Lesson 4: Earn Revenue - BRANCH OUT LIFE

At this stage in your business though, we are going to start focusing on the money

Remember, once you have relevant traffic, you have all the potential in the world to earn revenue online.

In this course we are going to be walking through many of the different ways in which you can earn MONEY through your traffic and through your website. Your website is going to be the focus in this training as this is going to become your main medium for implementing techniques and strategies that take a visitor (or a “click”) and turn them into revenue.

A look at how revenue is earned

If we look back to the very first lesson you did here at WA, this was the chart we looked at.

We are now on the 4th step. You have chosen an interest, you have built a website, you are and will continue to be working on rankings and visitors through content (and other traffic generation methods in upcoming training), now we are going to focus on the “Earn Revenue” part!

But one thing you need to truly understand first…

To Earn Money, You First Must HELP!

One thing that you are going to need to be careful of is trying to sell the heck out of your audience. Nobody likes being “sold” to, and if that is your intention with your promotions, you are going to alienate a lot of your potential customers.

I am always going to recommend that you shy away from is “selling” before offering any value. If your site becomes viewed as a portal (or worse yet, a dumping zone) for promotions, it is going to diminish your brand integrity and you will not become an authority within your niche.

If you help people, they will trust you, and naturally buy from you. If you can create a relationship with people, they will buy from you potentially many times over.

So this is going to be the our first focus, understanding who are customer is and the act that there is a real person behind every “click” on your website. If you humanize your process, you are going to be setting yourself up or long term and sustainable success.

Understanding the Customer Lifecycle

To really get a good grasp of your customer and what makes them “tick”, you often times need to look inwards and at your own behavior. We are afterall customers too!

I have created some training on the Customer Purchase Lifecycle, which digs deep into the mentality of a customer and how you can capture someone at different stages of their purchasing lifecycle.

Not all keywords have the same “intent” or will have the same value to your business. How you approach people with your content can dictate just how successful you will be with your content as well.

We are going to be discussing all of this.

READ THIS : Customer Purchase Lifecyle

This is actually the most important part of selling. If you can understand the different phases of the customer purchase lifecycle and understand why someone buys online, then you are going to getting your audience to purchase things based on your “recommendations” is going to become second nature.

Ultimately our main goal is to run a profitable and highly lucrative business right?

We all want to earn a profit. The biggest problem is that many people lose track of the fact that marketing, running a successful business, and ultimately earning money is about building a relationship with your audience. This is a PEOPLE business and you are dealing with REAL people.

REAL people are coming to your site.
REAL people are reading your content.
REAL people are going to take action if they trust yet.

If you understand the customer part and how to treat them like gold, then the money will naturally follow. This is going to be emphasized throughout this level of training.

Understanding Affiliate Programs and Networks

The first and most popular “money” technique we are going to explain is probably the most common, and you should definitely familiarize yourself with the term.

Affiliate Marketing.

Before you can become an efficient and successful affiliate marketer online, you need to understand what your role is, you need to understand the numbers of the game, and you need to the process in which you will be making money.

In this lesson we are going to be digging deeper into the affiliate marketing world and what it is going to mean to you business moving forward.

Understanding How Affiliate Marketing Works

This affiliate model is very simple, but most people tend to overcomplicate things. Affiliate marketing allows you (AFFILIATE or PUBLISHER) to promote product or services online for companies (MERCHANTS or ADVERTISER).

This is done through affiliate programs. There are 10,000’s of affiliate programs out there, and 100's of MILLIONS of products/services that you can promote as an affiliate marketer. In fact, if you can buy something online, chances are you can promote that same product as an affiliate through their affiliate program. When you join an affiliate program (we will be getting to this), they give you a special link you put on your site to promote their products.

Your website is starting point for your affiliate promotions. When someone is on your site and they click your “affiliate link”, you will get full credit for the sale if this person goes on to buy something.

Let's take Amazon for instance, they pay affiliates 4.5% as a base commission with performance incentives based on volume. Let's say you link (via your affiliate link) to this Thor brand “fridge” (yes people sell fridges online).

The price of the fridge is high ticket at $2,299. Your commission as an affiliate here would be 4.5% of this, $103.44!

So, for simply referring traffic as an affiliate to a site where people can buy the product, you earn a good deal of money. This can be done within absolutely EVERY NICHE imaginable. There is an affiliate program for everything!

Seeing the potential here?

How Much Can YOU Earn as an Affiliate?

As much as you like….seriously!

Your revenue is typically very closely tied to the amount of traffic you can get. And remember, in order to get traffic you need a website. You need to be creating content that is relevant and is targeting specific “low competition” keywords with every new post you create on your website.

I will give you some sample numbers you can work with just to give you an idea on some of the lower end averages so you can get a good idea of the earning potential.

Let's say you get 1,000 clicks to your site in a month. This is 33 clicks per day and once you get rolling this will be more than realistic. In fact lots of members here in the community are getting 1,000's of clicks PER DAY!

Now let's say that out of this 1,000 clicks, you get a 20% click-through rate on your affiliate links.

1,000 x 0.20 = 200 affiliate clicks

Scenario 1: If 1:50 (or 2%) of these people end up buying something, you will make 4 sales.

Scenario 2: If 1:20 (or 5%) of these people end up buying something, you will make 10 sales.

If you are promoting a product that pays $30 per sale (pretty typical), you will earn $120 in the first scenario and $300 in Scenario 2.

These are very conservative numbers, and this is in just one month! That same traffic is going to convert for you year round and is going to be working for you 24 hours per day.

Let's look at some realistic, but bigger affiliate $$$!

Within time and as you work on building out your authority site and your feeder traffic (traffic that is driven to your website from other sites) you will reach a point where you are getting much more traffic, 100+ unique clicks/day. There are many products out there that also offer $100+ per sale in affiliate commissions (like the Wealthy Affiliate one, after retention).

100 clicks day = 3,000 clicks per month

Let's keep the 20% click-through ratio. 600 people each and every month will be clicking through to your affiliate links. Let's say you are promoting something that leads to $100 per sale and you are converting at 1:20 (30 overall conversions).

That is $3,000 in profit in ONE month. That is a $36,000 profit each and every year.

And this can be scaled to any level you like. Rankings are everywhere and will only continue to grow cumulatively over time as you build out your sites. This is a reality from your affiliate marketing efforts alone, but this just brushes the potential.

You will hear stories about people earning $1,000/day off of a single keyword (I have done this personally, so I can vouch that this is a possibility).

This is true and this is possible. You will hear stories about people earning residual income year round from home. This is a reality and this is typically accomplished through affiliate marketing in one way or another.

Now that you understand the process of how affiliate programs can earn you money, it is time to register to some affiliate programs.

Task 1: Join at Least ONE Affiliate Network

Affiliate “networks” are centralized collections of often times 1,000’s of affiliate programs that you can join through one network. This is convenient in that you can promote many different programs at the same time (even in different niches) and receive one payment.

Some of the more common examples of these networks are:

(1) Commission Junction
(2) Awin
(3) LinkShare
(4) ShareASale
(5) Clickbank.com

**Your task is to join at least of one of these networks.

Relevant Affiliate Programs are Everywhere

There are affiliate programs out there for pretty much anything you can imagine, however most people do not know how to efficiently find them. It is very easy and in this lesson I am going to show you how you can quickly find affiliate programs within any niche.

Really, any niche.

But many of these programs you are not going to find within affiliate networks like the ones discussed in the last lesson. Many are completely independent.

Understanding ‘Independent” Affiliate Programs

There are MANY affiliate programs out there (and some of the best ones) that are independent, meaning they are not tied to any particular affiliate network. These are also referred to as “indie” affiliate programs.

For example, the affiliate program here at Wealthy Affiliate is an independent affiliate program. This means that we manage everything from the tracking, to the stats, to the affiliate program resources/tools, to the affiliate payments. Since we started Wealthy Affiliate back in 2005, we have never been late with a payment and we have paid out MILLIONS of dollars to affiliates.

So just because an affiliate program is independent, it doesn't mean that they are not a great product/service and it certainly does not mean that you cannot be very lucrative promoting their products.

In fact, over the years some of my most successful affiliate promotions across many different niches have been with independent affiliate programs. So I don't recommend limiting yourself directly to affiliate networks, there is a huge amount of opportunity if you reach outside of these.

Really, any niche.

But many of these programs you are not going to find within affiliate networks like the ones discussed in the last lesson. Many are completely independent.

Understanding ‘Independent” Affiliate Programs

Task 1: Search for “Niche Relevant” Affiliate Programs

Let's say I have a site dedicated to fitness and I am looking to promote “fitness equipment” to my audience. To find an affiliate program I want to go to Google and search for:

fitness equipment + affiliate program

This is going to go out and find me all the pages in Google that are relevant to my query, in other words it is going to load all the fitness equipment affiliate programs, and you will also get bloggers providing you with lists of relevant affiliate programs. They do the dirty work for you!.

Here are my results.

And here is another example performaing a Google search for “iphone cases + affiliate program“.

Instantly, I have pages upon PAGES of affiliate programs I could potentially promote. I could then sign-up to any of of these and instantly be able to promote a large range of “fitness equipment” and for my second search, “iphone cases”.

Your task here is to try this within your niche using keywords related to your niche.

YOUR_NICHE + Affiliate Program

I think you will be surprised as to what you can come up with (and very quickly)!

Task 2: Join at least 2 Affiliate Programs

Your last task is going to be joining at least TWO of the affiliate programs that you found in the previous tasks.

Each affiliate program will have a different sign-up and what you may want to do is start keeping a spreadsheet of all the affiliate programs that you are apart of (with your associated login details). This will save you a bunch of time and allow you to organize your affiliate operations.

Next thing we are going to teach you is how to add these affiliate links to your websites so that you can begin driving traffic and earning MONEY! 🙂

Adding Affiliate Links to Your Pages

You should now be registered for a few affiliate programs and at least one affiliate network. Now we get into the fun stuff. We now have access to PRODUCTS that we can promote on our website and that we can earn revenue with.

The next logical step is to get your affiliate links from the respective affiliate program so that you can use the link to sell the products.

What is An Affiliate Link?

An affiliate link is your OWN unique link that identifies you as the referring affiliate when someone clicks your link and goes to the product (MERCHANT) website. The affiliate link is what tells the company (via the affiliate program) that you are the affiliate that referred the person to your site. This affiliate link will go all the way through the order process, so if someone buys something you automatically get credit for the sale and earn a commission.

Here is the basic process:

Step 1: Some comes to your website
Step 2: They click your affiliate link
Step 3: They buy something from the merchant
Step 4: You get the affiliate commission ($$$)

It really is that simple, so don't over-think this process. And don't worry about people stealing “affiliate links” this cannot happen. If your affiliate link is the last one that someone clicks before buying a product from the merchant, you will get credit for the sale.

Side Note: there are all kinds of products, services, and mumbo-jumbo talk about masking and protecting your links so people cannot “steal” your commissions. Please ignore this because it is completely false, and you should not be worrying about “hiding” your links. Affiliate links and tracking is completely accurate, and people cannot “steal” commissions from you.

Where to Find Your Affiliate Link?

All affiliate programs and networks are different in terms of where you actually get the affiliate link. Most will have a section where you can go to get the affiliate promo links and other promotional materials.

I am going to show you an example of an affiliate link right here at Wealthy Affiliate (we happen to have one of the most lucrative affiliate programs anywhere online).

To get your OWN affiliate link here at WA, you go to the $ icon within the top header, this will open the “Affiliate” menu. Within there, you can click the “Program Details” tab to get your affiliate link.

Once you are on this page, you will notice at the very top of the page there is a link called “Your Affiliate Link”. This is your affiliate link (see example below).

At the end of the link you will see the “?a_id=vakj1tkb”. This is the part of the link that is unique identifier to you and allows us to track sales (and give you credit for all referrals). This is my affiliate link you see here, yours will be different if you visit the program details page and check for yourself.

This is the affiliate link that you would use to promote Wealthy Affiliate and the one that you can earn commissions with. If you know anyone that would benefit from the services here, you could earn affiliate commissions sharing this link (and we have one of the top paying affiliate programs in the world)!

All affiliate programs and affiliate networks will provide you with a similar looking affiliate link that you can use on our website.

How to Add an Affiliate Link to Your WordPress Content

Adding a text link to your website is always going to be the process. You will always want to highlight the text in which you want to link and then click the link button.

Then this will pop-up the Insert/Edit link pop-up in which you will add your respective affiliate link (which will be a different link for every affiliate program).

After pasting your link, click the Apply buton (blue arrow button to the right of the link) and you are done. The affiliate link is now added.

Just know that after you add your links, you will need to re-publish your actual content as well so that your affiliate links are live. Upon doing this you will now get affiliate credit for these links (which will lead to $$)!

Instant Access to MILLIONS of Products

The largest affiliate program in the world is by far, Amazon.com. Amazon has over 500,000,000 products on their website and that is growing daily as they attract new sellers. Although Amazon does not pay huge commissions (1-10% commissions), their product range and the fact that people make so many purchases at Amazon throughout the year make up for it.

Like most sites, you will get full “cart” orders, so if you refer someone to Amazon through your affiliate links directly to buy socks, and they end up buying a high end “fridge”, you will get commissions for both (assuming it happens within their 24-hour cookie window).

If you are not an affiliate of Amazon, I do encourage you to register.

Amazon Associates Program

There are also some affiliate programs with vast product ranges that I do recommend registering for as well, if you feel there is fit with their subset of products on your wbsite.

Here are a few comparable ones in terms of vast product ranges:

Etsy Affiliate Program (Offered through Awin)
Walmart.com Affiliate Program (Offered through LinkShare.com)
Wayfair Affiliate Program (Offered through CJ.com)

These companies also warehouse a lot of different products, and also offer competing (or in some cases better) affilate commissions than Amazon.

Task 1: Adding Amazon to Your Site

After you get access to the Amazon associates (affiliate) program, you instantly have the capabilities to promote MILLIONS of products. They have a product search feature within their system that allows you to search for specific products that you want to promote.

For example, if I were looking to promote “basketballs” you would simply do a search on this keyword.

Instantly, this will give me access to all the products that are related to “basketballs”.

On the right (within the results), you will see “Get Link”. This allows you to get your affiliate code and links associated with this product. In this example, I am going click the “Get Link” for the first product.

It takes me to the page where I can grab the code (as shown below).

In this case I am going to be adding the Text and Image version of this affiliate link to my website.

I simply want to copy and paste this code into the HTML tab of my page (remember this from the previous lesson). If you are using the Block Editor, you will need to click the drop down, and “Edit as HTML”.

Paste the code into your page or post.

After pasting it, you can publish your page and your Amazon affiliate product is live and available for your websites visitors to visit. Check it out!

I also have provided you with this specific example so you can see for yourself (scroll down page), and can click the link on this page to see how it works live.

===> View Example Page with Basketball Affiliate Widget

You can do this for any product on any page (or post) on your site.

Your task in this lesson is to add at least one Amazon product link to your site. If your jurisdiction/country is not accepted to the Amazon associates program, then incorporate one more affiliate link into one of the pages on your site as you did in the previous lesson from another program.

Extra Earnings Happen Naturally!

As I mentioned earlier, people will often times go to a website like Amazon to purchase one thing and ultimately the end up loading their “cart” with many different items.

Sometimes you will get someone looking to buy a $9 book through your affiliate link, they then decide to browse Amazon and buy a TV, you get credit on that as well (if it is within the 24 hour Amazon cookie period). This can really impact your revenue in an positive way!

Leveraging Product Reviews

First and foremost, before we discuss product reviews you need to remember one important aspect of marketing.

You are in the business of helping, not selling.

Even when it comes to offering your website visitors a product/service review, you want to take the approach that you are helping “potential” customers make and educated purchasing decision. The more you can educate someone on a product and the more authentic you can be with a product review, the better the results you will have.

Approach the selling side of your business the way you would want to be treated. You don't like to be sold to by a shifty car salesmen, nor do people that come to your website.

In the online world, you do not have the luxury of sustaining someone's attention. If they don't like you, their exit is just one click away. The “click away” happens more often than not. Just remember that when creating any product review or tying in any affiliate program (affiliate links, banners etc) to your website.

The better you can educate someone about a product or a series of products, the more comfortable they will be with your advice. This establishes TRUST, which inevitable leads to much higher conversion rates with your audience.

Task 1: Create a Quality Review

Now that you are clear that the visitor comes first, I am going to discuss some things that you can incorporate into a review page. I will also give you a sample review page that you can reference.

There a two types of reviews that marketers create.

One, a singular product review. An example of this would be any product. A Wealthy Affiliate review… a Air Jordan 12 Review… a ______ review… literally anything related to your niche.

Two, there are review pages dedicated to a multiple products or several “like” products. These could also be classified as “Top” or “Best of Class” types of posts.

Again, relating to my basketball website I could potentially have the “Top 6 Basketball Shoes of 2021”, and within that post I could review 6 of the top basketball shoes.

Someone looking for new basketball shoes would likely find great value in a comprehensive review of this type of product. Typically I recommend 3-10 products within a mulit-product review style page.

What sort of information should you include in a review?

As we have outlined, the more detailed the better. There are many different elements of a product that you can review, and this wjill vary based on the type of product/service you are reviewing.

Here are some “ranking attributes” you can focus on within your reviews.

Overall Rank (rank each product against one another)
Product Description
Pros & Cons
Price
Guarantee (YES, NO)
Product Specifications (unique to every niche/product type)

The key is being REAL with your reviews, making them understandable to your audience, offering insights into the cons as well as the pros (makes you seem like less of a hard salesperson), and offering detailed information about the benefits of the product.

There are no set rules here. You can review products in any way that like and test different strategies. The above example criteria will provide you with an initial framework and a template you can follow, but these are just guidelines. Be relevant to your niche and offer “real” advice within your content.

Your task in this lesson is to create either a single product review on your website. I typically create these as “posts” (versus pages) so they go to your blog roll and I will be able to organize them based on categories moving forward.

Task 2: Be on the New Product Lookout!

It's not just about promoting your favorite product or service, you need to become an authority (there is that word again) within your industry. You need to offer reviews that are meaningful and at times this may even include negative reviews. You need to have your “pulse” on the industry and be the source for information.

The best way to stay informed is to set up a Google Alert. If you are not familiar with Google Alerts, these are going to serve as a super efficient way to get news and products related info within your niche as it comes in. To set up an alert, go to Google Alerts (it's free).

http://www.google.com/alerts

You will then want to choose the search queries that are relevant to your niche. In this case, I want to keep an eye on any new product news relating to “basketball shoes cases”.

You can do the same for any niche…

new + your_niche_goes_here

You can also set watches on certain products. If I wanted to get alerted any time someone created a new page with “Earn a Living Online” in it, I could set-up a Earn a Living Online Alert (and I have!).

Getting Paid for Ads on Your Site

Another very common way to earn revenue is by placing “ads” on your website. The most common way to do this is through the Google Adsense program. First, we will quickly explain how it works and how it could potentially benefit your business.

How Google Adsense Works

Google Adsense is one of the many publisher networks out there. They act as the third party ad broker between the advertiser and the publisher (which will be you). By joining Google Adsense you gain the ability to put other people's ads on your site and earn shared revenue in the process.

When someone clicks one of these ads, you get paid by Google to put relevant advertising on your page, 68% to be precise. The advertisers who's ads get displayed on your site are using the Google Content network within their Google Ads account. In other words, they are paying Google to be put on your website.

If the advertiser is paying $1.00 per click for every click on their ad, you would get approximately $0.68 of that if the ad is served from your website.

So in short, you get a little snippet of code from Google, you paste it in your site, relevant ads are displayed on your pages, and you get paid every time one of your visitors clicks an ad. Simple enough.

Adsense can be a good supplementary income for website traffic that you are getting. You can earn revenue from Adsense ads when your visitors are simply not interested in your website by giving them relevant ads to click on. Remember, not everyone who comes to your site will find what they are looking for, so rather than have these people go back to Google and perform a new search, you are going to be able to offer them some relevant Ads to click.

In saying this, if you are getting Adsense clicks but no affiliate sales, you may want to consider some site optimization as it means your content is not delivering sales conversions or your promotions are not “relevant” to the actual traffic you are getting.

Let's get right into things here.

Task 1: Create your Google Adsense Account

The first step is to set-up your Adsense account. Sign-up using the following link:

Google Adsense Sign-up

You will need to set-up a Google account if you don't already have one.

You will also have to give them your website URL to do this. If you have more than one, you can choose the one that you have the best content on to get approved. You should already have some great content on the website you have been working on now, so that should work just fine.

**NOTE: Ideally you want to have 15+ pages/posts on your website before you apply to Adsense. If your content is inadequate on your website, I don't recommend apply to Google Adsense just yet as your application may not be approved.

Task 2: Write a New Post Targeting Low Hanging Keyword

Your last task today is writing a new post on your website targeting a new low hanging keyword. Remember, aim to target keywords with lower than a 100 QSR. Then the nature of your content should be centered around that keyword topic.

Put the keyword in your article title as well as within the first paragraph and write quality, engaging content. Remember, quality, engaging and helpful content leads to higher rankings in Google, more activity, and better conversions. Make this the focus with all of your content.

Once you understand how to get traffic, you have an audience. Once you have an audience, you can generate revenue. There are so many ways in which you can generate revenue and we are going to be advancing your knowledge in “monetization” as we continue through the various levels of training. Obviously affiliate marketing is one of the most significant, but there are MANY other ways.

With Help Comes Financial Success

You have made some wonderful progress thus far.

You not only have a traffic strategy in place and are continuing to build out the content on your website(s). Your authority and expertise within your chosen niche is growing and that is something that you should be very proud of.

And now, you know of several different ways in which you can EARN MONEY from your website. Adding a new affiliate promotion, piece of cake. Creating a review…no problem. Adding Adsense…piece of cake. Building out your website with new and engaging content…done!

But, the last thing that we want to re-emphasize before we move into the next course, is the main purpose of your website.

The Purpose of Your Site is to Help and Educate!

If you are promoting affiliate products, remember to help people before you sell to them. Make sure your products are relevant to your content (the more relevant the better), and make sure you are offering reviews of products within your niche. Quality reviews. Aim to help people by educating them on the products and services that you are promoting.

If you are putting ads on your site, make sure those ads are placed within content that is quality. Make sure that you are not trying to do too much on the page. A busy website with too many “bells and whistles” is only distracting to your audience. Keep it simple, keep the focus on the actual content.

Test different techniques. Try new things. Be OK with the idea of failing at something, not everything you do will be perect. You work towards perfection often times through learning what doesn't work (failing).

Be tasteful with the way you earn revenue, and it will pay dividends. Treat your audience and your niche with the dignity and respect it deserves.

With every thing that you do, keep in mind that when a visitor hits a page on your website, they make a quick decision. They decide whether to stick around and read on, or to take a hike and go elsewhere in their search. Make them stick around by offering quality content, and by making sure your website is not one big sales pitch.

Always aim to advance your skills within your niche. I invite you to have a read of a “strategy” blog post that I wrote on this topic.

READ POST: You Can Know a Little and Still Be Smart

I think it will offer you a lot of insight into how you can work towards expertise in your niche. It isn't about knowing everything sometimes. Often times less is more, and when it comes to being successful with your website, focusing on a particular segment of a niche and being great at that will be your path.

Keep it Simple – 4 Steps to Success

There are many ways you can earn revenue online. Of course I am not going to be able to cover the many ways within a 10 lesson course, but you now have some fundamentally sound knowledge of the process.

You can never know this process in enough detail though. Because of this I want to reiterate how the “successful” build a business online. This is the exact process that YOU can use to create a business and that I have used to create full time income streams within many different niches over the years.

There are really only 4 steps required to create success.

(1) Building a niche website
(2) Create helpful, relevant content
(3) Get Rankings & Traffic
(4) Make Money (many ways you can do this)

The Sky is the Limit…

In fact, you could even promote your own tangible products. You could build a list. You could sell ad positions on your website. You could establish info products or training and sell that. You could drop ship. You can offer your own services. The opportunities are endless.

Now that you understand the MONEY aspect building your online business and what opportunities are available to you, we are going to be covering “complimentary” marketing strategies and angles. We are also going to be advancing your business acumen within the online world, beautifying your website, and getting a lot more social within your respective niche.

In the next course we are going to be venturing into your website deeper. We are going to be learning about many tricks and strategies that you can implement to improve the user experience, social marketing, navigation, maintenance, spam controls, and overall website success. Lots of awesome stuff coming!

Ready for Level 4 of the Training?

Fast Track Training

Learn how to scale your online business in the shortest time available.

ACCESS YOUR FAST TRACK TRAINING

Back to Lesson 3 Next Course