Are you looking for affiliate marketing examples to follow? You can earn a great passive income by becoming an affiliate marketer but how do you go about it and whose example should you follow for the best success? Some of the most successful affiliate marketers have achieved a (mostly) passive income from their sites by using the affiliate marketing model.
The Affiliate Model
Affiliates earn their money through, on the whole, creating content and promoting products and services online. They can do this in several ways:
- Websites – by creating websites and content around a certain theme, affiliates gather visitors which they then send to products and services. They don’t have to own these products and services themselves and affiliates take advantage of this fact allowing them to concentrate on building traffic sources to their websites instead and never having to deals with products or customers.
- Advertising – You don’t need a website to be an affiliate and the affiliates who don’t have a website advertise products and services through platforms like Google Adwords, Facebook, Twitter and various other advertising platforms online and offline. Learn more about how you can do this here.
- YouTube – Video content can be much more easily ranked now than blogs and articles can. Many affiliates have turned to video creation to promote goods and services. By creating informative and valuable video content they build a following from which they promote other goods and services.
- List building – Emails are collected from websites, advertising and blogs and emails are sent out automatically to the list of subscribers. These emails contain useful content, videos and marketing materials. By providing a service to your subscribers you can build trust and then promote useful products. Join my list here.
Affiliate Marketing Examples
- Here’s an example of a very successful affiliate marketing site built on the money saving niche. Martin Lewis, the creator of moneysavingexpert.com has created a website which offers money saving advice, discount vouchers, advice on mortgage, insurance and saving money on things like utility bills. There’s no doubt that he is helping thousands of people with his advice. He also links to products and services for which he will receive commissions based on their sales – the affiliate marketing model. Take a look at his website and in particular look at how he links to various products and services.
- Here’s a very specific niche which you perhaps wouldn’t think of unless you had a unique interest in this topic area:Â (www.everything-about-scrapbooking.com) is a niche site which uses affiliate marketing and Google adsense to monetize the website. Have a look at the book links on the right which link to a downloadable product which is on Clickbank.com. When the owner of the site (Fion) sells one of these books she make a commission. She will also earn money if visitors click on here adverts. Although this is a different kind of site to Martin’s, it will probably get more visitors than a typical new ‘money advice’ site. This is because it is a much smaller niche and there is much less competition.
-  Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income website is another affiliate blog which is hugely successful. I followed Pat’s blog for some time. He made a website about the security guard industry as part of his niche site duel competition which was held on his blog and documented the entire process from keyword analysis to website creation. He always recommended starting with keyword research before starting a website. Pat’s strategy is to find keyword niches which can rank on Google for traffic. A website will never be successful without traffic. You can see both his websites below:
- Here’s a very simple website which earns money through advertising for things like car hire and hotel bookings. It just shows that you can have a very simple design and still have a profitable website. This website ranks for ‘Bergamo Airport’ on Google. It also has an email capture on it which collects travelers emails and sends them information and services. www.bergamoairport.co.uk
 Earning a passive income from Affiliate MarketingÂ
Sites like these can earn a passive income from affiliate marketing. They do this because they get highly ranked at the top of the first page on Google – the most used global search engine on the internet. If they stay there, the site owners can earn a ‘trickle’ income for as long as the site remains popular with Google.
What’s the catch?Â
Ranking sites is difficult, particularly when you are just starting out. It can take a long time and a lot of work and even then, your site might not rank for a number of reasons. Then all your work will have been wasted. Finding an untapped niche online is becoming more difficult than ever due to the mounting competition from other affiliate marketers.
Google doesn’t like affiliates
Well, Google doesn’t like crappy affiliate sites which offer little or no value. You have already seen some sites which do rank well with Google. The sites I have listed all rank well for their major keywords. But they also have good content, have probably aged domains (age matters), and back links to their sites which will help them to rank. They have a lot of content or content which out performs their competition. Don’t throw up a site, fill it with affiliate banners and expect a passive income overnight! You will also see some social sharing badges on some of these sites which will help them to rank, get found and get traffic.
Building an online presence that lasts
The main reason why these sites are successful is that they have started out to provide valuable content before making money. That’s not to say if you only do that you will be successful. There are plenty of valuable websites out there which make no money. But you also need to have services and products to promote in order to make any money from affiliate marketing.
How to build an internet business
There are many ways but the fastest is by paid advertising. Building a blog which ranks for your main keywords is hard if you are in a competitive niche – like “making money online” for example. If you have a very niche site like the scrapbook one above, you will be more likely to rank your content on Google. The alternative to ranking is paying for visitors. By paying you get instant traffic. The only problem is that it costs money.
High Ticket Products
By having high ticket items to sell you can offset this problem. By sending your paid traffic to landing pages, collecting visitor’s emails and following up with them with high ticket products, you can build an internet business in the quickest possible time. If money is an issue you can go the longer route of attempting to rank a website for a main keyword, or ranking for many long tail keywords.
Learn more about building your own internet business from scratch here.