Wealthy Affiliate

How to promote your business online? This has almost become a perennial question.

There are so many options out here these days. Shall I work with a web designer and create an online presence – my virtual storefront. Do I set up a Facebook page for it so I can have engagement with customers? Will I tweet and engage that way? Post on Instagram? Post on Pinterest?

What will be my budget to put all this out there? Will I outsource and get some expert to do it for me? Will I try to do it myself so that I have control of the whole process? How am I going to carve out time to add all this to an already busy life? Is this going to upset the delicate balance I have almost gained between work and family?

Is your head starting to spin? My biggest barrier is making time to do it. I spend at least half an hour each day in meditation. Most days I manage an hour. I work shifts. Some days I have early morning starts (0530). Other days I start late in the morning (1100). Couple this with a rural property of close to 3 acres with the work that takes and I sometimes wonder how I get to sit at the computer and create the content that helps to promote the affiliate business I’m building here. Yet I know I must. And I like the creative process.

What Do You Do?

So you now know the business I’m in is affiliate marketing. You know what I’m promoting. What do you do? Based on what I’ve learned in 13 years online I can help others build a similar business or show them tools to expand what they already have.

Whatever you are doing it will fall into the category of a material product, a service, or a combination of these. All of these can be promoted online with the right tools.

Tradesman, Salesman, Teacher, Retailer, Coach, Consultant, Doctor, Nurse, Vet, Healer, Manager, Minion, Artist, Lawyer. Each of these and others I haven’t mentioned here, may offer services and/or products online. Something has brought you to this site. So you’re perhaps looking for something to help you in your endeavours. You have a story to tell about who you are and how you’re going to promote your business online.

It all starts with a story…

How Do You Promote It Online?

This is one of the prompts in Wealthy Affiliate‘s content creation platform SiteContent. Blog posts are a starting point for your promotion. What can you tell your potential customers about what you do? How did you get into the business? What prompted you to get into the service you are promoting? Is there something interesting to pass on to your clients about the products you offer? How do you promote it online?

If you are creating a niche-based affiliate marketing business you can provide product or service comparisons. There is probably a story about how you evolved into your niche. How did your fascination with your niche arise? If there are products associated with the niche, perhaps you started off at the lower end of the market. As the interest developed further, maybe you began looking at higher-end products. These are areas to explore in creating reviews and comparisons for your websites.

Links to these reviews can be placed on your Facebook pages or can be created within Facebook itself if you have a presence there. The same with LinkedIn. Provide a link or build your content right on the platform. Tweet them. Use the images to post on Pinterest and Instagram and link to articles on your blog. Make video presentations of your products and service and upload them to Vimeo or YouTube.

Don’t feel the need to explore a range of social media options all at once. Pick one for getting your story out there and become fluent in it and familiar with the way it works. When the traffic begins to flow, that is a sign that a particular option is gaining traction. Stick with it or if you feel the need then add another to your arsenal.

What Other Tools Do You Need and Where Do You Find Them?

All these different social media platforms where you can engage and connect with others are tools. They help move your business forward. Platforms that were initially set up for one thing (YouTube – video) have evolved their platforms to include a social media aspect. What other tools do you need and where do you find them?

There are training platforms out there where you can not only learn things relevant to your niche but also add your training to the collective. Many universities are creating platforms and adding training to them that can be accessed for free. Think EDx, a collaborative venture between Harvard and MIT. Or, Coursera, which brings together open courses from the likes of Stanford, Yale, Google, and IBM amongst others. These have evolved out of formal institutions. They’re just the tip of the iceberg.

The platforms where you can provide and receive training include, Udemy, and Skillshare. LinkedIn started off as a social media platform for professionals and has developed its offering to include training and job search. If your business has a training aspect Kajabi offers a platform for building, marketing, and selling your course online.

I’m building this website by following the training of the Wealthy Affiliate platform. Their training focuses on all the aspects you may need in learning to create and build an affiliate marketing business.

Whether your creating your own site or using another platform on which to post, images are important. The places to access free images are Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels, Freepik. Paid images can be sourced on the likes of Shutterstock, Getty Images, and Adobe Stock.

Once you have bought, downloaded or if you have your own images you’ll need some way of editing them. I have a few online options I use. Canva, Fotor, Pizap, and sometimes Pixlr. Each of these has similar functions. They all have templates that make it easy for you to create graphics for your creations.

Canva is great as an all round graphic creator. They have a comprehensive range of templates that you can adapt for your own use. You can also create a design size that suits you rather than fitting into some of their sizing. Once you’ve uploaded your photo it’s drag and drop and then add what you require in the way of text.

Fotor has similar functionality as well as the ability to resize and crop your images manually. I find I’m able to do that quickly and then download to my computer to be uploaded to my site.

Pizap is a great option if you like funky fonts to add to your images and it also has a meme creator as well that you can have fun with.

If you need to create a png file one of the easiest ways I’ve found to do that is in PowerPoint if you have Microsoft Office. There is a remove background function in the application. Open a picture in a blank slide, select, and then use remove background. Right mouse click on the image that remains and ‘save as picture’. You’ll have a png file to use.

Outsourcing Options

Perhaps you haven’t the time but have some discretionary income you can put towards growing an online presence. If you have a clear picture of what you want and can articulate it you can post a job with any of the following.

Guru, Upwork, Fiverr.

Websites, mobile apps, graphic design, writing, editing, social media advertising. There’ll be someone on any of these to help you build and promote your dream.

Get Help with the Basics

Are you keen to have a go yourself? To start growing your dream. Wealthy Affiliate has all the tools and training you need to start your online presence whether you already have a business or have an idea or passion you want to share with the world. Get help with the basics. Dip your toes in the water. Start with a free membership and build a free website.

Blessings

When a foundation is put down for a building the deeper and wider the hole that is dug for it has a huge bearing on how high the structure can go. It is the same with the foundations of Affiliate Marketing. The deeper and wider you create your base of knowledge on which you build your business the higher your potential for earnings. If you skimp on any of the following concepts, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice.

Just as there are four concepts below there are also four ingredients cement, water, sand, and gravel that make up the concrete that is poured for a foundation. There are certain percentages of each and if the proper ratios aren’t observed the concrete won’t have the strength to carry the building. Likewise, if you don’t have a good mix of training, niche, content, and engagement the base for your affiliate marketing business will be weak.

Foundations of Affiliate Marketing #1 – Training

Training is the cement that holds all the other elements of Affiliate marketing together. Without training, we wouldn’t know how to bind these different aspects into a strong base.

This isn’t something you’d have learned in school. Sure, you can learn Marketing at a business school but to take that rudimentary knowledge and apply it to an Affiliate environment takes specialised knowledge. Where will you find training that specialised? Training with the depth and breadth to build the foundations of Affiliate Marketing?

The training platform at Wealthy Affiliate is probably the most comprehensive you will find. With their free starter membership you get a taster for what is required to build an affiliate marketing business. If you advance to the premium membership you’ll feel compelled to follow both their trainings – the Online Entrepreneur Certification and the WA Affiliate Bootcamp. When complete you become a seasoned professional. As a premium plus member you’ll have access to further training carrying you onward to Super Affiliate status.

What can you expect from the Wealthy Affiliate training?

In the Online Entrepreneur Certification are 5 Levels with 10 Lessons per Module. The five levels are: Getting Started; Building your own Traffic Producing Website; Making Money; Mastering Social Engagement and Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation.

The WA Affiliate Bootcamp has the following phases of training: Getting your Business Rolling; Content, Keywords & Conversions; Giving your Site Social Value; Get Visual, Get Aesthetic, Get a Brand through Media;Knowing your Audiences and Catapulting your Referrals; Bing, Yahoo and the Power of PPC and finally How to Scale Successful PPC campaigns.

Begin to lay your foundation through Wealthy Affiliate training. Click Here.

Foundations of Affiliate Marketing #2 – Niche

Discovering a niche is the second of the foundations of Affiliate Marketing. One of the meanings of niche is that it is a hollow space created to hold a statue, the other is that it is a product, service, or job that has a specific focus. Both of these are relevant. The hollow space creates a focus for something special to you whether it be an art work or something sacred.

Your niche should be sacred to you. When people arrive at your site they should be able to see that you care about whatever it is that you’ve chosen as a niche.

Perhaps you’ve landed here because you’ve searched affiliate marketing specifically but you’re not sure how it works. So, what do you have to do to find this narrow and specialized service or product? Maybe you were thinking this could be a new way of creating an income and it is, but what is a niche?

You May Already Be Doing It!

• You may already be doing it and have found your way here for a different avenue of putting your product or service out there.
• Do you have a passion – something that you’ll do for free without expectation of payment.
• Something you’ll help others with just because you can.
  • Have you ever watched someone who has model trains? They’re totally in sync with what they’re doing and be occupied for hours without noticing the passage of time. It’s what is called a peak state or a state of flow. Is there anything that you’re involved in that you’ve noticed creates a similar experience in you? If there is, this holds the possibility of a niche.
• What challenges have you experienced?
• Are there problems you are in the process of solving or have solved in the past?
  • Challenges and problems could specific to your passion or they could be associated with your current business. They could be affecting others who are looking for the solution you’ve already discovered.
  • You may have dealt with a health challenge in a way that caused a remission or easing of the symptoms. Use the knowledge you gained in the process to create a service or product to help others.
• And there’s the million dollar question.
  • What would you see yourself doing if money and time was no object to you?

If any of those things resonate with you, There is no better time to start than now.

To get help finding and expressing your niche with Wealthy Affiliate click here.

Foundations of Affiliate Marketing #3 – Content

The third of the foundations of Affiliate Marketing is Creating Content. This is the engine that will drive traffic to your website and help you gain traction in the marketplace for your offer. Optimising the content for search engines and choosing relevant keywords will oil that that engine.

Going back to the concrete metaphor, one of the features of our content will be what is called pillar or cornerstone content. This is content that will serve to establish your authority as an expert in the field you’ve chosen. When a potential customer puts a search term into a search engine if you’ve done your SEO right your page or post may come up on the first page.

The more cornerstones or content pillars you have will be beneficial for your website. As I said before the deeper the foundation the higher you can build your business. Pillars and cornerstones sit on the foundations enabling a structure that can carry the weight of the building growth.

If you’re just starting out or perhaps you’ve been doing it for a while but have lost your way a bit your pillar content can bring you back to what is important.

Plan It

Before you begin to create your content, plan it. Write down your ideas. I think it was Whitney Young who said, “It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to be offered an opportunity and not be prepared for it.” Making a content strategy prepares you for that opportunity. To be ready when it arrives.

Have some goals for content creation. How many words will you write each day? How many posts will put out in a week. Will you create video for YouTube or Vimeo. Are podcasts going to feature in your strategy.

If it’s a passion you’re going to focus on, you’ll know how you first got into it, if you made some mistakes along the way, also remember and recount your successes. What are some of things you need in the undertaking of this passion? Are some better than others? Can you write about the comparisons of products you have used and perhaps didn’t use while in pursuit of your passion.

If you’re providing a solution to a challenge or health issue you have, again you can set the scene, tell readers about your accomplishments and share your defeats. Let them about the battles you lost on the way to winning the war.

Establish your content strategy through a membership with Wealthy Affiliate. Click Here.

Wealthy Affiliate has a dedicated platform for creating posts to be published in WordPress. Using the Site Content platform can enable to create and achieve goals around your subject matter on the way to building out your website. Once you have this process happening there are avenues to encourage engagement with your posts through comments also on the platform. This is also a boon for search engine optimisation and better rankings.

Engagement – Being Social

Engagement is the last of the foundations of Afffiliate marketing we will be covering here. I’ve just said engagement will help boost SEO for your site. The other thing that it does is increase your personal authority. When you’ve posted a review of a product and have received questions regarding the review, the way you answer it will demonstrate your knowledge of the subject.

Described as the World’s Greatest Marketer, one of the things Seth Godin says about marketing is that it is about telling your story. I tell the story of how I got to doing this in my About Me post. And what do people need to get from your story. They want to know, “Who are you?”, What do you have?”, and “Why they should care.” Based on your story your readers or the people watching your video content, or listening to your podcast will make a decision on whether they can trust you. Establishing the trust of a potential customer will give you traction in your particular niche.

Social Media

Social Media gives us a great gift for being able to create a relationship with current and future customers. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, YouTube and others are all ways to open up a channel to engage with your audience. Also if you’ve ever signed up to do an online training you’ll have accepted an invitation to join a private Facebook group or you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other participants within the platform itself.

Wealthy Affiliate has this function built into their platform. They have an avenue for you to post comments in other members sites and in doing so be able to receive comments on your site. A nested ability to create engagement. Anything you post with in the platform itself be it question or blog post can be commented on also giving plenty of opportunity to develop the skill in a friendly environment.

Closing thoughts

There’s a story I heard about a builder who was coming up to retirement. He’d grown a little tired of the industry and was starting to take short cuts in his work.

He received another commission to build a house from his employer. This job took him through to his retirement. Unfortunately his short cuts had become habitual. Doing the preliminaries before he started the build he ordered cheaper timber and cladding for the build and hired subcontractors whose rates were lower than what was an average price.

All the way through the build he had an indifferent attitude to the work. Consequently when it came to completion and he looked back at the finished product he felt less than satisfied. Twenty years ago when he was a in his prime the work he put in was immaculate. Now it showed the signs of tiredness that he was unconsciously experiencing within himself.

The day came for him to sign it back over to his employer. When he met with the company director and went to hand back the keys to the completed property, the director took the keys and placed them in the builder’s hand and closed his fingers around them. “These are yours now”, he said.

I think it’s easy to imagine what the builder was feeling as this happened. I know what I feel – If I’m the builder engaging contractors for specialised work, I’ll employ them for the quality of their craft. Instead of indifference, I want the pride in my work that I had at the peak of my career.

Excellence

Bring your best you to the business of affiliate marketing. You’re building the house of your business here. You’re creating a virtual shop front. How do want customers to see you? Will they see a professional?

“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”

— Aristotle

Three months into Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What you need to know.

2020 Changed Wealthy Affiliate

Last year in the midst of Covid-19 a lot happened to the platform. 2020 changed Wealthy Affiliate. The interface changed. It was a bit of struggle initially to get my head around the newness and the way the functions now worked. Luckily things were bigger and easier to see so for the more focally-challenged. I was bit lost for a few weeks but eventually found my feet and was away again.

It is not a bad thing to have to relearn something. Having to rewire our brains in a new way to deal with new process creates a healthy resilience within us.

Thankfully the great stuff about Wealthy Affiliate didn’t change. The live chat function stayed in the same place on the right hand side of the page. The ability to set up our dashboard how we want it.

For me I love having the recent questions at the top of my page, followed by members blog posts. There’s always something there of interest, and a way of paying our experience forward by helping other members who may be new to the whole avenue of affiliate marketing.

On the home page everything became bigger. Text, images, comments, chat. And the menu being across the top at all times is definitely more user friendly if you want to change tack in the middle of a task. It’s interesting going through some of the older training videos and seeing how the platform was when they were made.

The icons at the top right of the screen have become bigger and again make task switching on the platform more user friendly.

To open the door to online income through Wealthy Affiliate click here!

Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Platform

Looking at the top menu from left to right – Clicking on the WA or Home will get you to your Dashboard. Find and click on the pin to the right of the Dashboard and you can select how you want your dashboard to look. Choose from stats, new blogs, questions or the Top 10 blogs. Some options give the opportunity to engage on the platform with other members through asking or answering the questions, reading and commenting on the blogs.

By engaging with members through blogs and questions you can increase your rank in WA. Liking comments and working through the training modules will also increase your ranking. As you grow in confidence using the platform you’ll be able to assist other newbies coming on board.

Stepping to the right on the menu you have access to the training elements of Wealthy Affiliate. As this is very comprehensive aspect of the platform we’ll examine it more closely in the next section.

Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about Websites

Moving right along we have Websites. In this tab we have:

1. Site Manager – you can view the sites you own or through siterubix, and where they at in terms of development. You can login here to them as well as accessing the email for each respective site.
2. Site Builder – self explanatory – get in there – click the appropriate button and follow the prompts. Any stumbling blocks, use the search function or ask a question.
3. Site Domains – purchase a domain here or add a subdomain to an existing domain you have.
4. Site Content – It is what I’m using to create this blog post and one of the best things about Wealthy Affiliate. Build all your content within the platform including images and then publish it to your website. Awesome.
5. Site Comments – By the giving and receiving of comments on your’s and other’s websites you gain traction in SEO on Google and this increases traffic to your sites. For every 2 comments you give you can ask for a comment on a particular post or page.
6. Site Feedback – By clicking on this again you can offer or receive feedback on a website. By offering to give feedback you can gain WA credits which can enable you to receive feedback or comments when you need them for a new page or post you’ve created.
7. Site Support – If you’re stuck for an answer through the search function or something has gone wrong with the website you are building you can put a question to the site support team. They will reply promptly to any query.

Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about Classes, Research, Promote, Publish and Help

Next to Websites there is Classes.

In Classes, there are a whole array of trainings. If there is a diamond next to the training it is available to Premium members. A crown next to it means you’ll have to upgrade to Premium Plus. You can search for different categories of training down the right hand side of the page.

Following Classes to the right is Research. Clicking this takes you to the Jaaxy website – Wealthy Affiliates own keyword research tool. As a premium member you have complete access to Jaaxy Lite. There are also Pro and Enterprise packages.

Promote is next after Research. Promote is dedicated to providing Affiliate programs to promote through your websites if they can align with the niche you have chosen.

Publish takes you directly into the Site Content function.

Help – In the Help Centre you can access Site Support, Ask a Question (to the community) access the private messaging function, or talk to someone through Live Chat.

Launch yourself off the Wealthy Affiliate Platform and dive in

The Icons

Search – Click on this and enter whatever it is on your mind about what you’re doing in Wealthy Affiliate. Select the option that seems the most relevant to you.

Live chat – Ask questions, or engage with the community

Pencil – This will open up more icons. They are quick actions enabling you to:

• Blog at WA,
• Create Training,
• Write an Article,
• Build a website, or
• Find a domain

Dollar Sign – Your personal access for tools to promote the Wealthy Affiliate opportunity.

Bell – Your notifications. You can personalize this setting up with different options.

Envelope –  The inbox. Private messages and communications with Site Support will turn up in here.

Files – Allow to toggle between the Wealthy Affiliate Site and the Jaaxy Site

Your Picture – Accesses everything to do with your profile.

Start building an online presence at Wealthy Affiliate – Click here

Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Membership

To excel in any field requires practice. Affiliate Marketing is no different. We can paint a picture of ourselves in our minds as successful affiliate marketers but until we start taking action that is all it will be – a picture. When we begin to take the plunge into what is required then we build real muscle for the business.

If we come into it raw we are firstly going to need some training. I have trained under other platforms and can say that Wealthy Affiliate offers the most comprehensive training I have seen. Below are the features of their training.

It helps to know that there are three different levels of membership at Wealthy Affiliate. The starter membership is free and gives you two free websites that you can build out yourself to get a feel for what is required in this affiliate marketing business. In the starter membership you also have access to the first module of the Online Entrepreneur Certification.

The premium membership unlocks access to all modules of both the Online Entrepreneur Certification and the Affiliate Bootcamp as well as 52 video trainings per as well as other training offered by other members on different aspects of webpage building, affiliate marketing, wordpress, dropshipping, social media and other aspects that are relevant to the business.

The next level membership is premium plus. Everything mentioned before in regard to training plus more training available only at that level. For members wanting to stretch themselves into Super Affiliate status.

Wealthy Affiliate in 2021 – What You Need To Know about the Training

Online Entrepreneur Certification

5 Levels – 10 Lessons per Module.

1. Getting Started
   
2. Building your own Traffic Producing Website
3. Making Money
4. Mastering Social Engagement
5. Achieving Maximum Success through Content Creation

Affiliate Bootcamp

7 Phases – 10 Lessons per Module

1. Getting your Business Rolling
2. Content, Keywords & Conversions
3. Giving your Site Social Value
4. Get Visual, Get Aesthetic, Get a Brand through Media
5. Knowing your Audiences and Catapulting your Referrals
6. Bing, Yahoo and the Power of PPC
7. How to Scale Successful PPC campaigns

My Training Activity

Whenever you access any training it will come up in at the top of your Training Activity. You can then scroll through those subsequent trainings if you haven’t finished with any of them.

Training HQ

Follow the prompt in the search field to find a specific training or scroll through to see the many offerings.

Classrooms

Choose from 13 different classrooms to access tutorials in those featured classrooms.

Become an Affiliate Marketing Initiate through the Wealthy Affiliate training – Click Here

Next Steps

Earlier there was an invitation to launch off the Wealthy Affiliate platform and dive right in. There is no better way. You can dip your feet in to see if this is something you want to continue with. Start wading into to shallow end of the pool until you become more confident. Use your starter membership to get a feel for the opportunity that is available. If it feels right use the premium membership as a springboard for your successful affiliate marketing business.

Start today – Click here

All the best

About Me

Hi, and welcome to AndrewsAffiliateToolbox.SiteRubix.com.

Andrew’s Affiliate Toolbox is here to chronicle my journey through the Affiliate BootCamp of WealthyAffiliate.com.

It has been a little over twelve years since I started my first blog CreativeMythology It grew out of a fascination I had with mythology at the time and how it fit with the personal development arena I was exploring at the time.

I tried monetizing it but somehow the ads that came didn’t seem compatible with the content I was producing so I removed the ads and just kept adding content that sat well with what I was trying to do with the site.

Fast forward eight years and I’m introduced to affiliate marketing and I imagine this could be the answer to monetization. At the time I’m struggling with motivation and believe this is the opportunity to really develop some traction online using motivation as a niche.

Only trouble is I’m dabbling, I’m the guy who came to the swimming pool to swim, I see all the other swimmers in the pool and I sit on the edge of the pool and just dip my toes in. I’d picked up a few skills along the way and could maintain a presence in the Wealthy Affiliate forums helping out here and there. I started well with posts and then my interest would wane. I started another site and same thing. A few posts and then….

WHY YOU WANT TO HELP PEOPLE

Yes, I was that guy who was helping other members from the side of the pool. And perhaps the entrepreneur side of Wealthy Affiliate isn’t my piece. After creating some content for another of my websites WhatILearnedBy.com I realized that all the personal and professional development courses I have done over the years could be particularly relevant to marketers endeavouring to get an online affiliate business launched.

THE GOAL OF YOUR SITE

My mission now is to create a site that not only facilitates a learning process for aspiring affiliate marketers wanting to set their own website, but also provide other tools to assist them if their motivation and productivity begins to fall away

If you ever need a hand or have any questions, feel free to leave them below and I will be more than happy to help you out.

All the best,

Andrew Michael Challies
AndrewsAffiliateToolbox.SiteRubix.com