1. Pick the right niche. The niche should be such in which you have good knowledge and experience, or at least good amount of interest.
2. Diversify and get rid of competition by going narrow — by selecting a sub-niche or sub-market within your chosen niche. For example, if your niche is weight loss your sub-niche could be weight loss for women over 50 or weight loss with keto diet.
If you are not sure about the concept of micro niches, check out our article – [Micro Niche Marketing For Faster Success]. You can also check out our [‘Micro Niches Weekly’] program where you get different niche ideas every week.
3. Always write for your ideal audience. Know who it is. Find more about them and their needs and then target them in your content. Don’t write for everybody as it may dilute the effectiveness of your message. Each piece of your content should be focused on a specific individual or a tiny group of people.
If your product or service appeals to different sets of people, you need to craft separate messages for each group. Don’t try to include all your target groups in a single message as effectiveness may be lost. When the message is directed to a specific and narrowly targeted group it can prove to be very very powerful and can evoke strong response.
3. Focus on providing immense value first and foremost. Providing value should be the first focus while publishing content. Enticing a specific action from the reader, like clicking a button or purchasing something, comes later, after you have provided them sufficient value.
Of course you are more interested in getting the sale, but you should go through the route of providing value first, and then trying to generate the sale.
4. Take steps to know and understand your audience more deeply. Find out what do they want, what content they need most, why do you think they need it, how would your product help them. Try to think from their point of view. Build an emotional connection and rapport with them.
The more you know your target audience the better you can market to them. If you want to make an impact you have to touch the emotional buttons of your audience. How can you touch their emotion buttons when you don’t know them properly. Try to know them inside out and you are likely to have an easy time selling to them.
It is not difficult to do a little research about your market. You can go to Quora and see what questions are troubling them, find on Youtube which videos in your niche are being watched the most. I specially advise you to read through user comments on Youtube, Facebook posts and Instagram posts as comments can be a goldmine to discover more about your audience.
5. Write Great Content! Had to put that in bold letters to emphasise its importance.
Learn the fine art of content marketing. It is not enough to grab a few keywords which a keyword tool spews out, slap together some paragraphs and spread it all over the internet. Content needs to be planned, researched, crafted and strategically published. There needs to be a method and plan behind it.
Remember content is king in the online world. So your content needs to be top notch in order to get the results you want to get. You can either learn the [nuances of content marketing] yourself or outsource it to professionals. Alternatively you can take advantage of [modern AI powered content tools]
6. When you want to write or publish some content, go out there and study similar content on the web on the same topic. Find out what things are being covered by your competitors and fellow bloggers. You may notice things you may have missed or get new ideas. Think of ways you could make your content better than most of the others on the same topic.
If you want massive traffic, sales and profits you need to try and be better than others in the market. Producing better content than your competition can be one way of dominating yoru chosen niche market. Think how Neil Patel, Seth Godin and [few top marketers] are a class apart from 90% of their competition in the online marketing space.
7. Study and analyze other influential marketers in your niche who have large social following and list out what you think may be the reasons for their huge popularity and crazy fan following. Surely they must be doing something awesome. Play the detective and try to find out.
These people may have some strategies, tactics, habits, personality traits, qualities, strengths, procedures, action steps, etc which you may try to emulate.
8. Aim for excellence in your work. Whatever task you are doing, you should try to do an excellent job. Some people want to finish off a task as soon as they can without putting in the required effort, focus or time. Poorly done work may fetch poor results.
A simple exercise would be to rate whatever work you have done. For example, whenever you are about to publish fresh content, rate it honestly on a scale of 1 to 10 on usefulness, value and quality. Don’t publish unless it is at least 7 or 8 in rating. Think of how you can make it little bit better. Keep improving till it reaches satisfactory levels.
You can climb the ladder of success much faster in affiliate marketing or any other business if you develop the habit of being willing to put in whatever effort is required to produce excellent work, and not be content with mediocre or poor work. People who put in a lot of thought and planning into each of their work usually achieve amazing things.
Have little tolerance for poor quality. Make chasing excellence your habit. Love quality and excellence. Prefer quality over quantity. Produce less work output if you have to but make sure to not compromise on quality part.
Crappy work can be your enemy.
9. Build audience of loyal followers and fans. Don’t chase customers but focus on building followers/readers.
Chris, founder of The Futur, said if you chase customers you may keep chasing them for life. If you focus on
building audience, they will chase and follow you.
10. Set high standards for yourself. Be a little tough, but not too much, on yourself so that you make all efforts to measure up to those standards. Maintain the work quality and do not let yourself become complacent or lazy.
11. Fall in love the process. Get excited about the work. Dan Henry says those people are likely to see great success who
love the process rather than just fantasize about the goals and end results.
If you want to achieve [financial freedom through affiliate marketing (affiliate)] then just dreaming of earning millions of dollars is not going to do anything. Rather you should start enjoying the processes that will take you closer to your goals. In this example, these processes can be content writing, social media marketing, building email lists etc. You may not like some tasks which you can delegate or manage, but the major bulk of your work should be fun and enjoyable for you.
12. Revisit your previous content from time to time and analyze their results. See how they are performing and if you can do some tweaks or make some improvements to them. Your perceptions change with time. What you thought was awesome few months back, may not seem that good now. So it is a good idea to keep revisiting older content from time to time to see if you can scrap off something, add something or change something to make the content better and more useful.
When you revisit older content, also list down lessons learned while publishing or marketing that content. These lessons may prove beneficial later on. Similarly list how you can do something similar in a better way the next time.
14. Pick one or a few platforms to market yourself on. You don’t need to be on all places, unless you are a big company with big budget. Then you can hire a team of people to build your presence on dozens of platforms. But for a small marketer, it is better to build your presence on just one platform, or 2-3 platforms at the most.
Avoid the temptation of building your presence on all platforms simultaneously as that can put too much work load on you. You can see lot of successful marketers have huge following on Youtube but are rarely active on Facebook or other places. Similarly some marketers are hugely popular on Facebook or Instagram but are almost non-existent elsewhere.
These are smart marketers who know what they are doing. Follow their lead. Choose a platform which you are most comfortable with and focus most of your attention and efforts on growing yourself on that platform.
This could be Facebook, your own blog, Youtube, podcast, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Later on you can expand your reach on other platforms but do it only after you have acquired a reasonable amount of success on the first platform of your choosing.
15. Now that you have shortlisted just one platform, next is to pick one simple strategy and stick to it. Don’t keep hopping from one method or strategy to another. Stick to one proven game plan for a long period of time. This can again tilt the odds in your favor, specially when you are a beginner with limited knowledge, experience and resources.
16. Don’t get disheartened if you don’t get satisfactory results from time to time. Sometimes you may get good results while other times not so good ones. Take it all in your stride and maintain your passion and enthusiasm.
17. Keep learning and increase your knowledge related to your niche, audience, products and services. Follow what is going on social media related to your niche. Network and interact with others in the niche. Keep an eye on what other marketers are doing.
Learn from anyone and everyone. Don’t think you know it all. Don’t think just because you have been in a particular industry from few years that you have learned all there is to learn. The moment you stop learning you stop growing.
Develop a strong desire and enthusiasm to learn more and keep increasing your knowledge, expertise and mastery of different areas of your niche. Keep a list of high quality blogs, podcasts, Youtube channels and social media handles in your niche to follow.
18. Don’t worry or focus too much on SEO and gaming any algorithms. Sure youu can do keyword research, optimize your content to rank for some keywords and spend some time in building links but don’t put too much effort or time into these things as they will make your business dependent upon the whims and fancies of the search engines.
Focus instead on providing great value and benefiting the customer, as much as possible. This is the way to build a sustainable and scalable business on solid foundations. Your business will not rely too heavily on Google, Facebook or any platform.
Sure you can use the available platforms and leverage them for your benefit; you can drive traffic from these platforms but you won’t be fully dependant on them as you are providing immense value and building your own authority and brand image. As long as customers love you they will follow you wherever you go, in case you decide to shift platforms.
19. Link out to other great and relevant content even if you don’t get any benefit out of it. If you feel the readers will benefit by visiting the link then by all means do so. You may hesitate in linking to other’s content because it can drive away your traffic. But in the long run such a practice may actually benefit you as people will love your content since it has all these links to other amazing, relevant content. Users are more likely to bookmark and share your content!
If you build walls around your content by not linking outside, you may actually be doing a huge disservice to yourself. Remember that walls will not only prevent anyone to go out but they will also prevent outside people from coming inside. So you may be stopping the flow of more traffic by trying to fortify your content.
Linking to amazing content need not always be external. You can and should have internal links, connecting one piece of your content with another. Did you notice how many links are there on each page of Wikipedia? There are links to other Wikipedia pages and also external links so that each topic is covered thoroughly.
20. Do not try to become overnight success. Study any successful marketer and you will realize how hard they worked, how many hours of tireless efforts they put in, how many failures and frustrations they encountered.
So do not shy away from hard work. Avoid trying to take unhealthy shortcuts and jumping from one shiny thing to another. Most of the time these things will just waste your time and prevent you from achieving real, sustainable success.
Many times the overnight success stories that you come across, are not the full story. We all have heard stories of how some guru made millions from a product launch within a week. If you dig deeper you will know how much hard work and months of crazy efforts went into it.
I was watching an interview of a guy who made millions in short time with a product launch. He revealed how the whole team worked their asses off for many weeks before the actual launch. They stayed in the office for 24 hours, working and sleeping in the office itself, not even finding the time to go home. The guy revealed that he did not even change his t-shirt for almost a full week, as his total focus was on getting all the things done properly before the launch date.
21. Smart work is not equivalent to lazy or crappy work. Some people mistakenly think that doing smart work means you can avoid hard work. Hard work is one of the essential factors that you would find in almost all success stories, and may not be totally avoidable.
Wherever you can save yourself some hard work you should do so, but not at the cost of reduction in quality. There are some things which you can automate or outsource to save yourself time and effort. There is nothing wrong in that. But don’t assume that you can just push some buttons and make thousands of dollars in income.
22. Be consistent and committed – If you publish a great piece of content today and then don’t publish anything for the next 3 months, do you think you are likely to see significant amount of success with such an approach?
On the other hand if you consistently keep publishing good to great content you can keep building your readers and follower base. Publishing regularly does not mean that you do it daily. Choose a frequency which will be easy on you and which will allow you to produce quality stuff with enough time for research.
Be committed to this online business. Treat it as a business, work hard at it. Do not treat it like a hobby or leisure activity. Make time for the different tasks needed to take it to the next level. Which business can be successful if the people involved in it work for only few days and then lay off for several weeks?
23. Go the extra mile, deliver more than others – if you want to grow massively beyond your wildest dreams, you need to get into the habit of really trying to help your audience and doing as much as you can for them. Ask yourself ‘how can I go the extra mile for my readers in my content? How can I give them more than they expect?’
24. Don’t hesitate to invest money in your business. Many so called gurus have led people to believe that you can earn money online without needing to spend anything. This is not always true. Don’t be fooled by such claims. They say this to just sell their products and make a quick buck off you.
Which business in the real world can be started without any sort of investment? Even if you want to sell stuff on the walkway you will need to invest money in buying the products in bulk which you aim to sell. Likewise in the online world also you will need money for various tools, training, resources, outsourcing tasks, advertising, domain and hosting, etc.
25. Don’t become too obsessed with your work that you neglect everything else. Don’t burn yourself out. Allow yourself some rest and leisure time. Go out and enjoy. Spend time with family and friends. Do other things as well besides your business. Take breaks sometimes. Have some fun. You are likely come back to work after a break with renewed energy and new ideas.
Don’t let your health and relations spoil. If you maintain balance in your life you can have greater enjoyment and experience long term happiness.