To get rich quick is not something that can be planned for and occurs very rarely.

Instead, your focus should be on how to get rich slowly, which means to take a slow, steady approach to invest over a longer period time.

Money of course isn’t everything.

Not by a long shot.

Where your definition of success is concerned, money may rank far down the list. Everyone’s definition of “success” is different.

For me, money doesn’t matter all that much, but I’ll confess, it did at one time (probably because I didn’t have very much).

So, let’s say money is on your list.

Let’s say, like millions of other people, that you’d like to be a millionaire.

What kinds of things should you do to increase your chances of joining the millionaire’s club?

Here are the steps I’d suggest. They’re neither fast nor easy. But, they’re more likely to work than the quick and easy path.

Stop obsessing about money

While it sounds counterintuitive, maintaining a laser-like focus on how much you make distracts you from doing the things that truly contribute to building and growing wealth. So shift your perspective.

“See money not as the primary goal but as a by-product of doing the right things.”

Start tracking how many people you help

Even in a very small way. 

The most successful people I know – both financially and in other ways – are shockingly helpful. They’re incredibly good at understanding other people and helping them achieve their goals. They know their success is ultimately based on the success of the people around them.

So they work hard to make other people successful: their employees, their customers, their vendors and suppliers… because they know, if they can do that, then their own success will surely follow.

And they will have built a business – or a career – they can be truly proud of.

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Stop thinking about making a million dollars

It’s time to start thinking about serving a million people.

When you only have a few customers and your goal is to make a lot of money, you’re incented to find ways to wring every last dollar out of those customers.

But when you find a way to serve a million people, many other benefits follow.

The effect of word of mouth is greatly magnified. The feedback you receive is exponentially greater – and so are your opportunities to improve your products and services.

And, in time, your business becomes something you never dreamed of – because your customers and your employees have taken you to places you couldn’t even imagine.

Serve a million people – and serve them incredibly well – and the money will follow.

View making money to create more opportunities 

Generally speaking there are two types of people.

One makes things because they want to make money; the more things they make, the more money they make.

What they make doesn’t really matter that much to them – they’ll make anything as long as it pays.

The other wants to make money because it allows them to make more things. They want to improve their product. They want to extend their line. The want to create another book, another song, another movie.

They love what they make and they see making money as a way to do even more of what they love.

They dream of building a company that makes the best things possible … and making money is the way to fuel that dream and build that company they love.

While it is certainly possible to find that one product that everyone wants and grow rich by selling that product, most successful businesses evolve and grow and as they make money, reinvest that money in a relentless pursuit of excellence.

Focus on becoming better 1% every day

The 1% rule is simple: improve just 1% each day.

The idea is that if you do this, the good habits you develop stack over time. Rome wasn’t built in a day and you won’t be either.

Stop focusing on the end result and start paying attention to the process.

It doesn’t take much to do every day, but it also doesn’t take much to NOT do it.

The difference is a slippery slope. Are you going to be the person who improves 1% each day or the one who gets worse each day?

If you think staying the same is an option – it’s not. Every day you don’t get better, you simply get worse.

So when it’s nighttime and you’re winding down for bed, ask yourself:

“What have I done today to improve by 1 tiny percent?”

Tomorrow, you probably won’t notice a difference. But what’s the result when 1% happens every day?

Improve a little each day. It compounds.

When 1% compounds every day, it doubles every 72 days, not every 100 days.

Track your progress 

We tend to become what we measure, so track your progress at least once a week against your key measures.

Maybe you’ll measure how many people you’ve helped. Maybe you’ll measure how many customers you’ve served. Maybe you’ll evaluate the key steps on your journey to becoming the world’s best at one thing.

Maybe it’s a combination of those things, and more.

Ready To Fire Your Boss? This is how I was able to replace my income…

Build routines that ensure progress

Never forget that achieving a goal is based on creating routines. Say you want to write a 200-page book; that’s your goal.

Your system to achieve that goal could be to write 4 pages a day; that’s your routine.

Wishing and hoping won’t get you to a finished manuscript, but sticking faithfully to your routine ensures you reach your goal.

Or say you want to land 100 new customers through inbound marketing.

That’s your goal; your routine is to create new content, new videos, connect with new prospects on whatever schedule you set.

Stick to that routine and meet your deadlines and if your content is great you will land those new customers.

Wishing and hoping won’t get you there – sticking faithfully to your routine will.

Set goals, create routines that support those goals, and then ruthlessly track your progress.

Fix what doesn’t work. Improve and repeat what does work. Refine and revise and adapt and work hard every day to be better than you were yesterday.

Soon you’ll be good. Then you’ll be great. And one day you’ll be world-class.

And then, probably without even noticing, you’ll also be a millionaire. You know, if you like that sort of thing.

This doesn’t surprise me. Most people are unhappy with their jobs.

In fact, 70 percent of Americans aren’t engaged by what they do for a living. Let’s put that into perspective. Provided that, there are American’s that still have a full-time job, that is number is around 120 million. 84 million of them don’t like their jobs.

Starting my own business was the last thing on my mind when I graduated from college. I’ll be honest, I just wanted to make a lot of money and have a stable job. As a bonus, I also wanted benefits and vacation time.

But as the years went on, I realized my life was not being fulfilled. I began entertaining the idea of starting my own business but kept coming up with excuses not to. Eventually, I realized I needed to face my fears head-on.

I still remember the moment when I sat down to check out a business opportunity. I was blown away and my world had been ripped open.

They offered me a product that could change people’s lives and also make money by referring other.

Except for one problem: the ticket price was $4,000.

I had no frame of reference for this, and I had $29 in my checking account —and still hadn’t paid my mortgage.

And yet, I felt that I was called to take action.

The decision didn’t make any sense, I committed and haven’t looked back since then.

It was one of the most powerful moments of my life and it had very little to do with the product.

It had to do with the fact that I was convincing myself that I was worthy of that type of investment.

Since then, I’ve invested over 6-figures in courses, mentors, seminars, live events and more.

The truth is simple: I would not be who I am today without investing in myself.

As humans, we are a herd species.

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Here are 7 reasons why most people are afraid to invest in themselves which is why they do everything in their power to stay stuck.

You’re not willing to be resourceful

If it’s important enough, we can all find the money. We can make it work somehow, someway.

Imagine a friend shares an opportunity to buy a mint-condition Lamborghini for $5,000. The offer is good for 24 hours.

You would do everything in your power to scrounge up the money to get buy the car because you know the value.

But most people would rather spend the money on a big screen TV’s and expensive Air Jordan’s.

As awesome as those are, they won’t transform your life.

You’re letting your fears win

Imagine putting everything you have — your hopes, dreams and finances — into starting your own business, only to watch it crash and burn

You’re afraid of putting money down and not taking action.

You’re afraid of declaring your dreams to someone else.

You’re afraid of being held accountable to your vision.

You’re afraid of achieving success and changing your life.

I had to redefine success. I realized it wasn’t enough for me to be at a decent job with decent pay — security wasn’t my definition of success.

For me, success meant chasing my dreams and achieving my goals. That’s when I realized I’d be failing to stay at my current job.

These fears are always out there.

You’re waiting for the “right” time

So often, I’ll have discussions with people and figuring out the details on how to move forward, and they’ll say the timing isn’t right.

Here’s the deal: the timing will never be right, you make it right.

Life won’t get less busy, the kids won’t be less intense, your bills aren’t going to disappear.

You don’t know where to start

Most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t know where to start when they start their first online business. Start out by seeking out a mentor who has achieved the goal you’ve set for yourself. 

Seek out the person, the structure of their business, and reach out to see if she can offer advice or information.

Just take a step forward and do what makes sense. The path will unfold as you continue to walk.

There is a big difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is what 95% of people do, which is consuming information. Knowing is implementing what you just learned.

You’re entitled and want it free

This is a charged word, but it’s true: people feel they deserve free coaching, mentoring and time from others. They will spend countless hours on YouTube to end up confused, overwhelmed and frustrated.

A few months back, I received a message from someone who wanted to work with me.

I quoted them the price what it took to invest in themselves. They came back with a message —because they “know” everything from doing research on YouTube, they wanted it free (or discounted.). Yet, they haven’t achieved any results for themselves.

95% people who are looking to start an online business are consumers of information, not producers.

What they fail to recognize is they wouldn’t do anything with free advice.

Ready To Fire Your Boss? This is how I was able to replace my income…

You want to keep playing small

Investing in yourself is a bold declaration of trust, faith and belief in who you are and what you’re creating.

It’s also a sign that you have skin in the game.

But it’s also a shift from playing small to playing much bigger —and not everyone is ready to play big.

They would much rather try and consume free “how to tips” and grab up as many e-Books as they can to try and figure it out on their own.

You want the reward without the risk

It sounds cliché, but there are no big rewards without any risks involved.

You want a guarantee.

There is risk in everything we do, including investing. But you need to start thinking long-term about building wealth.

Investing in yourself and in an online business is planning for your future through various avenues — which will help you in your golden years, so you’re not working far past your prime.

So start now by empowering yourself financially. Take a dip in investing in yourself. It’s never too late to start.

Most just want to achieve a degree of financial freedom, and the peace of mind that comes with it.

Whatever your financial goal, achieving it requires at least some basic financial knowledge.

Unfortunately, this is a problem for many people. Most of us weren’t taught money management basics in school. Most of us didn’t learn about investing or how to start a real business in school.

Couple that with the fact there’s no shortage of financial advice online (much of it self-serving) and it can be hard to even know where to start — much less how to finish.

All of which is why, according to a recent study, most people can’t pass a basic, five-question financial literacy test.

So if you want to enjoy some measure of financial freedom, and possibly even get rich, here are some simple truths about money and investing that apply to almost everyone.

Including you.

1. If your goal is to get rich, work for yourself.

Check out any “richest people” on Google. Once you find these people, check out the IRS list of the largest gross adjusted incomes. What will you find? Aside from a few people who won the genetic lottery and inherited fortunes, the rest are almost all entrepreneurs.

That’s because, in simple terms, when you work for someone else, you will never be paid more than that person or company decides you’re worth. And your income is always capped.

Start a business, and the only limit to your income is you.

You don’t have to quit your job to start a business. Plus you’ll minimize your risk by keeping your full-time job until you’ve build a solid foundation for success. Then you can quit your day job.

And there’s another reason to start a business: You can grow your retirement savings more than twice as quickly.

2. If you want to win the 401(k) game, own a small business.

Say you own a small business. Or even a side hustle. And you’re the only employee. You can set up a 401(k) plan and have your company match 100 percent of your contributions.

This means if you’re under 50, you can contribute $19,000 in pretax dollars and your company can match that $19,000 with pre-corporate tax dollars for a total of $38,000 per year. And your company can make a pre-tax profit-sharing contribution of $18,000 to bring your total 401(k) allocations to the maximum allowable amount of $56,000 (as long as employee and employer contributions are not greater than your income).

If you’re over 50, the $6,000 catch-up lets you contribute a total of $62,000. You can contribute $25,000, your company can match that $25,000, and your company can make a $12,000 profit-sharing contribution.

Compare that with the $19,000 (or $25,000 if you’re over 50) maximum personal contribution you can make if you work for someone else.

Of course that means your business has to generate sufficient income. And you need to make enough, and keep your expenses low enough, to be able to save that much money.

Even if you can’t hit the maximums, the possibility still exists to save more than if you work for someone else. (I know several people who started side hustles for the sole purpose of funding their 401(k) accounts.)

But what if you work for someone else and don’t own your own business?

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3. If you work for someone else, always max out the 401(k) employer match.

If your employer will match 100 percent of your contributions up to 3 percent of your income, make sure you contribute 3 percent. If your employer will match 50 percent of your contributions to a maximum of 4 percent, make sure you contribute 8 percent.

Otherwise, you’re leaving free money on the table.

And then…

4. Don’t look at your 401(k) statements more than once or twice a year.

Few people can beat the market, and you and I are probably not among them.

Choose a sensible way to allocate your investments. Decide how much risk you can stomach, and how adventurous you want to be, and then step away from your statements. That way you won’t be tempted to try to time the market. Or to shift into an income fund during a momentary dip. Or to double down on an aggressive growth fund during a momentary spike.

After all, if Warren Buffett suggests we should invest our 401(k) money in an index fund, who are we not to listen?

And then use the time you save not obsessing over your 401(k) performance to …

5. Spend your time focusing on how much you save.

Again, while it’s fun to assume differently, most of us have very little control over the rate of our investment returns. Even if you channel your inner Warren and spend hours each day poring over financial data, the difference you’ll be able to make in your investment returns is likely to be small.

But what you can control is how much you save.

The faster you build your savings, the faster you achieve a critical mass of wealth, the greater the effect even marginal gains in investment return will have on your principal. For at least the first 10 years, how much you put in your 401(k) makes a much greater difference than how much you earn on those savings.

Think of it this way: When you have $20,000, earning 10 percent instead of 5 will increase your savings by only $500.

But when you have $500,000, the difference is $25,000.

Saving more means finding ways to spend less money. And may mean finding ways to make more money.

Spend your time doing those things — because you can control those things a lot more easily than your investment returns.

 If you’re considering a work at home gig, you’re far from alone.

6. Only borrow the money you have to borrow.

The key, as in most financial decisions, is to separate wants from needs.

You have to live somewhere, so borrowing money to buy a house makes sense. (As long as you buy wisely and don’t borrow more than you can afford.)

But if you want a boat, and need to borrow money to buy that boat, then satisfying your want may come at a high price. Instead of borrowing so you can finance the boat now, save so you can buy the boat later.

Do that, and you may find that you only thought you wanted whatever you considered financing.

Or you’ll be sure you not only want, but can afford.

7. The best investment you will ever make is in yourself.

Want a guaranteed return? Invest in yourself. Improve your skills. Improve your network. Increase your expertise, your talent, your experience.

Invest in becoming a better version of yourself. That will generate better long-term results than any other investment. It’s the one investment whose outcome you can almost totally control.

And the only investment guaranteed to help you live a more fulfilling life.

Win-win.

Having a hard time making ends meet as an affiliate marketer? While there’s no doubt that it has a lot of potential for generating income, many have difficulty getting the ball rolling. Perhaps you need to revamp your affiliate marketing strategies.

As an affiliate marketer, it’s your main objective is to help solve problems. Yes, money is a factor, but the reason why you want to focus on serving people is that you want to be the solution to the problems that your avatar is having. The more effective you are, the more money you generate. However, not everyone can jump right in and expect to be successful as a marketer.

Here are 5 actionable steps that helped me create a strong passive income after struggling for years.

Simplified my business

What this means is that I stopped promoting anything and everything under the sun! Worst of all, I was trying to build my empire all by myself. Doing everything yourself is a sure way to burning yourself out.

What I did instead is I put my entire focus on one platform, one product (high ticket), and one traffic source that serves my audience.

I learned the hard way by doing the opposite. By doing this, I was able to get the results in my business that I’ve always wanted to achieve.

I stopped following all the “gurus” and unsubscribed to all e-mail newsletters that were not serving me. Most of the time, the e-mails that I was receiving were self serving and it was all sell, sell, sell and no value.

As the saying goes, “less is more”.

Ready To Fire Your Boss? This is how I was able to replace my income…

Got clear on who I wanted to serve

It’s important to know who my target audience is, and what problem I want to solve for them.

Without this step, there is no point in doing affiliate marketing. It is a mere waste of time.

This is the very reason why 95% of affiliate marketers do not make any money. When they get frustrated and get no results, then they call affiliate marketing a scam.

An affiliate marketer gets so focused on what they’re selling that they forget to think about who they’re selling it to.

This is the kiss of death for a marketing campaign, and sometimes even an entire business.

That’s why understanding your customer avatar (AKA buyer persona) is so important.

Before you can sell anything effectively, you need to understand…

• WHO your ideal customer is
• WHERE they’re hanging out online
• WHAT their challenges are

Promoted a high ticket product

It’s about the same effort to sell $1,000 and $100 product. The difference between the two is that the return is 10-fold.

High ticket affiliate programs intimidate a lot of new and small-scale affiliates because they are under the impression that these are difficult to market.

If you are one of these affiliates, you got it all WRONG.

Going after the right affiliate programs to promote can mean the difference between making $1,000 per month or $10,000 per month.

Truth is, super affiliates are super affiliates for a reason — they don’t mess around wasting their time promoting low-ticket products.

 Recommended: This is how I create a 5-Figure monthly passive income working online 4 hours a day…

Invested in a mentor

I’m sure you have heard it a million times, but I will repeat it anyways.

Without a mentor, you will be running around like a headless chicken trying everything under the sun (likely failing) and spending years to make it happen.

I spent years trying to not to spend a dime but yet trying to earn 6-figures in income.

If I were to start out all over again, I would get a mentor right off the bat.

Now, I know some people can not afford a high ticket product and a mentor at the same time (I was one of those people) so I found a product that was high ticket, that had a mentor attached to the program.

Surrounded myself with like-minded people

This can easily be neglected.

Depending on where you live in the world, chances are that you are not surrounded by entrepreneurs, affiliates and goal-getters, as well as people who will understand your goals, frustrations, and can help you.

I created a community (mastermind) that had like-minded people in there (we all invested in the same thing.)

It’s their cheering and support that made a bigger difference in my life than I could have imagined.

‘You are the average of 5 people you spend the most time with.’

So choose them wisely.

In this blog, I’m going to share my picks of the best ‘must have’ tools for affiliate marketers that you can use to build a passive income stream.

The number one question, I get regularly is, s there an easy way to earn money with affiliate marketing? The short answer is no.

Affiliate marketing is the ideal source of passive income because it doesn’t require large initial investments and helps evade the pain of setting up your own business. As a matter of fact, affiliate marketers are paid to promote products and attract new customers.

Easy Money With Affiliate Marketing?

If easy means “money for nothing,” then no.

Forget all those stories you hear about how easy affiliate marketing is. Or how you can make money without doing anything at all.

But in terms of difficulty, affiliate marketing isn’t complicated. It just requires some work.

Like with any other business, success in affiliate marketing doesn’t come easy. Deep knowledge, detailed planning, and consistent effort are required to generate a significant income. Thankfully, there are plenty of digital marketing tools out there to help you achieve better results in affiliate marketing. 

List Of The Best Tools for Affiliate Marketing

If you want to be successful you’ll have to invest at least a little in your affiliate marketing business.

While digital marketing tools will only help you execute a proper strategy (they won’t do the work for you), the right technology stack can really help you zoom past the competition.

Some tools out there are foundational — things like email marketing, websites, sales funnels, tracking software, and a video editor.

Let’s take a look at the tools that might benefit you the most.

Web Hosting

Before you can start an affiliate marketing business up and running you need to build a website first.

And the first stage in building a website is finding the best web hosting company you can afford.

Bluehost is one that I recommend for beginners starting off. When researching web hosting providers, and Bluehost will be on your radar almost immediately – it’s widely used and hugely popular.

Bluehost’s customer support, strong uptime, and affordable beginner plans make it a dependable hosting provider.

I like them because at the time before joining forces with Bluehost, I was looking for old-fashioned reliability. Bluehost was that choice for me.

Bluehost has a variety of affordable plans, which is particularly useful for when you’re starting a new blog or launching a small business.

Although normally starting at $7.99 per month, you can get started with Bluehost from just $3.95 per month with my link. 

Bluehost is also the best choice you can make if you’re hosting a WordPress site – it’s earned the title of best for WordPress hosting in our research, and WordPress.org itself has been recommending Bluehost since 2005. 

E-mail Marketing

If you want to capture customer leads, GetResponse is one of the few newsletter tools I’ve tested that’s truly built for inbound. It offers flexible forms, a landing page editor, Google Analytics integration, and sophisticated automation for segmentation and emails, allowing you to both captures and nurtures new leads. On top of that, it’s even possible to host live and on-demand webinars with them.

The whole platform is easy to use and quick to get to grips with. There are a lot of online resources and help centers to troubleshoot.

Having the 24/7 live chat for support added to enterprise accounts is also very beneficial.

The new beta email editor is a huge step forward as there are now many features that were previously missing that can now be implemented with ease such as:

• Social media icons
• Video
• Spacers

Having a comparison between desktop and mobile previews in a more efficient manner also helps email creation too. The account management is of the highest quality. The automation tool is very intuitive and gives a lot of options for triggers.

Sales Funnels And Capture Pages

Businesses need to promote themselves, be in front of their eyes (target market) at the right place and right time. Being online for acquiring customers today is nobody’s guess. If you have been in this for some time, you must have asked yourself this obvious question.

Websites are seen by many as a natural choice when getting online. Websites help businesses have a dedicated address to be found online and interact with the customers. Just like a physical address… the website is your online address (www.yourbusiness.com).

You dress up your website with pleasant “get up” in terms of look and feel, introduce your business, its products, and services and even give pointers for people to buy and try out your offerings.

ClickFunnels vs website: do I need both?

And the short answer is Yes!

A website, when used with Clickfunnels, can get you the best of both the worlds. It can help you leverage testing done on paid traffic and get the same benefits from organic traffic. A lot of successful businesses do that…

But at the end, you need to make the call based on your current needs. Ask yourself what type of traffic you are looking at generating.

You can start with Website first if you want to drive organic traffic and capitalize on free traffic from search engines.

Start with Clickfunnels if you want to test products/services in your target market and start earning revenue right away. Drive paid traffic and then expand based on what you find viable in your testing.

Click Tracking Software

Getting more subscribers and making sales is great, but understanding how your traffic is responding to your offers is really how you can truly maximize your profits and take your business to the next level.

ClickMagick provides several essential features for any marketer who wants to track and optimize their marketing efforts and increase their ROI.

Click tracking goes beyond free analytical tools, and it’s what allows you to accurately test price points, payment methods, sales copy, page design, and countless other factors.

Ironically, click tracking software is usually one of those things you don’t know you need until you actually start using it.

If you do any sort of marketing online, then you need to invest in a good tracking software like ClickMagick. It’s so essential to know where your clicks are coming from, and which of these are leading to sales.

Because once you have this information, you will know what’s working and what’s not, and you can optimize your marketing efforts to make even more sales.

And as a cloud based service, you can see all your link tracking stats from a single dashboard. This is great for someone like myself who owns multiple sites.

Plus, there’s a whole bunch of useful features in ClickMagick I didn’t even know I needed previously, like bot click filtering and uptime monitoring.

It really is worth spending a couple hours going through the tutorial videos to see which features you can use for your own business.

Screen Recorder And Video Editor

Camtasia is a software tool that easily records your computer screen and allows you to edit it. If you are looking to record what you see on your desktop computer and create an engaging video to share with students or your community, Techsmith’s Camtasia is an excellent choice.

Camtasia is hands-down one of the best video editing software out there. But it really depends on the type of editing that you need to be done. Basic editing could probably be done with other software but if you’re looking for professional-level capabilities, you really can’t go wrong with Camtasia.

Traffic Secrets Book (Get Your Free Copy)

Inside the book, Traffic Secrets, there are 3 different types of traffic and ways on how to leverage them.

• COLD Traffic
• WARM Traffic
• HOT Traffic

Cold traffic includes people who have a problem that needs solving, but they aren’t yet aware of the different products and services that can help them.

They might search for something like “how to build a chicken coop,” because they still don’t know what types of resources are out there.

Cold traffic is usually the cheapest to target with paid traffic.

Warm traffic includes people who are aware of the types of solutions out there but haven’t yet heard about your product.

A warm customer might search for something like “ best chicken coop plans.”

Hot traffic is the creme-de-la traffic.

These people are aware of the specific products that can solve their problems and are more or less ready to buy.

A hot customer is the most expensive to target with paid ads, but they also have the highest conversions.

My #1 Recommendation To Build A Business Online

Creating an online business shouldn’t be scary. In fact, it’s fun and you can do it on your own time. The end result through our training is that by building your online business, you can earn enough money to either:

• Quit your job.
• Supplement your current income.
• Have more free time to yourself.
• Spend more time with your family.

Get to do the things you want in your life and not be held down by anyone.

Digital businesses can also have extremely low startup costs. Making them perfect for a new entrepreneur without a lot of cash, or taking out loans to start an online business.

There has never been a better time in history to be an online marketer. Anyone can start a business today, as long as they have the drive and determination.

Health and wellness are one of the hottest niches since the invention of the internet. People, from all walks of life, no matter what their background, culture, or economic status want to be happy and healthy. And they are willing to buy products or treatments that will help them do that.

It’s one of the best markets out there for doing business online. In fact, health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry globally. That means there’s plenty of room for new businesses, and to carve out your own blue ocean.

A common mistake that most people make is avoiding going into a market because they feel it’s too saturated. The reality is if a market is large with a lot of players in it, it’s because it’s a healthy profitable market with a lot of money to go around. The health and wellness industry is no exception.

You might be asking: I’m not an expert in health… how can I run a health-oriented business?

The great news is whether you’re a qualified health professional, someone with an interest in health, or don’t have any knowledge of this market at all but are interested in starting a business in this niche, there is an opportunity for you to do just that.

Let’s take a look at some of the steps to starting your own online business in the health niche.

Identify The Top Health Niches

When it comes to your business’s niche, it should be in an in-demand profitable niche market so you know you’ll sell. Ideally, you’ll find a niche you’re passionate about too. Perhaps a condition you suffer from. Or an issue one of your family members has faced.

Remember, you don’t have to be an expert or professional in order to make profits in a market. You can share your own personal experience, do research and publish the information you curate from other sources, and/or interview other experts to provide content and information for your market.

But remember that you want there to be demand. So study industry trends, study the best-seller lists on sites like Amazon, see what’s selling on late night infomercials and on store shelves. What’s on daytime TV talk shows? What are people talking about on Facebook? This should give you a long list of products that are trending right now for you to center your business around.

Let me give you a shortcut. Here are some of the top niches in the health market today:

• Digestive health/healthy gut
• Weight loss
• Anti-aging
• Diabetes
• Arthritis
• Back and neck pain
• Hair loss
• Skincare
• Heartburn
• Fatigue
• Reproductive health
• Healthy eating
• Kangen water

One thing you’ll probably notice is that these are all topics that aren’t going away anytime soon. One mistake a lot of people make when entering the health and wellness market is that they’ll jump onto a fad trend (like a fad diet).

You want to be sure that what you’re doing is an “evergreen” topic, one that will have staying power and stand the test of time.

This doesn’t mean that you can tackle, address, and profit from fad trends as they come and go, you just don’t want your entire business to be based around a fad or trend.

Finding Products to Sell in the Health Niche

The great thing about having an online business in the health niche, or really any e-commerce niche really, is that you don’t have to create your own products. In fact, you don’t want to, especially as a newcomer to the industry, because of the time, money, expense, and risk involved. Instead, you’re going to leverage the work and expertise of others. And don’t worry — it’s a good thing.

You have a couple of options when it comes to making money online in the health niche without creating your own products.

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Drop Shipping

With an online drop shipping business model, you promote products through your website and marketing efforts. You take orders from customers. Then you contact your dropshipping partner or partners, usually a manufacturer, wholesaler, or retailer, and order the product at a lower price. They send the product to your customer for a fee. And you keep the difference.

In most cases this is completely automated. You just need to market and advertise the products and generate a sale and the rest of the order and delivery process is handled by the drop shipping company.

The big advantages here are that you don’t have to get involved with storing a big inventory of product or shipping orders to customers. You hand off that responsibility to your partners. This has several advantages of not having to carry the risk of investing in product creation, inventory, and all of other hassles and expenses of creating your own products.

Once you find an offer that is working well then you may consider looking into creating the product yourself if you’re able to make more money than going through a third party.

In the meantime, there are plenty of drop shipping companies that offer products in this space. Doing a simple Google search with “product type” and “drop shipping” will give you plenty of options to review.

Affiliate Marketing

Like drop shipping, with affiliate marketing, you hand off the “grunt” work of selling online to others. But there are some crucial differences. In this business model, your market and sell products through your website, blog, Facebook page, email list, or whatever online property you have. But when it comes to making the sale… you’re done – it’s completely hands-off for you.

Every click on the “buy” link for a product leads your customer to your affiliate partner’s page to complete the transaction. Each link is unique to you. That way, your affiliate partner can give you a commission (usually between 5 percent and 25 percent) for every completed sale. The affiliate partner takes care of order processing, delivery, and customer service, and every single aspect of the transaction. Perfect.

An easy way to think of this is looking at Amazon.com as an example, which is one of the first affiliate networks on the internet.

With Amazon, you can find any product on their website (a book, a health supplement, a fitness gadget) and write a review on your website or run a paid ad to it. Amazon gives you a unique link to track where the sale comes from and if anyone makes a purchase from your link you get credit for the sale and a comission.

In addtion to Amazon there are dozens of affiliate networks and thousands of companies that offer their own affiliate programs in this market.

Another attractive option with affiliate marketing is to promote digital information products, which offer much higher commissions, ranging from 25% to 50% or more.

White Labeling

I recommend white labeling only when you have some experience in your business. In this model, you work with manufacturers who already have a supplement (sometimes you can work with them to create a custom formulation), for example, and put your own label on it.

They’ve done the scientific research to make sure it’s effective. You study their work. And if you feel comfortable, you put your company’s name on it and sell it as your own. White labeling is a great option because it allows you to create a brand and differentiate yourself from everyone else in the marketplace.

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Marketing Your Online Health Business

Next, it’s time to market your new online health business. You have a variety of options available to you. And most are low cost or free ways to drive traffic to your website.

Content Marketing

Getting high rankings in the Google search results is key to success in online business these days. Back in the old days, you could “stuff” your site full of relevant keywords and get this “organic” traffic.

But now Google wants to see genuinely useful content full of solid information. That means to engage in effective content marketing you have to ad useful advice, tips, and more related to your niche on a regular basis through your website and/or blog.

The content should be closely related to your niche and can be written. But video is also very highly-regarded by Google today too. No matter what type of content you publish, you could offer health tips, review types of supplements, suggest cures for certain conditions… there’s really no limit to what you can produce. They key is to create good quality content on a regular basis to see results.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Social media is huge these days. Your customers are there on Facebook and other social networking sites, so you have to be there, too. You should definitely have a Facebook page for your business.

Post regularly about your products, link to related news, link back to your website (when you post a new blog entry, for example), videos, comments on trends, and even personal stories. Let people get to know you and your company. It’ll speed up the process of them coming to know, like, and trust you.

Make sure you post regularly and engage with your customers through comments. And comment on the pages of other companies and organizations in your niche too. Start a conversation!

Paid Traffic

If you want to drive traffic to your health website faster, and you have some money to spend, you can try the paid advertising route. But I would suggest doing this only when you have your business in place and systems running smoothly, so you can convert as much of that traffic into sales as possible.

With pay-per-click, or PPC, ads you sign up through a search engine; Google has the biggest reach. You write very short text ads that appear on the search results page, as well on the websites of people, known as publishers, who have signed up through Google AdSense. The idea is that your ads appear in the right context based on keywords. So when people are searching for health information related to your specific niche, your ads pop up. You pay every time somebody clicks on the ad.

When the person clicks it should take them to your website, a landing page to collect their email address or something like that. And be sure to track the origin of each click so you know which marketing channel is getting the best return on investment.

If you are going to experience explosive online growth for your business, then you need to understand that there are only three types of traffic to help increase lead generation and sales:

1. Traffic you control
2. Traffic you don’t control
3. Traffic you own

Once you understand how each type of traffic works and how it all ties together you’ll be able to control your traffic or more specifically direct the right traffic to the right offer. Once you nail down traffic that is converting for you, then you’ll be able to double down and scale your efforts.

Your number one goal should be to own all your traffic.

You may have heard the saying “the money is in the list”.

Understanding your traffic and putting a relevant, helpful offer in front of them is how you build and grow your list and also increase your sales and conversions. 

Again, advertising in the health space is extremely competitive and can be extremely costly; so only pursue this route once you have a solid sales funnel and a good converting offer.

Starting Your Online Health Business — Next Steps

If you’re passionate about health and wellness, this niche could be right up your alley. You know the topic, you know the products as a consumer… and now you can use that expertise to create a booming online business.

Even if you don’t have a personal interest in this niche, that shouldn’t be a barrier. You can become familiar enough to make it work… and there’s plenty of money to go around.

The trouble is that great content is not always content that will help you achieve your objectives. Great content is not always what sells.

You can write the most helpful, interesting content in the world and make no money from it simply because you haven’t written the content in a way that makes sales.

The most productive content is always written with the bottom line objective in mind, whether that’s increasing your mailing list, finding leads, or just making money. Generally, profit is the bottom line for any organization except a non-profit.

In this guide, you’re going to learn some of the best ways to create content that is not only interesting, but helps you to achieve your business goals—whatever those goals may be.

No more spending hours writing content that isn’t going perform. Learn how to write content that sells every time.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Why Content Doesn’t Sell

Before we start talking about the ways, you can write content that does sell, let’s take a look at a few mistakes people typically make when writing content that causes that content to not sell well.

The Big Five Mistakes:

1. No or weak call-to-action. When you have no call-to-action in your content or your call-to-action is weak, you’re basically wasting your time. People can’t read your minds. They don’t know what action you want them to take.
2. Off-topic content. You may be tempted to add content to your blog that isn’t related to your main topic as a way to try to draw more traffic, but this only weakens your position in the search engines and offers you little to no benefit with regards to leads or sales.
3. Content that goes on too long. Sure, search engines love long content. Some people even love long content. But creating long content solely for the purpose of getting traffic isn’t going to do you any good. Especially if that content drags on so long, and is so boring, that people leave before they have a chance to see your call-to-action.
4. Content that has no purpose with regards to your goals. Some people believe that any content is good content because it’s another article that can draw traffic. But it’s a waste of your time to write content that isn’t specifically geared toward helping you achieve your business’s goals.
5. Useless popups or other interruptions. Do not absolutely do not, include pop-ups, interstitial ads, or any other type of interrupter for anything that isn’t directly going to assist you with your main business goals. You’ll upset visitors and potentially lose them. Instead, save those interrupters for times when you are trying to achieve your goals, such as getting more email subscribers or selling a product.

Well, first-off you know some of the mistakes you might make that could cause your content to fail in its mission to help you reach the goals you have set for your business.

Now, it’s time to take a look at the best way to create content that does sell.

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Brainstorming

The first thing you must do, obviously, is deciding exactly what your primary and secondary goals are for your business. It might be solely to sell a particular product or service, perhaps with a secondary goal of building your email list. Maybe it’s the other way around, and you’d prefer to focus on building your email list with the secondary goal of getting sales.

Once you’ve chosen your goals, you can figure out what type of content you should create to best reach your goals.

Let’s say you want to focus on building your list as a golf professional. Each piece of content you post should specifically be geared toward building your list.

For example, let’s say you have a lead magnet called “10 Ways to Shave Strokes Off Your Golf Game”. You’d want to create content specifically that focuses on ways to improve one’s golf game so you could have a call-to-action asking people to subscribe for a free copy of your lead magnet.

Try to figure out a number of different types of content you can write specifically to relate to your lead magnet. If you create different types of content later, you might want to first create a lead magnet that matches it, especially if you think it will attract more subscribers.

For example, let’s say you’re running a weight loss blog that covers several different types of weight loss. You’ve been concentrating on the

low carb diet, and your current lead magnet is a list of foods that are good for each phase of the low carb diet, and ideas for snacks and meals.

Now you’ve decided you want to focus on the raw food diet. People who practice this diet would most likely not be the least bit interested in a list of low carb foods, because those foods are most often cooked or processed in some way.

Thus, you’d need to create a brand new lead magnet that focused specifically on the raw food diet.

What if you don’t have a lead magnet for a particular topic and would rather not create one? Well, you could instead find an inexpensive paid product to promote, or just have a generic opt-in box that says something like, “Enter your name and email address for more information about the raw food diet.”

Types of Blog Posts that Sell

There are lots of types of blog posts that have the potential to get results and some that probably won’t. In this section, we’re going to take a look at some of the most effective content types.

Always remember that you should keep your content as tightly niched as possible. You don’t want to create content that could hurt your SEO, and there’s no reason to create content that isn’t likely to help you achieve your goals.

Let’s say you’re running a blog about golf. You might think that creating a post about the top ten new luxury cars could attract golfers. While that’s not completely outside the realm of possibility since golf is a rather expensive hobby, that article is likely to attract a lot of visitors that don’t care anything about golf.

You want to create content that is the most likely to get you a new email subscriber, or buy something, or take whatever other action you wish.

Top Lists

Top lists are a very popular type of content that is perfect for a lead-in to a call-to-action. For example, you could have an article called, “The Top 5 Drivers That Can Lengthen Your Drives”.

You could then have your call-to-action at the end of the article asking people to opt in for your lead magnet called “10 Ways to Shave Strokes Off Your Golf Game”.

Interviews

Interviews with industry experts and popular figures in your market will draw a lot of attention, and they help lend a little credibility to your call-to-action.

If you’ve interviewed someone people recognize, not only will it draw in more traffic, it will also make people naturally feel your own information is more likely to be good.

Guest Posts

Like interviews, guest posts by popular people within your niche lend credibility to your own calls-to-action.

Tips & Tricks

People love articles that provide simple tips and tricks in an easy-to- digest format.

Lists of 5-10 tips and tricks on a particular topic draw a lot of readers, and make it easy to lead in to a call-to-action.

In-Depth Tutorials

In-depth tutorials always tend to be big draws, but they’re also excellent for getting people to take action.

A good in-depth tutorial will bring in a lot of traffic, and it will also give you a lot of credibility if it is well-written and interesting.

Video

Video is a type of content that has huge potential for getting people to take action, because you can actually ask them to take action in the video itself.

For example, you could say, “Visit my website your-url.com and enter your name and email address for more information about how you can lose weight with today’s most popular diets!”

People who are watching your video are much more likely to hear your call-to-action than someone who’s just read a lot of text and now need to read a call-to-action, so video can be extremely effective.

Other Types of Content

There are other types of content you can consider, too. Remember that you don’t have to stick 100% to your main goals.

Occasionally, you can have additional goals for your content.

For example, maybe you just want to raise brand awareness. You want to get a big kick of viral traffic, and you’re not as worried about your main goals.

In that case, you could create a post that was totally out there just to get traffic and help people recognize your name within your niche.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Let’s say you write an article called, “The 25 Most Bizarre Weight Loss Inventions Ever Created!”

This article is pretty generic, and it could potentially draw a lot of people who aren’t even interested in losing weight because they just want to see the strange information—BUT, it could also draw dieters who would be interested in what you are offering.

It could also increase recognition of your brand in your niche, which could benefit you down the road even if you don’t get a lot of results immediately.

Choosing an SEO Plugin

There’s a plethora of plugins out there to help you control the SEO of your WordPress site, but they come down to one that I highly recommend

All-in-One SEO Pack

Things can change rapidly in the world of SEO and plugins, so it’s still a good idea to test options yourself. This article just provides a good starting point to help you decide for yourself. (It also gives you a basic understanding of the importance of some SEO factors.)

Be sure to read its instructions well and be sure you’re using every possible feature included. Too many people install the plugin and expect it to work automatically, but there are things that must be tweaked, and you’ll need to include some extra information every time you make a post such as the main keyword you want that page optimized for.

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Advanced Tips

Now that you know how to create good content and how to get people to take action when they read your content, it’s time to learn a few advanced tips that can increase conversions.

Segmenting

If you have a website or blog that has multiple types of content—for example an outdoor website that has sections for fishing, hunting, and camping—it’s important to use different calls-to-action for each section.

Sure, it’s easier to create one single report that covers all of the outdoor hobbies on your site, but you could be turning off people who only like one aspect of the outdoor life.

For example, someone might like fishing, but not care for camping or hunting at all. If you have a free report that covers camping and hunting as well as fishing, that person probably would not subscribe.

It’s a better idea to segment and creates a unique lead magnet for each topic in order to give you the best chance to get the subscriber.

You can also segment your mailing list into separate topics to be sure you aren’t later marketing hunting products to camping fans.

Of course, you could always have a generic mailing list signup box in your sidebar for people who want information about every topic.

Multiple Calls-to-Action

You don’t have to limit yourself to a single call-to-action in each article. For example, you can have your normal opt-in box at the end of the article, but you could also ask them to view another related article on your site.

This would help you get more page views, and also give you another chance to get the subscriber if they didn’t subscribe after reading the first article.

You could also put your subscription box halfway through the article, and then put a call-to-action for a paid product at the end, or vice versa.

Retargeting

If you use an ad service like Facebook or YouTube, you can include a retargeting pixel on your website so you can run ads to people who have visited your site and perhaps didn’t buy anything or subscribe when they were there before.

Maybe they were not convinced the first time.

Maybe they were too busy the first time they visited your site, and meant to subscribe or buy something later.

Who knows?

But using retargeting will give you another opportunity to convert the visitor into a buyer or subscriber.

You can run ads that specifically target people who have visited your site in the past—people who have already proven they’re interested in your offerings because they’ve visited your site before.

Final thoughts

Writing good content isn’t necessarily enough to get you the results you are looking for. You have to craft that content specifically to get results by creating content that naturally leads users to want to take action.

Always write your content with conversion in mind. Whether your primary goal is to sell a product, grow your mailing list, or even make money from advertising on your site, content should be written with that primary goal in mind. (You may also have a secondary goal in mind. Don’t forget you can have multiple calls-to-action in a single article.)

Remember to use multiple lead magnets if you have a variety of topics on your site to ensure you have something that will interest the audiences of each of those topics. Just because two topics are related doesn’t mean they’re similar enough that fans of one will be fans of the other.

As long as you keep your goals in mind when you’re creating your content, you’ll find your conversions growing. More people will take action, and you will get closer than ever to reaching your goals.

One of the big problems with WordPress, however, is its serious lack of native SEO. It has only basic SEO functionality, and the rest must be taken care of manually.

There are myriad plugins available for WordPress SEO, but none of them will handle 100% of the optimization for your site. They also work differently and have different functions, so choosing the right one can be tricky.

In this blog post, you’re going to learn about the basics of setting up your WordPress for optimal search engine optimization, and how you can make sure your blog or site is set up with the basic foundation of proper SEO. We’ll take a look at popular plugins, methods you can use to optimize your site, tools you can use, and more.

So let’s begin.

Basics of SEO

Before you begin working on SEO for your WordPress website, it’s important to understand basic SEO principles as they apply to all websites and that should apply for many years to come.

SEO does evolve and change over time. It used to be that simply stuffing your keyword over and over on a page (sometimes in the text the same color as the background so visitors would not see it) could help you rank on the first page of pretty much any search engine.

But search engine algorithms have gotten much smarter and much more complex. And this will continue to happen as time goes on. You need to prepare for that and keep evolving with the search engines.

As of this writing, there are some basic SEO principles you can use to help your rankings:

Keyword Research – Keyword research will always be important, even as search engines evolve into using semantics. Sure, you might rank for “top golf tips” if you pick the keyword “best golf tips” because they are semantically similar, but you still need to know what topics are most commonly searched for to be sure you’re creating the content that could help you rank for those searches.

Title Tags – The title of your page will probably always hold significant weight. Obviously, people are going to title their page based on their page’s content, so search engines will look at that as

One of the most important factors when figuring out what a page is about.

Headings – Heading tags (such as H1, H2, etc.) are important because they are like your title. Most people use heading tags to enclose the title that is presented at the top of the page, like the name of the article.

Page Text – The text on your page should contain your main keyword phrase once or twice, but do NOT try to achieve some specific keyword density. Just write naturally. Semantics will take care of the rest.

Backlinks – You’ve probably read about how important it is to get backlinks already, but did you know you need to be very careful about how many you get, where they come from, the text that is used to link to your page, and a lot of other factors? We’ll take a look at backlinks in another section, but yes, getting links to your site (and your individual pages/posts) is very important.

Social Signals – Social signals, such as likes, shares, pins, tweets, etc., are another linking factor. While those links may not actually count as far as backlink juice (because most social network links are nofollow or cannot be seen by search engines because of user privacy) many of them ARE counted for SEO purposes.

Content-Length – The length of your content now matters more than ever. Google believes longer content is more in-depth and will be more authoritative and useful to readers, so the longer copy is key. The days of 250-300 words articles are long gone. These days, 750-1000 words is preferable, and anything longer is a bonus.

Load Speed – The speed at which your page loads is extremely important. If your page takes too long to load, it WILL affect your SEO rankings. Make sure your images are optimized and your hosting company is fast.

Outbound Links – Backlinks used to be the big factor in rankings. These days, they’re important, but not the biggest ranking factor. But though a lot of people realize having links TO their site is important, few seem to know that linking OUT to other authority sites can boost your own rankings. It’s a good idea to cite sources for your content with a link or recommend other good content that gives a different perspective than your own. Going overboard will harm your ranking, but a few links sprinkled into your articles to sites with good authority will help.

Mobile-Friendly – Your site should be optimized for mobile browsers, either resizing dynamically or redirecting mobile users to a different version of the site. For WordPress sites, this means choosing a mobile-friendly theme.

This is not, by any means, and an exhaustive list of ranking factors. It would take a full-length book to describe all of them. But it’s a good, solid foundation on which to build your SEO plan.

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Basic Setup

The first thing you need to do for WordPress SEO is to be sure you’ve completed the basic, essential setup for your WordPress site.

URL

First, you need to decide whether you’d like your site to be found at:

http://yoursite.com

or

http://www.yoursite.com

Either one is fine for SEO purposes, so it’s up to you which you use. If you have an aged domain you might want to check MozTrust for your domain to see if one version has more trust than the other, you’ll obviously want to use that one.

To change your URL, simply visit Settings > General. Your WordPress URL and your Site URL will probably be the same unless you installed WordPress in a subdirectory. The default does not have the www included. You can leave it if that’s how you want it to be, but you can add the www if you prefer that or if the www versions has more MozTrust.

Once you do this, you’ll want to visit Google Webmaster Tools to make sure they use the right version.

Under Webmaster Tools, visit Settings > Preferred domain. There you can set it to display URLs with or without the www.

Permalinks

One of the most important basic setup steps you can take for SEO for your WordPress blog is to change the permalink structure found under Settings > Permalinks.

The default structure is ?p=postid which is terrible for SEO purposes. It doesn’t allow the use of keywords in the URL and doesn’t offer any useful information to search engines.

To change you structure, select either “Post name” or “Custom structure”. If you choose post name, your URLs will look like this:

http://yoursite.com/title-of-your-article

You can also use a custom structure such as %category%/%postname%.

This would make your URLs look like this: http://yoursite.com/category/title-of-your-article

Either one is fine for SEO purposes, but using the category/title provides a good “Silo structure”, which basically means it helps the authority of your pages because everything is organized into specific categories instead of being lumped in together.

Choosing an SEO Plugin

There’s a plethora of plugins out there to help you control the SEO of your WordPress site, but they come down to one that I highly recommend

All-in-One SEO Pack

Things can change rapidly in the world of SEO and plugins, so it’s still a good idea to test options yourself. This article just provides a good starting point to help you decide for yourself. (It also gives you a basic understanding of the importance of some SEO factors.)

Be sure to read its instructions well and be sure you’re using every possible feature included. Too many people install the plugin and expect it to work automatically, but there are things that must be tweaked, and you’ll need to include some extra information every time you make a post such as the main keyword you want that page optimized for.

Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools isn’t just for WordPress sites, but it’s important that you sign up for it, just the same. Webmaster Tools will allow you to keep track of any issues your website might have, set certain preferences for your site, and keep tabs of certain things such as what keywords people are using to pull your site up in Google.

If you have the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, it’s easy to verify your site in Webmaster tools. Log into Webmaster Tools here:

http://google.com/webmasters/tools

Select the “Alternate methods” tab and choose “HTML tag”. Copy the meta tag shown in the box by highlighting it and pressing CTRL-C, or pressing COMMAND-C on a Mac, or right clicking and choosing copy.

Now go to your blog and log in. Under the SEO tab in your WordPress admin (Yoast SEO) choose Extensions. You’ll see several fields where you can enter codes for various sites. Enter your code in the Google Webmaster Tools section, and then go back to Webmaster Tools and click VERIFY. Viola! All done.

Google Analytics

Another critical element of SEO is having analytics so you can track your progress and figure out exactly how you’re doing. Google Analytics is the most common tool for this.

Unfortunately, changes to Google’s privacy settings have destroyed a lot of the usefulness of Analytics. It used to be that you could see almost every keyword used to find your site. Now, you can only see a handful of keyword searches.

Still, Analytics is useful for a variety of reasons. It will allow you to see how much traffic you’re getting, where your traffic is coming from, what your bounce rate is (the percentage of people who leave your site without viewing any other pages), and other important information.

Page Speed

Another major element of SEO is the speed at which your page loads. Google wants its visitors to enjoy the sites they visit, and if a site takes too long to load, visitors will often leave quickly. This increases bounce rate, and also makes Google unhappy.

To check your page speed, including discovering actionable information you can use to speed up your page, take a look at Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Using this will help you figure out what needs to be changed in order to speed up your site. It might involve getting a new host, or it may be as simple as optimizing your images or installing a caching plugin.

Crosslink Posts

Once you have the foundation of your SEO set up, it’s time to make sure you’re doing all you can every time you make a post to ensure the best outcome for your SEO.

That means making a few key posts that you might think of as cornerstone posts, and then referencing those posts in other similar posts.

For example, let’s say you have a post called “10 Ways To Increase Traffic”. It might be very in-depth, detailed information about using ten different social networks to increase a website’s traffic.

Then you could write smaller blog posts on each of those traffic sources and link to your cornerstone post by saying something like:

“Facebook is just one way you can increase your traffic with social media. Check out my post ’10 Ways To Increase Traffic’ for more ways to explode your website’s traffic.”

Not only will this help lower your bounce rate, it will also benefit you by giving a boost to the SEO potential of your cornerstone posts.

Social Signals & Backlinks

You know it’s important to get backlinks to your site, but did you know the source of your backlinks and the text used to link to your site is just as important as getting a lot of links?

You want to make sure you get backlinks from quality sites, and from a wide variety of different domains. You also want to be sure you’re NOT using the exact same text to link to your site every time, because this can appear spammy.

Instead, vary the text used to link to you between a few similar keyword phrases, and potentially the name of your site, too.

Social signals are also increasingly important. The more likes and shares you get on a large variety of platforms and from a large number of accounts, the better.

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Final thoughts

SEO is a complex, ever-changing game. You need to stay on top of it if you expect to get significant traffic from Google and other search engines.

And you definitely want to tap into such a massive, targeted traffic source. What kind of traffic could be more targeted (thus, ready to potentially buy something) than someone who deliberately searches for what you’re offering?

Now that you’ve read the complete guide, you should have a good working knowledge of SEO and how it applies to WordPress sites.

You’ll know about some of the most important plugins and tools you should be using, and you’ll be prepared to implement them.

If you’re serious about getting your site to rank, you’ll want to delve deeper into some of the big SEO topics like social signals and backlinks. These topics will help you get even more from your SEO efforts.

I wish you all the best with your WordPress SEO efforts, and I hope you get all the traffic you deserve!

If you’ve dreamed of being able to make a decent living through passive income, then affiliate marketing is a path you should consider taking.

The idea behind affiliate marketing is that you promote the products of other people, many times through an affiliate network, and earn commissions when people buy those products as a result of your marketing efforts.

Pretty easy right?

Unfortunately, there is a little more to the process, and it will take some upfront work on your part.

Before you can get started in affiliate marketing, it is essential for you to understand that there are four different parties involved in the process and how each fit in with the system.

When it comes down to the actual marketing part of the affiliate marketing system, there are two sides to the equation: the creator and seller of the product and the affiliate marketer.

4 Pillars Of Affiliate Marketing

This, simply put, means that you can be both the creator and the marketer and still make a profit from the underlying idea of revenue sharing.

You can look at affiliate marketing as the process of spreading product creation and marketing across various parties, where each of the parties receives a share of the profits according to their individual contribution to the marketing efforts.

The Merchant

The merchant is known as the creator of the product, the seller of the product, the brand, the vendor, or the retailer. This is who creates the product. It can be a big company like Dell, which manufactures personal computers, or an individual.

Anyone can be the merchant behind an affiliate marketing program, from the solo entrepreneurs to the startups, to gigantic Fortune 500 companies. They can be anyone who has a product to sell.

The Affiliate

This party can be a single individual or an entire company, that helps to market the products of the merchant. An affiliate marketing business can produce several hundred dollars in commissions every month to tens of millions.

This part of the system is where the marketing happens. The affiliate promotes one or more of the merchant’s products, trying to attract and convince potential customers of the value of the product in hopes that they will end up purchasing it.

This can be accomplished through a review blog of the merchant’s products or through an entire site that is dedicated to finding products that are related to a particular topic and promoting the affiliate products.

The Consumer

The consumer is what makes the affiliate system work. Without their purchases, there wouldn’t be any commissions to be earned, and no revenue would be shared.

The affiliate markets the products to the consumer through the channels that they see fit. This can be through digital billboards, social media, or a search engine using a blog and content marketing.

The Network

The network works as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate.

While technically, you could promote a merchant’s product and arrange a direct revenue sharing system with them, having a network like Jvzoo or ClickBank handles the payment for and delivery of the product, eliminating the hassle. Sometimes, in order to even promote a product, affiliates have to go through an affiliate network.

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4 Steps To Becoming An Affiliate Marketer

When it comes to the affiliate marketing system, you can choose to become a merchant and have others market your products in exchange for a commission on the completed sales, or you can become an affiliate marketer, promoting products in order to make money.

While most people decide to take the affiliate marketer route, building enough traffic to make an income that makes it worth your while, isn’t easy, or quick.

Step 1: Review products in your niche

The first step to building a business as an affiliate marketer is deciding on your niche. This step is critical to your success, so don’t ignore it.

When you are starting out as an affiliate marketer, don’t try to find a “secret niche” that no one else is marketing. Instead, start with what you are familiar with and what has the most offers.

When choosing your niche, you want to make sure you do your research. Here are three things you can do to help you find your niche.

1. Look at popular affiliate networks like JVZoo, ClickBank, or Commission Junction.
2. Head to YouTube and look for keywords that may be used for the niche you are contemplating.
3. Use Google to do the same keyword search.

Keep in mind, if you aren’t able to find any other affiliates in that niche, the chances are high that you are probably focusing on the wrong niche.

Step 2: Choose your approach

After you’ve decided on the niche that you want to promote as an affiliate marketer, you need to next determine the kind of affiliate marketer that you want to be.

There are three approaches that you can choose from, but as a beginning affiliate marketing, it is crucial that you only pick one of these ways to focus on.

After you’ve been doing it for a while, you can choose to branch out into the other approaches if you wish.

The Reviewer

As a reviewer, you would purchase products to review. After thoroughly testing the product, you would post the review on your blog, YouTube channel or social media.

It is important that you form your own opinions about the product and provide honest, ethical reviews in the form of a video or written content. To do this efficiently, you have to go through the product and get a feel for the pros and cons and provide authentic feedback as one user to another.

By doing this, you can better engage with potential visitors, giving good recommendations for the products you are reviewing.

As a product review, you should own or have access to the following tools:

• A computer with a microphone and webcam
• PowerPoint, or an equivalent product
• A website
• A budget to buy new products
• A way to track the movements of your visitors
• A way to track each click

The Emailer

One of the most successful ways to start your affiliate marketing business is with an email list. The idea behind this affiliate marketing method is to grow an email list by providing a small offer to get people to join your list.

Once you’ve added them to your list of contacts, you can start using the autoresponder feature to promote products that you feel will help your contacts.
As an emailer, you should own or have access to the following tools:

• An email marketing platform or autoresponder like GetResponse
• A product like a PLR you’ve written or video you’ve created to offer the consumer
• A landing page tool like ClickFunnels that attracts visitors
• A great eCover to attract interest
• A link tracking tool like Click Magick

The Social Media Personality

As social media grows in popularity, social media fan pages have exploded, giving fans a great mix of promotions and value.

If you decide to use social media to promote products for your affiliate marketing business, it is important to ensure that it remains classy, and not a place to post spam.

To be a successful social media personality, you need to create solid images and content while promoting your affiliate products.

As a social media personality, you should own or have access to the following tools:

• A way to create social media images
• A posting tool so you can automate the posts
• A way to track each link

Step 3: Discover your affiliate network

Once you’ve discovered your niche and style of marketing you want to do as an affiliate, the next step in the process is to determine the affiliate network you want to start with.

Your choice will depend on the niche that you selected and will require you to conduct some research. Here are just some of the affiliate networks that you can use.

• Clickbank carries an excellent variety of digital marketing products
• JVZoo is mostly internet marketing products and other related products to make money online
• CJ Affiliate by Conversant has a wide selection of products to choose from
• Amazon is one of the biggest affiliate networks
• RevenueWire is a global network with a large selection
• Click here to check out my #1 recommendation

When you are first starting out, you should sign up for just one network based on the research that you conducted.

Once you become more familiar with how the network works, you can begin to use multiple interfaces or even use a private program.

Step 4: Find and attract traffic

Now that you’ve completed the easy steps of determining your niche, the style of marketing you want to do, and the affiliate network you want to use, the final step to becoming an affiliate marketer is finding and attracting traffic.

For new affiliated marketers, finding traffic can be a troublesome prospect, and many new affiliates get stuck on this step.

However, traffic can be found in a lot of ways. Here are a few forms of traffic that are easy to start with as a new marketer.

Social Media or Facebook groups

Using social media and Facebook groups is a great, free way to generate traffic. You can visit popular Facebook groups that are focused on your niche and offer free advice to the participants.

In your signature, have a link back to your website, landing page, social media, or YouTube channel.

It is essential that you offer accurate, practical advice on the topic. This can also be done with your social media pages by placing your links on your personal or fan page and offering information to different groups.

The quickest way to derail your efforts is by moving from group to group to simply post your links or contacting each person in the group via a private message with your link. This is called spamming and will not help you with your affiliate marketing.

Search Engine Optimization

This is another free way to gain traffic for your affiliate marketing business. This is one of the oldest forms of getting traffic and is based on keywords and search rankings. With search engine optimized content, you can leverage the power of search engines to get free traffic.

This approach takes a lot of work and can be tedious and time-consuming, but when done correctly it can result in a ton of visitors to your site, without spending a dime.

Paid Solo Ads

Solo ads are simple to use if you do your research and use them correctly. Simply put, you are buying traffic from someone who has an existing email list.

The way solo ads work is that you pay for someone who has a targeted email list to send their contacts a recommendation to your site and send you targeted traffic. It then becomes your role to build a rapport with those people to buy your product or service or opt into your email list.

Paid Facebook and Google Ads

The fastest way to ramp up your traffic is through paid Google and Facebook ads. However, this option will cost you considerably more and has a higher learning curve than the other methods.

The intricacies of this process are too expansive to cover in this article, but you can find numerous resources online to help you out if you want to follow this path.

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Final Thoughts

It can feel overwhelming to complete all the necessary steps in order to become an affiliate marketer, but the time you put into building your reputation will be well worth it when you have your first sale.

Making your first affiliate commission is going to require you to put in some hard work, but by breaking it down into easy to follow steps, it won’t feel as overwhelming.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, there is a tried-and-true strategy that will have you reaping the rewards of your hard work after making your first commission.

A red ocean is a metaphor for a market full of competitors. Competition turns the ocean bloody.

Are you an affiliate marketer?

Then chances are that you are already operating in a market turning red, trying to figure out how you can make the competition irrelevant.

So, the question is: where would you like to be? Do you like to operate in the busy and highly competitive red ocean, or do you prefer the spacious yet very pioneering blue ocean?

However, once you become successful copycats will arise and take advantage of your idea, strategy, and the mistakes you made. They are forcing you in a red ocean, after all.

What is a red ocean?

To understand what a red ocean is, let’s talk about the blue ocean. A blue ocean where an affiliate marketer creates a completely new market space (or market category). This new market space is created by launching new offerings, with the aim being to make the competition irrelevant so that an organization can grow, uncontested, at least in the beginning.

You can think of a blue ocean being a place where the sailing is easy (uncontested with clear water) if you can successfully introduce an offering.

Blue Oceans can be thought of as markets that do not exist yet. An example of this would be basic water filters for your home.

Red Oceans can be thought of as all the marketplaces which currently exist. Kangen Water ionizers are considered to be a blue ocean and this trend started back in the 1970s, and today are still blue ocean, in comparison to the water filter red ocean space.

As such, Red Oceans already contain a number of competitors. You can think of the color red being used in the term red ocean because of the bloodbath that a highly competitive marketplace can sometimes feel like.

A Red Ocean Strategy is a strategy that aims to fight and beat the competition.

What is a blue ocean?

In contrast, is it the unknown market space, untainted by competition.

In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over.

There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid.

In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set.

A blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space. A blue ocean is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth.

Here is a comparison between red ocean and blue ocean and it’s common characteristics:

Creating an opportunity to displace your competitor is going to require you to be patient, persistent, professional pursuit plan to carve a platform to make you stand out from the red ocean crows.

Focus on current customers vs. focus on non-customers

In most industries there is little effort to attract new buyers to the industry, thus the focus on the customers currently purchasing in that industry. In the Blue Ocean, there is a focus on trying to increase the size of the industry by attracting people who have never purchased in that industry.

Compete in existing markets vs. Create uncontested markets to serve

Sounds good, right?

But how do you do that?

Existing markets are all the customers doing business in the industry right now, whether they are doing business with you or your competitors. If someone wins a customer, then it is assumed, someone will lose a customer. For someone to win, someone must lose.

In uncontested markets, there is only a winner, you. No one else is fighting for the business because either they don’t know about it, or they don’t know-how.

Beat the competition vs. Make the competition irrelevant

The competition becomes irrelevant because they cannot duplicate the ideas in a way that is a commercial success. Remember, the whole idea of Blue Ocean Strategy is to have high value at low cost. If you are doing that, how can anyone compete with you? All the would-be competitors fall by the wayside.

Exploit existing demand vs. create and capture new demand

You will be creating value so high that you will be attracting customers that never before would have considered entering the market. 

Final thoughts: The winning strategic approach

One final point to consider is that the majority of the most affiliate marketers on the planet didn’t create the ocean they operate in.

Let’s look at, Google and Facebook were not first in their space but they now dominate.

In fact, they dominate so much that it creates a huge barrier to entry for new enterprises. This can be summed up with the following phrase:

Applying this phrase to your own business could mean that you pay attention to new categories being created by your competitors, and then move into that space with conviction as soon as the category shows real signs of promise.

No matter which you select, there are a few things to keep in mind. It is important to remember that value proposition and innovation are critical success factors.

Also, remain aware of the industry that you are competing against as well as new introductions to the market that may disrupt any market share that you have attained.