How I made +$3,546 In 1 Month From Affiliate Niche sites

A long time ago I thought it would be a good idea to get into Internet Marketing and start making Affiliate sites! Little did I know that I was in for a rough ride…

You can make good money from affiliate products if you know what you are doing.

 

What you will Learn Here:

• How I went from $0 to +$3546 monthly profits
• Why you should get into Affiliate marketing
• What mistakes I made along the way
• Where I learnt the tricks of the trade
• About the 8 figure millionaire affiliate!
• A fool proof step by step guide to making money from affiliate products
• Why you should diversify your Affiliate sites
• (Hit the big time) Build your affiliate business and hire somebody to run it

 

So how did I become successful at affiliate marketing?

The reason I put this post together is because I have found that a lot of people online are interested in affiliate marketing and making money online, but for what ever reason they are lead into false pretences,

given the wrong information or simply don’t understand what it takes to find the right product, drive targeted traffic to their sites and convert that traffic into sales!!

I completely understand what it feels like when you get into affiliate marketing. It’s tough, and you end up spending a ton of time creating a new site only for it to flop as you can’t get it to rank.

Or you create a good site that ranks on page 1 but it just doesn’t convert well and you only make a few cents each week! (This is very annoying)

Here is the problem that 99% of newbie affiliate marketers face……

You see, affiliate marketing involves what I call ‘a chain process’. By this I mean you are required to fully understand many different aspects of internet marketing for it to work. If you miss something out or do something wrong along the way, your whole project will fail. Let me give you an example:

You might have found a great niche and some juicy keywords, you know how to create a great looking site and you know a bit about SEO, great, so off you go on your plan to build up a profitable niche site.

Problem is, you missed out a couple of vital parts in the chain. Not because you forgot or because you were careless.

It’s because you were not even aware of them or you were not as good as you thought you were at that particular event in the chain…..

like….

You may have failed to understand for vital parts of on page SEO and website structure that is holding your site back from getting top rankings.

Or you might have got everything right but your content is not converting well enough because you have not written it in the manner that it should have been written in.

This is really hard for me to try and explain to you, and it’s only since i have become more successful that I can spot these missing links in the chain very easily.

I have quite a lot of ‘failed’ affiliate sites knocking about, because when I started out I got some things wrong and I ended up abandoning my sites and moving on to the next one.

It’s only now that I can see what went wrong and the vital factors that I missed out, sometimes it can be something small, but if 1 link in your chain is broken, your site is doomed!!!

The only reason (well 2 reason really) I eventually became successful at it was through sheer persistence, and following somebody that knows what they were doing!!

I learned all of the links to the chain

It’s a bit like golf. It’s no good being able to smash it 300 yards, to be successful you’ve got to have accuracy, be a good iron player, have a good short game, chipping and putting, have mental strength and be fit. Without all of these attributes you are not going to make any money out of golf!!

 

So why should you be interested in Affiliate Marketing?

If you made jus 0.0001% of the total revenue from affiliate sales last year alone, you would a very rich person. In the UK, figures are reported to be around £14 Billion last year from affiliates!! and this number is growing every year.

So that’s why you should be getting into affiliate marketing 🙂

I can’t imagine the affiliate sales figure for the US

 

 

 

So it’s pretty obvious that affiliate marketing is a big thing, and it’s by far the most popular method of generating an income from the internet.

Another reason why you should become an affiliate marketer is because thanks to sites like Amazon, who sell everything, you can create a site and profit from just about anything!!

Large companies are making it easier and easier fro us to promote their products. The only problem with this is that it increases our competition, but luckily for us we understand every link in the chain, where as 99% of marketers don’t

 

Passive Income

This is my favourite part about affiliate marketing…… Once you have completed your affiliate niche project and it’s bringing you an income, you can pretty much forget about it and move on to your next project, because this site will continue to bring in a nice profit every month. You don’t have to handle anything!!!

The only times I need to go back to one of my sites is if the rankings have slipped and it needs a bit more SEO, or if the products need updating!!

This is when the true power of affiliate marketing kicks in and the big boys make there millions. They have dozens of affiliate sites all working on auto pilot, and this should be your aim too

 

So What Mistakes Did I make a Long The Way

Well, to be honest there were quite a few. I remember the first affiliate site I created was about golf balls. I purchased the EMD for the term I was looking to rank for,

I then added a page on my site where my visitors could purchase these particular golf balls, I then set Amazon affiliate links on their so that every-time somebody purchased them, I would get a cut.

It’s safe to say that I didn’t get much ‘cut’

In fact I didn’t make a bean, and the reason boils down to my inexperience and lack of knowledge at the time and I stupidly missed out a couple of vital parts of the chain. The first being my content. I thought it was great at the time but now I realise it was shite!!

Basically I copied it from a popular golf ball manufacturers site just because I needed some content on my site. I didn’t copy it word for word but I did take a large chunk of it.

Not only does this only fall under ‘duplicate content’ but it didn’t really offer my readers anything special,and most importantly ‘personal’.

When I mentioned the affiliate sales figures earlier, from the 14 Billion pounds made last year, 39% was from comparison sites (hint hint cough!!).

Now this should tell you that people like a bargain, therefore they search for the cheapest, and they also like a good recommendation and a real user review, and just some blurb about the product!

So there is a little tip for you. Sell affiliate products through personal insight and experience, build trust before you start to sell to them!!

My golf ball site did none of this. The next part of the chain I missed out was SEO. I have come to realise that my attempts on that particular site all them years ago was pretty pathetic to say the least. I had 1 keyword in my head that I wanted to rank for and I thought that was it.

Looking back, I was never going to outrank the actual official site for this golf ball and I never even new about long tail keywords.

 

Another BIG mistake I made, (but had no idea at the time)…  was on a website in the Food/gardening niche. I had done all of the right things, I created tons of useful content and my site was the best site in it’s niche, but it ranked nowhere. It picked up some long tail keywords and got about 2000 hits per month (and still does) but it doesn’t actually rank for any ‘high traffic’ keywords.

So why is that?

The reason is down to the structure of this affiliate site. The way I had set it up was poor and I am pretty certain I got penalised for over optimisation. Not only that, but I realised that although there was a massive market for this niche,

it wasn’t a profitable market. Most of the people searching for it were looking for information, and not products to buy.

Saying that it does make a bit from Adsense and I really should work on it more to increase rankings, but it will never be a big earner. If I can get it to $300 per month I’ll be happy.

Ok, so there are just a few of my mistakes and I hope you can see just how easy it to mess it up if you don’t understand all of the links in the chain.

 

Where Did I learn to Be A successful affiliate Marketer (The 8 Figure Millionaire Man)

It all started after about my 5th or 6th failed attempt. I thought it would be a good idea to do some research and learn as much as I could about affiliate marketing. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a ton of free stuff online, in fact, there is everything you could possibly need to know out there, absolutely free!

The problem is, it’s finding it all and putting it all together. In search of the perfect formula I quickly realised that it was a bit like being given 5 jigsaw puzzles all mixed up and you had to separate all of the pieces and put them all together!!

 

 

Although I was learning more, I still didn’t have a complete chain or formula. So this is when I thought it would be a good idea to research ‘successful affiliate marketeers’. I’d find them and learn from them, because obviously they know what they are doing, right!

I came across a few such as Zac Johnson and Mark Ling.

It was Mark’s story that caught my eye as he went from a pizza boy, to making $50 a month with an online banner, to quitting his job and making hundreds of affiliate sites. Needless to say he became very wealthy!

In fact, he is the 8 figure millionaire affiliate marketer I mentioned at the beginning! now this is what you call a ‘super affiliate’

A pretty cool guy to be mentor ay! haha

 

So why select Mark as my mentor?

Simple really, If you want to be good at something you should learn from people who are in a better position than you currently are.

Now the reason you are reading this is because I maybe in a better position than you are right now, so you are looking to learn from me, and Mark is in a better position than I am. So that’s why you should freeking well listen to him :-p   lol

 

 

 

Another reason I chose Mark is because he has achieved his success in many different niches, which tells me that his methods work. You can come across some affiliate marketers who have made it big time purely off the back of 1 product.

Now the main reason that closed the deal for me,  is that Mark had done something that none of the other successful marketers had done! He was willing to share everything he new about making money from affiliate marketing and he offered the 1 thing I had been in search for……

The Complete Chain

Yes, mark developed a 12 step video series which he said explained everything. Now I know that marketers like to push there products and they come up with a bunch of reasons why you must buy there product. To be honest I didn’t really take much notice of them, apart from these 2 which really caught my eye….

* Find out what you’ve been doing wrong all this time.
* Don’t get how the gurus make their money? Mark
Ling goes step-by-step, leaving nothing out.

 

This is exactly what I had been looking for 🙂

Now I don’t want this to sound like some tacky sales or something, but I’ll explain quickly what I received and how it helped me, as this post was created to show you how I made +3546 in a month and to teach you a thing or too about affiliate marketing, not to talk about products!

When I first logged in to my members area I was quite surprised to see the amount of information available. Mark had presented a 12 step process which contained a whopping 85 videos!!!

 

A Fool Proof Step by Step Guide To Affiliate Marketing

 

 

 

1 – Product research

The first thing you must do is ‘get good’ at is identifying good products to sell. You can’t just select any products at random. Believe it or not there are tons of products that you should stay well clear of because they simply won’t make you any money!

Avoid products that offer a very low commission. You might come across a product that you want to market. It sells for $20 and you get 10% commission. This means that you get $2 for every sale.

Now I always make my calculations on the basis that my site will convert at 1%. So for every 100 visitors 1 will make a purchase. (Now if you promote the right kind of products then this will be higher!)

To make $50 per day I would need to make 25 sales. To make 25 sales I would need 2500 visitors. Is this really achievable??

Well it depends on the popularity of the niche which I will come onto in a minute. But as you can see, it’s going to be tough to make from from this product because the profit margins are so low.

A good example would be a product that sells at $100 and you get 50% commission. Using the 1% rule you would only need 1 sale per day to achieve $50 profit and this time you would only need 100 visitors, which is much more achievable than 2500 visitors!!

 

2 – How do you know how many visitors you will get? (Keyword research)

 

When you have found a few products that offer a good affiliate commission then it’s time to do some keyword research. This is absolutely vital, and here’s why….

– You can find out what keywords people are using to find this product, so you can target them

– You can find out how competitive the market is

– You can estimate how much traffic you are going to get (so you can work out your profits)

Once you have identified the best keywords to use for your product, you can then establish roughly how much traffic you are likely to get. Once you know this it then becomes easy to work out if a product is actually going to make you money or not.

If you have a product that pays you $60 per sale, but you are only going to get 10 visitors per day, then it’s not going to be worth your effort!

Here is a free tool that I use to find keywords. It’s called UberSuggest

Just enter your product or keyword and it will give you lots of suggestions….

 

Now you should be able to find great products to promote 🙂

 

3 – Content that sells

If you are trying to sell something to your visitors then you better make sure that your content is great. Make sure that it is better than your competitors and that it offers them value. If you are writing a product review, then make sure you have learnt and understood everything there is too know about the product.

Become an expert on it and let this show across to your readers.

– Be honest

– Tell your reader what they asked for

– Be thorough and provide detail

– Come across as if you were talking to the person in a pub

Include these attributes in your writing and you will be on the right track!

 

4 – Web Site Design and Structure

Your site should be clean, easy to read and navigate. Don’t just splatter your affiliate link everywhere. I could write a whole new post on this subject, but I’ll keep it short here.

Make sure you cloak your links!

Use good quality images and even videos if you can.

I could also write a whole new post on site structure. It’s important that your site is set up right for SEO purposes.

 

Ok by this stage you have a good product that you know will be profitable with the amount of traffic you have estimated.

You have great content that stands out in your niche 🙂

You have a great looking site with a nice design and it is structured properly

Congratulations. The most important factors are done. If you have done this right then you should start to see your site indexed in the top few pages of Google for your keywords.

But this is not enough. You need to be on page 1….

 

5 – On Page SEO

The next link in the chain is on page SEO. You must get this right to give your site the best possible chance of ranking. The first thing I always do is check on on page ranking factors using Website auditor.

This is a great piece of software for analysing your own and your competitors websites. It will tell you exactly what keyword ration you should aim for in your title, H1-H6, bold text, body text and pretty much everything else.

It does this by comparing all of the sites on page 1 for your keyword. It then tells you what you need to do to your site to bring it up to scratch with theirs!

Website Auditor is also great for checking things like, duplicate title tags, html errors, crawl errors etc. All of this adds up and reflects on your overall ranking.

 

– 5 Off page SEO

By this stage you are in the perfect position to dominate your market. You have all the foundations in place. Now it’s time to get number 1 spot.

If you haven’t already done so you can see my ultimate guide on ‘How to rank any site number 1 in google’

Building links to your site will be the key to achieving top rankings, but get it wrong and you are in for a good slapping from Google!!

I have already explained how to rank a new site and why you should diversify your back links

There is more than enough info on this site regarding SEO

 

– 6 Monetize and optimise

Once you start to get targeted traffic to your site it is vital that you track everything that is going on. Set up Google analytics, It provides you with everything you need and its free!

After a few weeks you need to see how your site is performing. What is your conversion rate? If it’s 1.8% then do what it takes to get it to 2.3%.

 

 

There are many things that you can do, such as: changing your heading, changing colours. Test a different call to action, move images around. There are loads of things you can test!

Once of my favourite features that Google analytics provides is ‘Bounce rate’. This tells us if the visitor interacts with your site or just leaves without clicking anything on the page.

Your aim is to get your bounce rate as low as possible. If it’s high (above 55%) then you need to make some on page changes to keep your visitors more interested.

The bounce rate for this blog is below 20% and the average visitor looks at 5 different pages before leaving!!

 

– 7 More Keyword Research

Something a lot of people never do, and that’s keyword research after you have your site up and running!

You are probably thinking, why the hell would I need to do that again?

Well, the reason is, you can pick up a lot more traffic by target a few more ‘long tail’ keywords. You can see in your ‘Google WebMaster Tools’ what searches people are typing in to find your site. Now you might find one that is getting quite a lot of searches, something like…. “A push chair that folds away easy”

Now you might not have come across this keyword at the beginning, but now you can see that people are searching for it and you have received a few clicks. You notice that your site is on page 2 for this keyword.

So what you do is, optimise the page on your site that is getting this traffic. Something as simple as including this exact keyword in the first sentence of your page will probably shoot it up to page 1.

You have now just increased your traffic by quite a big margin for this keyword!!

 

Congratulations!!

You are a successful affiliate marketer!!!!!

 

 

Now it’s time to become a super affiliate!

Once you have your first site up and running the world is your oyster. You should go out and build more affiliate sites in many different niches. You should diversify your portfolio because you never know what might happen.

One of your best performing affiliate products may become unpopular or out dated.

Some dick might spam the shit out of your site to wipe it out of the rankings!!

This is why you should never rely on just 1 site to make you money.

 

Hit the big time! Get somebody to run your affiliate sites

How great would it be to have 10 affiliate sites, all bringing in $1000 per month on autopilot, and you had a part time guy keeping check on them for you well you did as you please!

A far fetched dream or a bit of hard work and desire!!

I’ll let you decide….. I know that this is one of my long term targets and although I’ve not quite reached it yet, I am on my way…..

With 3 affiliate sites at the minute I am looking and building more. Now you can see where my +3,546 in 1 month came from 🙂

 

My wrist is bloody hurting now!!

I hope you have enjoyed this post. If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer then the best advise I can give is to take action. If you fail then try again, that’s how you win in life 🙂

You can make things easier by having a mentor and following somebody like Mark Ling and his program. As I said at the start. Affiliate marketing is like a chain. To be successful you need to know every link.

I plan to write an ‘over the shoulder’ post of me creating and ranking an affiliate site from scratch. So join my newsletter and I’ll keep you updated on that as well as other great posts that I publish

Oh, and please don’t forget to share this on your social networks 🙂

 

Resources

– Mark Ling – Affilo Blueprint (covers everything)

– Website Auditor – (couldn’t live without it)