Best Practices to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

For most digital marketers, the commonest way to make money online is affiliate marketing. The strategy is really quite popular amongst online marketers. However, for most people who really want to make money online, numerous suggestions and recommendations available out there about the business tend to be overwhelming. Depending on who is behind the content, every blog post you read, every forum you visit gives you different ideas and methods for affiliate marketing that supposedly work. You can even get distracted or scammed online if you are not careful. If you are interested in the business and you don’t have an idea how to start, find below some simplified information and steps that can help you get started.

 
1. Decide on a Niche: A niche is where you can establish your marketing identity so you must carefully decide on it. The products you market must belong to a niche that you like yourself, making sure it is a place people like to spend their money. You can decide to market sports wears, vitamins and natural health supplements, travel and hospitality and such popular niches where people love to spend their money.

2. Do Diligent Research: With the help of keyword search tools such as WordTracker or SEObook, you can do some diligent research to find out the products people are actively searching for and with what keywords. You can find out how many people are searching using particular keywords. That is the information that allows you to know if what you are selling is on demand and from where. After identifying the right keywords/phrases, you can go to Google to search with the keywords/phrases. Google will throw up for you most of the sites using the same keywords/phrases and by direct implication, the sites you will be competing with when marketing your products. If the niche is not too crowded, your chances of making money from the niche are greatly enhanced. After identifying your competitors, you can “spy” on their marketing to know what ads they use and how they use them. If these sites display many Google ads, it is a sure sign that they are marketing in a money-making niche.

3. Start a Blog: Among digital marketers, the commonest content marketing strategy is blogging. Most marketers are into blogging to attract traffic to their blog sites. It is a direct way to lure internet users to notice the products they sell as well as the affiliate links in their content. If you don’t already have a blog, it is easy to set up a free blog on Blogger, Wix, WordPress and suchlike free blogging platforms. As you consistently create high quality and informative blog content, you attract more and more traffic to your blog and the blog audience grows as well. As the interest in your blog grows and starts to get more readers attention, your marketing begins when you add some affiliate links or banners to the products you are marketing.

4. Write and Submit Quality Articles: Articles marketing is another great way to put out your content in popular Article Directories to attract traffic to your website. If you are up to it, you can start writing quality articles related to your niche and submit to top Article Directories like EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com and the likes. These directories allow you an Author Resource Box where you can create a strong Call-to-Action, CTA and leave your affiliate links for readers. With that, you can manage to get some click-throughs to your site. That translates to good traffic.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is quite a simple business model, but you must know what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing to make money from the business. Once you understand and get the hang of the basics, making money follows from there. You need diligence and a bit of hard work particularly at the outset. Once you get started and stay the course, you’ll make money too.

7 Proven Ways to Make Money from your Blog

Most bloggers blog these days just to make money. You can too if you are able write a blog that most people want to read. The more popular your blog is with readers, the more money you can make from it. You do require some blogging skills though which you must master before starting out. Even with blogging skills, you need a bit of time, determination, hard work, testing and retesting before you can expect to make some impact in the highly competitive business of blogging.

Here now are 7 proven ways to make money from your blog as recommended by the pros.

#1.Affiliate Programs

If your blog is up and running, with some appreciable followership, you can sign up for some affiliate programs. After signing up and getting registered, you can then decide on some products/services related to your blog niche which you can help promote. These are products/services you will be earning commissions on as a blog publisher affiliate. These commissions will be paid by the product merchants depending on how much sales your blog is able to generate for them. There are many affiliate programs you can sign up with online but the most popular are Clickbank, SFI, Amazon Associates and Linkshare. These are the programs that already have good reputations and are working with thousands of affiliates. They pay good commissions too.


 
#2.Webinars

If you know something technical, informative and educative, you can package it in webinars and sell off your blog site. If your webinars are sufficiently helpful to your blog readers, they bring traffic to your blog site as well as helping you to make money from selling webinar slots. You must however ensure that the topics of your webinars relate to your blog niche. They must deal with issues much deeper than what your blog does not routinely deal with while offering how-to and where-to advice on getting things done.

#3.Google Adsense Monetization
 
By the time your blog starts to generate sufficient traffic, you can monetize it with Google Adsense. When you register with Google for Adsense Account, on approval, they start displaying ads on your site. You earn income from these Google ads when your blog readers visit/click on the ads. The more traffic your blog gets, the more income it generates for you from Google ads.

#4.Product Sales

If you have products related to your blog for sale, you can create a storefront in your blog page to sell such products to your blog readers. Even without a physical product to sell, you can create for sale e-products like e-books and sell to your blog readers at very attractive prices.

#5.News Content and Videos

If you are creative enough to add news content and videos on your blog, you don’t only get more and better traffic, you earn more money as a result. Online marketing experts advise that visual contents like videos, graphics and photos somehow help to attract more traffic to your blog than written content. Therefore, by embedding relevant news content and videos on your blog, you stand a very good chance to earn more money as well as very valuable return visitors’ traffic from it.

#6.Private Products Ads

If your blog becomes very popular with good inbound traffic, you can earn income from it by selling private ads related to the blog. It is left to you to decide how much you charge for displaying products banners on the ads space you’ve created on your blog. The more clicks and sales attributable to such banner ads, the more money your blog earns.

#7.Job Board

You can decide to add a Job Board to your blog if your blog provides freelance writing or blogging advice.  By doing so, the Job Board will not only add to your blogging income, it will also be giving your blog readers some good reasons to be returning to your blog. Returning blog readers are very valuable traffic as most expert marketers will tell you. With a Job Board on your blog site, you can then decide to charge advertisers some agreed fees to enable them to place their jobs advertisement on your Job Board for an agreed number of days’ duration. Job seekers then constitute their own unique return traffic back to your blog site since they know they will be able to view and apply for any jobs on your Job Board free of charge. 


 

How SFI Business Provides a Level Playing Field for all Affiliates

The very good news about SFI business is that it provides a very level playing field for all its affiliates and Mr. Gery Carson and his team work round the clock to ensure that this field remains perpetually level. In SFI, there is something for everyone. Even if you joined SFI today, what you need to succeed applies to everyone no matter who they are or where they come from.

The tools available to someone who has been around the business for quite some time are also available to you. What you do with the tools and the training is entirely up to you. It has nothing to do with how long you have been in the business. For that reason, how best you succeed in SFI is entirely up to you. That has nothing to do with how long you have been in the business.

The earning potentials, the streams of income, the success tools, the training, the support, and even the opportunities apply to all affiliates equally without exception. Everything in SFI is so transparent that even rookies start to make money within hours of their joining SFI.

My friend, welcome to SFI. Start doing your own thing, follow the rules and be diligent in your business. The sky is your limit irrespective of whether you have been in SFI for a very long time or whether you are just joining.

Best SFI LaunchPad Lessons

From my own perspective, all SFI LaunchPad lessons are very good lessons for anyone who wants to succeed in the business. However, when taken all together, I believe lesson of day 19, “How much can I make?” is about the best for the following reasons:

1. Everyone I know in SFI business (and that includes my humble self) is in the business to make money so that lesson is very apt.
2. The lesson tells you what you need to do to make money.
3. It tells you that you’ll get out of SFI what you put into it.
4. It tells you that SFI works if you do.
5. The lesson reveals to you that you are in control and it’s up to you how far you take the business.
6. It shows you and offers you the opportunity to earn residual income.
7. That basically means that for the work you do today, you have the potential to earn money not only for today but also for years to come.
8. The lesson teaches you how to use “leveraging” or duplication for maximum effects to make money.
9. The lesson amazingly reveals to you how duplication and global networking helps all SFI affiliates to make money 24/7.
10. It shows you how everyone helps everyone else in the same team to make money every hour of every day at SFI.
 

How Affiliates Can Set Long-Term Goals in SFI Business

Well, like every other affiliate, I am in SFI business to make money. On the long term, I believe I will make a lot of money to enable me live the way I want to live without any monetary inhibitions. In that case, on the long term, just like I did, any affiliate can set at least 10 long-term goals by providing answers to the following questions: 

 
1. Which place will you like to live?
2. What type of house will you like to live in?
3. Who will you like to spend quality time with?
4. What additional challenges will you embark on?
5. How frequently will you go on vacation?
6. While on vacation, where will you like to go?
7. How will you like to travel?
8. What form(s) of transportation will you like to own?
9. What social/recreation clubs will you like to join?
10. What charity/social services will you like to fund?

Any answers you are able to provide for these 10 questions can adequately represent your long-term goals. You must be as realistic as you possibly can but avoid fantasy. Since money is not expected to be an obstacle, I believe you can easily set the type of long-term goals which could enable you to live very happily ever after.