Making Money On Internet Traffic – Affiliate marketing 101

Making money on Internet traffic comes down to monetizing your traffic in one or more ways. If you are good at getting traffic to your website or blog consider yourself lucky.

Surveys in the past have shown the number one reason people fail at making money online comes down to traffic. Of course, when we say traffic we are referring to getting people to come to your site.

So, in this article, we will dispense the usual advice on getting traffic and focus 100% on making money on the traffic once you have it!

Make Money Directing Internet Traffic

The World Wide Web has millions of searches being done every day. Understanding search intent is one of the big keys to making money on the traffic once you get it.

Part of this starts by directing the right kind of traffic, to begin with. There is no sense in working to send someone interested in solving their problem of cooking the best omelet to a blog article on how to boil an egg in the microwave.

Search intent is the reason for the search. This is why we should be spending our time creating content for long-tail keywords.

Let me give you an example.

If you create a blog post for affiliate marketing you will get a wide range of traffic because you are not narrowing down the search.

If you write a blog post for pay-per-lead affiliate marketing you have a specific keyword phrase. Google will rank you for that phrase if you set it up correctly on your blog post.

Then when someone Google’s “pay per lead affiliate marketing”, or “make money with pay per lead affiliate marketing” you are doing a better job of meeting their search intent.

Monetizing Search Intent

So how do you make money directing Internet traffic through search intent? Google AdSense or other paid advertising would be a good start.

I talk a lot about Google AdSense in this article and for good reasons. AdSense really works great to make money from the traffic coming to a blog post.

You get paid by the click-on ads Google sells. Google sells the ads using its algorithms to match these advertisers to the content on your blog post.

Selling ads is their primary source of income, so they want you to tell them which advertisers to bring up on your page. Writing an article with search intent as the focus helps Google give you the best ads.

You are not actually directing traffic with this method. What you are doing is writing content so Google can direct the best Internet traffic to your blog.

This is a competitive game to get into, but it is the best long-term game to be in if you want to monetize search intent.

Again the way to do that is to create content for specific longtail keyword phrases. So how do you do that?

Develop Longtail Keyword Lists

If a blogger would spend more time on list creation they could do so much more with their blog and ultimately their income. Why don’t they then?

1. It is hard work.
2. They do not know how to do it.
3. They do not use the right tools.

There are plenty of keyword creation resources available online to develop keywords for your blog articles. Many of these are good, but they are simple.

Simple in that they give you the same keywords every blogger is targeting. If your primary keyword is affiliate marketing how do you build a list of longtail keywords for it?

Use Ahrefs’

This is one of, if not the best keyword research tools on the market today. They have a feature called a keyword generator.

This helps you build exhaustive lists of the best keywords to generate targeted traffic to your blog. You then create content focusing on one longtail keyword phrase at a time in each article.

I pulled this off of the Ahrefs’ website…

“Industry’s largest database of keyword ideas at your service
Keyword Generator is an integral part of Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

It is powered by the largest international keyword database. It contains 7.4 billion keywords from 170 countries and keeps on growing. This is the simple secret behind the impressive number of relevant keyword suggestions you can get with our Keyword Generator.”

It is not free, but they do have a $7 trial you can test drive Ahrefs with. I will suggest that SEO keyword research is probably the best time spent outside of creating the content.

Using a simple approach of targeting one longtail phrase per article will let you develop a very targeted blog full of the keywords people are searching for. Read Ahrefs’ longtail keyword guide to get more information.

When an Internet visitor arrives at your blog you are giving them exactly what they are looking for. When Google matches this search intent with the right advertiser they will click on an ad and you make money!

Sweet right 🙂

What else can you do to make money from the traffic coming to your blog?

Affiliate Marketing Methods

Affiliate marketing is going to be the fastest way to make money on the traffic you’re getting. This has proven to be true for most Internet marketers like you and me.

So what is affiliate marketing?

My blog focuses a lot on various types of affiliate marketing, but you can break it down into three or four.

1. Pay per click. As an affiliate, you earn money when people click on ads provided to you by the affiliate merchant.

Google AdSense is the top program in the PPC affiliate arena, but they are not the only one. Others include Media Net, Propeller Ads Media, Rev Content, Pop Ads, Adsterra, and many more.

2. Pay per lead or cost per action. As an affiliate, you earn money when your website visitor performs a specific action required by the affiliate merchant.

These actions could include filling out a lead form, downloading software, subscribing to an email list, and so on. The more difficult the action the more you get paid.

3. Pay per sale. Amazon was at the forefront of pay-per-sale paying affiliates to sell physical books.

Now you can sell digital content, physical content, physical products, info courses, and so on. Commission rates can run as low as 1-2% on big-ticket products, to 75%, and upon digital download products.

4. Two-tier affiliate. Get paid to recruit affiliates and on the sales or actions, they complete.

You want to look for 2 tier affiliate programs that pay you well on your sales and pay you well on the sales of your affiliates. A quick Google search will point you in the right direction.

You Do Not Need Your Own Products

I laid the groundwork in the section above on affiliate marketing for this reason. As an affiliate, you do not need a product or program of your own.

All you need is traffic to your affiliate offer and you can make money. Promoting an affiliate offer directly may not be the best way to do it, but there are people who do this very thing.

1. Find an affiliate offer.
2. Get their affiliate URL.
3. Promote their affiliate URL.
4. Make money.

Here is an example of how would do that using my affiliate URL to the Wealthy Affiliate program I promote.

1. I joined Wealthy Affiliate.

2. Here is my affiliate URL.

3. I promote this URL on my review page I wrote about Wealthy Affiliate

4. I promote that Review page on my articles. And those articles I promote on social media, guest blogging, in online profiles paid traffic and so on.

5. When someone reads my articles and joins Wealthy Affiliate for free learn all the skills that I am using and upgrades, their membership makes me money.

6. Then I work with them to help them to do the same or whatever niche they so decide.

Let me give you another way.

1. Buy a domain name relevant to what you are promoting.
2. Mask the domain name and redirect it to an affiliate offer.
3. Make money.

Here is an example of this in action.

1. SubscriptionIncome.org redirects to a free webinar
2. The affiliate program the affiliate is promoting is SubscriptionSchool which pays 50% on a $2K affiliate offer.

Do you see how promoting SubscriptionIncome.org looks more professional then promoting this affiliated URL:
https://subscriptionschool.org/dap/a/?a=166

The cost of this strategy is only the cost of the yearly domain fee around $15 a year.

Blogging Method

Here is one of the most popular ways to make money on Internet traffic. Start a blog on a targeted niche.

Add quality content to your blog that you would be proud for people to read. Monetize your blog with the Google AdSense affiliate program.

Focus on promoting your content and driving traffic to your blog. When people click on the ads provided to you by Google you earn 68% of the ad sale price.

Do this over and over until you’re earning as much money as you want. This is the easiest way to make money in terms of you are not requiring your visitors to do anything except click on the ads.

Of course, the hard part is getting quality content on your blog and developing traffic from it. I talk about various ways to do this in blog posts I’ve done in the past.

Build An Email List

Here is another, and I think the best long-term, method for making money on your online traffic. List building is where you get the email address, and maybe the name of your website visitor.

This information is stored in an autoresponder such as Aweber. You now have permission to email these people anytime you want.

How do you make money?

1. Sell to your list in the body of the email promoting an affiliate offer.
2. Send people from the email to your affiliate page.
3. Send people from the email to a blog post that contains a link to your affiliate offer.

The great thing here is as you build your list it is an asset you will have forever. No one can take that away from you and you can monetize it any way you want.

Sell Advertising

As your website traffic increases, it becomes more valuable to other businesses. If you can develop an authority blog you can make a lot of money just by selling advertising on your blog directly.

Bypass affiliate programs such as Google AdSense and just deal with one or two advertisers directly. Let them sponsor your blog and you focus 100% on content.

You can even include them as sponsors of your email newsletter if you choose to run one on your list. One good advertiser can earn you a six-figure income if you build an authority blog in the niche they would want to advertise in.

Final Thoughts

Most of them revolve around affiliate marketing which is the fastest way and in my opinion the best long-term way to make money on the Internet!

Spend more time on building targeted longtail keyword phrases. Use Ahrefs if you can and then create content for each keyword phrase one at a time.

Sell affiliate products, get leads, or get ad clicks from Google AdSense. You may be able to use more than one of these ways to monetize your traffic as it comes.

Then you just keep cranking out high-quality traffic targeting more longtail keyword phrases. Monetize those posts and rinse and repeat.

Looking To Make More Money?

As someone who has been through the process, I can speak from experience when I say that trying to choose a way to make money online is exhausting.

If you are interested in creating your own home business, check out my #1 recommendation on building a successful business online. You can get access to hundreds of training videos, 24/7 support, professional consultations, private access to training guides, tools, and much more.

PS: No credit card is needed.

Related Video:

Please leave your questions or a comment, I would love to get your feedback.