I would be lying if I were to tell you there is a easy way to make money with affiliate marketing. The fact is you have to put time and work into your affiliate marketing business. But with most things in life there are shortcuts to success, right?
I see no reason why you shouldn’t take a shortcut to success, if one exists.
What is that saying again?
“If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”
No, thats not it..
“Work smarter, not harder.”
That’s the one.
I’ve always liked that saying. Even back before I had my own online business and I was working a full time job in a warehouse. It used to amaze me how much extra work some of my co-workers would subject themselves to just to get the job done.
Not me though. I used to try and find the easiest way to complete the job as I could. My goal for every shift was to make money, while doing the least amount of physical work as possible.
I try to implement that same mentality into my affiliate marketing business. I still have to put work and effort into my business, but I discovered a few tricks that have helped me to; work smarter, not harder.
What is the easiest way to make money with affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a complicated lady. There is a ton of different aspects to affiliate marketing that can take years to master;
- Niche selection
- Affiliate programs
- Keyword research
- Blogging
- SEO
- Generating traffic
- PPC
- Conversions
If your someone who is just getting started with affiliate marketing, all these different aspects can be downright dizzying.
Its easy to get overwhelmed with everything that affiliate marketing encompasses, so I try to break it down into little bite sized pieces. Its easier to digest that way.
Tip #1: Don’t get too specific
Once you have your niche chosen, naturally you will move on to your URL selection.
My advice for naming your URL: Don’t get too specific.
Getting too specific with your website name puts somewhat of a restriction on what you can reasonably promote on your website and it makes creating content much more difficult.
A restriction on what you can promote = a limit on what you can earn.
Example: One of my first niche websites was all about promoting a specific weight loss program for woman. I thought my best bet for naming my website was to incorporate the name of the program into it. So I named my website jensbeachbodyreview.
The website had some reasonable success, but I was somewhat confined by the name of my website to only promoting Jen’s beach body program and a few fitness products that the program required.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s your website and you can name it whatever you want and promote what you wish. Hell you can name it bananas.com and sell apples if you want.
I’m just saying it looks more professional if what you are promoting can neatly be categorized into the name of your website.
Tip #2: Stop trying to hit a home run
One of the goals for every affiliate marketer is to rank high in the search results for a competitive keyword. This can be very difficult or even impossible to do if your website or blog is relatively new.
My advice: Stop trying to hit a home run with your keyword selection, and start hitting singles. Lots of them!
Try using a keyword tool, such as this, to find keywords that are generating searches, but have low competition. These types of keywords are called ‘low hanging fruit’.
If you can rank high for a low competition keyword that gets approximately 10 visitors per day, that would equate to 300 visitors per month for that keyword. Do this over and over, then suddenly your website is generating a very significant flow of traffic. And it didn’t require hitting a home run to get there.
Tip #3: Get somebody else to do the work for you
Creating content regularly is vital to the success of your website. The more active you are on your website, the more frequently search engines, such as google, are going to crawl your pages. This leads to faster indexing, and more opportunities for people to find your posts.
The problem with creating content regularly is that it’s a lot of work. Researching your topic and typing it up into a coherent, keyword rich post can be very time consuming. Try outsourcing some of that work to places like this.
For a small fee you can hire someone to research and type up a blog post on a topic and keywords of your choice.
Tip #4: Affiliate with affiliates
Talking to other affiliate marketers is one of the best ways to discover tips and tricks that can streamline your path to success. There are plenty of free online communities like this, (my profile is here) where you can connect with other affiliate marketers and learn from people who have been in your shoes before.
As you can see, the easiest way to make money with affiliate marketing still requires some work. But hopefully some of these tips prove useful to you and help reduce your work load.