1 Thing You Need To Do Now To Earn Passive Income For Your Business

How would it feel to wake up every morning to see that you made money while you were sleeping?

How would it feel to know that you are earning passive income from your business?

Pretty cool, right?

This post may contain affiliate links.

It is the blogger’s dream…

“I’ll start a blog sharing what I’m passionate about, get a bunch of followers, find ways to monetize it, and soon I’ll be making enough money to replace my day job and spend my time doing what I love!”

Sounds simple. You know it’s possible because you see other people doing it.

They post their income reports and show you how their business generates passive income every single month.

But….

I’m guessing if you are reading this post, then you are probably having trouble with the whole “how to make money” concept.

Trust me. I was in the same position.

This is where affiliate marketing comes in.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. 

In simple terms, it means that you are rewarded for recommending and promoting products and services on your website.

With affiliate marketing, you receive a commission for any sales that occur from your referral link. If you are completely new to affiliate marketing, I recommend that you check out my Affiliate Marketing Beginner’s Guide.

One of the best ways to earn money from your online business is by having your own product or service, but I know that may not be for everyone.

Maybe you haven’t had the time to make one, or maybe you simply don’t want to.

You can still earn passive income by using affiliate marketing on your website. It will help you to provide your audience with products and services they want without having to create them yourself.

Before I offer my advice on how you can get started, I wanted to share with you some tips on ethics.

You spend a TON of time growing your business and building a loyal audience; you do not want to just forget all of this to make money.

ONLY recommend items that you use and honestly believe in.

Your readers will be able to see right through you when you are just trying to make a sale. In the past, I would link to anything that sort of related to my post, whether I used it or not.

This was WRONG.

I have now created my own affiliate marketing plan, and have my own policies and beliefs that I uphold.

Before I jumped back into trying to make money from affiliate programs, I sat down and created guidelines for myself. Here are two of my non-dispute policies:

• I will NOT recommend a product or service that I have not used.

• I will NOT link to anything that is not helpful to my audience.

If you are completely new to the concept of being an affiliate partner, then hop over to my Affiliate Marketing Beginners Guide before moving on.

Today, I want to share with you the #1 way to generate passive income with affiliate marketing on your business website.

Want to know what it is?

Drum roll please….

A resources page.

Sounds simple, right? It’s because it is simple. (You can check out my resources page here!) 

A resources page is a post or page on your website that lists all of the resources you recommend within your niche or industry. My friend, Michelle from Making Sense of Cents, told me about this brilliant idea of having a recommendations page to help out your readers.

You’re probably thinking, “So, why do I need this and how will it generate passive income?”

Great question. Keep reading and I will show you.

Why You Need to Create a Resources Page:

1. Increases your income

Not only will your readers be interested in your top tools, but this page will increase your conversions to generate more income. It gives your audience a behind-the-scenes look into your toolbox, which is extremely valuable.

A resources page allows you to recommend everything that you use in one place. Your readers want to know what you are using, so that they can achieve the same results. It takes the guesswork out of wondering what products or services you use every single day.

Once you have built a relationship with your readers, this page will consistently generate passive income, because they will trust your opinion and purchase what you recommend.

2. Answers your readers questions

Your resource page will help to eliminate a lot of the questions your readers may have about what you use on a daily basis. It takes out the guesswork for them, and will cut down on the number of emails you receive.

3. Increases traffic

Once you have created this page and start to promote it, you will see that it will quickly gain traction with your audience. Your target audience will enjoy seeing that behind-the-scenes look into your top tools and resources, and will want to read what you have on there.

My resources page is in my top 10 posts that get the most amount of traffic on my website.

4. Increases SEO rank

By creating a page that includes your niche’s top resources and tools, you can actually increase your search engine ranking. Not only will this drive more people to this post, but it can increase conversions, because the people who come to your resources page from Google are highly targeted, since they were directly searching for this particular topic.

My resources page is titled: “Top Blogging Tools And Resources.”

I now rank for two specific keyword phrases that are related to this title. This means that Google is sending traffic to this post because my resources page pops up as a relevant search term.

To find good keywords to use in your title:

• Click on ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.’

• Type in a relevant phrase to your resource page and industry. Example: If you have a photography business, you could type in ‘best photography tools.’

• This will pop up with a ton of results. Click on ‘Keyword Ideas.’

• Find keywords that have low competition, but a high search volume, to use in your title.

How to Make a Resources Page:

I already mentioned how easy it is to create, so the first thing you need to do is start with a blank post or page on your website. You can add a new post just like you would when you are creating a new blog post.

Next, you want to categorize the top tools and resources that you use. For this site, mine are broken down into hosting, plugins, images, themes, emails, planners, etc.

Think of how you can categorize the resources and tools that you use.

Now, you can make a list of the top items you would recommend to your readers.

ONLY recommend items that you use and genuinely think will help your audience. You should NEVER recommend something just to earn a quick buck. You can refer back to my Affiliate Marketing Beginner’s Guide.

Here are a few examples to get you thinking:

• Books

• Products

• Services

• Software

• Equipment

• Training

• Courses

Everything on your resources page doesn't need to be an affiliate link. Think of other useful things that will help your audience, like top articles in your industry, or publications about topics within your niche.

You need to remember that you always have to put your reader’s needs first, so make sure you are still providing them with value before you are trying to sell them on anything.

You don't want this page to just consist of links that will make you money.

Write a short description of the items that you recommend and why. If you have relevant tutorials or review posts on your website, then link to those in the description.

Now that you have created a resources page, you want to focus on promoting it as often as you can to help increase your income.

How to Promote Your Resources Page to Generate More Income:

• Interlink - Link to this new page as often as you can in relevant posts. Look in your archives and see if there are posts where you can reference your top tools or resources to drive more traffic to this page.

• Place a link in your menu - Create a link to this page in your site's primary menu. This will help to increase its visibility and get more traffic to this page. You can see in this image that 22% of my traffic clicks on ‘Resources’ in my menu.

• Optimize the page - I already showed you how to find a good keyword or phrase to use for your headline, but you also want to take the time to optimize the post. Use your keyword or phrase naturally within your resources page; include it in the ‘alt-text’ of your images; put it in the meta-description; and follow all the normal SEO principles that you would use if you were creating a new blog post.

• Pinterest - Create a pinnable image for this new resources post you created and pin it to your relevant personal boards and group boards. Pinterest is a powerful tool that can help you to increase your income, but you need to leverage your traffic from it by promoting this post with a beautiful Pinterest image. Read my post on how to create a viral pin to help you increase your affiliate earnings. This is one of the top ways that I generate affiliate revenue with my blog.

• Social Media - Frequently promote this post on your social media networks.

ACTION STEP: Create a resources page for your website and start promoting it using the methods I just listed.

Here are a few examples of other bloggers with resource pages: Pinch of Yum, Making Sense of Cents, Smart Passive Income, and Brilliant Business Moms.

Do you have a resources page on your site? If so, does it generate passive income?