I’ve been building websites now since about 1998, so that’s 20+ years now. I started as a hobby, producing a community website for the town where I lived, alongside a discussion forum. The forum was quite well used and had a membership of 1,200 people, which isn’t bad considering only 10,500 people lived there!
Since then, i’ve become more interested in affiliate marketing and making money on the internet. The opportunities are endless, but you need to have a plan and a roadmap for your endeavours. Over time, I’ve seen the same questions asked over and over again by those interested in doing the same. Here’s my Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list.
Here’s my top 25 frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing and online business.
- Do I have to spend money to make money online?
- How do I start a website?
- Is there a single best way to make money online?
- What products can I promote?
- Do I really need to worry about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
- Do I have to work every day on my website?
- Will I need to employ people?
- How do I write good content?
- Affiliate Marketing seems hard, is there an easier way?
- Do I need to know how to make a website?
- How much money can I make online?
- What should the subject of my website be?
- How do I get Google to rank my website?
- How many hours per day do I need to spend on my business?
- What equipment will I need for my home office?
- How do I stop myself from being overwhelmed?
- What are the most common mistakes I need to avoid?
- How long before I start to make money?
- What is niche marketing?
- Why is website traffic important to me and how do I increase it?
- Do I need to know anything about sales and marketing before I start?
- How do I handle tax and keeping my books?
- What if I hate the niche I picked, can I change it later?
- How much do I have to write every day?
- Where can I learn more, or go to get help if i’m stuck?
1. Do I have to spend money to make money online?
Yes i’m afraid you do, but not nearly as much as you may think. That’s the good news. You can have a go at making money at no cost, but I don’t recommend you do it that way. Why, I hear you ask? Well, what seems to be the easy cheap way will actually result in a lot more work on your part. If you use free website hosting, it could put your online business at an unnecessary risk.
You need to spend a little money securing a domain name for your business. Buying a domain should cost you about £8 ($11). There’ll be a hosting cost as well, for the files that form your website. Expect to pay approximately £65 to £130+ for a year of hosting for your website.
The reason I recommend that you spend money on these two is so that you have complete control of your most important business asset. You own the asset and can therefore do whatever you like with it. The danger I spoke of earlier – this comes if you choose to use free hosting sites for your business. You’ll probably be forced to accept their advertising (which may be inappropriate for you) and you’ll also have to adhere to their Terms of Service instead of setting your own. This could limit and restrict your subject matter, the style of your website and the type of promotion you could do.
You can use free websites as a supplement, but don’t use them for your core business space. Don’t give someone else control of your website. Web designers move on, passwords get lost and you can fall out with them. Don’t let them hold you hostage! Spend money sensibly still, but don’t go overboard because it won’t make you succeed any quicker. Also, try not to tie yourself into any minimum contracts for stuff. Anything you sign up for should preferably offer a free trial and be cancellable without any notice.
No matter what your website is about or what your business is, you’ll need to use web building software. The industry standard these days is WordPress. You’ll need someone to host your website and you’ll need to register a domain name.
Some affiliate marketing network companies provide help to build your first ever website. This can be invaluable if you’re just starting up and are a little unsure of how things go. If it’s possible to be walked through the entire process, with the ability to ask questions along the way, it will be much easier for you.
If you are starting up on your own, I would highly recommend sticking with WordPress for building it. It’s an open-source product (which means it’s entirely free) and is the most commonly used software for this building their own sites. It has a lot of advantages over other website builders like WIX and Weebly.
You’ll need two parts to get your website up and running.
The domain name is the address people know your site by. It’s the address you type into your browser to get to a website. Google.com is a domain name.
The hosting account is the bit that all of the website files, text, pictures and scripts are stored in. Without these, your domain name is of no use.
You can buy your domain name and your hosting account from the same company (easier) or you can buy them separately (a little more fiddly to set up).
3. Is there a single best way to make money online?
There are a lot of great, legitimate ways to earn a living online. I’ll mention a lot of the better ones here on my blog as I discover them and will often review them (along with books and other items I think I can recommend or advise to avoid). Have a look through the site to see what I have identified. The products may just work for you and your niche. They will all be listed in the Links section, and often reviewed on the Blog.
No single way can be said to be ‘the best’, there are lots of different ways to do it.
One popular way is to become an online merchant, selling your goods through an e-commerce website. The goods may be made yourself, or else you’ll have to source them and buy them in from elsewhere. This type of business may need a great deal of time devoting to it and may be costly. For example, you may be left with stock you cannot sell.
A second way is to become an affiliate marketer. This is a system where you actually source and then promote other people’s goods. The advantages are that you don’t hold stock, get involved in any packaging or mailing of items, don’t have to set up payment systems and you just receive an affiliate fee from the vendor. This is a much easier, cheaper and less risky way of setting up your business. You need to diversify though, so you don’t have only one affiliate partner, as if they cease to trade, your business disappears too!
Another way is something called Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). This is a little like being an online merchant, but the product stocks are all held by Amazon in their warehouse, and then any orders are fulfilled by them, again negating the need to hold stock yourself or manage payments or shipping. Amazon do it all for you.
There are many other ways, such as Drop shipping. Which one you pick is up to you. It’ll take a bit of research to find out which option fits your timeframe and lifestyle and ‘floats your boat’. Ideally, the more automated it is the better. Any of the options takes time and effort though and sometimes learning curves can be steep.
4. What products can I promote?
This is the question that causes the most consternation when starting out. When I first started with online business, I watched a lot of webinars and YouTube videos and they all just told us to ‘grow your businesses’ and ‘make more money from your customers’. It was all very frustrating because I didn’t have a business and therefore no customers either.
If you choose affiliate marketing like me, you won’t actually ‘sell’ anything yourself, you’ll just be ‘promoting’ things. You do this by linking to products from your website. If someone buys from the seller through your link, you’ll get a commission payment from them.
This basic system means that you can make money from anything if the seller has an affiliate program set up. Affiliate programs are normally accessed from the vendors own site, or else through an Affiliate Network. The choice is usually physical products such as those sold by and affiliate program such as Amazon, or digital products from places like Clickbank.
The 8 top affiliate networks
- Rakuten
- Peerfly
- ShareASale
- CJ Affiliate
- VigLink
- FlexOffers
- JVZoo
- Clickbank
5. Do I really need to worry about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation is really the ‘Black Art’ of the industry. No-one but the owners and programmers at Google know the exact rules of their algorithm and they change if frequently, but there are basic principles that you should adhere to when building your site to encourage Google to rank your site as high as possible.
You should write consistent, high quality content. Google likes original content and if you can regularly churn out posts with a word count of at least 1,500, and do it regularly, Google and the other search engines will start to take notice of your site.
You should research low competition keywords and optimise your site for them. It may not be possible to rank for the best keywords as there may be too much competition, but if you uncover some of the lower competition, long tail keywords you can get traffic that way.
You can do your keyword research at sites such as Jaaxy
6. Do I have to work every day on my website?
The busier you are on your website, the quicker you will see results and start making money. An online business is no different to any other job in that you need to put in consistent effort to make it work. If you can do this, keeping your intensity, writing consistently good content, you will succeed.
So, when you are starting out, I would say the answer to this is ‘yes’, especially in the first 3 months when the website is new. Google will start to give your site more weight as it gradually gets older. It will also sit up and notice you more if the site is regularly updated. The more time you put into your site, the quicker you’ll get results.
However, Google doesn’t always see your fresh content immediately, so you’ll have to give it a little time to update itself in the early days. As you post more, the Google bots will come back more frequently, until they almost ‘expect’ fresh content from you. If you can provide that, you’re onto a winner.
One of the great things about the WordPress platform is that you can also schedule when posts get released onto the live site, so you can prepare your posts ahead of time and then while you are relaxing on a beach somewhere, your website will still be updated. You’ll want to reply to any comments that are left on your articles, but these days that can even be done from a mobile phone.
I will say though that you should factor in time for your family and friends! Don’t become a complete recluse and burn yourself out. There’s nothing worse that writers block and the inability to get an article out, or being resented by your own kin. Be sensible, but consistent.
7. Will I need to employ people?
Generally you’ll be working on your own, so no. One of the great things of having an online business is that you don’t need a lot of the things that bog other businesses down. You don’t need employees or special premises, just an area of your home you can call an office.
If you want to get help elsewhere, writing content for example, you can do this by outsourcing and have someone write for you from websites like Fiverr and Upwork. This way you just get the help when you want it without having to worry about all the things that go with having an official employee.
Pretty much everything you need to do as an affiliate marketer can be outsourced as needed, ad-hoc. No medical insurance, national insurance and tax to pay for your employee. No holidays to honour or other leave to consider. No interviewing or ‘letting people go’, each gig is self contained.
8. How do I write good content?
There is nothing more crucial for your website than writing good content. It will govern whether your site is a success or not. You should write in a conversational style, encouraging your readers to comment on your posts. Try to include a call to action if you can. Good content will also be shared more often, spreading the word about you and the products you are promoting.
To write good content, make sure you have good knowledge of your niche. Spend some time researching your niche so you can write with authority. This will help with conversions and orders if you have affiliate links on your posts. Try not to put affiliate links on EVERY post you make. Mix it up a bit so people don’t regard your site as a ‘selling’ site.
If you have strong opinions about your niche, write about it! There’s nothing invites interaction like a bit of opinionated content! Try not to sit on the fence. If there’s something you don’t like, say so. Don’t be abusive or nasty, just tell people what you think. Product reviews are a great way to do this and you can build trust with your audience by warning them off harmful websites and scam affiliate schemes to keep their money safe.
If and when people leave comments on an article, always try to respond quickly, letting them know their comment is appreciated (even if it calls your original article as BS). Google likes nothing better than interaction and ‘live’ web pages.
9. Affiliate Marketing seems hard, is there an easier way?
No-one said it would be easy! You’ll need to work hard to be a success at Affiliate Marketing. If you are expecting to make money as part of a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll be sadly disappointed. This is where most people drop out early. They haven’t got the staying power, or don’t put in enough work. They also tend to want to pursue the free option all the time.
Quality training is something that you’ll need, but quality training also comes at a cost. ‘If you don’t pay, you won’t pay attention’ is the phrase that is often used. It basically means that the people most likely to succeed will be the ones who invest in themselves. You don’t get something for nothing in life, and quality training for Affiliate Marketing is one such thing.
Most people approach Affiliate Marketing in a wham bam, thank you ma’am kind of way and they’ll inevitably fail. The correct way is that of Attraction Marketing, where people come to you because you offer them solutions on a personal basis. Trying to sell to a stranger is doomed to failure, but this is what most people try and fail at. This is what makes Affiliate Marketing appear ‘hard’, until the penny drops.
Educate yourself, through Affiliate Marketing Training at Wealthy Affiliate, then you’ll be primed with the knowledge you need to make things easier for you.
Building your Affiliate Marketing business takes time and effort, but you can make things a lot easier for yourself by training yourself properly.
10. Do I need to know how to make a website?
Chances are, as a beginner you’ll not know how to make a website yet, but that’s why you’re here, right? Everyone is capable of learning to build a website from scratch, with the right training and help. It’s easier now than it used to be (you used to have to edit raw html code).
These days, websites can be built using automated tools, without having to go near any complicated code. You can do it right here :
As you get more accomplished and learn more about building sites and the theory behind it, you’ll get more into plugins and themes for your site, but you don’t need to know anything about how all the code works to be a success, you just have to write content!
Again, all this can be taught with the right training.
11. How much money can I make online?
Ah, the $64,000 question!
This is the question that gets asked most, and it’s like asking ‘how long is a piece of string’? In truth, you can make as much money as you like. Don’t believe me?
There are billions of people with internet access now, e-commerce is currently growing at 10% per annum, mobile e-commerce is still developing. BUT, more than half of the World population doesn’t have internet access. It is still to discover for them.
As more people get themselves online, the internet and e-commerce will explode further, especially because a lot of the new access will come through smart phones, especially in the Far East. The scope is vast.
How much can you make? Well, the amount is unlimited. The only thing stopping you is your attitude to commitment and effort on your part. You can make a grand per month and then just chill, or you can try to build as big an income as possible and then sell your site for multiples of your income.
For example, a website bringing in $5,000 per month can be sold for $200k.
That’s the going rate. You can pro-rata that figure to any size you want. If you’re pulling in that $1k a month, you can sell your site for $40k. But why give it all up? Keep earning a nice cashflow instead. The choice is ultimately up to you, but you get the idea.
Remember, Anything is possible
12. What should the subject of my website be?
That is really not for me to say, you can make your site about anything you like! Part of your education and training is to show you how to select your niche, but it can be absolutely anything you desire.
Any topic can make money online, from handbags to cameras, from usb sticks to baby products. People buy everything online these days, they don’t need to go to the shopping mall anymore. Only you know what you know. Only you can decide what ignites your passion and will allow to write with authority.
Writing is tough sometimes and you’ll get bored and frustrated. Make sure you pick a niche that you know something about, that excites you and will keep your enthusiasm going. Only you can decide, but make sure you pick something that can be monetized.
13. How do I get Google to rank my website?
Getting your site indexed by Google is something that must be achieved if you are to achieve any success. Google is the leading worldwide search engine, and like it or not, dominates and dictates web search technology.
Google closely guards the secret of it’s Search Engine Algorithm, and regularly changes it, so your website position in searches may vary after a Google update. Sometimes it falls in rank, sometimes it rises, depending on what Google decides is most important at the time.
Self proclaimed SEO experts will claim to be able to get you to the top of Google, but only Google truly know how your site is ranked.
Having said that, there are general good-practice techniques that will boost your site’s ranking and get your content found and seen, but your ranking will ultimately be determined by your visitors and their engagement with your site content. The amount of links you get and the comments you get are also important to Google.
SEO is not completely irrelevant to you, but don’t fall for any offer to make your site appear at Number 1 in Google for certain as it’s most likely going to be a transient thing if they ever achieve it, and will probably be based on a key phrase that generates little long term traffic.
The best thing Google likes? Content written by humans for a human readership.
14. How many hours per day do I need to spend on my business?
Before you actually start to post about your business on your blog, you’ll have to do the research. Unless you are such an expert that everything you write is in your head, you’ll need to spend some time trawling the internet for the information you are going to write about. Don’t let the research prevent you from writing, just do the two things side-by-side. That way you won’t get bogged down writing all the time.
On average, you’ll probably spend about an equal amount of time researching as in writing. Because of the way the business works, you can do this almost anywhere! It will probably be especially difficult to start with if you are holding down a full time job as well, but there are ways. If you have a long commute to work on a morning, perhaps on the train, you can spend this time working on your business. When you are work, spend your lunch break doing the same. Repeat on the train coming home.
The more you work and write, the more visitors you’ll get to your site and the more potential sales you’ll get. Once you start taking action, things will start to happen. Try to do something every day, make it into a habit. You’ll then start to see results.
15. What equipment will I need for my home office?
Starting off, any online business needs a good computer and a reliable internet connection. A laptop computer or a tablet will give you the greatest flexibility as you’ll be able to work anywhere with them. At a push, you can also use your mobile phone to edit your posts and websites, but it’s slightly more fiddly to do that, maybe as a last resort (although I do it almost every day).
When you are writing posts for your blog, you’ll need to illustrate it with photos. Try to use your own photos rather than using those already in Google Images on the net. You want to make your blog as unique as possible, so take your own photos. You can either use the camera on your phone, or invest in a decent camera.
Another good investment once you get things off the ground is in accounting software. This will help you to track all of your income and expenses and make submitting your tax return a bit of a doddle in the future.
These are the only absolute necessities for your business at the start. You can add more later as you need to.
16. How do I stop myself from being overwhelmed?
Unlike other businesses, it’s really quite easy to manage your time spent on an online business. It’s all really common sense, although it’s possible you may get a bit carried away and ignore your family and friends. Don’t do that! You need their backing and screening them out will not work!
If you follow the business training I recommend at Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll begin by finding your niche, then buy a suitable domain name and start researching products to talk about on your blog and ultimately review. Once you start posting reviews, you’ll also need to begin optimising the posts to attract the most traffic for your site. Wealthy Affiliate teaches you how to do all of this as part of their training. It’s very easy to follow and a natural pace develops.
If you still feel overwhelmed by it all, just slow down a bit.
Take it easy at the start and make sure you understand all of the concepts being taught as this knowledge will be the bedrock of all your future development. This is all handled in the Online Entrepreneur Certification Training
Don’t work too late into the night. Get plenty of sleep and make sure you wake up refreshed. You might find getting up earlier and working then, when fresh is better than burning the Midnight Oil.
Only start one website in one niche to begin with. Any more and you’ll dilute your efforts and everything will take longer.
Wealthy Affiliate training has an extensive Support System built in for you. This allows you to ask questions when you get stuck (you WILL). Make sure you use it to get the best out of your time there and this will avoid wallowing around looking for answers. JUST ASK!
Once you start seeing how things hang together you’ll probably get more and more excited and the overwhelming feelings will all disappear.
17. What are the most common mistakes I need to avoid?
What are the mistakes that everybody that fails in starting an online marketing business makes?
a) Not giving the systems enough time and giving up before you’ve even got going. It will take time to grow your business and start to see results. My advice is to give it at least a year. When I joined Wealthy Affiliate I went Premium in 3 days and immediately took out an annual subscription to make sure I didn’t quit early. Once I got into the training, I didn’t look back.
b) Picking the wrong niche. Probably because somebody told you it was the best niche to make money in. You should pick your own niche and not listen to others. Do your research and find products that sell and will help people solve their problems.
c) Rushing things at the start. You don’t need to spend extra money on accelerator SEO guides to try to make things work quicker. Write regularly, with good content and originality and make sure to network with like minded people. Don’t spend time reading demotivating posts on Facebook for example.
d) Don’t underestimate your own potential to make money online from your niche. Absolutely EVERYBODY has the ability to make money online, no matter what your race is, how many qualifications you have, your business experience or whether you are male of female.
e) Being a perfectionist when you set up your website. Don’t waste hours of time producing the prettiest website on the Planet because if it has no traffic, no-one will see it. If no-one sees it, you won’t make any money from it. Ugly websites have been known to make a fortune however, so put your time and effort into creating content, not cosmetics.
f) Spending far too much time on Social Media. People (including the President of the United States) waste more time on Facebook and Twitter than anywhere else on the Internet. When I started on Wealthy Affiliate, I stopped visiting Facebook and set up my blog to automatically send a link to my new posts to Twitter and LinkedIn.
The distractions of Social Media will kill your efforts, your momentum and enthusiasm and will result in you being pulled away from the things you should be concerned with.
g) Worrying too much that your niche has ‘already been done’. If a niche is popular, it means there is plenty of money to be made there. That’s what you want, right? You can compete in your niche by making yours a micro-niche. Big websites started out as small websites. They take years to grow into the sites they are today. You are in it for the long haul, so you have to realise it’s not going to happen overnight for you.
The internet is awash with money. If you target your efforts correctly you’ll start to capture some of it for yourself.
h) Using other people’s images on your website. Don’t use any graphics from the Internet unless the image is marked as free to use, or you’ve had permission from the copyright holder to use it. In any case, if you use your own images your content will be unique and no-one else will have it.
i) Not setting up a work schedule for yourself. You need to compile a timetable for your business efforts, based around your available free time, your family, your current commitments and a realistic number of hours per day to work. You can’t bang away doing 12 hours work per day for 3 months, non-stop. Spread your efforts out to stop yourself from burning out. Try to post 2-3 times per week.
j) Copying content from other people’s websites. Google looks down dimly on this practice and will penalise your site. Be especially careful of this because it can inadvertently catch you out. For example, if you are posting links from Amazon, don’t be tempted to copy the descriptions and review text. You might also find your Amazon affiliate account terminated too.
k) Not providing enough text in your posts. For Google (and the other search engines) to value what you’ve written and index it highly, you need to write at least 1,000 words and preferably 2-3 times that much. At this point in THIS post, i’ve written nearly 5,000 words.
Go into as much detail as you need, and don’t make the mistake of trying to cram your keywords into your posts so they read poorly. Always write for humans, not for search engines.
18. How long before I start to make money?
You’ll not be surprised to find that this is an almost impossible question to answer. I’m not just saying that, there are so many variables to take into account that it could take a few weeks or nearly a year. It depends on the niche, how active it is, how easy it is to monetise, how closely you’ve followed the training and whether you write good content.
I started to make money after about 3 months of joining Wealthy Affiliate. You might find you do it faster. I posted an update recently to my WA Blog, giving my earnings so far (at the time of writing this, i’ve been going for 7 months).
The key is, if you don’t see immediate income or income after a few months – KEEP GOING! If you see immediate income – KEEP GOING! The only way to fail at this business is to quit. Most people who fail at Affiliate Marketing quit in the first couple of months then badmouth it as a scam. It isn’t a scam, they just haven’t put enough effort in or given it enough time.
There are enough people at Wealthy Affiliate who have succeeded with it to demonstrate that it’s not just a pipe dream. Those people have put the effort in and been rewarded for it.
A ‘niche’ is a small section – a specialist subject if you will. Niche Marketing is selling your goods or services based on this small section. You aren’t trying to market your product to the whole population, but rather to a small section of it – only those interested in your ‘Niche’.
This has great advantages to you as a Marketer. You are targeting your activities and therefore not wasting time and energy on those unlikely to purchase from you. It’s also easier to build an audience and a relationship with them. You can establish yourself as an authority in a niche a lot easier.
Definition of a niche
A nich is a sub-group of people. For example “Health and Wellbeing” is really an industry rather than a niche. “Weight Loss” is a subdivision of that, but is still regarded as an industry. However, not everyone who is looking to lose weight has the same needs. Everyone is different. So, by breaking this down we arrive at smaller sub-divisions that form “niches”. For example:
i) How to lose weight before a wedding
(ii) How to lose weight with no exercise
(iii) Ketogenic Weight Loss
(iv) Losing weight by swimming
(v) Weight Loss with Diabetes
These are all niches within the Weight Loss industry. The more specific your niche, the more likely you’ll be able to dominate it. However, please make sure your chosen niche is profitable for you. Make sure you pick a niche you are passionate about and that you can monetise it in some way. Next, you need to choose how you are going to make that money. If you choose affiliate marketing, you’ll need to start looking for affiliate programs related to it.
20. Why is website traffic important to me and how do I increase it?
Well, your website lives or dies by the traffic it receives. You can have the swankiest website in the World, but if it has no traffic you won’t make any money from it. You’ll have heard people saying that Content is King? Well, traffic is his Queen.
The more people you can attract to your website, the more likely some of them are going to click on one of your affiliate links and buy something. It’s a huge numbers game.
If you have a 1% conversion rate (a typical figure), you’ll be getting one order for every 100 visitors. If you get those 100 visitors every day you’ll be getting one order per day. Depending on what you are promoting, that could be cents per day or several dollars.
If on the other hand, you get 5,000 visitors per day, for the same conversion rate, you’ll be getting 50 orders per day. That is a huge difference. Even cents and pennies per order will result in a daily income of $25-30, which will yield a nice $750-900 per month!
If you are making $2 commission on every sale and sell 50 a day, then that’s when income can explode. Even that will yield $3,000 a month. Not too shabby, and you could make that from just one product!
The reason that Content is King is that this is by far the best way to get traffic to your site for free. If you can write reviews regularly and provide consistent, unique and informative content, you’ll see a gradual build in your website traffic and earnings.
See: How posting to your website regularly explodes traffic
21. Do I need to know anything about sales and marketing before I start?
You don’t need any particular qualification to get started, but it’s a good idea to get a basic feel of what you are going to do. You don’t have to have encyclopedic knowledge of your subject because you can learn as you go. Because you are just going to be providing information to people that will solve their problems, you don’t need to have any knowledge of sales to actually sell things.
However, as you grow your business and learn about optimising your pages, you can improve your chances of making a sale and that 1% conversion rate might become 2% or even 3%.
Wealthy Affiliate will teach you all about things such as Sales Funnels and How to build your email list. You’ll learn the best strategies (and the worst) to convert interested visitors into customers.
22. How do I handle tax and keeping my books?
Every country handles their taxes slightly differently. In the UK (at the time of writing – May 2019) it is ok to claim your early income from affiliate marketing as normal income. As a Sole Trader, you are allowed to earn £1,000 per annum tax free from ‘casual income’ (which your early efforts will probably be). Once your business starts to grow, you’ll need to submit details on your Tax Return. I believe it is similar in the US, but i’m not sure if there is any tax-free thresholds.
If you choose to keep your records in software, programs like Quickbooks and TurboTax can automatically submit your income to HMRC or the IRS. The great thing about an online business is that it automatically generates an email paper-trail to support your submissions.
If you use your car for any of your business, keep details of your mileage and fuel consumed. If you have an area of your house you use as an office, you may be able to claim a tax allowance against it.
If you start to grow into a seriously large business, you should probably think about forming a Limited Company.
I can’t give you any advice on tax matters though as i’m not qualified. You should consult your accountant and ask him what is best in your own situation.
23. What if I hate the niche I picked, can I change it later?
This is probably the easiest question of all to answer! If you’ve started your online business in one particular niche and you find you detest it, simply change! Just drop the subject you don’t like and move to something that gives you more satisfaction.
When I first started, I began in a niche that I found wasn’t really monetisable. I quickly realised that i’d picked an unsuitable niche and so changed to my current one promoting Wealthy Affiliate and exposing scams to protect people from making too many mistakes before they get going.
Being scammed saps your strength and faith in legitimate online options.
24. How much do I have to write every day?
Nobody can really define it for you, but if you’re looking for a rough guide, you’ll find that if you try to write 500-1,000 words per day it will be sustainable for you. As you create content you’ll find you naturally target keywords and key phrases that automatically attract search engines. You won’t know this is happening until you notice a slow rise in your daily traffic.
When I say 500-1,000 words per day, they don’t have to be individual posts. You can write a 2,000 word post spread over 2 days for example. You should try to keep each individual article (post) over 1,000 words to get most benefit from it. The more words you write, the easier Google will find it to suck out the context of the page.
25. Where can I learn more, or go to get help if i’m stuck?
If you click here, you can learn more about Affiliate Marketing and even build yourself a website, free of charge.
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Dave
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This is a very helpful post about the 25 most frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing. Anybody who is looking into starting as an affiliate marketer, will find this really useful. Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but if you consistently work on your website and create quality content, then the rewards are there. I agree that Wealthy Affiliate is the best platform to get training and be part of a supportive community.
Thanks for your comment LineCowley,
Affiliate Marketing is often misunderstood and linked with MLM and other models. The crazy thing is the unlimited amount of money we can make! Affiliate Marketing really is the closest thing to passive income you can get. Write a review once and sell multiple times, potentially for ever more. Perfect.
Dave