MAKING MONEY IN YOUR SLEEP: IS IT POSSIBLE?

It has been long. Really long. I missed you, my dear freelancer. Well, I took a hiatus. It is not that I just vamoosed. No, I was trying out something new and then come back here to pour it out to you. Let’s get to it.

When I started freelancing, I had one dream in mind. To make money in my sleep. Well, I am yet to get there since most of my work requires that I burn the midnight oil writing articles for clients and also wake up at the crack of dawn to continue bidding for more work. Therefore, I have never made any money in my sleep. The only time I tried doing so was when I wrote a weight loss eBook and tried to sell it really cheaply on Amazon Kindle. People didn’t buy my cheap and up to this day, I have never sold the eBook! It is there lying on Amazon waiting for a really good Samaritan to come pick it up and award a few dollars to the writer.

And so, my efforts to earn in my sleep died that way. But I have these friends of mine who, well started freelancing earlier than me and have built some really nice websites where they affiliate sell other people’s products and they earn a commission. Well, I never believed that they were really earning money in their sleep because—hey, who does that? To earn you have to wake up, fold up your sleeves and really work your body off, right?

So towards the end of last year, I started following them in the hope to catch them pants down and shout ‘Gotcha, you have been lying all along! There is nothing like earning in your sleep’ On the other hand, I wanted to know how to do it, that is if it really worked.

And so I joined this 2017 Internet Marketing challenge where guys were posting things that they were doing to earn in their sleep. Well, on reading their updates, I wondered whether these guys were serious. All they wrote was technical jargons which to me were simply gibberish. I figured out that this was another Facebook group of lunatics and lazy people who had so much internet to waste. Just as I was about to leave the group and go back to my active iwriter writing, Patrick, the guy who had invited me and also happens to be the group founder owing to his success in affiliate marketing asked how I was faring. I told him that the earn money in your sleep thing was a total hoax. And that there was no way, I would continue wasting both my Internet and time seeing insane people post things that they did not also understand.

Select Niche

Patrick told me that you have to select a niche which is a field in which you are genuinely interested in so that you can create quality blog posts on the same. The write-ups must really be engaging and promoting the product being sold. I told him that I was interested in men’s health. He told me that men’s health is quite a broad field, I needed to narrow down to a more specific field. I chose testosterone and set up this testosterone boosting products site.

SEO Tools

To know how much my niche ‘testosterone’ was being searched on the Internet, Patrick advised me to use Ahrefs.com which is a SEO tool for getting traffic towards a certain keyword. I signed up for the account and started checking what Google users were checking for related to ‘testosterone’. I found out that people were looking for low T, boost testosterone, anabolic testosterone boosters, and testosterone levels. This would form my first keywords.

Select an affiliate network to work with

Two, you need to select an affiliate network with which to work with. There are many affiliate networks today. Most popular are Amazon, Clickbank, and eBay. Well, with me, I have chosen to use Moreniche because it is more health-centred plus it has some really exciting features. Key among them include:

• Every affiliate marketer is assigned to a private trainer who shows them the ropes to earning while sleeping
• More niche has awesome commissions of up to 40% of the sale you make.
• More niche gives out lifetime cookies meaning that when your readers click on your links, you will still get a commission even if they buy the product three months later.

Build Up a Site with Good UI

Patrick asked that I build a website with a good User Interface (UI) so that my readers are able to easily read content as well as buy the items they are looking to buy. I was also to install tablepress plugin for comparison tables. Finally, all this was to be backed up with great content since, in marketing, content is king. My website sells their products namely: testogen, crazy bulk and marine muscle. They are all testosterone boosting products and I am targeting a United States market.

Back linking

After setting up the website, I was to do some back linking. This is where the rubber meets the road. It is a complicated and strenuous task that calls for consistency and persistence. You need to also be creative so as to gain the backlinks. Personally, I am trying to backlink by commenting on other people’s blogs, guest posting as well as translate my website to Swahili Wikipedia.

My efforts have not been in vain. Currently, I have gotten some 13 quality backlinks, content for the website and yes, I have made one sale. I sold testogen yesterday and earned 13 euros. I was overwhelmed when I saw the email telling me so. It came to me when I was in a friend’s fundraiser. Well, I was not in sleep but I was not actively freelancing.

I will continue talking more about my journey!