Why Use Affiliate Marketing Mentors?

Are you looking for affiliate marketing mentors? Welcome to affiliate marketing mentors online – a resource for struggling affiliate marketers.

When I started learning affiliate marketing over 15 years ago, I tried everything. I tried all sorts of tactics for selling products and for marketing websites. Some of them worked and produced a small amount of traffic, but most of them didn’t work at all!

I made a few ‘easy wins’ after lots of hard work. If I had been wiser and less enthusiastic, I would’ve quit, and got a proper job – like everyone was telling me to do!

Why Use Affiliate Marketing Mentors?

Not everyone wants a mentor, but since you’re here, I’ll assume you’re at least interested! If you’re looking for a mentor, you’ve probably had some experiences with affiliate marketing already. Or, perhaps you’re a complete beginner?

As you may or may not be aware, affiliate marketing is a tough business. It can be really good, but it can also be really tough. (See how difficult is affiliate marketing). It’s a performance based business which means you can do very very well if you’re at the top of your game, but you can also struggle getting off the starting blocks.

There’s many pitfalls you can meet as an affiliate. If you’ve gone it alone for a while, learning affiliate marketing, you probably know some of these already?! If not, you’re in the right place to avoid many of them. By getting yourself an affiliate mentor, you can shortcut many of these issues to get your online business profitable more quickly.

Here’s a few off the biggest mistakes I’ve made over the years:

• Not controlling my time and activities enough and being a ‘busy fool’
• Jumping from one ‘shiny object’ to another thinking the next one will be easier!
• Focusing on the wrong actions which produce little traction and ignoring the tough steps which were out of my comfort zone, but which make the biggest impact
• Not working on myself and not seeing that as a problem – personal growth

There are just a few! See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid for the full list!

Affiliate Marketing Mentors : What You’re Doing Wrong

Without 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching, it’s difficult to know exactly what someone is doing wrong. Once I joined an online community of mentors and other online business owners, I started looking ‘over the shoulder’ of other affiliates who were further down the path than I was.

This alone let me see and understand what I was doing wrong. Plus, being able to ask questions and receive feedback is invaluable as an affiliate marketer. Without feedback, you have to become very aware of your own shortcomings in order to grow. It’s very easy to get stuck repeating old behaviours which aren’t serving you.

Newbie Affiliate Common Problems

There’s several problems a new affiliate marketer will face. The biggest one is arguably their understanding of what they are doing. It’s difficult to see beyond what you understand so your actions will always be based on your understanding and knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know!

Get the wrong knowledge and you’ll set off doing things which won’t move your online business forwards. I like the analogy of a spaceship heading for the moon; less than one degree of inaccuracy in its trajectory, and it will be thousands of miles off course. Affiliate marketing is the same. Get the right knowledge from the start, and your results can be very different.

Here’s a few examples:

• Looking too much for results before taking the right actions to generate any results – I have definitely been guilty of this! Don’t look at results, focus on your daily activity first.
• Expecting too much from small amounts of work. If you’re spending all your time blogging, for example, don’t expect to suddenly get loads of sales. Free marketing strategies are notoriously slow. If you want fast results, you’ll need to pay for marketing which is faster (and more easily scaled up).
• Getting frustrated and giving up. You will get frustrated with affiliate marketing. Your response/reaction is what counts! Don’t let frustrations stop you moving forwards and taking action.
• Expecting it to be easy. Affiliate marketing is not easy. Certainly it isn’t in the first instance. Over time, once you learn what actually works and produces results, you’ll get better and making sales will be automatic. But until that time, you’ll have your work cut out.

Access Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What does an affiliate marketing mentor offer you? You can join an affiliate marketing community by signing up on this website (click here) to receive the free email series. You’ll get an email each day over several days with information about the community and what it offers.

If you decide to become a member, you can access a number of online private groups which allow you to join in webinars, ask questions and attend trainings. This is a great resource if you’re serious about building a long term sustainable business from the internet. Affiliate mentoring can help you take your online business to the next level.

Many affiliates set out to build an online business but never actually make it a reality. This is because there’s so much conflicting information available. By joining a community, you can seek the help of other people who are further ahead than you in the affiliate marketing business.

Whether you want help with marketing an affiliate business, or you want to learn to market your own business, this can help dramatically with your understanding and learning curve.

Sign up on my website here for more details and get back to me with any questions. Speak soon!

Why You Need Affiliate Marketing Mentors To Succeed Online

There’s a huge amount to learn within affiliate marketing. What products to promote, different affiliate marketing commission rates, how to market affiliate products online, how to know your target market, and on an on it goes! Without this knowledge, you can struggle for years without getting any traction. That’s why many would-be affiliates believe affiliate marketing does not work! But it does work, it’s just not as easy as you initially think!

Getting a mentor for your affiliate business can help in many ways:

• Learning the technical skills needed to set up Google compliant websites, landing pages, autoresponders and so on
• Un-learning preconceived ideas about building an online business and getting your mindset right.
• Psychological blocks to succeeding as an affiliate marketer and affiliate psychology.
• Beliefs around struggle and poverty which may keep us trapped however hard we struggle to overcome them by doing things.
• Holding you accountable to your action plans, goal setting and marketing strategy.
• Helping you decide on a marketing strategy which is right for you and which meets your needs.
• Choosing the right products – see affiliate marketing commission rates.

Choosing A Marketing Strategy Which Is Right For You

One of the hardest things as an affiliate marketer is choosing a marketing strategy which works for you. There’s many marketing strategies you can choose from such as:

• Blogging
• Organic video marketing
• Paid video marketing – YouTube or Facebook
• Social media organic marketing
• Social media paid marketing
• Niche website building
• SEO – search engine optimisation
• Paid search marketing

Choosing a marketing strategy which suits your time and budget is pretty important if you’re going to succeed as an affiliate. Some affiliates build huge businesses very quickly, if they can afford it. With a high ticket product range, and subscription products which pay affiliate recurring commissions, it can be easier to use paid marketing and make a profit. With lower value products, which may offer lower commissions also, paid marketing can be out of reach to the affiliate.

Knowing a time scale for your affiliate efforts is useful too. If you expect too much from your marketing strategy too soon, you’re likely to quit before you get any traction. So it’s a good idea to choose a strategy which meets your goals – in terms of action steps, budget and timeframe.

Using Recurring Commission Products

One of the early mistakes I made as an affiliate marketer was jumping on a strategy without learning what the best products were to sell. I use Amazon and eBay affiliate programs which although are trusted sites and easy to sell from, offer pretty low affiliate rates of commission.

So after spending months creating content, I was able to make tiny commissions by selling books on Amazon. I earned less than $1 for the sale! Later, I learned to promote high ticket affiliate products and made a $1000 commission for a similar amount of work.

So as you can see, there are different ways of earning through using the affiliate marketing model. Would you rather work the hard way or the easy way!? See also affiliate marketing cheat sheet for my fastest affiliate strategy.

With recurring commission products, you can earn a consistent income from affiliate marketing much more quickly. A recurring commission product offers ongoing value and is often a membership or software product. Products which offer a lifetime value to the customer are the best since these can pay lifetime commissions to those who refer them!

Affiliate Marketing Mentors – Paid Marketing Versus Free Marketing

If you want to escape a corporate career, you’ll likely take a very different route with an affiliate business than if you just want another income source. Those needing to escape an unhappy circumstance quickly, can do so thorough using high ticket affiliate programs and paid marketing.

Still, this will take some time and effort, but it’s much quicker and more scalable than using free marketing strategies such as blogging and organic video marketing, for example.

If you already have a few income sources, and are looking to make affiliate marketing an extra source of income, there may not be the need to replace an existing income so quickly. In this case, content marketing might be a better fit for you.

Although paid marketing is faster and more scaleable than organic marketing, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Not everyone has the budget to invest in high ticket affiliate items and use paid marketing either.

Why Get A Mentor? – To Model Success

The fastest way to have success online with an affiliate business is to model the success of others who have already achieved it.

It’s tough going it alone online and why do it when you can follow six, seven and eight figure earners who have figured out the best ways to earn online?

Stuart Ross, created a group known as Mentors to help and support newcomers to the online business and affiliate marketing space.

The group host a number of community leaders who support other online business owners through webinars, seminars, groups and events being held frequently online. Access the Mentors program here or reserve your place on Stuart’s webinar by clicking on the image below.

Unconscious Success Blockers Online

The unconscious mind is where your invisible blockages to success lie. If you have them, no amount of hard work and struggle will help you unless you can resolve the unconscious behaviour patterns and beliefs which sabotage your success.

Carrying negative self nullifying beliefs, self doubt, procrastination and frustration are all symptoms of underlying conflict and self sabotage. In the first 10 years of your life, you will have picked up behaviour patterns and beliefs which are completely automated and unconscious.

It is in the first 10 years of your life where most unconscious behaviours are learned. Before the age of 10, everything is accepted directly to the subconscious mind without conscious deliberation.

After this age, we start to develop a filter to allow or disallow beliefs, ideas and concepts into our subconscious mind. But if the beliefs we picked up as a child are negative, they can harm us later in life and stop us from growing and developing in areas which we want to change.

If you’re struggling with affiliate marketing, and have been for some time, this could be a reason. See also affiliate psychology for more on this topic. One of the fastest ways to overcome a negative self image is to surround yourself with positive people who are succeeding and learn from them. “Borrow” from their success by learning what mindsets and attitudes they carry, and the action steps they take to achieve success.

Affiliate Marketing Mentors – Who You Surround Yourself With

One of the best ways of determining how well you’re doing in life, and what you’re doing, is to look at your ten closest friends. As the saying goes “birds of a feather flock together”. If you’re not surrounding yourself with people who are achieving what you wish to achieve, you’re probably reinforcing old behaviour patterns which may hold you back instead.

If your “circle of influence”, discourages you from building an online business, or taking a certain course of action, it can be out of genuine concern. But it can also be out of fear; should you change your status or become more successful, it has a knock on effect of simultaneously changing the dynamic of your relationship.

If your ten closest friends are encouraging you and egging you on in life, it’s a good sign you’re with the right people. If they are negative, discouraging or dismissive, they could be helping to feed your negative self image and perpetuating your poor self worth. See why your friends and family don’t want you to succeed.

Affiliate Marketing Mentor – Self Motivators

Affiliate marketers need to be fairly self motivated, but even the tough minded have their moments when things aren’t going right. At times like these it’s worth having some reminders as to why you’re doing affiliate marketing in the first place.

Affiliate marketing is a fantastic business model which can give you a huge amount of time and financial freedom. It also gives you autonomy to work for yourself from anywhere in the world. Not many careers can offer the freedom and flexibility that working online can.

But before you get to that point, where your affiliate business is serving you, there’s a lot of work to do! When you’re wondering why affiliate marketing doesn’t work, and when you want to throw your laptop out of the window, thinking it’s all a scam, it’s worth reminding yourself why you started!

It certainly takes a lot of resilience to become successful as an affiliate marketer. But that’s why most people work in a job. It takes less commitment (initially), but over time you realise you’re trapped in it. If you quit, you stop getting paid. The longer you stay in a job, the more your salary tends to rise and the more you get trapped!

With affiliate marketing it’s the other way round – there’s huge commitment initially for next to no rewards. But if you stick at it, you can stop working and you’ll still get paid!

Affiliate Marketing Methods – Blogging

As a blogger, I’ve spent a huge amount of time writing content, like this article. Much of my work doesn’t get any traction at all. But some of it does. If you stick at blogging for long enough, you start to see the results. But it takes several months/years of consistent work for this to happen.

Most people give up before this point. But blogging can be a great, cheap strategy for generating traction from an affiliate business.

If you’re considering becoming a blogger, it’s well worth choosing a topic which suits you and finding products and services which are related to your topic. Some affiliates say to choose the product first, and create content around it. But as a blogger, you’ll need to keep going with your content for a long period of time. This is tough, and doubly tough if you choose a topic you don’t enjoy writing about.

So pick something you like to write about. If you’re unsure, try out different topics and see which feels the best. Some say blogging is a waste of time. But I don’t agree. It’s definitely not for everyone. But if you enjoy writing, it can be a great way to express yourself, get traffic to your website, FREE and leverage the internet to earn an income.

Paid Marketing

Using paid marketing is a good idea if you don’t have the patience to do content marketing, such as blogging or video, and if you want to build an online income more quickly.

Often for beginners, PPC affiliate marketing is recommended because it’s faster and drives traffic more quickly (PPC = Pay Per Click). Plus, with PPC you can set your budget to an amount you can easily afford and learn as you go.

Often beginner affiliates will get disillusioned with using organic marketing methods because it takes a long time before they see any results. Paid marketing is faster and more scalable, but the same can happen with paid marketing too. You can easily spend a lot of money using PPC marketing, and still not see any sales.

If you’re using paid marketing, it’s better to have high ticket products within your sales funnel because it means you can afford to spend more on advertising. High ticket commissions can help recoup advertising spend more quickly and scale up too. With low value products, it can be very difficult trying to squeeze a profit out of adverts, especially if you have no data or information to base your adverts on at first.

Initially when you run a paid advertising campaign, you’ll spend money learning. This should be expected and you shouldn’t expect to hit a “home run” straight away. It takes some testing and measuring before you know what works and what doesn’t.

List Building

Any reasonable affiliate marketing mentor will tell you to build an email list. An email list lets you build a list of subscribers and control the messages sent to that list. With content on a website, Google (mostly) controls who see’s it through the search engines.

With paid advertising, you get to send someone to a website or landing page. After that, they could leave potentially forever. But if you can capture their email address, and get them on your email list, you can send them messages and build a longer term relationship with them.

As you learn to communicate with your email list, you can promote and sell affiliate products to your subscribers. As your list grows, so does your income. With a good product range and multiple earning strategies, like the SFM Digital Business System offers, you can make more from building a list than by using only a single affiliate product.

To get started with affiliate marketing, build your own list and use a number of affiliate products in your own sales funnel, access Mentors All in through this link. You’ll also be able to access a number of online trainings and webinars and join a community to help you succeed online.

Affiliate Marketing – Your Journey

Everyones journey into affiliate marketing will be different depending on a number of factors.

The training and support you get, whether you’re unhappy in a job trying to escape or simply looking for another income source, how much time you spend on your affiliate business daily; all these factors have a bearing on your experience (and results) being an affiliate marketer.

If you have lots of available time as an affiliate, your journey is likely to be very different to someone who is desperate to escape their job and who needs an income quickly. If you’re a blogger, or doing free organic marketing to build your affiliate business, you’ll have a different experience to someone who is using paid marketing.

Your work ethic is a factor too and affiliate marketing is a performance based business. If you don’t get sales, you don’t get paid. This is very different to what most people have learned through working in a job. In a job, you get paid no matter how hard you work! Unless you get fired of course! You still need to do the work, of course, but you get paid for your time.

Affiliates don’t get paid for their time, they get paid for making sales. Therefore it’s a very different journey to working for an employer.

Affiliate Assumptions

Most affiliates marketers transition from working a job, being employed by someone else. Unfortunately this brings with it some residual habits and assumptions. For one, when you work a job, you get paid. When you start working your affiliate business, you don’t get paid!

You pay for training and support instead. Think of affiliate marketing training like an internship or being a trainee. If you do well, eventually you can make a full time living from affiliate marketing. But often this comes after months or sometimes even years after you start, depending on your products and strategy.

If you’ve worked a job and been good at something, it can be easy to assume that somehow this translates to working online. With an online business you need customers. So avoid getting stuck in the “technician” role, working on things you like, but which don’t drive your business forwards.

The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber is a great book to read for affiliate marketers for this very reason.

See also affiliate marketing psychology.

Get Started & Take Action

No amount of theory though is going to put money in your bank account! You need to get started and stay motivated to make money with affiliate marketing. It’s a marathon and not a sprint, but there are great rewards for those who stick at it long enough to break through and start generating consistent results:

• Work for yourself on your own terms
• Never need a boss or a job again
• Have an uncapped income source, unlike in a job
• Escape the eternal trading time for money trap, through selling products on autopilot instead
• Live wherever you choose
• No more commuting
• A scalable income potential

To get started access a free video series and sign up to become a member of the online mentors community. Click on the image below to get started.

Affiliate Marketing Mentors – Target Audience/Customer Avatar

One of the most important things I learned from my affiliate marketing mentors was about my target audience. Before I learned about this gold “nugget” of information, I was simply throwing content out and hoping for the best. This doesn’t work very well and it can become exhausting posting on social media and creating endless blog posts. By focusing in on and studying the small “slice” of the marketplace that you can best serve with your information and products, you can save yourself a lot of time as an affiliate.

Most online “users” aren’t going to be interested in what you have to sell. There’s millions of searches every single day online for anything and everything. If you can find the small slither of online traffic who is going to be most likely to buy your products, you can focus on attracting those people to your content. By learning about them, what drives them, what pains them and what can ultimately help them the most, you can place products in front of them which meet their needs the best.

Your customer avatar is the type of person you can best serve online with your affiliate products. It’s well worth taking the time to discover what makes this person tick. That way you can save yourself thousands targeting the wrong type of person with your marketing, or spending heaps of time creating content which attracts the wrong type of person.

Affiliate Marketing Mentors – Breaking Even On Your Marketing

This concept took me a while to understand and that’s breaking even on your marketing. Breaking even doesn’t sound very great really on the surface, unless you’re promoting a multiple product funnel which houses subscription, mid ticket and high ticket items for sale.

With these kinds of products “in the bag” you can break even with your marketing on the “front” end of your product range and effectively get customers for free. When your customers are buying subscription products, you get a recurring income from each sale you make. Plus, some of your customers will upgrade and buy further products in the range.

With most affiliate products you can only make a commission once at the point of sale. But with a multiple income funnel, you benefit from the lifetime business of your referrals. With subscription products and high ticket affiliate products within a range, this means up-sales and recurring income commissions are all profit, if you break even on the initial sale.

If you can achieve this with your marketing campaign, it means you have a business which can be globally scaled which has huge implications for your ability to generate an income online.