In this affiliate marketing blueprint pdf, I’m going to share some of the many trials and tribulations I’ve had over several years as an affiliate marketer. Before I started learning affiliate marketing I had tried many jobs. I had even worked as a stunt performer in film and TV, landing jobs on Xmen First Class, Bad Education and many other TV and film roles.
But the work was sporadic and the constant insecurity of work and numerous jobs I filled in with led me to look for a better solution. Trading time for money in a job always has its limitations; even a dream job like being a stuntman!
I looked to the internet as a means to overcome my financial problems and work instability. First I looked to Forex marketing. My father has showed an interest and bought a course which he let me borrow. After 2 years studying Forex marketing I decided I simply didn’t have the funds needed to keep going. I decided I would return to it when I could afford a trading bank I wasn’t afraid to lose!
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF
I shifted to an eBay business where I could buy and sell items from eBay. You can read about the method I used here. It allowed me to start small and slowly purchase more valuable items to re-sell for profit. But over time I realised that this business model wasn’t going anywhere. Trapped on my computer most of the day, I was only making a small income.
There had to be a better way to earn an income online, I thought. I just didn’t know what it was then. So, I decided to create my own ebook since it was an ebook purchase which led me to the eBay business model. It seemed so simple to sell an ebook over the internet; no physical delivery was necessary. It was just an automated downloadable product. People could buy it online and access it immediately. I just needed to create the book and set up a website – so I thought!
6 months later and I had done a huge amount of work. I’d built a website and created an ebook. But what I didn’t know was how to get people to my website.
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF
So I put myself on a few marketing courses which promised to teach me how to earn money online. The idea to was use the knowledge to sell my own ebooks. However, I soon realised that there was a better way – affiliate marketing.
My own ebook was a short guide to tell people how to become a stuntman! This has a much smaller audience of course than those wanting to learn how to earn online. So I abandoned my “how to be a stuntman” ebook and started learning how to sell other people’s products online instead.
My first major win was with a course offered by a guy names Peter Lexis. I promoted his affiliate course and ran a paid marketing campaign through Google Adwords. Just at the point of starting to increase my marketing budget, I had my Adwords account shut down. I wasn’t to get it back for years.
This was a huge blow and just at the point of getting somewhere. But I carried on and focused for a while on content marketing – a free marketing strategy which I would continue to this day.
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF
Affiliate marketing is an amazing business which can work miracles in your life. But, it can also become a monstrous disaster which can create untold misery too! Ultimately it depends on you. The key to affiliate marketing, as with everything, is to look at the bumps in the road as learning experiences rather than failures.
Stephen McCranie: ‘The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.’
As with anything in life, your mindset will determine your outcome before you even begin. Had I known how difficult affiliate marketing would have been, I think I would have attempted it anyway – simply because an easy journey has nothing to teach you. A difficult journey can give you an insight into your self. And this is the beauty of the affiliate journey.
And of course there’s the money too! Most people come into affiliate marketing to make money.
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF – Mistakes I’ve Made
Mistakes can’t be avoided in affiliate marketing. You’re going to make mistakes. But there’s some mistakes you can swerve by getting help. Mistakes are healthy provided you learn from them. Most of affiliate marketing is getting things wrong and learning from them. Over time, you learn to focus on the actions which generate results.
Most affiliates give up too early because they try a few things, nothing happens and they give up. Don’t be that person. Be the one who learns from the “failures”. Don’t see them as failures. See them as feedback and you’re already ahead of many who will drop out.
Get help from an online community. It took me years to find this online community of coaches and mentors. Getting help and following a well structured procedure will save you years of frustration and struggle!
Affiliate Marketing Blueprint PDF – Business Models
Affiliate marketing can be fraught with problems because there’s so many ways to do it. If you have no direction or help, you can easily spend years finding this out for yourself, as I did! Knowing the right business model is a major key. Without this knowledge, no amount of hard work will help. You have to work hard and smart to make affiliate marketing work for you. You can do this by choosing the right products and the right marketing methods.
Your marketing strategy will depend on your own particular circumstance of course. If you can afford to use paid marketing, do so. But start out carefully and use a good business model. What’s a good model?
Firstly let’s look at a bad business model. Amazon is a place many newbie affiliate marketers start out. Why not? There’s a tonne of product to choose from and lots of possibility to build a niche in almost any area right? But, Amazon only pays affiliates somewhere between 3% and 11% commissions. So if you spend months building a niche website, for example, and it actually works and gets traffic, you’ll still only be earning peanuts from it.
Digital products on the other hand pay much more in terms of commission. In fact most digital products pay affiliates 40%-even 100% commission in some cases. So, if you’re going to work hard, it’s worth working smart too. There’s also high ticket products you should consider too. High ticket items can make you commissions of $1000+ on a single sale.
Why High Ticket Products?
Why use high ticket products? Take a low value physical product for example. Let’s assume you’re selling an item from Amazon and you make a $10 commission based on a $100 price, or 10%. To make $10,000 worth of commissions you’ll need to sell 1000 items.
The equivalent high ticket digital product might be valued at $2500 and give you a 40% commission of $1000. To make $10,000 you’ll need to sell only 10 of these items. Now consider how you’re going to sell 1000 items from Amazon or 10 items of your high ticket digital product.
However you go about it, selling the higher value item makes much more sense. It may be more difficult to sell such an item, but will it be 100 times as difficult? Of course the answer is a resounding no!
High ticket products aren’t the only key which super affiliates use. They also use products which offer recurring commissions.
Recurring Commissions – A Key To Passive Income
High ticket commissions are all well and good. They can help you to achieve a larger income online and offset marketing costs so you can use paid marketing platforms. But recurring commissions are another major key which super affiliates use to make an income online. Recurring commission affiliate programs offer software products and memberships which pay affiliates again and again.
Like using high ticket products, recurring commission products give you an advantage which you don’t get from “one-off” sales. Even a small recurring commission is far better than a single sale over time. A recurring commission can give you a lifetime income. Even a high ticket commission is finite. A recurring commission can go on paying you over decades with the right products.
Multi-tier Affiliate Commissions
Multi-tier affiliate commissions are available on certain products. They are commissions you can earn from sales made by your referrals. Take a look at the SFM digital business system for more on this. The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) offer a product range with a built in sales team. Their digital business system offers:
- Recurring commissions to affiliates – through a membership commission
- High ticket product range – products ranging from $2500 to $20,000 which offer 40% commission (according to your positioning)
- Multi-tier sales – earn from sales made by your referrals
- A built in sales team – closing high ticket sales on your behalf.
Traffic – The Major Key To Success Online
Traffic is a major key to success online too. Without traffic you’ll never succeed online. There’s several ways you can get traffic to your affiliate products. With low value products it’s much more difficult because you’ll have less choice as to how you put products in front of people. This is another reason why the above business strategy is a much better option for affiliates.
Without a high ticket funnel, recurring income products or multi-tier sales, it’s more difficult to use paid marketing and still come out with a profit. With low value physical products, you’ll need to focus your efforts on cheap and free marketing methods. This takes much longer to do and is much less scalable than when using paid marketing strategies.
If you’re going down the organic marketing route through, you will need to put some serious time and effort in upfront, before you see any results. This can still be done of course, but is more difficult.
Organic Sales Online
Organic sales online are a wonderful thing when it finally happens. Those affiliate commissions rolling in overnight are simply wonderful. But there’s a lot that goes in before hand which goes unrewarded for a long time. There’s two questions you should ask yourself before creating content for your affiliate products:
- Is this person a hungry buyer?
- Can I get this content in front of those people?
When the answer is yes to both these questions it’s well worth pursuing. If you’re in doubt, save yourself the time and look for two “yes’s”! Ultimately this comes down to an important part of affiliate marketing – the customer avatar!
With content marketing you’ll likely create a lot of content which doesn’t work. Some will hit and some will miss. But as you learn and get better, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the content which gets sales. That content will work because it’s targeted a specific kind of person and got found.
Your Customer Avatar
The customer avatar is an important part of affiliate marketing. The better you get as an affiliate, the more you’ll focus in on your customer:
- Who they are
- What they want
- Their individual problems and challenges
- What they’re searching for online
- The kinds of videos and blogs they read
- How old they are
- Are they a parent?
- What interests them
- What pains them?
- And on an on..
The Email List
Whatever kind of marketing you’re doing, build an email list. With an email list you get people to subscribe and opt in to your list. You can then drip feed emails on a regular basis and keep in touch with your subscriber. This has two huge benefits over just having a website to sell affiliate products from:
- You can extend the period of time over which a customer can buy from you – from 10 minutes on a website to months and even years through email marketing
- You’ll be able to build trust with many subscribers by offering real value
One people know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to purchase a product from you.
Paid Marketing – The Fastest Route To Building An Income Online
Paid marketing is the fastest route to building a sustainable income online. But you’ll need a great business model like the one discussed earlier in this pdf/ebook. With a business model like The SFM digital business system, you’ll be in a much better position to learn paid marketing strategies with less risk.
Using paid marketing on low value products is very difficult. This is because there’s a learning phase when you’ll spend marketing budget and get nothing back. Over time, through testing and measuring your marketing, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work.
The benefit of using paid marketing during this period rather than content creation is that you can cut advertising which doesn’t work. Adverts which work, and make sales you can keep running. With content marketing this process is much slower. You create content and it can take months before you see any results from your efforts. With an advert you get the feedback straight away.
Recap & Resources
There’s a million different ways to do affiliate marketing. You can avoid getting lost down a rabbit hole if you get the right help and advice from the very start and find a mentor.
Choose affiliate products which offer at least one of the following:
- High ticket digital products – which pay out at least 40% commissions
- Recurring income affiliate products – membership or software products
- Multi-tier sales – earn from sales made by your referrals.
- A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf from a product range
- Training and coaching including 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching
Ideally use a training resource which offers all of the above (Click banner below). Use paid marketing if your affiliate business model allows it. Test with a small budget to start and slowly build up your marketing budget.
