In episode 26 of The Side Hustle Show, I’m joined by Josh and Jill Stanton from ScrewtheNinetoFive.com. This pair is living the digital nomad dream, coming to us all the way from Chiang Mai, Thailand!
Thanks to Adam from TropicalNomad.com for the intro!
They earn a living running their location-independent affiliate marketing business from their laptops, and share the five keys to their success during our call.
I can’t believe we made it to episode 26 without having an affiliate marketing conversation! This has been my “main hustle” for the past 5 years.
There are a ton of great, actionable tips here to get you started with an affiliate side hustle. In fact, we use one of my neglected sites as lens and a conversation piece to move through the discussion.
Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show on iTunes!
Subscribe to The Side Hustle Show on Stitcher!
You’ll learn:
- 3 strategies for selecting a niche.
- How to do the keyword research and competitive analysis.
- Why Josh says, “competition is more important than search volume.”
- 2 unique SEO strategies, in addition to guest posting.
- Some sweet content creation ideas to make your site more compelling without making it “sales-y”
- The most important thing to consider when building an email list.
The 5 Pillars:
- Niche selection
- Keyword research / competitive analysis
- Traffic generation
- Content creation
- List building
Links mentioned:
- Stop Building Affiliate Sites
- LiveChatSoftwareHQ.com
- Long Tail Pro (affiliate link) | My interview w/ Spencer Haws
- Open Site Explorer
- PRPowerShot.com
- ScrapeBox.com
- Xenu broken link sleuth | Article explaining this
- Marie Forleo
- Aweber
- Reachmail
- BadAssGuestBlogging.com
What do you think? Could affiliate marketing be your ticket to quitting your job and working from exotic locations around the world?
Be sure to stop by ScrewtheNinetoFive.com, say hi to Josh and Jill, and grab their free Art of Authority guide. Trust me, it’s a good one.
If you have any questions about the episode, be sure to leave a note in the comments below and I’ll guarantee you get an answer from one of us.
Hi Nick!
This podcast seemed to go so fast for me because I enjoy affiliate marketing so I was listening intently. I picked up a lot of good advice from this podcast.
I like Josh and Jill’s strategy. I like the idea of the authority site as compared to smaller affiliate (churn and burn) type sites. I find it is much easier and enjoyable for myself to write on topics I like. I’ve lost interest quickly when I’ve made affiliate sites on random topics for the possible income. Enjoy your trip overseas!
Thanks Eartha! I’m with you — the more authoritative sites definitely seem to have the long-term advantage.
Cheers!
Thanks so much for having us on, Nick!! We had a blast :-)
You bet! I know we could geek out on this topic for hours :)
Great podcast Nick! There were tons really good informative tips in this one! Will have to listen again for sure. Josh and Jill were great guests too – already downloaded their authority guide. Hope you have them on again sometime.
Awesome! Glad you liked it!
Great Podcast!
I got soo much valuable information, I really think this podcast should have a part 2.
I listenend when I was in the car running errands for work and the first thing I did when I got back to the office was to IMMEDIATELY go renew all my godaddy domains.
Keep up the great work and Im looking forward to checking out the content you guys are putting out.
Cheers,
Michael Riscica
Nick,
We are loving your show and we have started a website and blog through your affiliate link with Bluehost/Wordpress, so hopefully you got a few more pennies in your piggy bank!
Question—Does one of your affiliate marketing podcasts address the question of WHEN to start adding affiliate links? We are building a blog right now and will go live in about a month. Do we need to wait to monetize (in any of the forms you have suggested—affiliates, ads, memberships, etc) it until we have a certain number of page views or followers?
And a related question is how soon should we go live with the blog? How much of our content needs to be written before publishing? (We have an initial list of about 30 blog topics and have written about 20% thus far.) Should we wait until we have more there or just go live now?
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the note. I think you can start adding affiliate links from Day 1. The only challenge is some advertisers who approve publishers manually might want to see a site with some content on it first.
Regarding when to hit publish, the advantage of publishing sooner rather than later is it starts the clock of Google indexing your material. I’d get it out there.