There are three primary aspects to success with any online business: 1) Traffic, 2) Conversions, and 3) Repeat Business. Unfortunately, most affiliate marketers focus too much on conversions. Yes, it’s true that you must absolutely find a product which converts.

However, once you find a product that converts you need to figure out how you’re going to get repeat business from that person, and then find similar individuals to come to your website. Hence, your marketing plan should be structure in the following order: 1) Conversions, 2) Repeat Business, and 3) Traffic.

The second mistake most affiliate marketers make is completely ignoring the concept of repeat business. Repeat business is very vital, and is truly the only way you’ll be able to automate your business and earn passive income.

Most individuals do not realize was true passive income is. I drew a little chart to help you out:

This chart, of course is just hypothetical. But I want you to get the main idea here: As your business grows, you spend less time on it and your revenue gradually grows. So, when you started out at working 40 hours per week, you made around $40 per week, or $1 per hour.

If you set the proper steps in place, then over time you will be able to spend even less on your business, as little as 5 hours, and earn around $240 or $48 per hour. Once again, I just created this chart on the hypothesis that each week you’ll raise your revenue by 50%.

Of course, things don’t work that way.

Passive Income = Passive Traffic + High Conversions + Repeat Business

The first step to passive income is following the right product. This will probably be the most difficult aspect of your business. I was lucky to be able to find a handful of products from beginning that already converted for my site.

In the beginning, don’t worry about how much traffic it takes to convert a product. Just find something that converts, whether it gives you $50 per sale or $5. The best way to go about this is to find multiple products, around 3-5, and promote all of them at the same time.

If you’re using a blog format, as I did, you can simply write 10 articles for each product, post them on your blog, and see what happens. Underneath each post, link out to the product, and place a tracking code so you know which article converted the sale for you.

You’ll generate traffic through SEO primarily. But you can also send social media, ppc, forum, and referral traffic to your website.

Once you get a single sale, stick to that product. Look at your clickbank stats and see how many hops it took you to convert that product. For example, lets assume that it took 200 hops for you to convert a particular product.

This means that 200 people saw the product’s sales page, but only 1 person decided to buy. This means that the conversion rate is .5%. Your goal now is to get that conversion rate up to 1%. The first step is to create a landing page.

Go back and locate the initial article that converted the sale. Convert this into a landing page. Here’s an example of an article I used to convert sales that I transformed into a landing page: http://shahtraining.com/hundred-bodyweight-exercises/

As you can see, this landing page doesn’t follow the traditional approach of a landing page. But it works, and that’s all that matters. But to convert into a landing page, you’re going to actually have to elaborate on the product just slightly.

Especially if the vendor has some sort of up sell, simply talk about it. Include product features and benefits, but write it such a matter that it becomes a part of the article itself. Hence, it’s not just a random sales pitch.

There’s relevancy there.

Once you’ve done this, go back and change back all the links of all the articles that you published earlier and point them back to your new landing page. Now you suddenly have 25-50 articles pointing back to your landing page.

This will help improve the SEO of that particular page, hence generating even more valuable content to your landing page. Over the next few weeks see how many sales you make from page. Each week, measure your conversion rate.

If after a week, if you’re not at 1% conversions, then make little tweaks in the page to improve conversion. Here are some ideas:

• Adding video
• Adding testimonials
• Elaborating on one aspect of the product
• If it’s an eBook, copy and paste the table and contents
• Elaborate on one specific benefit

Remember, your landing page should try to get the prospect excited about the product. Hence, they’re already in “buy mode” when they get to the vendors page.

There you go. I’ve just provided you with a blueprint of how to get you first few clickbank sales. Now go do it!

Next time, we’ll go deeper into the idea of getting the income more passive.