marketers selling their products… wouldn’t that be a better scenario?

In truth, the answer is ‘maybe’ and there are certainly advantages to both situations. Let’s have a quick look at the key differences and hopefully that will help you to make the best decision.

 

Advantages of Creating Your Own Product

 

On the face of it, you might initially think that creating your own product is the best option. After all, this means you’ll benefit from 100% profits whenever you make a direct sale and it means that you’ll be able to get at least 40% and possibly more from a ton of other people all promoting your hard work too.

Additionally, selling a product you created and that you’re proud of is also something that brings a lot of satisfaction and gratification. What’s more, it lets you easily align all your marketing efforts with the product itself and stay ‘on message’ all the way through. You can write a website promoting a certain way of life and then sell an eBook as a natural extension of that. This also means people will stay engaged with your brand – instead of pushing people away from your site to buy something else, you’ll be keeping them on your page and the product itself will help to increase awareness, authority and trust. In other words, having used your product and hopefully enjoyed it once, they’ll be considerably more likely to come back to you to buy again in future.

And finally, when you sell products as the owner rather than as an affiliate, you’ll have the full control to change the price, to introduce special offers or even to make changes to the product based on requests. In other words, you’ll have far more flexibility which can be a huge advantage as a marketer.

 

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

 

BUT while this might seem like a lot of wins for product owners, it’s actually not as clear cut as you think.

For starters, creating a product takes a lot of time, effort, money and skill. You can outsource the process or do it yourself but either way this means a lot of work and time before you even get your first product out there to sell. And this is especially true seeing as your product needs to be very good. Selling products that are sub-par will only prevent people from buying from you in future and make you lose a lot of trust and authority. At the same time, people will normally be able to tell from the offset that your product is less than great quality meaning fewer sales.

So if you want to start earning money quickly then you should become an affiliate marketer. But it goes much further than this…

As a product creator you see, there’s no guarantee that your product will sell and there’s no verification. So this means essentially that you could spend months or years creating something and pouring a huge amount of hard work into it… only to find that nobody buys it. The result will be low or no ROI and a huge disappointment. In fact, this can often be enough to completely destroy your motivation and your enthusiasm and to put an end to your business altogether.

To interject briefly with some personal experience, I actually knew someone this happened to. They had a great idea for a website that would allow researchers to find people to cite in their studies. They were a researcher themselves and they had a good understanding of the industry – they knew this was something people needed and that it was something they would use themselves.

From there, they then went about investing a huge amount of time and money to create the product. They sought legal advice and trademarked the name, they built a website (from scratch – not in WordPress) that was responsive enough to work on every sized display (this was before the days when mobile web browsing was so commonplace) and they hired testers to use the product.

Two years and several loans later they launched the product. Two months after that , they filed for bankruptcy when their hosting charges (which were very large) drastically exceeded their ability to pay off the debt. 

There was an awful lot wrong with this business model and the lack of cash flow projections or contingency plans were no small part of that. But what was really wrong here was that he never tested that anyone actually wanted the product and he hadn’t gone about finding a market first. He assumed that people would need his service because he wanted something like it himself. In business though, a ‘hunch’ just isn’t good enough – you need to be certain. 

This is the risk that you put yourself in when you create a product of any kind. On the other hand though, when you work as an affiliate marketer, you will actually have the ability to choose products that are already selling. That’s right: you can pick a product that is a proven success. And when you do this, you have no fear that there isn’t demand for it. If you fail to sell the number of items you’d hoped, then you know with certainty that the issue is not with the product and you just need to sell harder! Why make things more complicated for yourself when you have a proven money maker you can simply start using? It gets better than that too, for as we’ll see later on, selling an affiliate product actually means that you can re-use the existing marketing material often. If the seller has found promotional sales copy that works then they have no reason not to share that with you. You’re literally taking an existing business and repeating it – meaning the risk is hugely mitigated.

And if it doesn’t work out? Then you haven’t lost anything. It takes you about a day to set up a sales funnel and to start trying to earn money if that. And it costs nothing – there is absolutely zero upfront investment and you will breakeven as soon as you make your very first sale!

 

 

  

 

The Wealthy Affiliate:  

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

 

 

 

Quick Lesson: Fail Fast and Verification

One approach to selling a product that is popular in business at the moment is something called ‘fail fast’. What this means is that you minimize your potential risk by minimizing the amount of time it takes to fail. Your objective here is to find out very quickly whether your business model works or not and then to just get out if the answer is that it doesn’t. This way, you minimize your damage. As a product creator, the best way to do this is often to create an ‘MVP’ to test the market. An MVP is a ‘minimally viable product’ and only if that sells well do you then add to that initial concept by improving the product and building on it. This is one way to mitigate risk and it’s especially possible thanks to the fact that most apps can be updated remotely now.

An even better way to mitigate risk though is to avoid creating the product in the first place until you’re sure it will sell. This is called ‘verification’ and an example of how you might do this could be to have a sales page and then only tell the user that the product isn’t ready yet after they’ve clicked ‘buy’. You can then see how many people would have bought your product and thus make a decision whether to go ahead based on that. Better yet is to collect pre-orders.

When you’re an affiliate marketer though, all the verification is done for you already. You’re selling a product that is already selling well. Thus you know that you’re onto a winner and you absolutely minimize your risk.

Finally, when you sell something as an affiliate, the business model you’ll be using is still highly scalable meaning you can increase your revenue and you can increase your profits.

In fact, it’s an understatement to say your business model is scalable – it’s even better than that. Affiliate marketing is actually repeatable and what this means is that the business model can simply be repeated over and over again.

Remember when we said it potentially takes a single day to create a landing page and start selling an affiliate product? That means that there’s nothing stopping you from creating 100 landing pages for 100 different products in 100 days. If each one sells only once a day and you make $30 per sale… well then you’re now making $3,000 a day. And that business will be incredible resilient and therefore stable – because it’s highly unlikely that all the products would stop selling at once.

Affiliate marketing is the perfect business model in many ways then because all you need to do is to take an existing product with an existing promotional campaign and then share it. It’s literally a ‘copy and paste’ business and when you know a few key things it’s practically fool-proof!

Note: If you do decide you’d rather create and sell your own product then don’t worry – a lot of the information in this book will still apply and you simply have to use it to promote your own product instead of someone else’s!

        

Chapter 2: 

The Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle  

– The Reality Behind the Hype and Is It Right for You? 

 

Hopefully, after reading that lengthy introduction to affiliate marketing, you’re now ready and raring to go. We’ve seen how you’ll essentially be taking other people’s business models and then just repeating them for your own profit. And we’ve seen how you can repeat that process over and over again to scale up your income to a huge extent. So it’s pretty much a dream job in many ways.

But how likely are you to succeed? What does this job actually entail on a day-to-day basis? How much can you realistically expect to earn and what kind of person makes a good affiliate marketer?

Let’s take a look…

 

Affiliate Marketing – The Reality

 

We’ve painted a pretty nice picture of affiliate marketing so far as a job anyone can do and that can generate big income. And it’s certainly true – a lot of people making a huge amount of money marketing this way and it’s the very best way to make a living if your key goal is fast and straightforward income.

But will you be able to pack in your job tomorrow? Most likely not. Of course there are still challenges when it comes to being an affiliate marketer and there’s still a fair amount of work and smarts involved – otherwise everyone would be doing it.

As a marketer you really have two options. One is to market through advertising – using Facebook Ads and Google AdWords in order to reach a highly targeted audience. The other is to build your own audience over time who will trust what you have to say.

The latter is the preference because it allows you to build a stable income selling repeatedly to the same group. It also means that you don’t have to pay for advertising. But unfortunately, this strategy is also a lot more slow going and it takes a lot of time to build up the kind of trust and authority you need to begin making money. If you choose to go the advertising route though, then you need to invest money into those ad campaigns in order to get money out. In theory, you should always earn money back and get a good ROI for your efforts – you’ll be paying a few cents per click so if you are targeting the right people you should make a few sales before your overheads exceed your profits. But this takes time and effort to get right and that in turn means that you might lose a little money before you hit upon the perfect ‘formula’ to start generating cash. There’s an element of luck here too as you need to happen across the right product and the right advertising campaign to maximize your income.

Most affiliate marketers will use a combination of these strategies – they will advertise while at the same time building a mailing list and running a blog. 

For these reasons, you certainly shouldn’t hand in your notice tomorrow and it will take time to start seeing BIG income.

 

How Much Will You Earn?

 

So how much can you expect to earn precisely and how long will it take? Well, the answer to this ranges hugely depending on your product, the amount of work you put in and your luck.

To be completely honest, it certainly is possible to start seeing an income in the first day. If you choose the right product and pay for some ads, you might well generate a couple of sales before long.

But when you start out with your sales page, you can expect it to convert <1% of the time. That means that for every 100 visitors, you’ll get less than one sale. With practice it can get higher (10% being a very good target for the advanced marketer). 

Likewise CTR (click through rate) on adverts doesn’t tend to be particularly high either

– maybe about .1-.2%. So now you have a situation where your ad will need to be seen by 1,000-2,000 people for you to get a single sale. Luckily if you’re paying for advertising, you will only pay when someone clicks your advert – but that still means you’ll need to pay for 100 clicks before you’re likely to make a sale. What’s more, the more you pay for each click, the more likely it is that your advert will be seen (adverts appear based on ‘bids’ with the highest paying ad winning the ad slots most regularly). If you pay 30 cents per click (a fairly average amount in order to get your required 10,000 views), then you’re going to be paying $30 to get your one conversion. (All this will be explained in more detail later on, for now just go with it).

If you’re getting $40 for each sale then, you’re now spending $30 for $10 profit. To earn a reasonable $200 a day then, you’d have to be spending $600 on advertising. That’s a fairly big investment and especially if you’re nervous to begin with.

And if you plan on building your own audience so you don’t need to rely on ads, then you’re going to need to get your website/mailing list/social media account to the point where you’re reaching 100,000-200,000 people a day in order to make a real living. This is something that certainly won’t happen overnight and rather you’re looking at a good few years before you’re likely to get to that point. And that will be a few years of posting articles, sharing links, networking and trying to avoid being dissatisfied with your slow start.

Should you give up? Not at all! Everything will be explained in this book and we’ll look at some methods you can use to save time and enhance your profits. But just know that you’re not going to be rich overnight (despite what those adverts claim). You’re going to have to work hard – and work smart – in order to reap the benefits later on.

 

What Are Your Goals?

 

This then is going to be perhaps your most important lesson in the entire book – and it’s something that will help you to practically guarantee success no matter what business model you end up settling on.

The key is to know your goals and to know your timeframe. Unrealistic expectations is the single biggest obstacle for 90% of affiliate marketers and is more often than not what ends up being their undoing.

If you become an affiliate marketer thinking that it’s going to make you rich overnight and thinking that it involves nothing but posting occasionally to a blog, then you’re going to be very disappointed. Likewise though, if you think you need to quit your day job and take out a loan in order to spend the next two years developing your marketing platform then you’re going to be putting your family in financial jeopardy and you’re going to be taking an unnecessary risk.

Instead, you need to have realistic goals and a realistic time frame. Using the calculations above, you should be able to come up with a reasonable $10 a day business model using a landing page and a $30 ad spend. This is something most of us can afford to risk. Meanwhile, if you can get your website page views up to 200 a day, then you can realistically get $10 a week within the first couple of months.

As long as you’re willing to wait that long and as long as you’re willing to invest the necessary (and small amount of) time and money, then this is practically guaranteed and relatively low-risk.

That’s not going to change your life of course. BUT what it will do is to allow you to earn $70 from advertising a week and $280 a month. Suddenly, things have started looking up. And if you add the $40 a month from your website, you now have $320 a month profit in total which comes to $3,840 a year.

Before you scoff at that, think about how much of a difference just this small amount of money could make to your lifestyle. This is enough to afford a holiday to somewhere rather nice for you and your partner! Or maybe you could put it into savings and earn $38,400 over ten years before tax and interest. That’s a pretty nice nest egg for a child and a decent deposit on a small house even!

But what’s more, is that this ‘small’ amount of regular income will grow over time. Because after the first couple of weeks you’ll have more money in your pot and you can begin to increase your investment in ads regularly. As long as your conversion rates stay consistent, the more money you spend on advertising the more you will be able to scale your income!

And of course your website traffic will grow over time and there’s nothing to prevent you from setting up more revenue streams… Suddenly, the amount you’re earning will grow and grow.

It will take you a long time to become a millionaire then but it’s possible to get there – at least partly thanks to the exponential growth that you often see as a marketer (which is to say that you don’t gain one new follower a week but more likely several and then several more at a time).

But the point is that it will take no time at all to start seeing an improvement in your lifestyle. Don’t aim too big to start with; make this your initial goal and then grow from there. That way you’re far less likely to become disappointed and to give up.

 

How to Quit Your Job and Become an Internet Marketer

 

What’s more, this gives you a much more stable way to become full time as an internet marketer and it means there’s no risk and nothing to be afraid of. Want to ‘quit the rat race’ and stop working eight hours a day in a job you hate? That doesn’t have to mean suddenly quitting and storming out and leaving yourself with no steady income!

Instead, all you have to do is to set up a small amount of income through affiliate marketing to make a little bit more cash… and then to grow this income steadily over time to the point where you’re making a lot of money. Only once you’re earning a very stable income do you then consider quitting your day job and going ‘full time’ as someone who works online. You could even try earning money fully online on a ‘trial basis’ to begin with, or you could reduce your work to be part time – or do a job that you enjoy even if it doesn’t bring in as much cash. There’s zero risk, nothing to be afraid of and everything to potentially gain!

 

 

Lifestyle Design and the Digital Nomad  Keeping your ‘ultimate goal’ in mind as an affiliate marketer is also important for other reasons. A lot of people who start working online will do so because they want to change the world and to be a famous entrepreneur. A lot of people start out wanting to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. But often, those same people would find that achieving that would actually be unfulfilling. If you’re trying to get to a place where you’re doing less work, then setting up a huge international business actually isn’t the answer. It’s also clearly not the quickest way to make it happen. As an affiliate marketer, you will be making money by taking an existing business model and product and selling it to people. You categorically are not changing the world and thus you won’t be a famous entrepreneur. You might build some recognition as an influencer in your niche if you build a mailing list, but you certainly are not Mark Zuckerberg – it’s important that you’re okay with that before you go ahead. Actually though, this is what many of us actually want when we set out to start earning more money. Think about the things that would actually make you happy: More time with your family Less financial stress More money to travel and see the world The ability to get up when you want/to lie in bed More time to spend enjoying hobbies/working on your passion projects Now if you think of these points as being your actual goals – suddenly it doesn’t make sense to take on more responsibilities as the head of the next start-up. ‘Success’ in the traditional sense is not actually the fastest route to freedom and security. Affiliate marketing on the other hand cuts all the excess that comes from running a business and just gives you the freedom and the income. This is what’s known as lifestyle design. Lifestyle design was originally popularized by Tim Ferriss in the book The Four Hour Workweek and it describes the process of choosing a career and income to suit the kind of lifestyle you want. Instead of fitting your life around the job you do and deciding how much you travel and where to live on that basis, you instead choose your career to support the lifestyle you want. You don’t actually need to be rich to live in a sunny country – you just need to be able to work remotely. And you could probably afford to travel more if you weren’t paying for an expensive commute every day to work! Lifestyle design means prioritizing the things you want out of life and this is made very possible when you work online in any capacity.

And the natural extension of lifestyle design? For those who love to travel and see other countries, that would be to become a ‘digital nomad’. A digital nomad is someone who doesn’t have any single address and instead travels the world, working online as they do. If you work online as a digital nomad then you won’t need an office and you’ll be able to work from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. Combine this with the fact that you’ll be earning passive income and there’s nothing to stop you from travelling around the world and working in cafes or on beaches as an affiliate marketer.

 

Who is Affiliate Marketing For

 

With all that in mind, affiliate marketing is perfect for anyone who wants to support their current lifestyle with supplementary income and anyone who eventually wants to quit the rat race and start living a far more relaxed and flexible lifestyle. This isn’t about creating the next big thing or being a technological marvel – it’s about taking the fastest and most efficient route to securing a stable passive income.

It doesn’t give you riches overnight and it does require work to begin with. But you can start to benefit right away by working for just a few hours in the evenings and after a couple of years you’ll be earning big bucks if you do everything right. 

And in terms of the actual ‘day to day’, you’ll spend most of your time looking for products, posting and designing adverts, looking at the performance of your campaigns, writing e-mails and posting blog posts. You’ll also work on social media a fair amount and may occasionally want to outsource some tasks to designers and writers. This does of course meaning spending a fair amount of time in front of the computer and as you won’t have a boss, you’ll need to be self-motivated and disciplined to make sure you don’t spend all that time on YouTube looking at videos of cats.

The skills you’ll need for this are relatively few. Having a good understanding for business will help a lot but we’ll go over a lot of that as it relates specifically to internet marketing in this book. Likewise, it’s very useful to be able to write at least fairly well. You’ll be doing most of your marketing via the written word, so this is a highly useful skill. As long as you have the basics though, we’ll look at how to make your writing more persuasive here.

Finally, you’ll benefit from having some basic skills with regards to IT. You don’t need to know how to program or to understand complex networks – you just need to have the basic technical knowhow to find your way around web-apps and social media. As long as you’re able to use a computer to a basic level, the rest should be fairly self-explanatory.

So if you can tick those boxes and if you know what you want, then you’re ready to start earning money as an affiliate marketer.

Chapter 3: 

A Quick Set-Up to Start Earning Money RIGHT NOW! 

 

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

We’ve talked a lot already and have barely even touched on the tools, steps or processes involved in becoming an affiliate marketer. Perhaps you hoped to have a lot more technical knowledge by now but all the above is crucial to ensure that you grasp the fundamentals of affiliate marketing and that you go into it with the right mind-set to ensure your eventual success. Often it’s knowing how to approach affiliate marketing and understanding its nuts and bolts that really makes the difference.

But just in case you’re getting a little impatient, we’re about to take the complete opposite tact. We’re now going to jump in with a highly straightforward and simple business model that you can use to start earning money right away as an affiliate marketer. This chapter will outline a few simple steps you can take to start earning money immediately and that you can execute without any experience or specialist knowledge.

This will serve a few purposes. For starters, it will further help to explain the process by providing a working example. At the same time, it will give the impatient among you the ability to start earning money right now before you’ve even read any further. Finally, it will give us a decent framework that we can build upon later. With this as you very basic business model, the following chapters will show you how to tweak the various factors or improve the business model, ultimately leading to greater profits, faster growth and more success.

Without further ado then, here is a very basic business model you can use right now to start earning cash. Remember: everything we look at here will be built upon further, so don’t worry if it seems overly simplistic or if you need more information.

 

Your First Automated Income

 

Step 1. Finding Your Product

The first thing you’re going to do is to find the product you want to sell. To do this, you need to find an affiliate network. This is where you will find most affiliate products to sell for a decent amount of commission. 

For the purposes of this quick example, we’re not going to look at all the different networks or at the other options. Instead, we’re going to focus on one that offers the best deal in many cases: JVZoo. Compared with other affiliate networks, JVZoo tends to have the fastest set-up and most user-friendly interface. It’s also very flexible and makes it super easy for you to grab an affiliate link and to embed it in your website, your emails or anything else.

To get started, head over to http://www.jvzoo.com/register/ and click ‘Become an Affiliate’. From here, you’ll then have to verify your phone number over an automated system and will then have access to start searching through products to sell. 

Once you’re in, you can set up your payment information etc. and then go to Affiliates > Find Products. You’ll be able to see the top products on the first page, alongside with the number of products sold. Right now for instance, ‘ProThemes Add On Membership’ has sold 58,000+ copies for an average of $20.22 and with %50 commission. You can even see the number of refunds, in this case 1.96%. 

Something you’ll notice right away, is that most of the top products are in the ‘internet marketing’ niche – they’re products that people are selling to other people trying to make money online! This is one of the most popular niches making it a good niche to choose. The only problem with going the ‘make money online’ route though, is that it means you’ll be competing with a huge amount of other people.

Instead then, to begin with, let’s start with something a little more niche. As well as reducing the amount of competition, doing this will also allow you to find your target audience more easily and to identify a ‘route to market’ (any easy way to access your target demographic).

So for instance, we might choose an eBook on improving your basketball skills. This is an area where there isn’t a ton of competition and it lets you target your audience very easily. Alternatively, you might find a book aimed at tree surgeons. Find your product and look for one that’s already selling well and that offers a decent amount of commission. Careers is actually a great category to think about. 

Another great strategy is to try and solve a very specific problem. A great example of this might be helping people who are getting married, or helping people who are trying to buy a home.

Once you click it, you’ll then have to click ‘Request Affiliate Approval’. In a short time, you should hear back and be given an affiliate link that you can use to start promoting. You’ll then get your affiliate link which is all you need to begin making money!

 

The Wealthy Affiliate:  

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

 

Quick Lesson: Affiliate Links

When you get an affiliate link, this is all you need to start making money. As long as someone clicks on your affiliate link, is taken to the website of the seller and then buys a product, you will get paid. 

This works using cookies. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, a cookie is a small file that your browser downloads and then stores on your computer. Websites instruct the browser to do this and can then subsequently check for those cookies in order to identify users who have visited the site before and to store information about them. So for instance, when you log into Facebook, this stores a cookie on your computer and that is then what the site uses in order to identify who you are so you don’t need to log in next time.

In this case, clicking on that specific link stores a cookie on the computer of the customer and then redirects them to the main checkout page. This in turn means that when they buy the product, the seller is able to identify you as the marketer who referred them. All this is handled automatically by an affiliate network meaning you don’t need to worry about it – you just log in and then see easily how many sales you’ve made.

 

Step 2. Setting Up Facebook Ads

 

Next up, you need to set up some Facebook Ads to start sending people to the checkout page via your affiliate link. You can choose to do this either directly, or via a landing page. In this case we’re going to keep things nice and simple by sending people directly to the checkout where they can buy the product.

Setting up adverts with Facebook is easy enough. Just log into Facebook and then click the arrow on the far right. Here you can then find an option called ‘Create Adverts on Facebook’. Once this page loads, you can then create a new campaign and here you’ll have a number of different options for the ‘objective for your campaign’. 

Now choose ‘Send People to Your Website’ and where it gives you the option to enter a URL, just enter the affiliate link you were given. 

From here, you’re then given a huge number of options regarding who you want to visit the link. You can choose to narrow the visitors down based on their location, based on their age, based on their behaviors and their interests… You can even target them based on their employers, based on their job title, based on their relationship status…

This process is called ‘targeting’ and this is how you can then make sure that the only people who see your ads are people who are quite likely to be interested in buying what you have to sell.

This is important because your objective is not to be seen by as many people as possible and it is not to be clicked by as many as people as possible. Every click is costing you money, so what you want to do is to increase the number sales you get while keeping the number clicks to an absolute minimum. You don’t want anyone to click your ad who isn’t at all likely to buy.

So let’s say that we were looking at the ‘marriage’ option and you were hoping to sell an eBook on how to organize a cheap wedding that still impresses guests. Now, all you need to do is to target men or women who are engaged. Now the only people who see the ad, are people who are likely to be currently planning a wedding. You can also target people who are of a certain age to avoid the types of people who maybe are happy to live as engaged for years without any plans to get married.

Further down the page, you get to choose your daily budget. This determines how much you can spend every day before the ads stop showing. If you only have a set budget to spend on advertising, then this is an important figure to set – otherwise you can end up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars!

It might be tempting here to think that you can set your ad spend really low in order to avoid losing too much money. This strategy might work in theory but in practice it means that you won’t get any ad clicks. That’s because, as mentioned briefly earlier, adverts have to compete for certain ad slots. There are hundreds of people all trying to show ads to ‘engaged couples’ and so the budget you set will be used to determine how often your ad shows up instead of someone else’s. The higher your budget, the more you’ll pay for each click but the more your ad will be seen. You need to spend a certain amount just to ensure that your ad is actually going to show up at all!

Next we get to add an image, a title and a description. The title should be something eye grabbing and something that makes our product sound desirable. It’s only 40 characters long though, so you need to be smart with your use of words.

The description meanwhile is where we elaborate and this is where we’re going to use a smart technique to improve our ROI further. This is only 20 characters long though. Finally, you reiterate your destination URL. There is a ‘text section’ though as well where you also get to add some information about your site, and you can use a few more characters here.

Finally, you also get to add an image and again our aim here is to grab the eye.

So while the headline and the image will grab the eye and will draw people in, we’re going to use our description to filter people out. How? By adding the price of our product front and center and by being very frank about what it is. So for instance:

Plan The BEST Budget Wedding Ever! 

$50 Wedding Planning Tips eBook!

So the reason this works so well, is that it tells people front and center what the price of the eBook is. They’re not going to click the link thinking they’re getting free tips (unless they don’t read the full thing – which will happen). Most of the time, your visitors will only click the link if they’re potentially interested in buying an eBook for $50. You just got rid of all your time wasters and greatly improved your profit margin as a result!

Going Local 

It’s up to you if you want to use this strategy but another option to help increase your ROI further is to filter your audience by local area. For instance, you could say that your eBook is only for people in X location. This will greatly reduce the amount of competition you’re facing and thereby mean that your ad is seen more often even if you set your daily budget to be lower. Check out http://FacebookSecrets.sec.bz  

 

Creating a Landing Page

 

With the above business model, you can start spending some money, you can set your ad to live and you can start earning right away. Then, the more you invest, the more you can increase your revenue and profit.

The amazing thing about choosing a niche like ‘weddings’ is that new people are coming along all the time. This means you’re very unlikely to saturate the market! 

But at the moment, you’re rather reliant on other people. You’re paying to send people to the product creator’s website where they can buy the eBook but if they drop the ball and fail to sell the product then you’re going be wasting money.

This is why it’s very important to look at another key number when you’re choosing your product on JVZoo – that being the ‘conversions’ figure. This number tells you what percentage of referrals are successfully converted into buyers and that makes it very important for you to think about.

But seeing as many of the more niche products on JVZoo only have 50+ sales, you might be wondering if there isn’t more you can do to encourage even more sales. The good news is that there is!

Specifically, what you want to be doing here is to create your own ‘landing page’ or ‘sales page’. This is a page that is entirely built around promoting and selling a product. Instead of linking your Facebook ad to the affiliate product directly then, you instead link it to your landing page where you’ll make the product sound absolutely amazing and really whet the appetite for it. This way, people will be more likely to want the product and to click through from your landing page to make a purchase.

 

 

The Wealthy Affiliate:  

How Anyone (Including You) Can Earn Consistent Online Income

 

Quick Lesson: Landing Page