Big Picture Stuff

 Big Picture Stuff

One thing I’ve always hated about online business products is that they assume you know a lot of information, or assume that you’re ‘savvy’ to some things about the industry. I remember the first product I tried to get involved in just kept repeating “grow your business” over and over again.

I emailed the owner and said, “I don’t have a business, so how do I start one using your product?”

Luckily he never emailed me back, and I became frustrated and didn’t end up buying his junk. The program he was promoting is now defunct.

So let’s take a look at what type of business you will actually be building here with some BIG PICTURE ideas before we dig into the details of how you can start your own online business and make money with affiliate marketing.

1. You will be building a website. More specifically, you will be building a blog style website. This means that you are going to have a few core pages to your website, but you will be updating it with new articles to your website on a weekly basis.

2. This website is going to be an “authority” in a “niche”. That means we are going to develop a highly respected resource for information on a very specific topic. The topic you choose is part of the initial phases which I’ll discuss later.

If you don’t have any genius ideas right now of what to make your business about, don’t stress.

3. This website is NOT going to be a virtual mall or Amazon clone! We are not going to simply list products with pictures and some feature blurbs. It’s important that you bring unique value to the table for any business. In the case of building an affiliate blog, the value we provide is information, also called “content”. How to do research and write content will be covered in this book.

4. By posting unique, insightful information on our website in these articles, or “blog posts”, we are able to drive traffic to our site for free via search engines.

People look for information online. Our website contains that information.

That’s how they land on our website, and those visitors are collectively called “traffic”.

5. Some articles they find on our site contain links to other websites selling products. By affiliating ourselves (or partnering up) with companies and directing traffic to those websites, we can make commissions for each product sold. How to find these companies, add links, etc is all discussed later on in this book.

Here’s what the process of making money with a blog and affiliate marketing looks like:

1. You do some research to find out what information people are looking for

2. You write an article about this topic and publish it to your website

3. The next time someone searches that topic, your website turns up

4. Your post points them to an appropriate product recommendation

5. They buy that product through a vendor’s website you linked to

6. You make a portion of that sale

7. You then scale this over time, with more articles and more products

Remember! Our goal is not to be sneaky and just slip into the first page of Google to ‘intercept’ clicks and make sales of stuff people are already intending to buy. Our goal is to provide some kind of unique insight that helps a person decide if a product is right for them to buy.

Sometimes it’s not so black and white. Not everything on your website will be “Yes, buy this” or “No, don’t buy this”. There’s a certain amount of finesse that can be used to make affiliate sales through writing content. But in general, remember that our goal is to create a unique resource of information that can help people make more informed buying decisions.

Preview + FAQ

Preview: What To Expect From This Book

Before getting started, it’s important to have a general idea of where you’re going. Let’s take a look at what we’re going to cover in the book (not correlating to chapters, but pretty close).

1. How to pick a topic for your site

2. How to get your website live

3. What to write in the core pages of your site

4. How to find what topics people are searching for

5. How to write an article that covers those topics

6. How to get your articles found in search engines

7. How to find companies to partner with

8. How to write reviews

9. How to make sales from the traffic on your site

10. Basic ins-and-outs of social media and how it relates to your website

11. Basic outsourcing

12. Setting long term goals for success

Oh, one more thing. At the end of each chapter I’m going to have a checklist of a few tasks for you to complete to make sure that you are following along and engaged in the material. You can choose to do these along with the lessons as you read, or you can choose to read through the whole book first, then come back to the tasks when you are ready to start building.

The advantage of doing it the first way is that you can keep yourself on track and have fun following the lessons, kind of like a workbook. The advantage of doing it the second way is that you get some insight on how the entire process works, and can review the material as you start to take the steps needed ti get your business rolling.

Making Money Online FAQ

But before we get to that, let’s look at some common questions new affiliate marketers have.

Can you actually make money online?

Yes, I have personally been earning a full time income working solely online for

3 years now. I also know many people that do the same.

How does making money online work?

There are many business models that you can use to earn money online. We’ll be talking about just one in the book, which is specifically building a Wordpress website, writing articles for that website, and promoting products/ services through affiliate programs.

…More details to come!

How much money can you earn?

The earning potential is infinite. The only limitation is related to time management. If you can earn $5, you can scale it to $5 million. The trouble is efficiently growing your business to include other people doing tasks for you.

There is a limit on how much work one individual can handle, but that will depend on each person’s ability to learn, adapt, and grow.

In a nutshell, you can earn a bunch of money, and how much depends on YOU.

How fast will I start making sales?

It’s impossible to say. Some people get lucky or have some business/ marketing/web experience and get a sale within their first couple weeks online.

Others take years because they work on their sites sporadically and just take longer to absorb the information.

For considerable, reliable profit (not just making sales), I would honestly plan on working at least a year. I earned $4000 in my first year of operation, but sales were sporadic and I couldn’t quit my job yet. By 18 months into it I was earning over $10,000 per month, but still had some income dips ahead of me.

It took me about 3 years to really have stable, diversified income coming in.

Everyone’s story is different and comparing yourself to other people is going to be a huge stress factor (I know from experience), so try not to do it.

Do I Need A Website?

Yes. Well, there are ways to make money without a website, but they aren’t any easier. For example, you can start a YouTube channel.

But to make money through affiliate marketing and blogging, as we’re talking about in this book, yes, you definitely need a website.

Do I have to be tech savvy to make money online?

No, but you do need to learn some new skills. Actually, once your initial website is set up, your main ‘work’ is going to be research and writing.

However, doing things like posting pictures to your website, creating links, or troubleshooting website issues are all part of your business. You can work through the problems yourself, or pay someone to fix them for you.

If you’re the type that runs into a problem and wants to smash the computer screen or not touch it for a week, then you are in for a bumpy journey. That’s not to say that you can’t learn new habits though :)

I started off my business as a total n00b, without a Facebook account and still thinking Hotmail was an awesome email provider. 4 years later I’m editing my CSS files on the fly via FTP – not that impressive to someone who knows what that is, but it’s pretty cool considering where I started out.

There’s a YouTube video or a written tutorial for just about everything.

Honestly, a really simple website with interesting content can do great. Having some technical skills can definitely take a good site and make it better, but those skills are not essential to earning money. Learn as you grow your business, and you’ll be fine.

I need to make money fast. Can you show me a faster way?

No. I hate this question because it makes it sound like I’m showing people the slow way on purpose. If there was a faster way, I’d be doing it. Well, OK, paid traffic can be faster but that often leads to expensive advertising budgets and if you are a newbie, your sales pages just aren’t going to convert.

Starting an affiliate website with search engine traffic is definitely a slow route to earning money online. However, it’s also the cheapest and is the most newbie friendly in terms of allowing you to make mistakes without it costing big bucks.

If you create a sales page with paid traffic that doesn’t convert and it could cost you $100’s or $1000’s of dollars in wasted clicks. Make the same mistake with a poorly written article aiming for search engine traffic and it costs you $0.

If you want the freedom to make cheap mistakes and don’t have at least a few hundreds dollars extra each month to pay for advertising, then welcome to the slow road baby!

Chapter 2 Summary + Tasks

Summary

We are going to be building a blog style website, and getting traffic from search engines. It’s cheap and newbie friendly. It’s also what I know best, and can teach you most efficiently.

Tasks For This Chapter

1. Decide if you are in this for the long haul. If you need money next week or even next month, get a job. Are you committed to making changes to your time management and work habits to learn a new skill?

2. Prepare yourself to learn something new. Some of the information in this book might confuse you the first time around. If you prepare yourself for a challenge though, you will have a better chance of succeeding

3. Set aside some time each day to read a little bit in this book. It’s better to learn in bite sized pieces than gorging on information once in a while.

4. Get excited! You are holding an incredible source of information in your hands right now. After reading this book, you will have the potential to create a significant source online income.