Welcome to my affiliate marketing checklist pdf article. Having an affiliate marketing checklist can help you make sense of your affiliate journey. Affiliate marketing can be pretty daunting when you’re starting out and there’s many pitfalls too. So by being prepared you can hopefully avoid most of them. “Fail to plan and you plan to fail”, or so the saying goes!

By using an affiliate marketing checklist, you can see the journey you need to take beforehand. This can help you to get focused on the step you’re taking in the moment and help you avoid falling into overwhelm. Don’t try and do everything all at once. Just take one step at a time.

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF- #1 Product/s

Some affiliates will start with their products, and others with their marketing strategy. But when you know the product you will be selling, it will help you immensely. Having a product in your mind can give you ideas for your marketing strategy too.

If you don’t have a product in mind which you want to sell, you can join a training course which will help you decide. If you enjoy the course and get value form it, you can also promote it yourself as an affiliate. This is where I started out, knowing nothing about affiliate marketing. I simply joined a course and learned how to promote it.

You can access a step by step training resource here. This course will also walk you through affiliate marketing step by step, at a pace which suits you.

Choice Of Product

Your choice of product is pretty important and it’s wise to choose something with longevity. The ‘here today gone tomorrow” type of product isn’t what you want to promote because it can take some time to get your marketing going. If you choose a product which may be gone in a year, you can waste a lot of time for nothing, promoting something which doesn’t stand the test of time!

It’s also worth looking at the different types of products you can promote as an affiliate. High ticket and digital products pay the most in terms of commission. Subscription affiliate products are also worth looking at because you can make ongoing recurring commissions from them, so you can earn more from the same amount of work as if you have promoted low value products. See best products to sell as an affiliate.

Ideally choose products you highly value yourself. When it comes to marketing your products, you will be spending a lot of time either creating content or describing the value of your products, depending on what you choose. So choosing a product or products which you align with can give you a major head start. It’s so much easier to promote something you genuinely value and appreciate yourself, than something you don’t believe in or care about! Plus your integrity, (or lack of it) will shine through in your marketing efforts – one way or another!

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF- #2 Marketing

Once you’ve chosen which affiliate products to promote, you’ll need to choose a method with which to promote them. Like I mentioned earlier, you can start out with your promotion method, and choose products later. This might suit someone with a passion blog for example. If you’re passionate about a certain topic, it makes sense to use that passion in your marketing.

Blogging can be a great form of marketing for someone who is passionate about their topic. It’s a long term strategy though so you should expect to maintain an output of content for several months or even years to make it pay.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is definitely something you should use to promote affiliate products, whatever other form of advertising you use. With email marketing, you build an email list of subscribers and communicate your marketing message to them over a long period of time. Sometimes I get sales coming in from my email list even years after someone has subscribed to it! See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing, or click on the image below to access a free email marketing software.

There’s many ways you can market your affiliate products and the method you choose will depend on your own particular situation and circumstance. If, for example you are working full time in a busy job, you may want to use paid marketing. But if you have plenty of time to create content, you may want to choose blogging or video blogging as your promotion method.

See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

With paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much more quickly than with content marketing (e.g. blogging). However, with paid marketing you put money at risk rather than your time. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content marketing too, so it can help you grow a bigger audience faster. See PPC vs organic marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF – #3 Mindset

Your mindset is one of the most important things you can work on as an affiliate. As you get better and start generating affiliate sales, it will be your own attitudes and mindsets which hold you back. You can’t grow a business beyond the thoughts you have about it. This means that unless you’re growing, and expanding your awareness of limiting ideas which you carry, your ideas, expectations and limits will naturally show in your business.

Successful affiliates therefore are often found to be fervent believers in self development and focus on improving their mindsets.

You can do this by reading books on motivation and mindset (see motivational books free pdf downloads). You can also join webinars and seminars led by successful affiliates and access mentors and coaches to help you. (Do that through this online training resource).

Affiliate Marketing Checklist – #4 Tracking

You can’t change something you’re not aware of. If you want to lose weight, for example, you need to be aware of your dietary and exercise habits. Only then can you make the appropriate changes – through measuring what you do differently! The same holds true to affiliate marketing and it is tracking which is the measurement of your affiliate activities.

In the early days of being an affiliate, I rushed headlong into actions which didn’t amount to much. So I assumed affiliate marketing didn’t work! I was ruled by my attitudes and habits, but I didn’t record what I did, or measure the outcomes.

Initially you should measure your activities and track your traffic, leads and sales. Over time, as you gather more data, you can use what you have learned to focus your time on the most productive activities. You simply won’t know what this is if you don’t use tracking to record meaningful events in your affiliate business. So it’s a good idea to make good habits of putting tracking in place in the early days of being an affiliate.

#5 – Failing

Before succeeding with affiliate marketing you much first fail! You’ve got to fail at getting traffic in order to know how to get traffic. You need to fail at building an email list before you can know how to build an email list. You need to fail at getting sales before you eventually make a sale! A common term for failing in affiliate marketing is failing forwards!

Just like a toddler who is learning how to walk must fall down many times, affiliates need to put themselves out there and learn how to stand up again and again. This is tough, especially at first. Affiliates who succeed have failed many times, so failure is the path to success. You probably won’t start out hitting a home run every time you start a marketing campaign. Or get a blog post going viral after only writing a single blog post. But by making mistakes, putting yourself out there and failing many times you’ll learn perseverance and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work for you.

Tis can be tough because you’ll need to do a lot in order to achieve a little at first. But over time, you can learn which actions produced the best outcomes for you consistently. Without consistent effort and “feedback”, you will never gain the necessary experience to move your affiliate business forwards. See failure as feedback and keep learning from your feedback. Failing in affiliate marketing is only feedback. You only fail when you quit, so make a decision never to quit! If you haven’t failed at affiliate marketing, you haven’t tried!

Summary

So that’s my affiliate marketing checklist pdf. Depending on your route as an affiliate marketer, there can of course be many more steps. Here’s a quick recap of what’s been covered:

• Products – find products you love and want to promote. If you find a product you really value, it will come across in your marketing and you’re more likely to sustain the necessary effort require in its promotion.
• Marketing Method – There’s many ways to promote affiliate products. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Find a single strategy you can get behind, build on and stick to it until it’s working for you.
• Mindset – Affiliate marketing is a business which can produce spectacular results. But it can also be very difficult. Your mindset is the driving force behind all of your actions and how you think about your online business is intricately tied up with your levels of effort, the things you do and the results you attain. Work on your mindset and keep working on it! Your affiliate business can’t grow beyond the level of thinking you bring to it! Your thinking is the glass ceiling of your business!
• Tracking – Tracking is the eyes and ears of your affiliate business. Without awareness of something, you can’t improve on it. Tracking lets you see what works and what isn’t working in your affiliate business. So make sure you set up tracking so you know where traffic, leads and sales have come from.
• Failing – “Failing forwards” means making those necessary steps in order to put yourself in a learning environment. Without “failures” you’ll never experience success. Failures lead to successes because you can learn from them. A toddler never stops learning how to walk even after a 1000 falls. The same should be true of your affiliate business.