Let’s Make Some 2021 Money
This will be another go to try to make some proper money with affiliate marketing. Month and month of work is not supposed to make you money. You will not have anything for a good half of the year. And most of the times you’re going to be confused and not know what to do but the key thing is to make sure we keep going. Just like working out we just need to be consistent, and not give up.
Setting up the Mindest
I really want to get my shit together and I’m looking forward to see how this goes. Right off the bat my favourite go-to people for looking for resources when I don’t know what to do are: Miles Beckler, Patt Flynn, and Reddit r/juststart when I’m not sure what to do. A really, really good outcome would be able to reach a $3000/month mark within 10 months. Miles Beckler managed to do this by putting in lots of resources and 10 years of experience with Affilaite Marketing so something more likely for me would be maybe $1000? Although with Amazon commissions cut it can take longer than that. So let’s just aim for a good $500/month mark in under a year. That may be the most realistic. Obviously we’re going to be aiming for the moon ($3000/month) but I need to register that I’ll be okay with $500 otherwise I feel like I’d give up pretty quickly as we can see with my previous attempts.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
To keep it simple, some companies let you recieve a commission for “selling” their product. (Selling is in quotations because the approach I’d like to take is providing infomrational content based around a product similar to this post so I only want people to buy stuff taht will help them out!). So really all affiliate marketing is commissions when you help people out on the internet!
So What is Our Goal?
We basically need to understand who our audience is and what they need so that we can ensure that we’re creating content that can help them out. My approach I suppose is trying to find myself and I’m sure there’s other people out there like me. So hopefully we can help each other out. I think ideally it would make the most sense to try to help a more specified topic but if this is literally all that plagues my mind it must account for something niche enough right?
Selecting a Niche?
So this is what is super highlighted by gurus and stuff but honestly I think this is the topic that makes me freeze up all the time because I don’t think my own interest is considered niche enough. But I suppose if I’m this hyper-focused on not being broke I’m sure other people would be the exact same. So let’s just say f the gurus and just focus on yourself. Worst case scenario at least I’ve done a bunch of research that can hopefully make myself feel better. So that’s a good thing.
As I was journaling the other day I think I finally managed to niche down my main three interests in to Life, tech and finances
Also at the end of the day you’re not locked into the niche you pick. I think we always have an issue with branding, niche topic picking and all that stuff. Like I think we dont’ believe change is possible. But it really is. Think about when McDonald’s rebranded (you probably don’t rememebr when that happend), there’s more liek that. Beer Store, Google, Pepsi, Cocacola, MAstercard. everything shitfts when they need to so don’t worry. Just get started.
Build Your Website
I’ve built multiple guides on buiding a site on a budget and highly recommend using WordPress.org (key note: wordpress.org not wordpress.com). This is because you’ll own your own hosting, domain and you can customize the site to however you like.
As stated above your website is comprised of two main things: a hosting plan and a domain.
- Hosting: a company you pay to store all your files so that its on the internet
- Domain: the address that points to your files so people can find your website
And the company that I recommended the most in the guide is Siteground because it keeps you secure, gets the domain and emails setup for you for free by signing up for a plan today. And you can get all that started for under $10/month
My blog post here walks you through step by step on setting up your WordPress website. But if you have any questions feel free to hit me up and I’ll try to help you out to the best of my ability.
Make Yourself Known to The Internet
I think most people’s misconceptions with the internet is the “build it and they will come” attitude. I don’t really think anything in life really works that way. While it would be nice and some people may even believe that happens, I’m 99.9% postiive that’s not true (fight me).
Anyways the next step is just basically spreading yourself out so that your site is “crawlable” by search engines. Nowadays this isn’t even really a necessary step, however I find it helps speed up the process so that it helps Google know about you. I personally like to use Yoast SEO cause its free and it helps you create a sitemap (I also cover this in that same website blog post). but I’ve heard people have success with some paid plugins (I’ll write a round up of these later on).
Another feature I’ve liked recently is install Google Sitekit WordPress Plugin (built by Google) and it’s pretty awesome which gives you access to Google Analytics, Google AdSense and more! Each one of the Google features will have so much information that university degrees could be built on them. But I must highlight that you shouldn’t get caught up in it because I’ve lost myself in it for wayyyy tooo long.
So what should we do instead?
Focus on Creating Content
There’s so much talk about focusing on keywords, optimizing SEO, and analytics upon analytics. But really if you’re not shooting your shot all that preparation doesn’t mean anything. Why do i say this? Cause I feel like I’ve been preparing for the past 10 years and seriously, I have nothing to prove for it. It is a terrible feeling and all my knowledge is essentially out of date. So my recommendation is just start making stuff.
So my plan is to just go all in on whatever information I have lingering in my head. I’m not exactly sure what that is yet however I know that I like to talk alot about: Life, tech and finances. So that’s the approach I’m going to go with.
Keywords are helpful and all but to prevent you from falling into the rabbit hole of the research. Your titles should focus on longtail keywords instead of just keywords you think will be searched alot. This helps us out in the beginnign because there should be less compettition. Some examples or keywords vs long tail keywords are:
Regular Keywords
- Best Chef Knives
- Smart Home Tech
Long Tailed Keywords
- Best Chef Knives for Left Handed Cooks
- Best smart home tech for small living spaces
You get the jiff, just make content. and when thinking of the topic, just make it more specified for more uses. this helps because then you can create variations of that content for each different use case.
One Thing at a Time
Don’t get too distracted. I think my issue is that my brain runs at 5000000000 words a minute and I can’t keep up with whatever I’m thinking about. I get side-tracked when I’m working on one idea and want to start doing that at the same time. and then after 10 years I’m stuck with a bunch of outdated ideas with nothing to show for it. So even if it sucks just build something. Just make sure you finish it. Done is better than perfect. We can always add more or make soemthing else when the time comes.
Just Repeat the Process
Ideas –> Keywords –> Written Content –> Reviews –> Publish
Then repeat that’s all there is to it.
But Where’s the Money?
Well as you can see all we’ve talked about so far is content . What happened with those affiliate links I’ve talked about? I need money.
Like I said this is a very slow game. You’re probably not going to see money till like a year out after consitent effort. Just like working out which is why I guess I havent done well in either. But I have signed up for all these programs and they do do well. I just have only accumulated like $100/year max? But that’s only because I haven’t hustled consitent enough so this year that’ll change.
So let’s go through the different programs.
Amazon Afffiliate
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home
Google AdSense
There’s other stuff like:
- avantlink
- mediavine
But these are what I would recommend starting with because this is the easiest way and probabgly the world’s most trustworthy brand.
We’re good to Start Rolling!
That’s pretty much all you need to setup the bones of your machine. Super easy to do and definietly can be done in a day. The only thing left for us to do is create content! Most people mention that the first goal is 100 posts. I suppose thats the amount that is needed to start making money. This blog probabyl already has more than 100. But they aren’t the most well written articles so I’m basically starting from scratch and tracking from here on out. So we can be on the same track right now! Let’s just keep it going!
Once you’ve expended all the information that out of your head we can start focusing on creating content that makes the moulah!
Dont Breath. Just Write 30 Posts!
Aim for high quality content but let’s just aim for 30 seo optimized content. How much can I do? 3-4/week which means that;’s about 10 weeks?
So if we did 30 posts thats 24 reviews, 6 how tos.
We’ll aim after every 4 reviews well do one how-to
80% Direct Review Posts. How to Write SEO Affiliate Reviews Fast
Often takes like 3 days to write the first post. Then we can work up to just a few hours to write the post.
20% How to Articles
Then eventuall everything can link togeter!
Next 30: Focus on Search Engine Optimization
Then check impressions vs click.
Learn to see why we are or aren’t getting clicked. If we’re being skipped over impressions are not converting. We could be missinng out the title or something isn’t worded right because people are choosing around you instead. We need to figure out why. And increase our click through rate.
Now that we’ve casted a wide enough net to try to catch some people we can start gearing our content to more detail and analytic driven content.
This will most likely be around the 3-4 month timeline and this is when most people burnout so to avoid it what do we do? Just understand there’s no shortcut. Keep it going and it will pay out. Keep producing content. Avoid gurus especially at this point because this is when you’ll be the most susceptible.
Hiting 90: Refine, refine, refine!
At this point blog posts should start becoming second nature. You should be learning how to do keyword research and you may begin starting to see what is pulling in traction. You can start gearing your content to target the topics taht are doing well and it helps you learn how to strategize your website to start snowball some real traffic from Google!
Keep It Going
Now that you have some posts that are doing well this is a good time to start adding fuel to the fire and try to get you name out there. Guest blog posts, letting more and more people know about it is a great way to bring more traffic to your site
References
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVQneGsDOlc
- https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/
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