I had spent nothing on advertising at this point. However, there are a few downsides to trying to make money with affiliate marketing completely for free.

How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing?

There’s a lot of directions you can take with affiliate marketing and without a “roadmap” it’s easy to get lost en-route. For that reason I would say the best investment you can make is in your education, which you should consider as ongoing. Join a course and get some information and support. Cost of courses ranges and there’s many trainings which will teach you something of affiliate marketing. You can join this one for $37.

A course can give you some ideas about products and marketing strategies you might want to use. But unless you implement some kind of marketing strategy, you won’t move forwards. One of the best pieces of software you can invest in is an email autoresponder. You can access one for free here. This gives you free access to up to 500 subscribers and after that you will need to pay a monthly fee. This begins at $14.99 a month (at the time of writing).

500 subscribers is enough to get you started though and this is free! Affiliates use email autoresponders to send out automated messages to a growing list of their subscribers. It’s one of the best investments you can make because it puts you in greater control over your traffic. Traffic is one of the main hurdles which affiliate marketers face. Without any traffic (or visitors) to your affiliate products/website, you won’t make any sales. There’s several ways to obtain traffic and the cost of them varies.

How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing – Getting Traffic To Your Products/Website

To get traffic to your affiliate offers you can do several different things:

• Blogging
• Email marketing
• Paid advertising
• Video blogging
• Social media marketing
• SEO – search engine optimisation
• Niche websites
• etc.

Paid marketing is going to cost you more but you can still use it at a daily budget decided by you. Spend more and get more traffic. You can also build traffic through creating content (such as this blog post).

Content creation can give you free traffic but it takes a lot longer to generate and you can’t easily control that traffic. With paid marketing you can easily scale up by increasing your budget. But creating content takes time and effort and it’s a slow process building traffic for free.

Whichever strategy you decide on it’s worth building an email list because traffic either costs you time or money, or both. By building an email list of subscribers, you can communicate with and sell products to your list over a longer timespan than is possible from a website.

How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing – Buying A Domain Name/Hosting

The next best piece of advice I can give you is to buy a domain name which you own and host it with a hosting service. You can upload videos for free to YouTube, and write content on Hubpages.com and other free blog sites to get traffic to your affiliate links. But ultimately you don’t own the platforms and if they decided your content breached their terms they can cancel you anytime. Plus, free blog sites don’t rank very well on the search engines and you can struggle getting people to see your content.

With your own domain name and hosting, you have a digital piece of property which you own. This also gives you more authority than when using a free website or blog platform. Google is more likely to rank your content and it can be easier to get organic traffic if you’re going to become a content creator.

Some affiliate programs too don’t like you pointing directly to affiliate products. So having your own digital “real estate” puts you in a better position with many affiliate programs you might like to choose from.

A domain name costs around $12.00 a year and a hosting can be bought from as little as a $3.75 a month. Checkout this link for deals. I buy my domain names from namecheap.com.

Summary

So how much does it cost to start affiliate marketing? You can “start” affiliate marketing for nothing. Join an affiliate program and learn how to promote your affiliate link. However, many programs want you to at least own your own website and you’ll need to learn a promotion method. So your best affiliate marketing “toolkit” comprises of at least these purchases if you’re taking it seriously:

• Training and education course – here’s one at $37
• Buy your own domain name and hosting – $12 a year (domain) ($3.75 a month hosting)
• Get an email autoresponder – (free up to 500 subscribers here, then $14.99 a month)

If you’re going to create content that offers the cheapest way to drive traffic. But if you want to build faster, you’re going to need to spend some marketing budget getting people to your offers. You can start with a daily budget which suits your needs, but the more you pay the more traffic you can obtain. (Start small and build up as you grow in confidence and get better at marketing).

As businesses go, affiliate marketing is definitely one of the most affordable. However, you get paid only when you sell something and it’s a performance based business model. Remember that a lot of affiliates quit when they don’t have the success they expect straight away. Success belongs to those who stick with it and keep going when everyone else quits!

To join a community of online business owners and get help and support, visit affiliate marketing mentors online and sign up for the free video series to learn more.

You can also find a number of affiliate marketing coaches here.

The post How Much Does It Cost To Start Affiliate Marketing? appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

So one of the best tools you can find is an online community of people who are like you, working as affiliates. Access one here.

Having a clear direction, focus and intention gives you clarity. Lack of clarity is the main reason why around 95% of new affiliates fail and quit!

Affiliate Marketing Tools For Beginners: The List

An email list is another important and vital tool for affiliate marketers. Without a list, you’re at the whim of sending traffic directly to affiliate offers from either paid ads or your own content.

Since content creation is a very slow way of generating traffic, free traffic from content marketing takes a lot of time and effort to achieve. If you’re running paid advertising to your affiliate offers, you run the risk of losing a lot of budget when visitors click away. Once you’ve paid for that visitor, and they leave, you’ve lost them forever.

Not so with an email list .With an email list you can capture their details and follow up with them, building trust and offering value through an email marketing campaign. On a list, you can continue communicating with potential customers for years or even decades. But once you’ve lost a visitor from a website, they are gone potentially forever!

A list puts you in charge of your traffic and allows you to build relationships with your subscribers. Top marketers built email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. This allows them to deliver a marketing message and build trust, selling multiple times through a single email messages, which can also be automated!

Get free access to an email autoresponder here. See also best email autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Tools For Beginners: Mindset

One of the most underrated of tools is one which helps you with your mindset. The affiliate’s mindset is what matters most in an affiliate business and without the proper mindset your chances of success are slim. Without focus and direction, it can be easy to fall into bad habits, and waste time on unproductive activities which don’t move your online business forwards.

One of the best resources I’ve found has been Stuart Lichtman’s book “How to get lots of money for anything fast“.

In this book Stuart shares a technique which he calls Cybnernetic Transposition. Stuart Lichtman spent over 25 years developing this strategy to help people achieve the seemingly impossible. He studied at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organisation development and cross cultural business. 

The cybernetic transposition technique is a way to integrate parts of yourself so as to remove the conflicting parts of your brain. This is why so many people struggle achieving goals they set for themselves. Parts of themselves compete against the new goal because it serves another purpose. For example, when trying to lose weight, you might set a goal to eat less. But a conflicting part of yourself doesn’t want to give up fatty food. Your self image competes for control and if you don’t see yourself as a slim, fit person, you will struggle to lose any weight.

Summary

There’s many affiliate marketing tools which beginners might want to use; but it will depend on your marketing choice as to what tools are most effective. I’m a big fan of blogging and so I can also recommend a number of plugins you can use for WordPress. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

But if you’re going to use paid advertising to build an email list, those plugins aren’t going to be of interest!

Here’s a quick recap to the best tools I’ve found online which have helped me the most:

• An online coaching & mentoring community & business system you can use (complete with step by step training and tools you can use).
• An email marketing autoresponder (free access and up to 500 subscribers for free)
• A goal setting masterclass and mindset guide to help you achieve the seemingly impossible!

The post Affiliate Marketing Tools For Beginners appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

Maybe that’s you? If you’ve been working diligently on a strategy for several months without success, is it worth carrying on? Should you change tactics?

Depending on the strategy you use to put affiliate products in front of likely customers, affiliate marketing can take weeks, months or even years before you see consistent results. The fastest way to get traction with affiliate marketing is through using paid marketing. But some affiliate products pay so little that it can be tricky even to break even when paying for your marketing.

Even with high ticket affiliate products and subscription products which pay recurring income, it can be tricky in the first instance. When you’re a beginner, you don’t have experience (or any data) to base decisions on. So you’re running blind until you “fail” a little, and collect some real experience.

It is during this time period when most affiliates quit. If only they kept on going they would see their “failures” as stepping stones to their future success.

Affiliate Marketing Does It Work: Types Of Marketing Methods

There’s many ways to skin a cat as the saying goes and it’s the same with affiliate marketing. There’s no one correct way to get products in front of customers although there’s several which stand out as the clear winners. But if you don’t have a marketing budget and a high ticket sales funnel to promote, it’s going to take a lot longer to get some successful results.

If you’re on a tight budget you will probably need to choose a cheaper marketing method such as content creation, social media strategies, blogging or v’logging (video blogging).

These strategies will take a lot longer and a lot more effort than those strategies which involve running paid ads. Plus they aren’t as scalable as paid advertising. So if you choose a cheaper route, which may be necessary, you’re in for a tougher ride! But if you’re in a high earning career and have a good marketing budget you can run ads until you hit a winner. Then you can simply scale your marketing by increasing your budget.

Affiliate Marketing Does It Work?

For whom does affiliate marketing work? Well the success rate for affiliates is remarkably low at around 5%. This means that for all who attempt to make money with affiliate marketing 95% drop out! Wow, that’s an amazing statistic! But it’s the same with most businesses and just because people assume affiliate marketing will be easy doesn’t make it so! The 5% are better prepared to stay the course, they get help and learn from failures rather than assuming the system is broken.

It’s true you can waste time as an affiliate doing all the wrong things which won’t build your business. In which case, even working for 100 years straight won’t help you! This is known as being a “busy fool” – spending time on those activities which don’t move your business forwards.

Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business, you don’t get paid for your time, as in a job. This can be a tough transition if you’re used to being paid a wage; and so many an old habit can hurt your affiliate business if you don’t become aware of it.

See affiliate psychology and 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid!

Tools Which Help

There’s many tools which help affiliates succeed which not every affiliate knows about. I struggled for years before finding better tools, better products and getting help and support. Some of the best products to use are those which offer recurring commissions and high ticket commissions.

These kinds of products can make your life a lot easier. You should also use an email list, which allows you greater control over your traffic by directing traffic into a manageable list which you own. Traffic is either hard won through content creation or expensive or both, so an email autoresponder is vital to grow your business more quickly.

Affiliate marketing is tough, no doubt about it, but it does work if you stay consistent, get help and support and make a decision never to quit! Learn from others and follow coaches and mentors. When you finally break through and start making those regular affiliate sales there’s nothing quite like it!

Before that happens you need to keep an eye on your mindset and motivation levels. It’s easy to become demoralised and lose the faith. So initially, mindset is one of the most important factors in sustaining your efforts under the adversity of not having achieved success yet. See also affiliate marketing mindset. At the beginning, focus on the small easily achievable goals right in front of you. Celebrate small wins and over time they’ll turn into the big wins.

The post Affiliate Marketing Does It Work ? appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

Aweber is a super easy to use platform with great deliverability for affiliate marketing campaigns. It’s all I’ve used in years of doing affiliate marketing so obviously I’m a little biased!

Best Email Autoresponder For Affiliate Marketing – Why You Need One?

You definitely need an email autoresponder if you’re serious about being an affiliate. Email marketing gives you control of your traffic and the ability to develop a long term relationship with potential customers. Before I got an autoresponder, I struggled with affiliate marketing.

One of the reasons was that I didn’t have enough traffic coming to my websites. On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a purchase from you. Once this window is gone, so is your visitor; usually forever! But if you can capture your visitor’s email address from a website, you can maintain that connection over a much longer timeline.

Often it has been years after someone joins my list before they make a purchase. This just couldn’t happen from a website. Website visitors are here today and gone tomorrow. It’s also useful to have a list because you can build trust by offering value.

Most customers don’t buy something on their first visit to a website. They tend to look around and do some investigating first. It takes several “touch points” before someone will actually buy from you. Particularly on the internet because they don’t know you. How many touch points before a sale is made? Typically it takes between 6 and 8 contact points for a website visitor to make a purchase.

Traffic + Trust = Sales

Traffic isn’t the only factor which affects the success of an affiliate although it tends to be a major problem in the beginning. The first thing a new affiliate should do is send traffic to a landing page where they can collect subscriber’s information. That way, they don’t waste their efforts sending traffic to a website where someone can browse around and take their time. A landing page is designed to give a visitor only two choices: sign up to your email list, or leave the site.

A website on the other hand gives a visitor many choices. They can browse around, click through to see your content, and generally look around. When it takes so much effort to get visitors to your site, you don’t want to waste it! A landing page means you optimise your efforts to encourage visitors to opt in to your email list. Once on your list, you can build trust and generate relationships with your potential customers by giving them valuable email content.

With the right traffic, and the right content, you can offer the best possible affiliate products which are congruent with the needs of your subscribers. When you learn how to do this, you can write your own pay check!

Building An Email List

building an email list can be done in several ways both using paid and unpaid strategies. By far the fastest way to build an email list is with landing page software and paid marketing. Landing page software lets you collect email addresses from a landing page and paid marketing allows you to send targeted traffic to your page very quickly. You can also scale up your paid marketing campaigns once they are working well.

The other way to build your email list is through organic marketing which is a much slower tactic. Blogging, for example, is one way you can do this. With a blog, you attract traffic from the search engines and other promotion methods you use. It can take a much longer time period to attract traffic from a blog and depending on your particular topic it can be weeks or months of work before you see the fruits of your labour.

See also blogging for profit.

The post Best Email Autoresponder For Affiliate Marketing appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

But once you have a few skills up your sleeve it’s time to go to work. You can spend the rest of your life learning new skills. This is called getting stuck in “learning mode”. While there’s not limit to the amount of knowledge you can build up with affiliate marketing, knowledge alone doesn’t make you any money! You also need to apply. So the first thing you should do is get some training as an affiliate. Once you understand some concepts it’s time to go to work! The affiliates who succeed know when to become producers instead of consumers.

So what are the bare minimum of tools which are needed to succeed as an affiliate? Here’s a few I’d recommend.

Affiliate Marketing Tools – Training

Absolutely the best money you can spend is on your affiliate marketing knowledge. Of course you can find free stuff on YouTube and Google. But it can be very much a lottery as to the bits of information you paste together on your own. A course is a step by step training for affiliate marketing. It breaks it down into simple easy to accomplish parts.

By investing in your knowledge, you’re setting yourself up for long term success. So many people rush into affiliate marketing thinking they are going to make a lot of money without much groundwork. I did the same. It was years before I realised that I needed firmer foundations. Knowledge is your foundations so they are definitely worth building if you intend to make affiliate marketing a main source of income. Access a starter account here to learn step by step.

Affiliate Marketing Tools – Email Marketing

I spent years before I even realised that I needed an email autoresponder. It was wasted years! I held out hoping that the few sporadic hits on my website would eventually turn into sales. They mostly didn’t and it was a disappointing ride. An email autoresponder is the best money you can spend as an affiliate after getting training and support.

What does an email autoresponder do? An email autoresponder for affiliate marketing essentially gives you control of your traffic. Organic traffic takes a lot of time to build up, and paid traffic is expensive. But once you start collecting emails on an email database you own, you can send that traffic anywhere you want. You can build a relationship with your subscribers over a long period of time by offering huge value. When people like you they are much more likely to make a purchase of your affiliate products.

Most people need several touch points from a website to buy too. Which is harder to accomplish with only a small amount of traffic. With a list, you can do this much more easily and quickly. Plus you can build up a number of subscribers quite quickly, especially if you’re using paid marketing.

A Website

Why do you need a website for affiliate marketing? While technically you don’t need a website for affiliate marketing, a website is a good idea for a few reasons. Without a website of your own, you’re reliant on other platforms such as free blog sites or video blog sites such as Hubpages.com or YouTube.com. Should a site change their rules or decide to ban you, you can lose your content over night. Plus there’s less freedom in using free blog platforms and you can be restricted on the affiliate products you promote from them.

Having a website of your own gives you more authority too; both with your visitors and with the search engines which don’t rate free blog sites as highly as owner domain names. There’s a couple of ways you can use your own website to make money with affiliate marketing. One way is to create a lot of content on it and attempt to rank organically in the search engines. While this is slow, it’s also cheap – free even! So if you’re on a tight budget, it’s a great way to build up your “digital asset” over time.

You can also send paid marketing to a website to collect emails for your email list. You can also do this through using a landing page software. Depending on your marketing budget and available time, a website is definitely one of the most important tools you can use as an affiliate. If you don’t have time for blogging or content creation though, you can bypass owning your own website and go straight to building an email list using your autoresponder and a landing page software.

Landing Page Software

A landing page software is the shortcut version of having your own website. On a website, visitors have choice to browse around and look through your content. On a landing page they only have a couple of options – sign up to your email list or leave! So a landing page software is pretty awesome if you don’t want to build content and you have a marketing budget for paid marketing. Landing page software lets you focus on building an email list much more quickly than through using content marketing.

You can also cross test your marketing with a software. This means you can easily test one landing page against another to see which one out performs the other.

Affiliate Marketing Tools – Your Mind

Training has already been mentioned but it’s also worth mentioning that your mind is your most important asset (or your most dangerous liability) when it comes to affiliate marketing. When things get bad in your affiliate business will you quit or will you learn from it? Since 95% of affiliates quit, you’ll need to be pretty aware of this if you’re to become successful.

It’s easy to take a few bad affiliate experiences and throw in the towel. Far more difficult is to pick yourself up when things don’t work out as you expected.

Having a focal point for your mind to “flag up” is definitely a good idea. You can’t hit a target if you don’t have one and goals and vision are vital for success. One of the best affiliate marketing tools in this regard I’ve found is Stuart Lichtman’s books “How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast“. Despite the “salesy” title of this book, Stuart Lichtman had spent over 25 years developing a strategy to help people achieve the seemingly impossible. He studied at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organisation development and cross cultural business. 

The result is a strategy for flagging up any i seemingly impossible achievement to the subconscious mind to get all parts of the brain working on the outcome you desire. Stuart discovered that most people don’t succeed in their goals because they have other parts of their mind competing against the outcome. By focusing your subconscious mind on the main problem you wish to overcome, you can get it to flag it up so that it’s always there, working on a solution. See also Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition.

The post Affiliate Marketing Tools appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

In a particularly competitive niche, it will likely take much longer to build traffic through blogging due to the competition. In a less competitive niche it may be quicker to build traffic, but niches with low competition tend to be more difficult to monetise.

Getting this right isn’t just about picking a topic you love. Although choosing a topic you have an interest in will definitely make content creation more sustainable. If you choose a topic just for the money though, you’ll likely burn out. Conversely, if you choose a topic just because you love it, it may be difficult to monetise. So you need to do both.

Blogging For Profit – Choosing A Bad Niche

After six months of blogging about mushroom harvesting I’d had enough! I picked that particular niche because I thought I could rank on Google for it. I did and was at the top of Google for my chosen keyword “when to harvest mushrooms”! Unfortunately for me, this topic was pretty difficult to monetise. Also after a few months of blogging, I was absolutely done writing about it. Each post had to be thoroughly researched, since I knew nothing of this topic. I wasn’t even vaguely interested in the topic either – just about making money online!

So even though I did manage to get free traffic to by blog, I was unable to monetise it or sustain my interest in it over the longer term. I soon burned out and another blogger (who was much more into this subject) took over the top placement. This person was actually uploading videos on a regular basis of their mushroom harvesting activities! How could I compete with this clear passion?

So the first thing I’d say when choosing a topic to blog about is at least make it something you want to learn about. Ideally find a topic you can write and create content about over several months or even years. That way, you’re giving yourself the best possible chance of success.

Blogging For Profit – Know Your Product

It’s well worth knowing what product you’re going to be promoting well before you choose your niche. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself several months in looking for a way to monetise all that content you’ve created. If, like me, you’ve picked a bad topic for monetisation, you’ll find all the work has been for nothing – at least in the monetary sense.

Ideally find a product or service you can promote as an affiliate that you believe in and can stand behind. You can also monetise your blog with Google Adsense or other similar ad platforms. However, you’ll only earn tiny amounts from monetising in this way, and you’ll need thousands of daily visits just to make a pittance. So I’d recommend finding a topic you can monetise with an affiliate product; preferably one which pays out larger commissions and recurring commissions too! With a recurring commission affiliate program, such as a membership program or software, you stand to earn a lot more from each sale. With a single “one off” sale, you need to keep making sales to keep making money.

Good products to promote offer huge lifetime value and pay out recurring commissions to affiliates.

Blogging For Profit – Found Your Niche?

Once you have found your niche you can build a niche website around your target keywords. This can give you a head start as far as free traffic is concerned, particularly if you’re careful about doing your keyword research and you choose a keyword which is relatively uncompetitive but well targeted for your topic.

A niche website can help you rank your content for a particular keyword. However there’s plenty more to do in order to build a good amount of traffic to your site. To find other keyword combinations within your niche you can use Google’s keyword planner. Type your main keyword into the planner and look at the other variations which it gives you. Then, set about writing content for each of these keywords.

Use an SEO tool such as Yoast SEO and other plugins which will help you rank your content and promote it via social media. See affiliate tools for more tools which bloggers use to get more visitors for free.

Keep creating new fresh content for several months and use an automated tool to syndicate it throughout your social media accounts. You should start seeing some hits on your website within a few weeks if you’re posting and sharing regularly. You can also write guest blogs on similar websites to your own. This helps you build up a backlink profile which Google uses to determine rankings for your content.

This can be a long labour intensive process but you can also outsource much of it to SEO companies and content creators.

Email Marketing

It’s well worth building an email list from your blog too. Without an email list you’re relying on traffic from your blog converting into sales. This happens only for a tiny amount of your website visitors because more people need a few contact points or “touch points” before buying something online. With email marketing you can accomplish this much more easily than through blogging alone.

On a blog website, you only have a small “window” of opportunity to get your visitors to make a purchase. But once you get them on your email list, by offering a freebie on your site, you can send them messages on a daily basis over a much longer time period.

Often people will buy from an email list after weeks, months or even years of having been on it. But on a website, they are much less likely to return.

The post Blogging For Profit appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

Also you need to actively promote your blog posts. They don’t automatically jump into the first page of Google and give you a bunch of traffic, although that would be nice! No you need to work hard at both blog writing and blog promotion if you’re to get a good amount of traffic to your blog. Here’s a few of the tools I recommend.

Blog Writing Tools – Keyword Planner

Google’s free keyword planner is one of the first stop shops every blogger should know about. While there’s many other keyword tools available, I’ve always mostly just used Google’s planner. It’s free and it shows you the traffic for keywords related to your topic of interest. There’s also another tool called keywords everywhere which is a useful addition.

One strategy you can use with Google’s keyword planner is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Why do this? Simple, most keywords are hugely competitive so if you write an article titled “affiliate marketing” for example, you have a snowball in hell’s chance of it ranking anywhere on the search engines. However, if you find a longer tail derivative of that keyword, you have a much better chance. For example using the keyword “step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf“, you’ll find much less competition, and potentially rank your article on Google and/or Bing, Yahoo etc.

You can also find many other keywords which people are searching for in your niche; even those you had never thought of. By targeting these keywords with your content deliberately you give yourself a better chance of traffic because you know people are already searching for that particular phrase/keyword. You can also check on Google to see the relative competition for the phrase before you start creating your content.

Blog Writing Tools – SEO Plugin

An SEO plugin is another essential tool in the kitbag of a blogger. I use Yoast SEO and it’s one of the most popular SEO plugins. SEO means Search Engine Optimisation and the tool helps you write content in an SEO friendly way. This means writing your article around a specific keyword or phrase and making sure that keyword is in your:

• Headers
• Copy
• Image alt attributes
• SEO title
• Meta description

Knowing how to do all this without a plugin is much more difficult. But the plugin shows you with a simple interface what aspects of your blog post need attention to bring it up to speed.

Blog Writing Tools – Syndication Tools

Once you have finished writing each blog post your job isn’t over. It’s important for bloggers to get the most out of each post they write. This can seem a laborious task but content promotion is as important as writing your blog in the first place. If no one sees your posts, you may as well not be writing them! As you make a habit out of blog sharing, you should see more people visiting your content over time.

A simple way to automate this process is with a WordPress plugin called Revive Old Posts. Revive Old Posts does what it says on the tin! You use the plugin to automatically syndicate older blog posts you’ve written already across your social media presence. It also lets you automatically post your content as you publish it too. This can save a huge amount of time and effort and is especially useful if you’re not good at self promotion!

If This Then That

IFTTT (If This Then That) is another tool you can use in conjunction with the Revive Old Posts plugin. It lets you automatically connect other social media platforms to Twitter, and use the free Twitter share from Revive Old Posts to trigger other shares across your social media platforms. While Revive Old Posts does this with the upgraded version, you need to pay for this service. So by using IFTTT you can do it all for free! (Sorry Revive Team!! Love you!)

Email Marketing Autoresponder

Another vital blogger tool is an email marketing service. Email marketing is a great way to connect more regularly with your blog visitors through a subscription newsletter or email list. By offering something on your blog as a free giveaway, you can encourage your blog visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Once on your list you can send subscribers useful information and links back to your blog posts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can also use a list to promote affiliate products and monetise your blog (see also affiliate tools).

Most people won’t revisit your blog so by capturing their email details you can generate repeat visits more easily. Over time as your email list grows in numbers, you should find your blog traffic will grow too if you let your subscribers know about your latest posts.

Push Engage

Push Engage is a free plugin which lets you notify subscribers of your latest posts. As visitors come to your site the push notification offers the option of opting in to your notifications. If they do, they will receive a popup on their web browser when you next publish something on that particular blog.

I’ve been using Push Engage for some time now and it’s given me a huge boost in returning visitors to my blogs.

Social Media Share Icons

Social Media Share Icons give your visitors the opportunity to share and like your content. So it’s well worth getting a plugin which encourages this as it will help get your content seen and only takes a minute to set up.

There’s many social media share icon plugins you can use on WordPress both free and paid for. Just do a search on Google or your WordPress blog for social media share plugin.

The post Blog Writing Tools appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

So if you want to build an online business quickly, you’re much better off using paid marketing strategies. Of course paid marketing platforms are expensive and depending on your particular products and niche, you may need a large budget to get off the ground. Ideally use high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products if you’re running paid ads. That way, you can recoup your marketing budget much more quickly.

One of the best ways to build an online business is to run paid marketing and send qualified leads to a sales funnel. Your first “entry level” product should recoup your marketing budget and therefore you’re effectively marketing for free while using paid marketing. If you have a few mote products in your sales funnel, including subscription products, you’ll make a profit on the up-sells.

Paid Vs Organic Marketing

Organic marketing is much slower by comparison. If you’re purely using organic marketing, expect a much longer journey. Organic marketers create a lot of content and promote it for free using social media platforms. Blogging and video blogging (v’logging) are examples of organic marketing strategies. But you can also promote affiliate products in other ways too, such as through using free social media strategies.

With blogging, it can take several months to gain traction and start getting traffic to your blog from the SERPS – search engine results pages. This will depend on your particular blog topic/niche. In a highly sought after niche, it will be much more difficult ranking due to the competition. In a less competitive niche, it will likely be easier to get traffic, but often it’s more difficult to monetise with affiliate products.

Whether you use paid marketing or organic marketing it’s well worth using email marketing to help you build a following and connect with them regularly. On a blog, an email list can be used to send subscribers back to your content and make sales. From a paid ad campaign, you can scale up more quickly and easily if you have an email follow up series in place.

Which Is Best For You?

Whatever you choose for your marketing tactic with affiliate marketing, it’s worth knowing which one you can sustain for a long period of time, particularly with content creation. If you enjoy writing and can sustain a blogging habit for several months, or years, choose blogging. If that sounds like a nightmare for you, choose something else. Video blogging can be quicker since YouTube is less competitive than Google; but it’s still competitive and building an organic following from YouTube will take some serious work.

If you don’t have that kind of stamina and creativity, you should probably choose paid marketing. Use a high ticket sales funnel ideally which will give you a greater return on investment for your marketing budget.

Access an online business system which gives you the tools and resources to learn how to do this here.

See also affiliate tools for tools and tactics for both content marketing and paid marketing strategies.

The post Paid Vs Organic Marketing appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

Most affiliates will pick a single marketing strategy and stick to it until they are successful. If you jump around from one strategy to another, you might be wasting time and be spreading yourself too thinly.

Affiliate Tools For Organic Traffic

The affiliate tools you will choose for organic traffic are going to be different than those for paid traffic. Paid traffic affiliates will often use landing page software such as leadpages.com. Lead pages offers a landing pages software where you can build and cross test different landing pages against each other. By sending targeted traffic to an opt-in landing page, you can collect subscribers and build an email list using an email autoresponder.

Here’s another affiliate tool which is very useful if not absolutely necessary. Without an email autoresponder in your affiliate toolkit, you must rely on passing traffic – either from organic search or through paid marketing. Since organic traffic is hard-won through content creation, and paid traffic is expensive, it’s a good idea to capture your visitors and collect their email addresses.

That way, you can follow up with them through an email marketing campaign. Most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit of a website. In fact, it takes several “touch points” before someone will buy from you. On a website, this makes things difficult. But once you get someone’s email address, this is much more achievable.

Affiliate Tools: Organic Traffic From Blogging

While there’s a variety of free blog platforms which affiliates can use such as Blogger.com, Hubpages.com and WordPress.com, it’s far better to build your own website by purchasing a domain name and getting it hosted. With your own domain name and website you send a much more authoritative message to your visitors. Google and other search engines also rate owner domains far higher than free blog sites. So you’re much more likely to both stand out to your audience and in the search engines if you own your own website.

You can purchase domain names from several places but a good, cheap place is namecheap.com.

You can also specifically choose a domain name with your particular niche in mind. This strategy is known as niche website building. With a niche website you can pick a domain name to give you some extra traction in the organic searches for your particular keyword. This website is an example of a keyword chosen domain name. I hope to get some traffic for my main keyword Affiliate Toolkit!

You can read more about building niche websites in this article: build a niche website.

If you’re building your own website once you have purchased a domain name you’ll need a hosting provider to host your domain. Hostgator.com offer a number of cheap hosting packages you can use for only a few dollars/pounds a month.

Blogging & Keyword Research

I’m a big fan of blogging and use several tools to help with my blogging SEO (search engine optimisation) and distribution/promotion. One of the main ones is a free plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin helps you write search engine friendly content which is optimised for the search engines.

Before writing any content though it’s a good idea to do some keyword research. Keyword research gives you some information you can use in the blog titles. It will also show you how many monthly searches a certain keyword gets on Google. By doing a quick search on Google, you can also see how competitive your keyword is so you can give yourself more chance of ranking your content in the search engine listings. For more on this see Niche Blogging For Profit.

You can access Google’s keyword planner for free here. You just need an account to access it.

Affiliate Tools: Blog Post Promotion

While you can run paid ads to help give your blog content more views, this can be expensive. Google Adwords has a great advertising platform and I’ve found the “Dynamic” ad a great tool to help promote my blog posts. It lets you set up an advert which is relevant to each individual blog post on your website. But if you’re not yet ready to pay for blog promotion there’s other affiliate tools which can help you get your blog posts out there.

One of the ones I use is called Revive Old Posts. This tool automatically syndicates your content throughout your social media platforms. You can set it and forget it too!

You can also connect this strategy to another plugin called IfThisThenThat and automate syndication for free across a number of social media platforms. This lets you autopost to social media from WordPress without paying your Old Post subscription to upgrade the plugin! Sorry Revive Team!

Training, Tools & Support

One of the best things you can invest in as an affiliate is a connection to other affiliates. I found an online business community back in 2014 which helped me massively building my affiliate business. You can also get all the tools and software you need to build an online business from scratch using this resource. It lets you build a push button affiliate website which is pre-populated with affiliate links and banners. You can access mentors and live webinars as well as connect with other affiliates. I found a heap of value in this online business resource over the years.

Access a free video series to learn more below:

The post Affiliate Tools appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.

Initially too, affiliate marketing can be pretty tough. most people simply don’t want to work at something which produces no results immediately. If you can work continuously on yourself and your affiliate business when times are tough, you’re ahead of the 95% of affiliates who quit.

Most will have a go at affiliate marketing, get no results and assume it doesn’t work. But it’s a big mistake. Affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative if you approach it with the right mindset because it’s globally scalable.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset: How To Get It?

So how do you get the right mindset for affiliate marketing? It helps to surround yourself with others on the same journey. You may have heard about the saying that you become the average of the 10 people you spend most time with. So if you’re surrounded by top affiliates you’ll likely absorb some of their ideas and mindsets. Likewise if you circle is full of doubters and haters, becoming successful with affiliate marketing will likely be harder due to their negative influence.

There’s many books you can read about mindset too. The Big Leap is a good one by Gay Hendricks which addresses the subject of glass ceilings in business. The glass ceiling is hidden within you and unless you are very aware of it, it will keep you trapped in your comfort zones unable to break through and achieve the success you really want.

Most people operate like elastic bands where they push forwards only to come up against their comfort zone and self image. If your self image isn’t happy with a certain level of success, you’ll sabotage yourself and fall back to levels where you feel comfortable. Understanding when and how you do this is well worth your investigation.

You also need to have a clear objective with building an online business. Without a clear path and goal to aim for, you can easily dawdle and end up in old habit patterns which won’t move your business forwards. Being comfortable is seldom the right path for progress so you’ll need to get comfortable being uncomfortable as an entrepreneur.

For more on this topic read about affiliate psychology.

Learn more about my affiliate journey in my about me page.

The post Affiliate Marketing Mindset appeared first on Affiliate Tool Kit.