How To Make Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

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Affiliate marketing is one of the most passive forms of passive income online. and I can say that with full confidence because I currently make over 125,000 a month from affiliate marketing. I’m in over 300 affiliate programs, and I’ve been earning passive affiliate revenue from my blog adamenfroy.com that I started back in 2019.

Now when I decided to build my site, I knew I wanted to go after big money, where I could earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. Not the nickels and dimes that many affiliate programs payouts.

Passive Income With Affiliate Marketing

However, building up this form of passive income does take time, and requires a very specific approach. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, but the results are worth the effort. Here, I’m gonna teach you how to make money online by using affiliate marketing.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Before we get into the details of affiliate marketing, let’s take a quick look at its history. Affiliate marketing is also known as referral marketing.

You essentially sell products and services and get paid commissions for each purchase made by your referrals. You’re basically a middleman or middle person between a buyer and the seller.

It actually all started out in the mid-90s. Because of an online florist named PC Flowers and Gifts, which was founded by William J. Tobin. So, Flower and Gift created a co-branded service for a bunch of large websites that wanted to sell their flowers.

By 1998, they had 2,700 affiliates. They generated millions of dollars in Revenue. So, while John was having some success with his affiliate program.

amazon-referral-marketing

A small business you may have heard of called Amazon has been working on its own referral marketing system. They were different from anything else out there at the And then it was the first online affiliate marketing platform for the general public.

So I mean anyone could signup as an Amazon affiliate and post custom banner ads and links on their own Personal or Business website. However, what you need to know is that this time Amazon was only selling books.

So, this kickstarted the beginning of what we know today as modern digital marketing. As affiliates grew, so did online adver­tising with the usage of text and banner ads, among others.

Back when online advertising was just starting out. Much different than we think it is today. From Amazon’s early success with affiliates came affiliate programs, which were launched in 1998. So those were Commission Junction and Click Bank which are still around today among many others.

Affiliate marketing has benefitted both businesses and affiliates alike. If a company has a product that they want to scale and sell, then they’d register for a network of their products.

And then the network would handle you know all the technical aspects of the affiliate program, things like tracking sales, providing metrics, based on unique links, who was referring traffic, and affiliates could get paid by signing up with one of these networks and picking from a list of products they want to promote on their own sites.

Now as of today affiliate marketing generates over 12 billion dollars globally each year. And it drives over 16 percent of Commerce sales around the world.

Affiliate marketing has become very sophisticated and it’s even more competitive than ever before. However, because of this, even if you commit to mastering this, the benefits are greater than they’ve ever been before in regard to how much money you can earn.

Affiliate marketing is the most passive form of online income

passive-income-with-affiliate-marketing

Passive income is defined as earning an income without having to be actively engaged in any business activity. So, it’s detached from the money aspect where you aren’t directly working a salary for it.

However, the definition has evolved over time to include money earned from online activities that require little or no effort to produce. So for example, dividends and returns on investments are considered passive income.

However, these passive income sources require either one or two things. So either time or money or a little bit of each. So, if you have capital, you can buy a company or real estate that produces income. You could either invest in shares or live off their dividends.

But you need capital for that. So, if you don’t already have the funds, you need to put in the time and effort into creating something that will pay you back later for the work that was done. So my favorite way to earn passive income is through affiliate advertising.

You don’t have a physical item to sell because you’re selling digital content. You’re just promoting other people. You’re doing online marketing and you’re earning passive revenue. But this requires some upfront effort to get it working correctly. You must water it and keep it well-maintained.

And if you do everything right, it can be easy to keep up. While it can be difficult to stop, once you have started. So you can build and earn some extra cash by doing something you already know how to do.

In 2007, Tim Ferriss popularized this concept in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. But it has really changed and grown a lot since then. It’s now a lot more data-driven and scientific than it was back then.

new-york-times

So even big Brands like the New York Times have a Blog you know called wire cutter and product review sites like ratings.com make an absolute killing every month by being an intermediary between consumers searching for products online and eventually purchasing them through affiliate links.

So when I started my blog adamenfroy.com in 2019, I put in a lot of effort creating this content. Now my blog makes over 125,000 a month just from affiliate marketing. I put in that work and then it doesn’t take too much to maintain now.

Because I got a ranking on Google for stuff that is still ranking and just still sitting there within the first few results of Google for a lot of high-value Search terms. So back then though I spent hours researching keyword ideas, coming up with a Content strategy, determining which niches I wanted to go after, and making income from.

So when I started my site I had a nine-to-five job. So I couldn’t work on it during my free time. But as it grew, so did my income and it eventually doubled and tripled my nine-to-five income. All from setting up a good foundation of affiliate marketing business strategies.

So, now you know in this blog, I want to get into some specifics of how you can build this passive income through affiliate marketing.

You + The Brand = Make Money

When starting out, I always suggest building a site with your own brand or a simple variation of your chosen keyword. Nowadays, most people choose to go for it because they know it opens up so many possibilities in their lives.

So you don’t want to limit yourself to one specific type of business. Or something you really dislike or something that you cannot pivot with. So for example, if your domain name has running shoes in it running shoes.com.

You can’t really pivot into something like lawnmower reviews. But if you have your domain as your name as I do, you can write about virtually anything and eventually hone in on it. The niche that works and that’s the key most people teach is that you have to find the tiny Niche first.

But what if you just start by yourself and then gradually expand into doing it based on data, based on which things work, and based on actually trying out Google in a scientific manner? So, if you start with a particular niche but lose interest, you can always go back to the drawing board and start something new. Don’t give up, don’t quit.

By failing fast and learning as you progress, you allow yourself to fail fast and keep moving forward. But once you’ve started, your goal should be to become as profitable as quickly as possible.

So as an instance, let’s say you are obsessed with productivity. You want to start writing a blog about teaching college students to be more productive at school and with their studies. But as you think about this audience, you realize that most college students don’t have much money.

They’re not likely to spend their money on things like productivity software or a course. They’re going to spend it on partying, just like I did. But you could use that same passion for productivity to create something completely different.

So you could focus on course creators in the digital marketing space and talk about how to be more productive, when you’re creating products, reviewing e-learning software, and community, and group software.

Now you have fewer people to target. But if you’re able and willing, then they’re going to be more likely to pay for things that help them become more productive. So when you’re able to shift your attention from one thing to another, just slight changes.

You can continue writing, and testing that out as blog posts, and you can start earning some income instead of giving up. Because your audience doesn’t have money. So you can change and adapt over time.

Affiliate Marketing Is Competitive

So now you need to know one thing affiliate marketing is competitive. So, since the inception of affiliate marketing back in the early Amazon years, it has become extremely competitive.

So instead of just having a bunch of individual site creators throwing banner ads on their site hoping for the best, there are entire brands with full staffs writing articles and ranking for highly competitive keywords.

The Mom and Pops type blog like mine, I can still outrank Forbes, and business.com, Business Insider all of these sites with a small team. So you can easily find keywords for which you want to target them to make the most profit by searching for the phrase “best” followed by the keyword.

So something like the best flat screen TV. So, you’ll see sites with review scripts that have links towards products like Amazon or Best Buy, that could make commissions from these purchases. So you can also use a tool like ahrefs which is a keyword research tool I use every day to find the profitable niches to focus on.

With so much competition, it means you must take it seriously. Blogging is not a hobby anymore. Affiliate marketing is not a hobby. It’s something serious. But it’s just a matter of seeing the opportunities.

If you want to then you need to spend more time thinking about your niche, target audience, and keywords you want to start with. So you may not know this but around 95 of bloggers, Who start out with the idea of making money typically fail.

And it’s not because they weren’t good writers or didn’t care enough. Because they couldn’t make it profitable period. If I had to write about something that I was really passionate about. I was also doing fantasy football, astronomy, and my favorite recipes, but I didn’t make any money from it.

I would quit every single time too. But that’s actually good news for you. The good news is that most people who start out are likely to give up. They’re not your competitors. If you can just keep trying, you’ll eventually succeed.

So your goal should be to stick it out and learn how to compete with the big player.  So how do you do that so you build your affiliate site the right way from day one and you can find your Competitive Edge?

When I started my blog, I wanted to rank for terms related to business software. I am using a variety of tools at work, including video conferencing software, CRM software, website hosting, online courses, and landing page builders.

So you need to learn things that others don’t yet. This was my competitive Advantage. Because I knew a lot about these things, I knew a lot about SEO and Link building and things that people didn’t know at this time.

Which made the creation of content much faster and more efficient. So all I had to do was create content around these types of software posts, setting up my blog pages in a way that would get traffic from Google.

And this way I was the middleman between someone thinking of something and searching for it on Google, and a product, and purchasing through an affiliate link.

So something like the best podcast hosting. Once you know how to set up your site and write about topics that Google loves—like travel, sports and food—you’ll be able to get traffic on Google. Then you just need to put into practice the strategy and keep doing so over time without giving up.

How fast can you implement what you know?

So how fast can you implement everything you know? If you want to come up with this writing schedule, this content creation schedule. I published three or four solid articles a week.

Sometimes two, sometimes one. Even now when I started making money and I was trickling in some income, I was able to quit my job, which bought me a lot of time back to create more content. I hired a writer to help me scale this fast, and I was able to essentially double my output.

Then, I could focus on other things like link-building, guest blogging, building my authority, and getting targeted traffic to my site. So, you don’t have to go as fast as I did.

But doing this with some speed and urgency and focus. Is important early on this is how you build true momentum. So if you only post one or two articles a month, it’s going to take you a long time to rank for keywords, that bring any amount of appreciable.

You know traffic and value and money into your website. So you should aim to post multiple articles a week if you can. Because not everything you publish is going to rank.

So the way that you create Leverage is by publishing regularly and letting Google do its thing by recognizing you as an authority in the niche you’re writing about.

So let’s take a look at some numbers. So let’s say you want to replace your current income. And you currently make five thousand dollars a month working 40 hours a week.

For sake of Simplicity let’s say you’re promoting a few different affiliate products that cost 500 each, and you make a 20 Commission on those sales.

That means you need to sell 50 of those products every month in order to match your income of five thousand dollars every month. Now when you break down the numbers we usually say that around two percent of your visitors will make a purchase.

That means you need around 2500 visitors to the pages that link to the products you’re sending traffic to. So 50 purchases times a hundred dollars equals five thousand dollars.

Now you’ve just matched your nine-to-five income. It’s time to double that. You know keep working, figure out the next steps, then you can quit your job.

Focus 100 on this business. Or hire someone to help you while you’re working your day job. It’s really up to you. As long as you don’t quit. So when you just start out, it’s best to have a plan for this content.

So, I use what I call a Content assembly strategy. Where I make sure every article has a basic structure. It’s optimized for SEO. I have affiliate links and multiple pages on it. And it links you know from other pages to my website.

So this means, you can get a lot of content done relatively, quickly if you use kind of a Content assembly line method.

The faster you can get your content indexed in Google, the faster Google’s AI can crawl your site. Determine its Authority and start to rank you initially in the search ranking.

So it’s about quality and quantity. So over time, you continue to update your content to keep it fresh and make it more engaging. So Google knows when you update your pages, so the better you do this the higher you’ll rank.

So higher rankings equal more clicks and more clicks equal more money. So this was the approach I took when starting out. Because I knew I needed multiple pieces of content out there before I’d see any traction.

So when I first started making money, it motivated me and helped me build more momentum to do more. And the progress snowballed from there and to the blog I have now. That earns over 125,000 a month from just affiliate income.

Affiliate marketing is a highly lucrative way to make money online

So as you can see affiliate marketing is a highly lucrative way to make money online. Even now in 2022, we’re still at the beginning of a massive shift in how people are spending their money.

So more and more people are going online to buy things instead of going out, and while this is a viable way to make money, it does take time to build up your brand.

But if you do it correctly, you have the opportunity to quit your job, save more for retirement or even take it further and build generational wealth by leveraging your skills and abilities online.

Conclusion

In this blog, I cover some specifics of how you can build this passive income through affiliate marketing.

So if that was interesting to you if you want to learn the exact strategy, how I built my business into a four hundred thousand dollar a month online business. Make sure to click the link below. Sign up for my free 60 Minute Master Class.

Thousands of students have gone through and had lots of aha moments. I have got a ton of articles on SEO, blogging, affiliate marketing, making money online in the 2022s, and the business strategy behind it.

Digi Skill Grow
Digi Skill Grow

I Help Beginning entrepreneurs grow a passive stream of income through the internet without spending a lot of money. My main goal for this site is to provide quality tutorials, tips, courses, tools, and other resources that allow anyone to work online and master digital marketing based on real case studies and deep research.

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