Completed-Lesson 2 ⇒Understanding how to Make Money Online
Understanding how to Make Money Online is Lesson 2 out of 10 of the Level 1-Getting Started. This 10-lesson course is part of the Wealthy Affiliate Online Entrepreneur Certification, which are now free with the Free Starter Membership. The goal of Level 1 is to build the foundations of your online business.
Review of Lesson- 2 Understanding how to Make Money Online
Key learning objectives:
Overview of how to Make Money
Kyle emphasizes that this is just an overview of how to make money through Affiliate Marketing.
This lesson will not teach you specifically how to make money. You will learn the details during the next training sessions.
Key elements of the Online Entrepreneur Certification are a website, rich content, and traffic. Without those key elements, you can’t make money.
Affiliate Marketing can be a Lucrative Method to Make Money
There are many different ways to make money online. Affiliate Marketing is one of the most lucrative, and this is what you are going to learn in Wealthy Affiliate.
Typical affiliate commission rates are between 1% to 60%. As an example, Amazon Associates (Amazon.com affiliate program) rates, based on this Associates Program Standard Fees Schedule range from 1% for Physical Video Games and Video Game Consoles to 10% for Luxury Beauty and Amazon Coins.
Kyle goes over the fundamental processes of generating revenue online through Affiliate Marketing.
Your Financial Goals
You will create (Write Down) your financial goals. I find this is an essential part of this lesson. A Forbes article notes that “describing your goals in written form is strongly associated with goal success.”
Write Down
your Goals
These are the annual gross revenue goals I set up for myself:
⏱Year 2020: $5,000
⏱Year 2021: $10,000
⏱Year 2022: $20,000
⏱Year 2023: $30,000
⏱Year 2024: $40,000
Goals are personal. You will need to figure out what kind of goals you want to set up for yourself. You need to be realistic, considering that there is a learning curve. As long as you are consistent, you can achieve realistic goals.
Let’s make one thing clear, Wealthy Affiliate is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Wealthy Affiliate is a great platform to learn affiliate marketing, but you will not succeed without significant effort. I’m thrilled that this is the case. There are too many useless websites out there claiming you can get rich in a couple of months.
Networking
You will be asked to comment on at least two people’s goals. Once you have been in Wealthy Affiliate for a little while, you’ll realize that you are often encouraged to participate in the community.
Say hello to new people, read posts that interest you and comment on them, ask questions, etc.
I’ll be honest; at the very beginning, it looked like a little too much, but now I realize that Wealthy Affiliate is asking me to network. And networking with “like-minded” people is crucial.
You need to
Network
You will get new contacts, increase your visibility, improve your problem-solving skills through feedback; you will also increase confidence. Some people, me included, don’t like to “interact” too much, but the reality is that if you want to succeed, you need to network.
I enjoyed this second lesson. You are welcome to continue this journey with me by signing up for the free starter membership.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
After I finish each lesson, I like to do some research to understand the subject better and to help others who may benefit from it.
Wealthy Affiliate’s is all about Affiliate Marketing. I have created a basic video to help those of you who may need help understanding what affiliate marketing is.
If you find this video useful, consider subscribing to the Finance Notebook Youtube Channel.
Definition
There are many definitions out there. But basically, affiliate marketing is the process of earning commissions by promoting someone else’s products or services.
In Wealthy Affiliate, you will learn how to do this by writing blog posts related to the niche of your choice. You and I will learn more about this in the next lessons.
Four Components of Affiliate Marketing
These are the typical four components of Affiliate Marketing.
Advertiser: Seller of products or services. An advertiser could be a company selling a product or service like a computer, a car, airline ticket, credit card, insurance policy, etc. Bottom line, an advertiser is the person or company that pays for the product or service advertised.
Publisher: A publisher is an individual or company that promotes an advertiser’s product or service in exchange for a commission. You will be a publisher after you create a website (a blog), get it indexed in search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) and promote it. We’ll learn more about this in the next lessons.
Consumer: Individual who purchases a product or service of the advertiser through the publisher’s website.
Affiliate Network: An affiliate network is an intermediary between publishers and advertisers. It provides an affiliate link and tracks the referral.
An affiliate link is a unique URL that contains your Affiliate’s ID. When you add your affiliate link within a blog post, you may get a commission when your visitor clicks on the link and makes a purchase or completes any other defined action.
A typical affiliate marketing transaction
Let’s describe a typical affiliate marketing transaction. A customer purchases a Rolex watch online:
You (the publisher) promote the advertiser’s product in your blog.
For this example, say that your niche is “Rolex watches for men.”
You may want to promote the Men’s Rolex Oyster Perpetual 39 Black Dial Luxury Watch by writing a positive product review on your blog www.rolexareformen.com. By the way, this is not a real domain, and it is available as of today!
You love that watch and decide to complete a thorough and compelling review about it on your blog.
A consumer visits your blog after searching for “Rolex watches for men” in Google.
He/She reads the review you completed about the watch and is intrigued enough about it that clicks the link (which has an affiliate link that identifies you as the affiliate of Amazon Associates) you placed for the watch, which takes him/her to Amazon.com.
The consumer loves this watch and completes the purchase. Today’s price of this Rolex watch in Amazon is $5,490.
The Affiliate network (in this case Amazon Associates) tracks the purchase through the affiliate link and makes sure you get credit for the purchase.
You (the publisher) receive a commission. Since Amazon Associates pays 4% commission for watches and the price of the watch is $5,490, you would get a $219.60 commission.
Not bad for a blog post, and realize that there could be more than one sale with the same blog post. Of course, if you promote a book, you would probably get under $1.00. On the other hand, you may be able to sell 1,000 books, compared to only 1 Rolex watch.
We will learn more and talk about niches in the next lessons.
Let’s learn from the veterans…
A few tips for beginners from an experienced blogger
To help us begin our journey as bloggers, I’d like to highlight a few useful tips from an experienced blogger. I love this video from Carly the Prepster!
Essential tips from her video:
Just Start. Some people want to have everything perfect from the beginning. I love her sentence, just start “you need to get going to get going.”
Go into blogging with the right intention. Write about something you enjoy and would like to explore. If your heart is not in it, it will show in your writing, and people will not want to read it.
What is the right niche size? Keep your niche narrow so that you have a defined audience but broad enough so that you don’t run out of ideas to write about.
Think of your reader as a friend. Your blog posts should be like a conversation with your friend. Although the tone of the talk will depend on who your reader is.
Quality. Try to put out the best content you can. Doing the bare minimum will not make you successful.
Quantity. Some people think it is quality over quantity. The key is quality with consistent quantity. You don’t have to publish a post every day. Choose how many days per week, per month, you are going to post and be consistent.
I hope this was useful. Join the community Wealthy Affiliate.
