how to do affiliate marketing in 5 hours a weekDo you want to make money online but only have a few extra hours to spare?

There are lots of explanations floating around about how to do affiliate marketing, and what some of the best strategies to use are.

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Unfortunately, many of the existing material focuses on how to build an affiliate site for a heavy part time or even a full time job.

In this post I’ll share a strategy that will work, even if you only have 5 hours a week or less.

The Basic Principles

Regardless of how much time you have to invest in your project, the basic principles of affiliate marketing remain the same.

You’re going to be tackling the following steps:

  1. Pick a hobby or passion
  2. Find a market niche related to that hobby
  3. Build a website
  4. Write helpful blog posts and product reviews, using affiliate links
  5. Rinse and repeat.

You can read more on these principles in this post, or follow along with this free training.

The 5 Hour Difference

The difference when you’re trying to do affiliate marketing in only 5 hours a week is that you need to be extremely careful about how you plan and execute your blog.

Low Competition is EXTREMELY Important

The most important difference between a 5 hour a week business strategy and a 20 hour a week business strategy is the ability to target a low competition niche.

While I believe that every niche has low competition keywords that present opportunities to rank a site and generate traffic, regardless of how competitive the overall niche is, getting to rank for any keyword in a high competition niche takes longer and requires more time up front.

This means that you need to take the first market research steps more seriously than if you had more time to invest. You really want to make sure you find products to promote that don’t have a lot of other well-ranking websites promoting them, and that you’re able to find a lot of small websites ranking on the first page for some of your key niche keywords.

Avoiding Social

The other major difference with a 5 hour a week strategy is that you’re probably not going to have a lot of time to invest in social media outreach.

I recommend that you focus the overwhelming majority of your time on creating new content for your website (with 5 hours, you should target 4-5 posts a week) and less time on other promotional activity.

Setup accounts on the major social networks and post your new blog articles, but don’t spend much more time than that.

This will mean that your website will grow a little more slowly to begin with, but in the long run it’s the best way to make use of your limited time.

Follow A Clear Action Plan

Finally, it’s essential that you have a detail plan in place for every single action that you take.

While this is a good idea regardless of the amount of time you’re willing to put in, it’s especially true when time is limited.

If you don’t know where to begin or what to include in that plan, follow an established program that will clearly outline every action you need to take on the route to success.

For more information on getting started with affiliate marketing, click here.