Timmo789, Author at Auto Pilot Money Making Software

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing

The idea of autopilot affiliate marketing is very appealing. “Set it and forget it” is the catchphrase. But how many of these kinds of systems actually work? Do they work at all? Or do they only work for the people selling the courses?

In my early years of learning affiliate marketing, I jumped from one course to another learning various online marketing and affiliate tactics. You can read some reviews I wrote about the various courses I took in my article digital profit course review.

This is known by some as “shiny object syndrome”: jumping from one system to another looking for the “magic bullet” which will pay out with the smallest amount of work, understanding or input! I had some success with certain strategies, but mostly it was a disappointing experience.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – What’s The Truth?

So what is the truth of an autopilot affiliate marketing system. Well statistics don’t lie. Around 3% of online marketers go on to build successful businesses long term. That means something like 97% fail. That’s a huge amount of disappointed people going into affiliate marketing and leaving. Of course there’s many who will struggle along too, making only a small amount from their online businesses.

But what does that statistic say about the so called autopilot affiliate marketing systems which are offered? Well, probably that they claim it’s too easy to build an online business and be successful with it. Tighter rules have put some pay to those businesses which claim you can turn on a strategy and leave it running without doing any work! Without proper disclaimers on websites, they’ll be punished. But there’s other reasons for the high number of people attempting and failing at internet businesses.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing – Easy To Start

It’s very easy to start an online business. You only need a credit card and you’re in business! Consider how much more difficult it can be to start a physical business. There’s much more cost involved for a start. An online business is pretty accessible too. Anyone with a smart phone can access a website and purchase an autopilot affiliate marketing business “system”.

But that doesn’t mean they’ll succeed at it. It’s a similar concept to buying gym membership in January and then never actually turning up to a gym for the rest of the year.

The gyms win! And for a small time you win too – thinking it’s the start of a new “you”. This usually happens around the time when you’ve over indulged over the festive season and are having some misgivings about how to change your growing belly! I know, I’ll pull out the credit card and get a gym membership! Then, with that good intention done, it’s back to the Christmas pudding and perhaps some wine!

What Does It Really Take To Make An Online Business Successful?

So the real question when it comes to these autopilot affiliate marketing systems and strategies is what does it really take? What does it take to succeed? Those who have made it know that there’s a lot more to it than simply throwing up a landing page and driving traffic to it.

Although I had some success with a strategy like this, Google banned my adverts shortly afterwards. I lost my Adwords account for years! For most people this will be enough for them to throw in the towel and give up. An autopilot business system can only give you so much. After that it’s kind of up to you. For the average person it’s far too difficult and technical to learn how to build websites and landing pages.

That’s why many companies offer to include these kinds of software within their packages. It takes the hard work out of building an online business. But you’ve still got to be compliant if you’re going to become an advertiser and use paid marketing for traffic. Having a ready made sales funnel done for you is all well and good. But you’ve still got to market it, and this is a skill.

Online Business Owners Are Entrepreneurs

Yes online business owners are entrepreneurs. If you’re moving from a job to become a business owner, there’s a lot more to contemplate than just setting up a website. See the what psychological factors limit the growth of a business. If you think you can “set it and forget it” you’re going to be very disappointed! There’s far more to it. You’ll need to build a sales funnel and then focus on marketing it. This takes time and money. Even with a very good set of digital products, and an automated and scaleable business system and strategy, you’ll still have a lot to learn.

Most people just don’t see this nor do they see the potential of working on themselves. They want fast results and when they don’t get them, they become disillusioned and blame the business not themselves. See why affiliate marketing does not work.

Be Honest With Yourself

Be honest, did you start looking for autopilot affiliate marketing because you want your work cut out? Do you expect to work long hours for several months before seeing a return? No of course not! We want fast results and we’re looking for someone to give us them! Unfortunately those who are offering fast results may not be there to help you when your bubble bursts! Ideally find a company who are realists and who are also honest with you.

Take the time an energy needed to learn what needs doing. You can join an online business community through this site. Just sign up for the free videos to learn more.

Internet Business That Runs On Autopilot

I always wanted an internet business that runs on autopilot. Back in the early naughties, I imagined a system which churned money out while I was enjoying my life elsewhere! The idea became apparent after I purchased an ebook on eBay which taught a business system to sell on the auction site. See How To Start A Profitable eBay Business for the strategy.

The ebook purchase was what struck me – not really the system it taught. And although I made money from the strategy it taught me, the ebook seemed more “magical” to me. I had bought a digital downloadable product with my purchase. It was something which was sold directly over the internet without needing postage or handling. The complete sale was also automated and I immediately saw a huge potential in this model.

Internet Business That Runs On Autopilot – What Next?

I was using this eBay business strategy and buying and selling things for some time. But the business I was doing was time heavy and I had to personally answer questions about products I was selling and physically post goods out. This took up a considerable amount of time.

My days were split between searching for goods on eBay to purchase, answering questions from customers and trips to the post office to weigh and post items out. The business wasn’t making nearly enough money for all this time I was spending online. There had to be a better way!

I wanted an internet business that runs on autopilot; which could be scaled up, and largely ran by itself; and I was convinced it was possible. I just didn’t know how back then.

Internet Business That Runs On Autopilot – My Story

I realised that even though I was working for myself, and was using the internet, all I really had was a job that I owned. I was convinced that there must be a better and more lucrative way to use the internet for profit. So I abandoned the eBay strategy and looked elsewhere. At first I tried to create my own ebooks to sell. I wrote one on becoming a stuntman; something I had learned about some years before.

I didn’t sell any copies of the book but it did land me in some hot water in the stunt business. But that’s another story! However, I did learn how to set up a website and automate the payment process; which was part of the process. I wrote another one about becoming a TV extra too, but struggled to make sales.

The weak link in the online sales process was in marketing. I had learned some technical skills on the way, but my ability to put the product in front of the right audience was weak! So I put myself on several online marketing courses over the following few years. You can read about some of them in my article digital profit course review.

Marketing – The Key To An Autopilot Business System

Yes marketing. Marketing is key but not the only thing to consider for an autopilot business system. Without marketing, all the fancy “bells and whistles” of an online business simply won’t work. It took me some time to figure this out. When I first started out, I thought just putting up a website was enough. I though people would just somehow be able to see my website – perhaps because I thought I was so important! How little did I know!

If you imagine a shop opening up in a quiet neighbourhood, down a back alley, in a place no-one goes to, you have a small idea of what a website really is. A website is simply invisible in most instances. Without marketing, or building it on a good foundation, you’ll get no visitors, none.

But there’s more to a good business online too. You also need to provide some kind of value. Without an exchange of value, no-one wants your products. This is where affiliate marketing comes in. With affiliate marketing, you can market other people’s products. Other people’s products, I realised, offered far more value than my little ebook I created.

A Business Model That Works!

After a lot of failures online I eventually found an business model that worked! I had tried many things with some success but most met with failure! See my article 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. With the right business model, and attitude, you can build an internet business that runs on autopilot! How does this work? Here’s a quick overview:

Use paid marketing – yes this article is an example of ‘free’ marketing or content marketing so I’m kind of contradicting myself here. But I also use paid marketing too. (I just like writing). Paid marketing is good because it’s fast and most importantly it’s scalable. Don’t ever forget you’ve got a global audience with an online business.
To use paid marketing, you’ll need some awesome products which offer huge value (sign up to the free video series on this website to learn more). Small products pay small commissions. Large value digital products pay the most commissions.
Use a program which offers recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer the opportunity to earn an ongoing commissions from each member sale you make.
Leverage other people’s experience. Yes get help. Affiliate marketing can be tough but it’s far harder if you attempt it on your own. Sign up on this site for the free videos for access to an online community which offers help to its members.

An Online Business That Runs Itself?

But what’s the catch? Sure, an online business can run itself. But there’s heaps to do first. You need to set up a ready made sales funnel which offers a range of digital products. Then, you’ll need to learn marketing. That’s it! If you are successful, you can scale up your marketing and reach more and more people. Re-invest your profit back into scaling up your business. Operate it from anywhere in the world and keep learning and growing it.

With online marketing strategies and digital products, the whole thing can run 24 hours a day on complete autopilot. You’ll still need to test and measure your system though. But this is far less time consuming that working in a job trading your time for your money forever more! Far better to learn how to stop trading time for money and automate an online business instead!

Who Can Do This?

Most affiliates quit in the first few years of starting an online business. So I’d say you need to take this as a serious business from the outset. Don’t let reports of people making millions overnight with an online business fool you. Yes millionaires do exist in the online world, but by and large they’ve spent years testing and measuring their businesses before scaling up. Their “overnight success” took them years of hard work.

Anyone can start an online business though, whatever their background. The SFM digital success mentoring program offers a complete business system, strategy and online training and mentoring community to thousands of people all over the world. (You can sign up on this site for access).

AutoPilot Money And The Law Of Attraction

Autopilot money and the law of attraction? My first taste of “autopilot” money was with the business model affiliate marketing. I had written an article reviewing a product I had bought and made a sale some time later. It was an exciting event and the start of a journey to learn how affiliate marketing works.

But the first time I ‘discovered’ the idea of autopilot money online was long before this. So let’s start there!

I was buying and selling on eBay to make some extra money and I was looking for a better business model. I found an ebook which had an eBay “system”. It taught a strategy to find badly listed items on eBay and then re-list them for profit. I share the full strategy here in my article how to start a profitable ebay business.

autopilot money and the law of attraction

However, despite using this strategy explained in the ebook, it was the ebook idea which lit up a lightbulb in my head! I realised that the ebook sale was an automated sale. Having bought it, this proved that it worked! I also was able to download the book automatically from the internet without anyone having to speak to me or send a product physically. The whole process could be not only automated, it could be scaled to a global audience.

This was the initial idea I had which led me to learn how to automate income from the internet via an ‘autopilot’ business system.

The Idea – Autopilot Money And The Law Of Attraction

This idea initially led me to create my own ebooks. After a lot of problems selling them, I eventually put myself on several marketing courses.

The courses I bought were mostly affiliate marketing courses and taught a number of different strategies for making money online.

Eventually my pursuit of a profitable online business model led me to a business model and online community which taught me the best marketing strategies and business models for success online.

The Law Of Attraction ?

Looking back at the process it’s easy to see how the law of attraction played a role in my building an income from the internet. What is the law of attraction?

I never let go of the idea of creating an income from the internet. There were many road blocks on the journey, but eventually through sheer determination I was able to make a break-through and create an income online.

This happened over several years and wasn’t without a great deal of work and determination. See how the law of attraction led me to an online business. I later found other online marketers who had achieved much faster results through an online business community. (Access by signing up on this website).

During a live training event online with other community members

My Online Journey & The Law Of Attraction

It wasn’t until I had failed many times that I started to look inside for the causes of my problems with my online business.

There’s many roadblocks to success online! I found most of them! See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. But there’s also a lot of internal problems which get in the way of making money from the internet.

For starters, society is very sceptical of anything new, particularly when it relates to making money. If there’s an easier way to do something, it negates potentially years of sacrifice and struggle through maintaining the status quo. For this reason, it’s difficult for anyone to accept change and look for new solutions to their problems.

“Life is hard”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, “you need to work hard for money”. Any of these ideas sound familiar? Chances are good that you’ve picked up some beliefs relating to money, lifestyle and what’s possible for you. Working 9 to 5 for example is a typical example of an arbitrary pattern or ‘ethic’ which is no longer relevant for many people today.

Letting go of deeply entrenched ideas is much harder to do than continuing to perpetuate them in your decision making.

Releasing old ideas and the old self image is part of the journey to something new.

Best Online Business To Start With No Money

So, what is the best online business to start with no money at all? Well the first things which spring to mind are YouTube and Hubpages. With YouTube you can start generating content and uploading it. Over time and lots of regular and useful videos, you’ll see some traffic and gain some subscribers. Then, you can simply promote affiliate products to your subscribers and viewers. See clickbank autopilot money making software.

Clickbank is good because you can choose products to promote and there’s no fees involved. But like any affiliate program, you only get paid when you sell. So traffic will be your main problem, and buyer traffic at that!

Making Money From YouTube

Making money from YouTube without spending any money is a long term strategy. You’ll need to get busy uploading loads of content to build an audience. But before you start, choose an affiliate product or products which is in alignment with who you are and what you are about. This way, creating content which is in alignment with your products should be a lot easier.

Choose products you would want yourself. People like people who are like them. So to create a following, you’ll want to talk about things which you like and ideally, know about. If you don’t do this, your videos might lack congruence and authenticity, and this can effect your traffic and sales. Be yourself, whatever you do!

Best Online Business To Start With No Money – Hubpages

Keep in mind that having no money at all is severely limiting with an online business. Imagine starting a real bricks and mortar business with no money. No advertising, no staff and no business premises. What do you expect the outcome to be?

With an online business, it is possible to start with no money at all though. However, you should be prepared for some serious work to get the traction you need.

With an online business, your main cost is advertising. With free advertising such as Hubpages articles and YouTube videos, for example, you’ll need to work very hard and for a very long time to get any traction. Plus you’ll need to find the right audience for your products through creating content. Working smart is key though.

Ideally if you can afford to build a website of your own, this is worth doing. See create free website and earn money. This costs next to nothing. You’ll just need to buy a domain name and pay for hosting. But overall it’ll cost you less than $10 a month. Anyway, on to Hubpages.

My first online success came from using Hubpages to write content and link to affiliate products. I wrote a review about a product I had bought. It was a website building software and it sold for about $100, making me $40!

Digital products pay a larger percentage of the cost. So use those kinds of products. Don’t choose low value physical products because they only pay 3-10% commissions. So you’ll need to sell a lot of them to build a business. (More on this later).

Best Online Business To Start With No Money – Build A Review Website

A review website is probably the best online business to start with no money. Why? Simply because reviews are the things people read just before they purchase something. They just need a bit more information about some product before they buy.

Once they make the purchasing decision, they purchase through your affiliate link. Hey presto, you’ve made a sale!

Many affiliate marketers fail because they don’t get this bit right about their content. They write about things which don’t attract targeted buyers. So much of the effort is wasted on people who aren’t interested in their affiliate products. With a review site, you know your visitors are interested in the products you sell, so straight away, you’re ahead of many other affiliates.

One review website which is a particularly good example is Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com. Yep that’s a review website! It’s a website which helps people make great decisions about their finances and leads them through to products and services which can help them save money.

best online businesses to start with no money

Building a website is a cheap way to start an online business. Your main task once you’ve built it is to bring people to it. Traffic is key for a monetised site and your visitors need to be ready with their credit cards in hand! That’s why a review site is a good idea for an online business if you’re on a budget.

What Would You Love To Be Doing?

A good question to ask yourself is what would you love to be doing. If you like writing, then using a blog posting site like Hubpages is a good idea. If you like creating videos, YouTube might be for you. Perhaps you like interviewing people? Maybe creating podcasts is the way to go.

Remember with an online business, you can choose many routes. The main problem with having no money is traffic and getting eyes on your content. Paid traffic is the fastest method of building an online business, but expensive – especially if you don’t know what you’re doing!

So if you’re going the free route, expect a lot of hard work before you see any tangible results in terms of income.

Choose Products Which Help You

There’s a couple of ways to choose products which help you as an affiliate marketer. Affiliates promote other people’s products for commissions on the sale. When I started out as an affiliate, I needed to learn some marketing strategies. So I bought products which taught me marketing.

If you want to get some training sign up to the workshops on this site. Or, use a product which helps you learn about traffic generation. Checkout my ebooks Niche Blogging For Profit and The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing which are completely free.

Another way to choose products which help you is to look at those which offer recurring income from sales. Recurring commission affiliate programs are good for affiliates because they give you ongoing income from previous sales. So even from few sales you can start generating an ongoing income. This can help dramatically in the early stages of an online business – especially if you’re got a limited budget, or you’re starting on a shoestring.

If you’ve enjoyed this article I’d really appreciate it if you shared it or left a comment below. Plus if you’ve any other thoughts or ideas to share, I’d be interested!

Best wishes with your online business empire!

How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing

If you’re wondering how to find a niche for affiliate marketing, here’s a few ideas for you.

Firstly, it’s a good idea to start out with a product or service you would like to promote as an affiliate. Starting with a product gives you a focus to build a website around. If you start without a product, you have to find a product later on and this can present problems, especially if your content isn’t a good match.

The idea of finding a niche for affiliate marketing is so that you can attract free website traffic and you don’t have to pay for advertising. To do so often requires an expensive product range which can be out of reach for many. If time is more of an issue for you, use a high ticket sales funnel and paid advertising instead. It’s much faster, but more difficult if you’re on a budget.

How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – The “Untapped Niche”

The dream of many affiliate marketers is to find a untapped niche markets to build their website around. If you’re the only person in a untapped market, you can get free traffic and make sales on autopilot! However, untapped markets a few and far between these days.

If you find a low competition keyword to build a site around, consider yourself blessed. In many cases, you won’t get a huge amount of traffic from a niche website. But, if you go about it the right way and build your niche website well, you can benefit from almost instant free traffic to ‘kick start’ your site! See How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic.

Finding a completely untapped niche is pretty tough. It’s also highly unlikely. Instead, try and find a niche which you have an interest in, and you can build a site around. If your passion is something competitive, you should still aim to find a sub-niche which you can create content for. You’ll be much more motivated to build a site around a passion or at least an interest, than in something you have no interest in.

Finding Your Niche Through “Blocking”

Start out with a route keyword and block down. Alternatively, start with a route keyword and block up! For example, lets use the keyword affiliate marketing. This is a super competitive keyword and you’ve very little chance of getting far with the niche keyword of affiliate marketing for a niche site on its own. However, think about working down into a sub-niche of affiliate marketing:

Using blogging with affiliate marketing
How to use YouTube organically with affiliate marketing
Keyword research and affiliate marketing
Using affiliate marketing with an existing business
Monetising an existing website or blog

Or you could ‘niche-up’ instead. What I mean by this is think about what affiliate marketing is to people and how it fits into the larger whole. Many people don’t know about affiliate marketing but they still search online for solutions which affiliate marketing can fix:

Building online businesses from home
Working from home without any experience or products to sell
Side stepping a career and changing jobs
Career changes for the over 60’s

You can apply the principle of blocking to any main keyword which you choose. Ideally find something you’re interested in and find affiliate products which suit that particular topic.

How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – Product Searching

Another way to find your niche is by looking for and choosing products which you, yourself would really appreciate. If you’re going to be writing content and creating videos about a particular product, you want your audience to also want (and need) that product.

You will ultimately draw people towards you who are like you with your content. If they are like you, chances are good that they’ll also want to purchase the kinds of products you like too.

When you appreciate a product, you’re much more congruent when it comes to talking about it, writing about it and promoting it. So, use a product you have already bought, or would like to purchase to define your niche.

Ideally use a digital product. I use a digital online training program which you can access through my email list. Sign up on this site to access a free video series. You can use any product you choose though. Digital products can be the best because they give affiliates larger commissions than physical products. Remember though, choose something you want yourself. Then you’re in a better position to market it through your niche site. See my article on clickbank autopilot money making software for some recommendations on what products to choose.

How To Find A Niche For Affiliate Marketing – Your Interests

Another way to search for your niche is to look through your interests. You can turn your interests into cash, especially if you have an interest which you’re either passionate about or is particularly specific. Make a list of the things you’ve done in the past 10 years of your life. Think about:

What you’ve done for a living
Books and films you’ve read and watched
Things you’ve learned about life and yourself
Relationships you’ve had
Skills you’ve learned
Places you’ve visited
People you’ve met
Interesting things about yourself which you often don’t share
Interesting people you know

When you look at the different areas in your life, there’s probably things which you can share which you haven’t thought about. Skills you have are often overlooked and your life experiences can be written about in order to build a following online.

What You’ve Already Bought

One of my first sales online came from a software program which helped build websites. (It was called X Site Pro). I wrote a review about it and made a sale through my affiliate link. This was one of my easiest sales. If you’ve bought something online, and most people have, you can usually find an affiliate program which sells the product and link to it through a review website.

Review websites are a great way to start out too, if you’re still stuck for ideas. With a review site, you catch a buyer looking specifically for reviews of the product you’re reviewing. That means you have a very targeted piece of content which draws in hungry buyers to your content.

Take an inventory of everything you’ve bought online over the last year or so and it could give you a clue how to find a niche for affiliate marketing.

Conclusion

If you’re still wondering what niche to get started in for affiliate marketing, you can also build a website around something more general. If you don’t want to blog around a certain topic, but just want to get going, just buy a domain name with your name in it and get started. See my article Create Free Website And Earn Money where I share how I built this website from scratch.

Having a specific keyword in your domain name isn’t absolutely necessary but it can help you get a ‘foot in’ in the organic searches and get that much needed traffic on your site to get your going. Quality content is also a vital part of building a niche website of course too. See How To Build A Niche Website and Get Free Traffic.

Untapped Niche Markets

If you’re looking to start an online business, one strategy is to find untapped niche markets online to rank a website for. This isn’t easy and does require some research.

Take this website for example, which is a niche website. Although I’ve gathered small trickles of traffic from building the site around the topic of Autopilot Money Making Software, there’s a limit to the potential traffic (and sales) which can come from this main keyword.

Untapped niche markets are those which you can more easily rank a site for and get free traffic. Once you’ve done that you also need to make your website profitable; more on this later.

Untapped Niche Markets: Where To Start

I have built a few niche websites around various keywords I’ve found which have either:

Proved themselves in the past to actually convert into sales
Shown promise because they have very little competition on Google

If you don’t already have any stats to use to determine which keywords are brining you sales, you’ll need to determine whether your keywords are good enough to start building a niche website around.

Some keywords look good on the surface, but won’t convert into sales. You need to find those keywords which are relatively uncompetitive on Google and which have a good search volume already. You also need to think into the search intent behind the keywords you are hoping to rank your website for.

Untapped Niche Markets: Examples

This starts with Google’s Keyword Planner. There are also paid-for keyword tools you can buy, but if you don’t want to pay, there’s always Google’s free keyword planner.

Look for long tail keywords which you would like to build a site around. Start with the kinds of things you’d like to write about. Starting with your passion or interest is a good place because you’ll need to create some content on a regular basis, even with a good niche site.

Here’s a couple of example sites I built: Whentoharvestgarlic.com, Tedssheds.net, and this one of course too “Autopilot Money Making Software“. You can see the step by step strategy I used to find the keywords and build this site in my article Create Free Website And Earn Money on this site.

When To Harvest Garlic

The garlic site I found through the keyword planner. I built the whole site around the main keyword “when to harvest garlic”. However, I’m using this as an example of what not to do since it wasn’t a great success! I ranked the site at the top of Google for some time however. But, it didn’t convert well into sales.

The topic didn’t have great products to sell on my site and if you look closer into the topic, you’ll see that it’s not really ‘geared’ to sell anything – just to impart knowledge! If I had stuck with it, I could have created products around the topic. However, the main problem was that I wasn’t interested in the topic myself! I worked on it for 6 months or so and then left it. It soon dropped off the organic listings and disappeared!

Teds Sheds

Ted’s Sheds was a success in terms of that it ranked and got free traffic. I even made a few sales. I promoted Shed Plans which I found on Clickbank (see clickbank autopilot money making software). Again though the keywords were focused on a UK based company called Teds Sheds. Visitors mostly wanted to buy actual physical sheds and have them installed, not buy shed plans and make a shed from scratch themselves. Hence the site didn’t do very well, but was a learning experience.

Monetising A Website

Having found a good niche topic which is aligned with some interest or passion, you can start building your site. On this site I used the keyword in the domain name. This can help rank a site for those keywords providing you build some quality content on your site too. Ideally, choose a number of keywords to write articles on. You can find these on Google’s Keyword planner by typing in your main ‘seed’ keyword and looking for any other longer tail keywords which come up.

When you have a few articles on your site for derivatives of your main keywords, your site will have more authority for those keywords if you’ve chosen a relatively uncompetitive niche to build a site in. If all goes well, (and there’s no guarantee of this), your site should rank and start getting some free traffic.

Build An Email List

Turning traffic into subscribers and sales is your next priority. But you should firstly aim to build more traffic by creating content on a regular basis. Affiliate links on your site can affect it’s standing with Google. So be wary of using them too frequently or too early in your site’s development. Focus on providing quality content first. Thinly disguised affiliate websites with little or no actually useful content seldom escape Google’s all seeing eyes!

Ideally, build an email list by offering some great giveaway to your visitors on your site. This can be a good way to connect with your visitors, offer value and build an email list, without spamming your content full of affiliate links.

Ideally you’ve built some great content which attracts the right visitors. Matching your affiliate product/s with your visitors should be a priority from the start when you did your keyword research. If you get this wrong, it’s much harder to promote and sell products to make sales.

You can find a product within your niche by searching for “{your niche} affiliate programs”.

Untapped Niche Markets

Untapped niche markets are few and far between. There’s millions of affiliates who have been trying to tap into these markets for years now. Even with a tonne of competition though, you can still be in with a chance. Look at your competition before starting out with a niche market. Create something better than whatever currently ranks on Google.

Finding an untapped niche market is the hardest part of niche website building. So you should aim to spend some time on this part of the process to get it right. Here’s a quick video to help with the process of keyword selection.

How To Become An Affiliate Blogger

Wondering how to become an affiliate blogger? Well you can start either by using a free blogging platform such as Hubpages, or building your own website and blogging on that! See Get Paid For Advertising Online Without A Website.

There’s a few things you should know before you decide on your route though. For starters, free blogging platforms have some limitations which can limit your earning power. Ideally use your own blog platform by creating your own website. A free blog platform seldom gets picked up by the free search engines like Google. This can severely limit your traffic. Ideally, as a blogger you’ll get found on the free search engines and get free traffic. If this doesn’t happen, you can still get traffic but it’s a lot harder and more time consuming.

how to become an affiliate blogger - free blogging with hubpages

How To Become An Affiliate Blogger: – Choose Your Topic

Some bloggers start out with their topic and others with their products. If you have a passion or interest already, it’s a good idea to build a site around that! A blogger will need to create regular content and keep blogging for a long time before they can make any money! Some blogs even start out without the intention to make money at all! Bloggers create content around their passion and, over time they generate traffic (visitors) to their content.

You can also build a niche website around your topic. This can have an effect on traffic if you do it well. See my article on this, and a step by step about how I built this niche website: Create Free Website And Earn Money.

If you’re unsure of a topic, access the workshop series, and learn more about the kinds of products you’d like to promote first. Then, when you know your topic better, or what you’d like to write about, you can create appropriate content to market your products or services.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing – Becoming An Affiliate Blogger

Bloggers blog about all and any topic whatsoever. That doesn’t necessarily translate to sales of affiliate products though. The best bloggers lead with value through their blogs and create appropriate content to lead their visitors to products which will give value and help their visitors. If you get this wrong, you can be blogging for years without actually making any affiliate sales.

Some of my best sales came for free from blogging. When the content is a good match for your products, and it gets found on the search engines for free, you’ve got a great business model. Keep doing that! If this doesn’t happen immediately, just keep learning and keep blogging. I blogged for a long time before I broke through and started making regular sales.

Choose The Right Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing is a great business model which can allow you to blog and make money – if you get it right! Affiliate products are available in many different areas. If you’ve already got a subject area you’re passionate about, look for affiliate products which fulfil a need in that particular subject area.

If you’re passionate about motorcycles, there’s no point in recommending affiliate products which relate to photography on your motorcycle blog. It’s a bad match. It’s an obvious example but get this wrong and you’ve got your work cut out. Ideally find affiliate products which suit your niche. Search for “{your niche} affiliate programs” to find products which relate to your interest. Then, you can blog around your passion and sell those products which are right fir your audience.

Ideally choose products which are digital. Digital products pay much more than physical products. (40-50% compared with 3-10% commissions). You should also look at products which offer recurring affiliate commissions.

Affiliate marketing commissions with physical products — Commission rates from Amazon’s partner program

Blogging – How Long Does It Take?

So, how long does it take blogging before you see any kind of results? See How Long Does It Take To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing. This will vary wildly depending on a number of factors:

Your niche you pick and how competitive it is
How often you write a blog post and publish it
Your ability to share you posts on social media and generate back links to them
Your blog quality and post length
Your strategies for sharing and marketing your blog posts

There’s a saying that content is King. While this is true, content marketing is important too – perhaps content marketing is therefore “Queen”!

If your niche is very competitive, it will take considerably longer to get your content noticed than with a very uncompetitive niche. Again, see my article on building a niche website.

Why Is Content King?

Content is king, particularly if you’re a blogger. If you run an affiliate marketing business with paid adverts, it’s a different story. But if you’re a blogger, your content is everything. Your content will determine a lot:

Your shares, likes and comments
Your click-away rate – the rate at which people read your full content, or click away after the first sentence.
The open rate of your articles when people see your title
Whether people sign up to your email list
Your ability to make sales through your list

These factors will also determine to an extent your ranking and authority on Google, which will determine how often your content gets seen! And on it goes, round and round!

So you want your content to go down well with visitors and for them to share it.

Writing great content which gives value is therefore massively important to a blogger. You also should use an SEO (search engine optimisation) tool like Yoast SEO. This helps you write content which clues up Google to the intended keywords you want it to rank for.

How To Market Your Content

Time should be taken to share and link to your content as you write it. You can use a plugin which shares your content throughout your social media platforms. You can also link to your content by blog commenting, article writing (on free blogging and article writing platforms), and through forum posting and social media.

You can also place a number of social media share buttons to help your visitors share your content quickly and easily should they like it!

Back-linking takes time and effort. You can write articles on other bloggers sites to help generate backlinks too. This is a time consuming activity but worth the effort. Ezinearticles.com is a site which lets you write content which other bloggers can use. If they use your content, they must share a link back to your website too.

You can also use YouTube to create and upload videos which link back to your content too. Once you start generating some traction with your content, you should start to see which posts bring the best results. You can then use some paid marketing if you choose. Ideally start with a small budget and build up gently! Otherwise you can find you’ll burn through a lot of cash really quickly!

How To Become An Affiliate Blogger – Keep Going!

Blogging as the sole means of generating traffic can be tough. You need to keep going long enough to make a break through. If you succeed, it can mean free traffic and sales to your affiliate products. If you give up too soon, you might see nothing for all your hard work!
If you want to know what it takes and learn how to become an affiliate blogger, download my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit and get blogging!

You can gain an advantage too by building a niche website in the first place. A niche website is a website built around certain keywords which you want to rank for. See how I built this website and How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic.

How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic

If you don’t want to use paid marketing strategies to build an online business, learn how to build a niche website and get free traffic instead.

It’s a much slower method of building an online business than with using paid marketing. However there’s a few reasons to do this:

Your products don’t support paid marketing strategies. That is, they are low cost products so you can’t actually make it viable to use paid marketing.
You don’t have the money to use paid strategies but you have the time to build content. If you’re time rich, but cash poor, building a niche website might be the answer for you.

This is a niche website. I built this site as an experiment to see whether I could rank on Google for some of its main keywords. So far so good! I’ve managed to rank the site, and have started generating opt-ins to my email list – all without paying a penny in advertising. You can see the steps I’ve taken in my article Create Free Website And Earn Money.

How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic – From Where?

Free traffic from a blog is hard won! You have to create some useful content in order to get it ranking on the search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baldu, Ecosia, Yanex, DuckDuckgo etc.

Google is obviously the biggest used service for search. Ideally, you want your content to rank on Google. However, you can still pick up some free traffic from other search engines too. But you should aim to rank on Google.

Simple Trick – Buy A Domain Name With Keywords In It

Now in no way does this guarantee you a place on page 1 of Google. If you don’t also create some awesome content, you’re not going to get a ranking. But it can give you an advantage. If I had put this content on another site, it wouldn’t have ranked for several of the articles I have written around the main site keyword “Autopilot Money Making Software”. Plus it also depends on the relative competition. If you go looking for “money making online” and hope to rank it, you’re gonna fail. Why? Simply because this kind of keyword is far too competitive to rank a low authority site.

Simply put, a specific niche website will rank better for articles which double up on keyword phrases which match the domain. It’s recognised instantly as an ‘authority’ if the site is built specifically for the purpose of those keywords.

The Downside Of A Niche Website?

The problem is, there’s only a few keyword related articles you can build around specific keywords. And that gives you only a limited amount of traffic. Before building a niche website, you should do your homework. Find out how many searches your keyword/s get on a monthly basis before you start. You can always build more content on your site though, of course.

Use Google’s free keyword planner to research specific keywords. Then, use a phrase match search in Google’s normal search by putting your keywords in quotes “like this”. You should get a number (on a desk top computer) which comes up. This number corresponds with the number of competing pages for that specific keyword.

Take a look at this article for more detail on how to build a niche site.

What Next?

So let’s say you’ve built a niche website and written a few articles on it. See how here. Don’t expect to have immediate traffic. Google often takes a month or two before it will rank a new website.

You should also build links back to your content too. Ideally, make a habit of it. Over time, as more links are built, Google will see your site as more of an authority.

You can build links in a number of ways:

Create videos for YouTube and link back to your content
Use article marketing sites (hubpages.com and ezinearticles.com)
Blog comment on blogs which are similar to yours and which allow backlinks.
Post in forums and join discussion
Use social media platforms to link back and share you content.

You can also use a social media plugin to help your visitors share your content too.

Building Content On Your Site

Building Content is pretty important for a niche website. This is the real key if you want to know how to build a niche website and get free traffic. Good content can far outrank clever ‘tricks’ like keywords in the domain name. Remember that you want your site to rank for a good, long time. Otherwise, you’ve done a lot of work for nothing.

Even great content will eventually drop off the search engines down the rankings. So make sure yours is awesome if you want the long term benefit.

Ideally write over 1000 words for each article. Use a plugin which helps you write content with the search engines in mind. Yoast SEO is a good one. It helps you balance the right number of keywords in your article, titles, image alt tags etc. Remember too that this is just a guide to help. These kinds of plugins don’t know exactly how Google ranks content and often change their settings accordingly.

With that in mind it’s important to write for your readers, rather than for the search ‘spiders’ which crawl your site. If your content gets read, and liked, and shared, you will gain greater authority than if people click away immediately. So write good content and that can stand as the cornerstone of your niche website.

Case Study – How I Built This Website

You can see how this website started from keyword selection to SEO plugins and link building.

Checkout my article which takes you through the process step by step:

Create Free Website And Earn Money

How Free Websites Make Money

If you’re wondering how free websites make money, the answer is with a lot of hard work!

Creating a completely free website to make money from is much harder than spending some money on building your own website. Free blogging platforms allow online marketers to create content and then link their content with various products and services.

For example, Hubpages.com is a free blogging platform. It lets you create an account, post content and link to various affiliate products. You’ll need to join affiliate programs in order to do this. Hubpages connects directly with these programs and lets you use drag and drop ‘blocks’ to put into your content.

Blogging Platform Or Free Website

A blogging platform like Hubpages does offer a means to get online and earn income completely for free. However, there are some limitations. You can’t rank your content like you would your own website. Google doesn’t rank Hubpages content on its free search algorithms (search results). There are also some limitations to the affiliate products you can link to.

To create your own website, you’ll need to spend a modest amount of money to purchase a domain name and host your site. Hosting is less than $10 a month and a domain name can be bought for $10 or less. See create free website and earn money.

How Free Websites Make Money – Affiliate Marketing?

Most free websites earn an income from either one or two strategies, or both. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of monetising a blog or website. Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and services from their websites.

For example, I offer training and education for affiliate marketers through my blogs. I recommend products and services I have found useful to other would-be affiliate marketers. If I make a sale, I earn a commission based on the sale.

Google’s Adsense Program

Another income generating strategy for bloggers is Google’s Adsense program. With Adsense, bloggers and website owners can place adverts within their content. When someone clicks on their advert, they earn a small commission.

If you own the content, you receive a percentage of the advertising revenue paid to run the advert. How much you get paid will depend on your content and the appropriate adverts places on your content, which is done automatically by Google. All you need to do is place some code within your blog posts.

Adsense is a great way to generate income if you have lots of traffic. For new bloggers, traffic is the main concern. Without a steady stream of visitors to your content, you don’t earn any money with either adverts placed on your content or affiliate marketing products.

How Free Websites Make Money – Digital Products

So, how free websites make money is through selling other people’s products and/or using advertising placed on content which generates clicks of pay per click advertising. You can of course also sell your own products too, if you have any to sell. Usually though, website owners use other people’s products because then they don’t have to fulfil on the delivery and products can be downloaded from the internet if they are digital products.

Digital products therefore are useful for website owners because they don’t need posting. They can also be bought from anywhere globally, which makes them perfect for an internet business. Product owners don’t have postage, handling or even much manufacturing costs, once they are made. This means their cost is advertising. Affiliate marketers get up to 40%-50% of the cost of a digital product in commissions because they do the advertising for the product owners.

The owners make a sale and the affiliate gets a large commission. It’s a win win because the affiliate doesn’t need to create their own products and the product owner doesn’t have to pay for advertising. They just pay the affiliate marketers to do the selling.

Marketing Your Website

Since this article is about how free websites make money, I’ll discuss the methods of marketing which are completely free to do. Some website owners use paid strategies too, once they start generating income from their blog. For a completely free marketing strategy to work well, you’ll need to create a lot of content for your website. You can do this through a number of different strategies:

Blogging
Video creation – Uploading to YouTube
Creating Podcasts or webinars
Building content on social media
List building

Most free websites start out with a blog. Blogging is a free strategy of creating content to build a steady stream of visitors to a website. Bloggers write content based around their products, or an interest. They can then attempt to sell affiliate products through their website, or the can build an email list.

How Free Websites Make Money – List Building

Some website owners build an email list so that they can promote their products and services (affiliate marketing) to their subscribers. There’s huge value in building a list of email subscribers for website owners. When someone visits a website, they only have an opportunity ‘window’ of a few minutes to decide whether to purchase something from that website.

If you can get a visitor to opt-in to a subscribers list, you can extend this time period to weeks, months and even years. Years later, someone can purchase something from a list. See autopilot marketing.

Websites get people to subscriber to their email list by offering a free giveaway product, like an ebook, for example. I offer a few ebooks to my website visitors to offer value and encourage them to sign up to my email marketing list.

Build Your Own Free Website

You can either start a blog on a free website hosting, or build your own website for a little more. With your own hosting you get to choose which products you can link to and you stand more chance of getting free traffic from search engines like Google.

See free automated money making software for details on building a free blog.

If you want to build your own website with a domain name and hosting, checkout create free website and earn money.

For a more dedicated training and education community, and a range of digital products and services which you can promote, sign up to my email list on this website.

Autopilot Business System

What is an autopilot business system and how does it work? An autopilot business system uses a few strategies to promote and sell other people’s products. Affiliate marketing is the business model around which an autopilot business system can be built.

With the right affiliate marketing business model and support and training, anyone can use automation, the internet, and digital products and services to build a consistently growing income. So how is this done and what’s involved?

Autopilot Business System – The Right Products

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the ‘affiliate’ is rewarded for referring customers to other people’s products and services on the internet. The best known affiliate marketing website is probably Amazon. Amazon is now pretty well known and trusted as a site to purchase goods from. Amazon also has an affiliate program which rewards its ‘partners’ for promoting and selling it’s products.

Although Amazon’s products are well tested and will sell, their affiliates only earn from 3-10% commissions from any sales they make. Digital products pay far more – 40-50% commissions on each sale. In addition to using digital products, using products which offer more ways to earn is a much better way to earn from an autopilot business system.

A Digital Business System and Sales Funnel

Ideally, choose digital products which offer:

Subscriptions

Subscriptions – this is a major key to success with an autopilot business system. With subscriptions, affiliates can earn ongoing commissions for previous sales they have made. This lets the business grow more quickly than if the affiliate was to use only basic affiliate products. Choose subscription affiliate programs.

Up Sells

Up-sells – Not all affiliate programs are created equal. Most don’t reward you again after your initial sale. Amazon will pay you for the initial referral (and for anything else the buyer puts in their ‘trolly’ within a certain timeframe). But that’s it. You don’t get any repeat commissions if your customer returns the following month and buys a lot more. With a good digital business product range, you earn again for the lifetime of that customer’s purchases: even if you don’t personally close the sale and it’s sold by an in-house sales team, on your behalf.

High Commission Affiliate Programs

High commission affiliate programs offer larger valued items which you can earn up to 50% commission from. Items which sell for $20,000+ can earn you $8000 in a single sale. This means you can scale up more quickly and offset the cost of paid marketing more easily.

Multi-Tier Sales

Multi-tier sales – Give you the ability to earn from the sales made by your referrals. By building a team of affiliates, you can earn commissions based on their successes, as well as your own.

Digital Products

Digital products – offer the ability to automate sales and delivery to anywhere globally. In addition, there’s very little cost involved in delivery, storage or production (besides the initial set up costs) of digital products. This is way digital products can pay the larger commissions to affiliate marketers – up to 50% on a sale. Because the affiliate is doing the advertising for the ‘vendor’ product owner which amounts to a large portion of the cost of selling.

A Ready Made Sales Funnel

To create a range of digital products of your own which contains all of these benefits would be quite a task. Instead, purchase a ready made sales funnel which has everything in it mentioned above. You can also ‘position’ yourself with any number of the above benefits in your ‘virtual store’, according to your budget. See defy9to5.com/how-it-works

Promoting Your Virtual Store

Once up and running you’ll have a website, landing pages and an email marketing campaign which runs automatically, delivering emails and offering products to your email list. Get started here.

Once this is in place, you’ll need to promote your landing page and get people into your sales funnel where you can offer them insight and value through your email marketing campaign. You’ll also be able to sell a range of digital products and services and earn commissions from them.

This can be done in a number of ways, the most common being either content marketing and paid marketing. The fastest method is paid marketing. See book below:

Paid Marketing Vs. Content (Free Marketing)

Paid marketing isn’t cheap and content marketing isn’t fast! But you can also do some of each according to your circumstances. Content marketing will take longer to generate results from.

Paid marketing should be started with care, because you can still burn through a budget quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. Ideally, join an online business community and learn from others who are already achieving the results you want from an autopilot business system.

When I started out with affiliate marketing, I only did content marketing. Checkout my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit below.