So, the big question is – how fast can you make money with affiliate marketing?
One site makes $100 and another site makes $1000 every month. Is there any difference? Of course, Yes.
It’s during this transition that new affiliates run into problems. Many people build their sites and give up when they only start earning a small amount of money.
This is a huge mistake! Unfortunately, most of the newbies make the decision to quit affiliate marketing just before reaching their $1000 monthly journey!
Long line short, without talking about numbers, let’s first go with the basics.
Choosing a Profitable Niche
You are passionate about something and when you are in that then it will be easier. For example, if you have a passion for golf, your niche could be golf equipment.
Although it’s important to pick a topic that you’re passionate about, you should always be confident that it’s going to make you money.
Next, be sure that your niche surrounds a topic that you’re confident about writing about. This is necessary to be your site authoritative and somehow this is for SEO.
If you’re unable to produce enough relevant and fact-filled content, Google’s crawlers won’t identify you as an authority on the topic, therefore your site will sink far into the page ranking abyss with no sales
You need to ask yourself if your chosen niche is taking the attention of your audience. Without consumer interest in products, your niche isn’t going to make much money.
Identify the Different Types of Programs
Before you start making money, you need to sign up for an affiliate program. To do this, it’s time to learn how to identify the different programs on offer.
One Tier
One-tier programs earn you a commission once a sale conversion is generated from your affiliate link.
Two Tier
Two-tier programs earn your commission when you refer other affiliates and start making sales.
Recurring Commission
Recurring commissions work as a result of subscription services. You will continuously earn commissions as long as people are signed up.
Climbing Tiers
Climbing tiers programs provide increasing commissions as you make more sales.
Pay Per Lead
These programs work by paying a commission based on the number of leads sent out to a business, for example, contact fill-out forms. It’s important that your analytics are set up to track the leads and that you have a written agreement with your affiliate.
Sitewide Commissions
The program will earn you a commission regardless of what’s bought on the affiliate website. Amazon offers affiliates (sitewide) that you can grab for affiliate marketing.
Cookies
Cookies track the amount of time site visitors spend after they click your affiliate link and you will earn a commission if a sale is generated for the brand.
Amazon’s Affiliate Program
Amazon allows affiliates to review products you’ve used and write tutorials. For example, you could write a tutorial about how to tune a guitar and include an affiliate link to a guitar tuner.
Amazon is popular among a large majority of affiliate marketers. Amazon’s affiliate program is great especially if you are a beginner or an amateur blogger and you can’t purchase domain and hosting. For the following offers, amazon is great:
- High conversions
- Sitewide commissions
- You are eligible to create custom links for your chosen products
- Up to 10% commissions
- Commission percentage based on categories
Sign Up For Affiliate Programs
Choosing an affiliate program will require you to invest a significant amount of time and research because this is where your income will come from.
The products that you’re promoting to your audience must be of good quality and relevant to your niche. When choosing an affiliate program, it’s important that you make sure other similar sellers are using the same network.
This will help you assess the likelihood of success within that specific program. Next, make sure you sign up for programs that generate a fair return on investment.
Commissions should be over $1 for cost-per-action programs and there shouldn’t be any harsh restrictions on how you promote products.
It’s crucial that you believe and know everything about the products you’re promoting. You need to build trust with your audience to deliver an effective sales pitch.
Lastly, check the level of customer support that you can expect from your affiliate program once you’ve signed up. Conduct some online research and if possible, speak to other affiliates using the same program to see whether they’d recommend the platform.
Learn to Build Traffic
Something that beginners often overlook is the fact that they need an audience to sell to.
However, building an audience that’s big enough to make money from and encouraging them to trust you takes commitment and time.
There are some affiliate marketing niches that make it seem to make money quicker than others, but you’d have to be lucky to find a product that you want to promote that pays well with little competition.
The more high-quality posts you have, the more search traffic you’ll earn. You should keep realistic expectations about your post. The main reason behind it is that your every post can’t rank on Google or be a successful post, however, the learning curve is even more reason to keep at the content creation.
Focus on Content Creation
Additional traffic strategies generated are useless if you don’t have informative and interesting content to back it up.
Having more content will;
- Build your search engine authority
- Expose you to more search traffic
- Makes it likely that someone who lands on your site finds multiple posts to read
A good base of content can vary from small to long detailed posts. The most important factor is that the content is rich in up-to-date details and the content can be a mix of posts, images, and videos.
Regardless of the style of content you choose, it will likely take you at least 50+ hours to build your initial base. For most niche site creators, their initial year should focus mainly on content creation.
The most important thing that search engines identify is whether searchers are clicking your link to view your content.
If your link is tested in a higher position but your link isn’t clicked, the search engine will deem your content not worthy of the higher position.
Offering useful content on a broad range of topics on your niche signifies to your site visitors that you’re an authority on the subject matter.
Your site authority will increase the likelihood that your readers will subscribe to your content and purchase products from your affiliate links.
Scaling Your Niche
Traffic doesn’t come to your site instantly, it takes approximately 6 and 12 months, and it will take at least 12 to 18 months for your affiliate earnings to be over four figures.
If you want to maximize the earnings of your niche site, you should consider diversifying your income streams beyond affiliate marketing.
Everything depends on your niche, so you are depending on your niche to decide this. Generally, this will involve offering a service that’s relevant to your site such as;
- Coaching
- Consulting
- Webinar
- Newsletters
- Subscriptions
- Products that relate to your niche
Consulting and coaching are excellent methods of reaching out to your readers on a personal level and helping them reach your level of success. Most successful affiliate marketer takes this road because this is a very beneficial and rewarding business.
Understanding SEO
Having a knowledge of the workings of search engine optimization will help you generate sales quicker. The more sales, the higher the commission!
Using handy tools like “ahrefs”
have a Keywords Explorer function that will enable you to easily identify keywords related to your niche.
You should seek specific long-tail keywords that are 3+ words long. Once you’ve identified a keyword, you need to research the keyword’s competition to make sure it’s not too competitive.
Including keywords within your content will contribute towards a positive Google rank and therefore, increased site traffic. Hooray!
Always create relevant, interesting, and fact-driven content surrounding your main topic. Never forget a catchy title to attract more customer’s eyes.
Next, write a bitesize meta description to help google visitors understand your content in a few seconds. Make it interesting, you need to draw them in!
Never overwhelm your mind or take stress for keyword density. The important place to include your keywords is in your title, description, and post meta description.
Media is important! Whether you choose to use infographics, images, audio clips, or short instructional videos, people will love them!
Also, utilizing a reliable WordPress theme can save you a ton of trouble when it comes to security, website speed, compatibility, and built-in SEO.
It’s really helpful to add your blog posts’ publish date to the search results so readers can see how fresh your content is!
Ways to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
The issue with affiliate marketing is the frustrating masses of self-proclaimed experts and ‘get-rich-quick’ money-making schemes.
Suggesting that affiliate marketing can be scaled without time and effort is incomprehensible.
Perseverance, research, and engagement with brand networks and your products are the only ways to make financial gains with affiliate marketing.
It takes a large commitment to generate enough traffic needed to result in income. This is important because negative affiliate referrals can ruin your credibility.
How much time you should work to make $1000 a month?
Scattered and irregular growth for the 1st year is very common and this is not a problem. Usually, the main factors that help a site rocket include good quality content, on-page SEO, and links…
It’s also important to realize and accept that if your site isn’t generating heaps of traffic in its first six to 12 months, it’s COMPLETELY normal.
You might find yourself feeling frustrated because you know you’re doing everything right but you’re still struggling to get the sustained income and traffic that you know your site deserves.
Please don’t quit, give it at least 18 months. If your site is still young, you’ll want it to grow as fast as possible. There’s a great way that you can do that and I’ve addressed this already – KEEP CREATING CONTENT.
Focus roughly 80% of your time on creating content, this can be in the form of articles, imagery, or videos. Overall, the plan is that you offer as much free content as possible.
Having more content exposes you to more search traffic and makes it more likely that a site visitor will land on your page and find multiple posts they want to read.
The more high-quality posts you create, the more search traffic you’ll gain. Of course, you should prepare yourself and understand that not every post is going to be golden.
For example, for every 20 posts you create, 2 rank excellently for a high-frequency search term, 6 rank well for medium-frequency terms, and 12 don’t rank very well.
A site with 80 posts will have 8 articles driving high traffic and 24 posts driving medium traffic. However, a site with 40 posts will have 4 articles driving high traffic and 12 posts driving medium traffic. Therefore, the more posts the more traffic!
By offering useful content on a wide range of products and topics within your niche, you reassure your readers that you’re a reliable authority on the topic.
Conclusion
I hope this guide has equipped you with some realistic expectations on how long it takes to generate reliable income on a niche site.
The most important thing is that you give time, and the best practice to influence your success will be to keep creating high-value and relevant content.
I’d like to reiterate that the above applies only if you’ve picked a good niche. Choosing a solid niche is fundamental to your success. You can do this by checking that your chosen subject is something that people care about.
Sports, health, fashion, lifestyle, and gadgets are among popular topics.
If you’re worried that your niche isn’t growing fast enough, remember it’s normal to have low income and traffic in your first 6-12 months and you need a base of strong content if you want your traffic to show significant growth.