Maybe the title of this post should be..."How to Sell More Affiliate Products (Than Everyone Else)".

I don’t care what you’re selling, if you’re an affiliate then you have a whole boatload of competition. There may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other affiliates all selling the exact same thing as you.

If you just run around the internet slapping banner ads up hither and yon, you’re not going to sell more affiliate products, probable you'll sell less. Your ads will get lost in the noise. You’ll get beat out by any number of other affiliates who’ll outsell you any day of the week.

But wait…

Being beaten by the competition is for mediocre affiliates, and you’re anything but mediocre. Once you know the same secrets as the super affiliates (and use them), then you too can sell more affiliate products and outsell the competition. So let’s start right now with these three tips and tricks for turning you into a top affiliate…

#1: Engage Your Audience and you'll sell more

Take a look at what the top marketers are doing, and you’ll see that their focus isn’t on driving cold traffic to the vendor’s sale page. Instead, super affiliates drive traffic to their own lead pages, build a list, engage this audience, and then drive these warm leads to their links.

We all know about lotteries. 

Here in the US, nearly all the states have some sort of lottery.  

I suppose it helps to raise money for education ;-).....

There was a elderly man who would get down on his knees every night and pray and pray....

"Please Lord, let me win the lottery".

This went on for a long time.....years I think...

One December night, a cold wind whipping outside, the old man was knelt next to his bed...

"Please Lord, let me win the lottery".

Suddenly a bright angel appeared in the room on the opposite side of the bed. 

With a sigh of exasperation, the angel told the kneeling man....

"In order to win the lottery....you must buy a ticket".

I imagine some of us take that attitude with our business.

Please Lord let me succeed.

You see internet ads all the time for "easy money", "quick success", and on and on. 

It doesn't happen like that. 

You cant win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.

You cant succeed at business if you don't have a solid plan and commitment to follow that plan. 

Success comes in small dribs at the start, but with continued focus and effort, success will follow.

The opportunities for an online business or a home business are abundant. 

Some of them include:

            Blogging

            Affiliate marketing

            Drop shipping

            Online courses, coaching, consulting

            Building websites

            Virtual assistant

            Translator

            Online tutor

            Social media manager

            Data entry

            Customer service rep

Do a google search for any of these and you’ll find useful suggestions. 

Spend a few hours or a few days doing the research.  

After that take action. 

Once you start, remember you are your own boss. That has advantages, sure.  

But it also has disadvantages.  

No one will hold accountable except yourself.

No one will ask you at the end of the week what you have accomplished.  

No one will be there to encourage you.

One foot in front of the other. 

One step at a time.  

Keep going.  

Try not to sweat the small stuff. 

Once you start to see a little success it will be contagious. 

Success brings more success. 

1. Know your niche - decide what product you will promote. Research the product including personal testing.

2. If affiliate marketing - check with the company for marketing resources. Some affiliate programs will include “swipe” emails that you can modify and use in your email marketing campaigns.

3. Your List - Your autoresponder will store your list. Keep growing your list with new prospects. Trim your list of inactive subscribers.

4. Follow-up Messages - create a dozen or so follow-up messages. These will be sent automatically to new subscribers over time. Set the delivery interval in your autoresponder. Generally, one message per day with some gaps over the two week period.

5. Broadcast Messages - create a group of messages that will be sent out to your entire list (not just new subscribers) over a period of time. Use the calendar in your autoresponder to schedule delivery dates and times.

6. Create a Landing Page that will promote your offer and encourage new subscribers to your list.

7. Facebook Group - consider creating a FB group with links to your marketing material. Invite your subscribers to join the facebook group.

8. Deliver Value not Sales Pitches - Don’t continually try to “sell” to your subscribers. Offer tips and tools, e-books, product reviews and comparisons. Your subscribers will be more interested in receiving something of value. After a relationship is established, the subscriber will be more likely to push the button and make a purchase.

9. Your List - continue to grow your list with new subscribers.

10. Send a Thank You to your subscribers along with gifts like free e-books and links to courses.

1. Choosing a Location for “Work at Home”

Your work space is a key to your productivity. A clean and tidy work space will really improve your overall mood.  If your current work space is cluttered, try spending a half-hour to clean it up and organize it a bit.  I’ve always found that organizing my space is a boost.  It helps clear away the physical clutter but also, amazingly, it helps to clear the clutter in my head.  Like a fresh start.  Probably should do this every Monday morning.

If possible, separating your work space from your living space is important too. Having somewhere to ‘go’ to focus on work makes a big difference.  Try moving from your “designated work area”, to a different place in your apartment or house.  Try going outside for a short walk while you phone conference with someone or you just take a break to clear your mind.

2. Setting Goals

Everyone needs daily goals.  If you used to work outside of the home, at an office for example, you probably already know the importance of setting daily goals.  I’m sure you do, but take a minute to remind yourself how that went.  In the morning or the night before, you made a mental list of what needed to be done.  You prioritized your mental list and decided when you would take on each challenge.

Now that you’re working from home, you need to do the same thing. Make a mental list, prioritize, and maybe even make a to-do list.

Working from home, you can set your own schedule.  That’s a plus, but don’t get lazy and let things drift.  Look at your list and decide when you will spend time on each task.

Your goals will be your motivation, pushing you towards a realistic, time-bound achievement. For a ‘regular’ day (whatever that might mean for you), ensure your goals include several ‘hit points’ — points you are aiming for with approximate times, whether or not they mark the end of a task.

Subdivide your day into morning, afternoon, and evening working sessions to evenly spread your workload. Don’t want to work evenings? Spend more time in the morning and have evenings free! Only want to work two hours at a time with more frequent breaks? That can also be achieved.

Try ‘push days’ — days where you really strive to maximize your output by setting tough objectives that will take some doing to meet. Interspersing push days with regular working days is a key to making the push-days productive.

‘Push days’ are useful when you need to make headway into big projects. Whether it’s launching into new ones, or pushing for the completion of old, lingering ones. We’ve all got to that stalemate situation, where a project has reached the point of moving forward in unenthusiastic drips and drabs. A push day will move it leaps-and-bounds towards finally being wrapped up.

3. Creating Variation

A varied workload might seem unachievable depending on the business (or job) you have. But there are ways to keep things interesting whatever you do, in the way you order your tasks. Your morning could be reading emails, your afternoon, focusing on creative direction, your evening, engrossing yourself in analytics.

This kind of variation into your day automatically helps to reduce the tendency to stare aimlessly at a flashing cursor, praying for inspiration — instead, you just move on to the next pending task.

Avoid switching between tasks too much, though. You need to allow yourself time to really sink your teeth into things. To push through the initial time drain that naturally occurs when you start any new task — the ‘getting into it’ phase. Too much switching, and you’ll soon find a disproportionate amount of time is spent this way.

If tasks are long (several hours or more), try to spend a minimum of an hour per session. Working only five minutes here and there on it will drag these kinds of tasks out indefinitely, and result in more time spent overall.

Likewise, you have a bunch of smaller, five-minute tasks, put them together into 30 minutes of ‘quickfire’ tasks. By identifying how long a task you’re working on should take before you do it, you minimize the risk of accidentally spending an hour on, for example, replying to unimportant emails.

A good time to have these quickfire sessions is during your ‘afternoon lull’, or when re-introducing yourself back into work after lunch.

4. Distractions & Breaks

When you didn’t work at home, when you were in an office or working at a store, what did you do for a break?  Now that you’re working at home, what will you do for a break.  You still need them.  Your free now to decide how to structure your breaks.  I’d suggest that you DON’T spend any time, or at least not a more than a few minutes, with things like TV, internet, or cleaning the kitchen.  These things have their time and place, but you weren’t doing those things when you worked outside the home, so why would you now.  Go back and review #2 above about the goals.

Many people find music helps them to focus. It can! But pick the right songs — make a playlist that inspires you to work, or use some of the ready-made ones designed for this on Spotify. Blasting out Mariah Carey power ballads that demand to be sung as a duet is unlikely to help concatenate an Excel file.

Breaks are as important when working from home as anywhere else, so don’t neglect to take them.

Do whatever makes you feel great, but you will work better if you’ve gotten away from your screen for at least an hour throughout the day.

5. Exercise

Without your commute, it’s easy to become stuck inside. Aside from obvious health implications, you might find that you find it more difficult to sleep. So, it’s important to use up that energy.

There are some great indoor workout videos on YouTube if you are unable to go outside. Alternatively, get creative with other ways of exercising indoors, or use a garden or courtyard if you have access to one.

Consider scheduling a half-hour walk or bike ride every day.  It will give you something to look forward to and you will return to “work” refreshed. 

Find your perfect balance

Ultimately, you will decide what works for you; your personal habits and strengths. These five suggestions are meant as flexible guidelines to be adjusted to suit you.

You may be a night-owl who finds focusing on one thing for the whole day helps you focus better, or someone who finds switching between tasks more regularly helps you stay focused.

Whatever you decide on, make sure the work pattern you create is sustainable.

Starting a Blog

We’ve been talking for a while about the idea of writing a blog and monetizing it, but the idea of starting a blog may be new to some, or some may not have a clear path forward.  

There’s plenty of opportunities to turn your passion into sustainable income via blogging, but you need to start, and then you need to continue.  Those may be the two hardest parts about blogging.

Your Interest – Your Blog

It’s best to start a blog by writing about something that interests you the most. That way it will be easier to keep publishing content on your blog.  For example, if you used to go the gym every day, you could document how you are continuing your workout at home, now that the gyms are closed.  Write about your progress and offer tips to your readers on ways they can stay start and stay consistent with their own home-bound exercise program.  You could also focus your blog on promoting a healthy diet and how diet and exercise go hand in hand. I think you get the idea. Start writing about something you are already doing and you’ll find that you can always come up with new and fresh ideas for your blog.

Start Your Website

If you know that you can write well-researched and appealing content, then all you need is to make your stories visible online.  Starting a website is definitely the best thing you can do if you want to monetize your writing.

Here is a list of several steps needed to get your website (and blog) going.

A short video tutorial with tips on how to grow an email list

that can help you grow your online business.

Did you ever have an image that you wanted to use on your blog or website, but it wasn’t big enough? 

You couldn't just stretch it because it would blur.  So you added a background to extend the image to the proper size. 

But now the background color and the original image color don’t match at all. 

Using a tool like “instant eye dropper”, can easily solve the problem.

The instant eye dropper is a free tool that will report the color at any location on your computer screen.  In the example above we want the blue background to match the dark color in the original image.

The instant eye dropper reports the HEX color as #050505.  Then we only need to change the blue color to the desired dark color with whatever image editing tool we are using (here it is Powerpoint).

Blogging Quickstart - How To Start Blogging For Profit In Any Niche

The difference between blogging and blogging for profit is monetization. Starting a blog today is as simple, easy and fast as setting up a social media profile. Anyone can start a blog, either  self-hosted or using a webhost. There are blogging platforms that allow you to have your segregated section, complete with your profile and exclusive posts.

There are free content management systems that allow you to host a blog on their parent domain. Consider Google’s blogger. You could also purchase a domain, register it, host it and create a website essentially designed to be a blog. I like this approach best, but you should assess the costs of the different options, consider your technical skills such as website design and choose a platform that suits you.

Choosing a Niche

There are bloggers who want to write about everything, almost.  There are bloggers who focus on a niche. Both can work and both can fail. It depends on the expertise of the blogger. Not the writing expertise, but the knowledge. Not every blogger can develop a sound understanding of every subject that can be written about. If you are alone or have a very small team, then it is best to focus on  a niche. Trying to write about too many things will not only be challenging but it will also confuse your potential audience. Readers like specificity. You too would be perplexed as to whom you wish to target. If you check out the popular blogs or even the video bloggers who have amassed millions with their channels on YouTube, all of them are focusing on a niche that is well focused.

You could write on anything, from fashion to technology, geology to politics, economics to history, consumer electronics to real estate, family or kids to relationships, dating or health, sports or current affairs to news, events, photography and anything that interests you.  That’s a key.  Write about what interests you.  If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll give up posting.

Bloggers who have a good understanding of what they are  writing will always do well. Blogging  is  not  just writing. It is a fine combination of writing acumen, knowledge, specialization, awareness of latest updates and an understanding  of what people or readers are looking for.

Choose a niche that you are comfortable with.  Do not pick a niche that no one is interested in. You can write a blog on a niche to satisfy your own desire but that blog may be hard to monetize. You can only

monetize a blog for profit that will have substantial traffic. Microbiology or nuclear science, applied mechanics or even the history of textiles would not be appealing niches, even though  some interesting posts can potential get thousands or hundreds of thousands of hits. A niche must be  continuously  popular  for  the blog to be monetized for profit. You need sustainable revenue and not a onetime windfall gain.

Path to Monetization

There are many ways to monetize a blog. One of the most unpopular and ineffective methods is a subscription. We live in an   era when information is free. While you  can  have  your  content and intellectual property protected with copyrights, you cannot  really prevent the information from being available in some other form.  Reproduction of information in non-plagiarized forms will always happen. Since there is no shortage of information,  using the  subscription format has not really been the most successful way to monetize a blog.

Even the most popular newspapers and magazines  are  losing  paid subscribers. However, if your niche is very refined and your target audience is looking for rare exclusive information then you can charge a fee. This will not work for most types of blogs but   then there are always exceptions. You need to assess if your audience will be willing to pay a subscription fee per month or yearly to access your blog. This can potentially be a captive source  of  revenue.

Advertisements

The most widely used method of monetization of blogs is advertising. There are many types of advertisements you  can  resort to. First there are Google AdWords which  would  put  relevant advertisements on every webpage or post on your blog. Your website will effectively be populated with ads. You sign up for  the Google Ads and they will sprinkle different kinds of ads in allotted spaces on every webpage.

Advertisements like these pay revenue in different ways. Pay per click advertisements will pay you only when the readers on your  blog actually click on the links in the ads. Pay per view or impression ads will generate revenue based on how many people are on the given webpage coming across  the  advertisement.  Some ads require visitors on a blog to hover over the advertised link or content for the impression. Usually, pay per view ads has fixed revenue for a certain count of thousand or several thousand.

There are sponsored ads, banner ads, footer ads and larger sponsorships. You could have sponsored ads on top or bottom of your webpage, ala banner or footer ads, ads within  the  content  you are posting, on the sides or you can have a specific webpage dedicated to only one advertiser or just one brand that will have     its offers dominating the layout of the webpage.

These can be facilitated by Google or you can have a direct association with advertising networks. You may also get brands to directly advertise on your blog but for that you would need a substantial readership to entice them.

Advertising is a steady and rewarding source of revenue for blogs provided there is a large readership. Blogs that are not read by    too many people will generate almost no or insignificant revenue with ads. This is why other methods of monetization become not just important but essential.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an effective way to monetize a blog. It has a simple method and can be used by any  blogger.  You need to sign up with an affiliate marketing network, also referred    to as affiliate network, and start promoting the  products  or  services directly or indirectly. Affiliate marketing is quite simple.

You create a blog post about a product or service.  These products or services could be described in detail in your post, or just mentioned    in passing within a post. If the reader clicks on the link to the product or service and purchases or signs up  then  the  blogger gets a commission.

Affiliate marketing has become a rewarding source of revenue for bloggers, principally because one doesn’t need a very large readership to earn revenue. Even if one of your blog posts get fifty views and two people end up buying a product or signing up for a service, you can get a handsome commission. These commissions could be far greater than what you would earn with pay per view or pay per click advertisements. However, people have to buy or sign up for the products or services respectively for you  to earn anything.

Affiliate marketing is often upfront where the blogger makes it amply clear that the posts are about products and services. These posts are mostly reviews or accounts of personal  experiences with the product. They are informative but do have some degree of  promotional intent in the manner the content is created. The purpose is to offer information and to influence the buyers to purchase the product or sign up for the service being promoted.

Paid Content

You could monetize your blog with paid content. You can get paid  to write specific types of posts. These could be informative,  reviews, assessments of specific products and services, comparison posts, analyses of  companies  or  brands, endorsement articles or just outright informational posts to help increase the outreach of a company.  Paid  content  is  very common and even some of the most read blogs  have  various posts that companies sponsor directly.

However, a blog cannot survive entirely on paid content. Then it becomes a glorified billboard. Paid content would inevitably be promotional, subtly or overtly. There should be more organic content than paid content. No reader wants to read a blog that is only self-serving and paid content is more in the interest of the company and the blogger than the reader. There are exceptions     in cases of products or services that can truly help people in their day-to-day lives. Other scenarios are outright consumerism.

Direct Sales

This may not sound like a very plausible strategy to monetize a  blog for profit but it is absolutely plausible. Affiliate marketing, paid content and ads are essentially promotions. They are all about commerce. Facilitating direct sales is more straightforward than the indirect measures. There are blogs that host direct sales.

People who trust the bloggers they follow don’t mind shopping for products they need directly from the blog. This has become very popular in fashion, beauty and healthcare sectors. This is becoming a trend in electronics, accessories and peripherals. Depending on the niche you are targeting, you can easily set up an online store and sell select products or services. Be selective and have only the best products or services. Have an e-commerce strategy to go along   with your everyday blogging.

Multipronged Monetization

You have to start somewhere and with something. You need to   pick one path to monetization and perfect it. If it works, then you should improve it and then consider another option. If it doesn’t work, then have it in place and then expand your scope of monetization. You can never be sure which monetization attempt will work for you. It is also true that each of  these  methods has its strengths and weaknesses so they all must  coexist. It could be affiliate marketing one month earning you revenues that you need to stay profitable for six months. It could   be sponsored or pay per click ads in another month that will earn  income for you.

The simple reality is that a blog must have a multipronged-monetization strategy. You should be open and prepared to generate revenue from any and every  possible  source.  Multiple sources of revenue is the only way to survive, to ensure a blog is profitable and to remain focused on what matters more than everything else, the readers.

The readers want helpful information, content that will positively change their lives or assist in their decisions. To achieve this, you ought to stay committed to research and ever expanding knowledge base, you must be dedicated to creating quality blog posts and you must continue working on expanding your readership.