In my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF ebook I share some of the main things I think you should know as a new affiliate starting out. I started learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s, and it’s no easy feat making an affiliate sale online.
There’s a variety of strategies you can employ as an affiliate in order to generate a single sale. Here’s a few of them:
- Blogging
- PPC – Pay per click
- Email marketing
- Video marketing – both paid and free (organic)
- Social media
As a newbie, you’ll be keen to get started and start making those commissions. But I hope you will at least read through my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF guide first (access here) because it will prepare you much better for the journey. I made many mistakes as a newbie affiliate and if you read this ebook, you’ll be much better prepared for success than I was!
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Traps To Avoid
There’s a few traps you’ll want to avoid and prepare yourself for as a new affiliate. Shiny Object Syndrome is the tendency to jump from one course to another looking for the easy win! Let me tell you there’s no easy win! I did this for years and no sooner had I started out on one particular training course than another “shiny object” caught my eye. The next course promised “faster and easier”, so I jumped ship and started again with a new strategy.
The Busy Fool
The problem with this approach is that you never get any traction with any given strategy. Becoming successful with affiliate marketing is a little like push starting a freight train! Once it’s going, you can add a little more effort until it’s at full speed! But getting it going from a standing start takes some will power, belief and motivation.
Being a “Busy Fool” is another trap to avoid! It feels nice starting your own business but you have to remain vigilant. Don’t get complacent with your time and start wasting it. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model so if you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. Getting those sales early will give you the necessary momentum to continue on. Not getting them can mean you lose belief and encouragement, making the journey more difficult.
If you’re not used to being your own boss and managing your own time, it can be easy to dawdle and spend time on fruitless activities which you enjoy, rather than those which move your business forwards.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Business Models & Products
When I started out as an affiliate newbie, I chose products from websites I used such as Amazon and eBay. Both platforms have affiliate programs – also known as “Partner programs” which let you join them and send people to the various products on the sites. But you should know that these platforms offer the lowest levels of commission, from 1% to 11% commission. So if you sell a $100 product from Amazon, for example, you’ll only make $1-$11 on that sale!
See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission for details of their rates.
If you’re selling low value physical products from these sites, be aware that you’ll need to sell in large volume to make a good income from your affiliate business. There are other types of products which can be much more lucrative and it’s worth considering the types of products you’d like to sell from the outset. Digital products typically pay much more in terms of commissions and can pay from 20% to even 100% commission on certain products.
Subscription affiliate products offer some of the best earnings because you can earn ongoing commissions for each and every sale. There’s also high ticket products too which offer the highest rates of commission available for affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Mindset & Motivation
Although pretty much anyone can become an affiliate, not everyone succeeds and builds a profitable business through affiliate marketing. This can be for a number of reasons but the sheer volume of people “having a go” at affiliate marketing is testimony to the fact that so many drop out.
I hope that you are not simply “giving it a go” because this attitude seldom works for affiliate marketing! It takes a lot more than dipping in your toe to make an affiliate business work and something like 95% of affiliates drop out and quit! See affiliate marketing failure rate.
The right mindset and attitude is therefore a massive factor in whether you’ll become successful as an affiliate. This is therefore worth cultivating and particularly in the early stages there can be a lot of hurdles to overcome. If you’re well prepared mentally, and have a “never say die” kind of approach, so much the better. You’ll surely face adversity when approaching affiliate marketing and your resolve to overcome obstacles is part of the journey!
I even believe that it is adversity which makes you improve yourself personally and that affiliate marketing is both an inward and outward journey. Often the money at the end of the “trail” isn’t the most important part, but the personal growth is!
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Marketing Strategy
Whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need some kind of marketing strategy. There’s many different tactics and ways to promote affiliate products so you should choose carefully. Your choice will also depend on your circumstances and if you’re time rich you may want to focus on content creation and look towards generating organic traffic. This can be done through various strategies such as blogging, video blogging and using unpaid social media marketing tactics.
If you have less disposable time, you will probably want to get things automated as quickly as possible and scale up your business fast. If this is the case you should be looking towards using paid marketing. Paid marketing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Adwords for example are useful if you have less available time and want faster results.
Whatever method of marketing you choose it’s always worth building an email list. Email marketing is a powerful way to collect subscribers and deliver your marketing message through email messages. See also the power of email marketing. Access a free autoresponder here.
Best Business Model
Most affiliate products only pay you once. This is known as a “one time” commission. After that the customer has found the company providing the products. That company then acquires the customer and potentially earns from a lifetime of sales in the future from your referral! It’s a sweet deal for companies like Amazon who continue to lower their commissions and change terms to make affiliate’s lives more difficult! But it’s not such as great deal for affiliates who only receive tiny commissions on these kinds of referrals!
Product Ranges
If you want to give yourself a head start as an affiliate, choose programs which offer multiple products within a range of products from which you can earn. Promoting a product range as an affiliate gives you much more potential to earn in the future from sales you have generated. Up-sells are useful to affiliates particularly when a built in sales team closes sales on the affiliate’s behalf. An up-sell is another product within a range which offers more value to a customer.
The three main types of affiliate commissions are:
- OT – One time commission, you get paid only once
- S – Subscription products
- HT – high ticket products pay you larger than average commissions.
With a good product range such as the SFM Digital Business System, you can benefit from all of these kinds of commissions and a built in sales team, up-selling products on your behalf.
Timescale & Marketing Strategy
Depending on your marketing strategy you can build an online affiliate business over the course of months or years. Most affiliates will take at least a year to get traction in their affiliate business but it depends on the strategy you are using and your marketing budget; and of course product range.
With a high ticket sales funnel, you’ll earn a lot more from sales you generate and therefore you’ll be able to afford the more expensive advertising platforms. So according to your “buy in” level of a high value product range, you’ll be able to access the highest levels of commission.
Of course you don’t need to purchase affiliate products in order to sell them. But with a high ticket digital product range, the more you invest the larger your earning potential when it comes to re-selling.
If you take a cheaper approach to marketing, such as with blogging, expect it to take much longer. With a paid marketing strategy, a good marketing budget and high ticket sales funnel you can start generating traction much more quickly. Some affiliates do manage to replace their income inside of a year with this strategy; although these results aren’t typical. See also how long does affiliate marketing take.
With low value products and an organic marketing strategy, it can take years to gain traction. You’re far better off at least using subscription affiliate programs to speed up your journey!
Access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners!
If you’re serious about starting your own affiliate marketing journey, you can access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF here! Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll get back to you.
You can also join a community of online entrepreneurs and start your affiliate journey by getting access to tools, training and support here.