What Is Affiliate Marketing
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What Is Affiliate Marketing & Why Do I Recommend It For Beginners?

If you have been looking for ways to make money online, even for a short period of time, you have likely come across something called affiliate marketing.

Maybe you have heard that it is a scam and that you can't make any substantial money with it or maybe you heard that is a good way to make money online but you aren't sure how to get started.

For all those concerned that it might be a scam, I assure you that it is not. I have been making money via affiliate marketing online since 2015 and have been able to turn it into a full-time income, currently making me over $6000 a month.

Not only have I found it to be a legitimate and sustainable way to make money online, but I think it is a good way for beginners to get started for several reasons that I will discuss here.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

In a nutshell...


Affiliate marketing is when you promote products online for companies and earn commissions when you help make sales.


There are all sorts of companies out there willing to pay people to promote their products… Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Best Buy, ClickBank, Dollar Shave Club, etc. Pretty much every company that is keeping up with technology and the Internet has in affiliate program that you can make money with by promoting their products.


How to Go About Doing It

There are a variety of ways to go about affiliate marketing, some that work and some that don't. For example, you could start posting affiliate links all over the place on social media and forms, but this is not effective although it seems easy. If it were this easy than everyone would be doing it.


Nowadays you pretty much need your own website unless you are some Internet celebrity and have some massive social media following. 


This is how I do it… By having my own websites that is.


I promote various products on my websites via affiliate links and earn commissions by doing so. Just about all of my website traffic comes from Google, which is completely free and one of the best and most sustainable ways to get visitors to your website.


A diagram I threw together of this process is as shown…

Recap: 
  • I create small niche websites
  • I promote products related to my website
  • I bring in traffic from Google and other search engines for free
  • I get paid commissions when people click on my affiliate links and purchase the products I am promoting
  • I am then very happy when I help make sales 🙂

Affiliate Marketing Opportunities

As I mentioned earlier, there are so many different affiliate marketing programs out there and plenty of opportunity in this industry.


The reason affiliate marketing programs are everywhere is because it is a win/win situation for both parties… You and the company. Just think about it… You are bringing more sales into them which in turn makes them more money. And then of course you make money… Win/win.


Any type of product you can think of you are able to promote as an affiliate and earn money… Jewelry, plants, food, workout equipment, computers, picture frames, paintings, Barbie dolls, shoes, video games, etc., etc., etc.


Below are two very good examples of big affiliate programs that you can find many different products to promote on…


Example 1: Amazon 

We all know Amazon… The e-commerce giant that is taking over the world. They have the largest affiliate program in the world and it is no wonder with there being hundreds of millions of products to promote in such a widespread popularity.


You can find just about any product imaginable to promote within the Amazon affiliate program (called Amazon Associates) alone. And this is just one company… One of many affiliate programs that exist on the Internet.

Example 2: Clickbank

Another good example of a rather large affiliate program that is popular is ClickBank. ClickBank is not as popular as Amazon, but it is definitely growing. And for those of you who don't know, ClickBank is a marketplace for digital products, such as e-books, online programs/systems, software, etc.


There are so many products that you can promote within the ClickBank affiliate program in a variety of different categories. In one thing that is nice is that you can find some pretty darn high paying offers here.


For example, you can see within the Health & Fitness category the first two offers that come up allow you to earn an average of $33.55 and $27.58 per sale, with the ability to earn as high as 90% commissions…

High commissions or common when it comes to digital product affiliate programs like this because they have so much profit margin.

Good for Beginners, But Why?

Not only is affiliate marketing a legitimate and sustainable business model, that many large trusted brands rely on to help drive in sales, but it is also something that I and many others consider to be great for beginners.


But why? Why is it good for beginners?  Why do so many top-level online marketers start out as simple affiliate marketers? Here are a few reasons…


#1 - It Requires Little to No Start-up Cost

First off it is extremely affordable. When it comes to online business in general, startup costs are already significantly lower than traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. However, there are many different forms of online business and ways to make money online and affiliate marketing is by far one of the most affordable.


You don't need much to be an affiliate marketer. It are the cost anything to have your own website… All you need is a domain and hosting which are more affordable than ever. Of course you are going to want a good training program as well, but you can actually get started with affiliate marketing training for free as I will show you shortly. And… You don't need to have your own products, which brings me to my next point…

#2 - You Don't Need Your Own Products

Think about how it works for a second… All you do is promote products for companies. There is no need for you to have your own product to sell. You simply pick some good products that are already proven to sell and promote them.


Product creation is a daunting task and can be extremely difficult, especially when starting out. Most online marketers, that do sell their own products, have created digital products such as e-books, educational material, and other information products because this is much more simple than dealing with the hassle of creating a physical product.


But you don't have to worry about any of that with affiliate marketing. It doesn't matter whether you are promoting a physical product or a digital product, all you do is promote

Other Upsides

And there are many other upsides to affiliate marketing, which aren't specifically good for beginners, but are good for anyone involved in affiliate marketing regardless of their skill level.


When upside that is a pretty big deal is how you can change the products you're promoting very easily. For example, if you're promoting some light up dog collar and the product gets discontinued, you can easily change your promotion to some other relevant dog collar. In other words, you are not chained directly to anyone business or product and have the flexibility to change what you are promoting simply by changing the link you are using.


It's also nice how you do not have to deal with customers when you are affiliate marketing. Remember, you are just promoting products and directing people to other websites. When you promote a product on Amazon and someone clicks on your affiliate link, they are directed to the Amazon website to purchase the product. You don't actually have to deal with the customer, deal with returns, complaints, etc.


And there are lots of other upsides that I'm not going to get into here.

But It's No Walk In The Park

Sounds pretty awesome right?


It is awesome, but one thing everyone must understand is that affiliate marketing is no walk in the park. As I mentioned earlier, if it were super easy than everyone would be doing it. But… Unfortunately it isn't.


You can just go out and start posting affiliate links everywhere thinking that you are going to strike it rich. These misguided approaches to affiliate marketing simply do not work. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scam training programs out there that lure people in by giving them the idea that they can make easy money doing this, and then provide them with some outdated crappy training that is never going to work.


I've been in this business for a while and reviewed plenty of affiliate marketing training program scams out there. So you just have to be careful with how you get started. Of course you need training, unless you want to spend years trying to figure out everything for yourself and likely wasting years of time in the process, but I'm guessing most people would rather follow a proven training program that works, which is what I want to talk about below…

Recommendation for Starting Out

There is by no means just one way to get started affiliate marketing. HOWEVER, there is only one recommendation I'm going to give and this is because know it works based on my experience.


You see back in 2015 when I first started out I didn't really know where to begin. I came across a lot of different methods/programs and wasted a bit of time trying to find something that works. Then I found it… The program I am talking about is called Wealthy Affiliate.


Wealthy Affiliate is an affiliate marketing training program and, in my opinion, the best one out there. In this program your provided with everything you need to do what I do, which includes:


  • Step-by-step training with plenty of video tutorials making things easy to follow
  • The tools necessary to get started (including 2 free websites + hosting and more)
  • Access to the community forum where you can interact with thousands of like minded individuals, including veterans like myself that make a living doing this
  • And a lot more I'm not going to get into


I know the program works because it took me from $0 to making over $6000 a month consistently online


If you are interested then I suggest you check out my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.


Please leave any questions or comments down below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can 🙂

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Why Have a Mobile Friendly Website
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Why Have a Mobile Friendly Website? – You DON’T NEED ONE If…

Why have a mobile friendly website? 

Is it really all that important? Can you get away with just a regular old website? And besides… What the heck is a mobile friendly website anyhow?

I'm sure you've heard the term before "mobile friendly", or maybe "mobile optimized", or even "mobile first". There are various terms out there but they all refer to the same thing, which I'm just going to refer to as mobile friendly from here on.

The truth is that, while you don't absolutely need a mobile friendly website, it can be a big help and if you don't already have one then you will likely notice big differences by converting yours to a mobile friendly version.

In the rest of this short article I will be going over what exactly a mobile friendly website is, why this is important, how to find out if you have one, and if you don't a quick fix to the problem.

What Is a Mobile Friendly Website?

Okay, so what exactly is a mobile friendly website well… In simple terms it is just a website that is optimized for mobile devices, meaning that people can visit your website from smart phones and tablets without any problem.


But what is it about certain websites that makes them mobile friendly and others that make them not so friendly?


Below I have a list of some of the top criteria for a site being considered mobile friendly.


What makes it mobile friendly?


1) Pages Are Responsive


The number one criteria that a website must meet to be mobile friendly is responsiveness. But what do I mean by this?


When I say that pages are responsive, I am meaning that the different pages of a website respond to the varying sizes of screens.


If you were simply to take the view of a website from a desktop screen and make it smaller so that you can see on a mobile device, this would be extremely "un-user-friendly". It would be very difficult for visitors to see what they are doing and they would have to be constantly zooming in and out, scrolling around in every direction, and it would just be a mess.


However, this is the problem that some sites have. If you go to a website that is not mobile friendly, you are just viewing the website on a mobile phone as if you were doing it on a desktop computer.


A mobile friendly website will reformat everything to make the experience much more simple. You will be able to simply scroll down on your mobile device without scrolling side to side, having to zoom in and out, and all that nonsense.


Can you simply adjust the settings on your website to make it mobile friendly? The answer is no. Unless you are a master coder, you will have to get a theme that is already mobile friendly, which I will discuss shortly.


2) Fonts Are Easily Readable


Another aspect to the mobile-friendliness is readable fonts. This is something that you can manually adjust on your website and that everyone should be able to do on their own, if your theme allows it. But not all themes allow you to change the font style. That said, the default fonts for most themes are usually easy to read and are good to go.


The reason that font choice is a lot more important when it comes to mobile devices is simple… They are much smaller and that is already a disadvantage when it comes to readability.


3) Image Display


Having optimal image display is also something that you could say is part of the criteria for being mobile friendly.


If you view your site on a mobile device, does it mess up the images? Does it make them incredibly hard to view?


This is something else that comes with the theme you have installed on your website. Some themes, such as the one I am using for example, optimize image placement and size for varying mobile device sizes.


4) Navigation


Having mobile friendly navigation is also key. Being able to navigate a website on a smaller screen makes things a bit more difficult, so making it as easy as possible for visitors to get to where they want to go is a necessity.


Menus are very important when it comes to this. Have you ever been to a website on a mobile device that has some massive menu that takes forever just to look through? And maybe it took you 10 minutes just to find the menu in the first place? Yeah… This is not what you want.


Often mobile friendly websites will have a little menu icon that visitors can click on to expand a full menu. This is what you want because the menu is out of the way and allows for the screen, as small as it already is, to be filled with other things, yet it can be clicked on and expanded by the user at any time.


This is something else that just comes along with a mobile friendly website theme. If you are viewing this post right now on a mobile device then you should see something like what I am talking about because my website is mobile friendly.


5) Other Ways to Keep It Friendly


The truth is that there are many ways to keep your site mobile friendly, besides that of simply using a mobile friendly theme. I'm not going to go over all of them, but another good thing you should think about is keeping your paragraphs on the shorter side in breaking up your ideas and thoughts.


As I already went over, reading things on a small device is already hard enough, you don't want to make things harder than they need to be. You don't want to jumble everything together into one massive paragraph that might take a couple minutes to scroll through. Break things up into nice, easy to digest, bite sized pieces.


This is something you want to do regardless. It doesn't really matter if people are on mobile devices or not, but I would say that it is a bit more crucial when it comes to mobile users.

Why It Is Important

So why is this also important? I mean… I get it… If people visit my website from a mobile device and they have a rough experience than they are more likely to leave in a short period of time. But is it really all that important?


The answer is Yes, it is.


According to Statista, the global mobile internet user population was a massive 3.9 billion in October of 2018. In North America 38.67% of all Internet traffic came from mobile devices, 37.08% in your app, and as high as 61.09% in Asia.


And if you think that is a lot, get this… The traffic coming from mobile devices is projected to increase astronomically by 2021.

What the chart above shows is the amount of "exabytes" of data used on average per month for a given year. In 2016 the global mobile traffic added up to 7 exabytes of data per month, but in 2021 it is estimated to increase by 7x that amount.


Now you don't need to know what exactly an exabyte is or anything… The point is that mobile traffic is increasing a lot, all across the world, and if you want your website to be effective for whatever its purpose is, you are going to want it to be mobile friendly.


You Don't Need One If...


This section I put here just kind of as a joke. The only time you don't need a mobile friendly website is if you want to have some crappy website that many people can't even read and leave soon after they come across it.


But who would want that?

How to Find Out If You Have One?

Don't know if your website is mobile friendly or not? Well don't worry, finding out is pretty darn simple.


All you have to do is go to https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly, which is a free tool provided by Google, in order to find out.


When you click the link above and go to this website you will see the page displayed below where you will be prompted to enter the website you want to test… (You can enter any page on any website that you want to test)

Then you simply click the button to run the test and it will analyze your website. This may take a minute depending on the size of your website.


Then you will get the page shown below. It will either say your page is mobile friendly, or is not and it will also display an image of what your site looks like on a mobile device…

As you can see above, it did tell me that I have "page loading issues", but they turned out to be nothing for me to worry about… Just some scripts and stylesheets that didn't load, not actual pages.

Not Mobile Friendly? Here's a Fix

Years ago when smart phones were just becoming popular, it was rather difficult to make your website mobile friendly, simply because there weren't all that many mobile users yet and no one really cared about it, but nowadays it is pretty darn simple.


There are lots of different mobile friendly themes that you can get out there, both free themes and paid themes. A good mobile friendly theme will be responsive so that no matter what size of screen a visitor is viewing your website on it will be user-friendly, it will optimize image size for any device, it will make navigating your website easy, and so on.


Now I only have WordPress websites, so I only can speak for them, but all types of websites will have mobile friendly themes. And in case you are wondering, I use Thrive Themes. They have a variety of different mobile friendly themes that are conversion focused and work great.


So in closing, I hope you understand the importance of having a mobile friendly website if you didn't already. This is a big deal and not having one can massively affect success when it comes to the need to increase website conversions, whether it be selling a product, promoting a brand, getting people to opt into a mailing list, etc.


If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can 🙂

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