Don’t believe the affiliate marketing gurus who say how easy it is to make money online – all you need do is buy their course right?!
It’s definitely not an easy thing to do. The “gurus” who “made it” often did so after many years of struggle, or even not at all, (if they’re liars)! I’m no guru, although I wanted to be one at one point. I followed many affiliate marketing gurus for years and took many courses. Checkout my digital profit course review which details some of the courses I took.
You’re likely to find many affiliate marketing guru’s on YouTube offering you great riches, often just for signing up! But the truth is there’s a lot of work involved in becoming successful as an affiliate marketer; which presumably is why you’re here? I mean to become successful, not for the “lots of work” part!
Affiliate Marketing Guru’s – Real Or Fake?
Finding a mentor, or “guru” isn’t easy. You need to find someone who will genuinely help you or at least point you in the right direction. The problem with YouTube, or anywhere online for that matter (as a source for guru’s), is that everyone is selling you something; even if it’s themselves.
Is someone genuinely offering help, or just trying to sell you something? Can you access help for free, and is cheap help good help? I’ve taken a lot of online courses which offered “get rich quick schemes”. You know the ones. The guru shows you how much they earn and tells you how you could be doing this too, right!
What they fail to show you is their advertising accounts which may show a massive investment of advertising dollars too! Their income may very well be a small fraction of their sales reports!
Affiliate Marketing Guru’s – Google Sniper
I bought George Browns’s Google Sniper 1.0 many years ago. This was a fairly cheap course (around $50 as I recall) which taught how to get your websites ranking on the search engines.
Of course along came Google updates Penguin and Panda and everything changed for affiliates. I’m not knocking this course, it did teach me some valuable strategies, but my sales on Clickbank didn’t look anything like George’s, even after months of hard work!
The main problem with courses like this one was lack of support. I wanted to make a living from the internet and back in the early 2000’s this was the only type of course I could find on earning online.
Pat Flynn is another affiliate marketing guru who I learned a similar strategy through. Pat has a huge following and I followed his niche website contest for some time; building niche websites attempting to rank them on Google. I think it was called niche site duel, or something like that. (Yep that’s it!)
The Keyword Academy – 11 Years Ago
A couple of online entrepreneurs called Mark and Court built the keyword academy several years ago. They taught how to use keyword research to find niche website ideas which could be monetised through Google’s Adsense program. Again, the strategy was to rank a site highly on Google’s search engines and place adverts on the content to make money.
I stuck at this for about a year before throwing it in! I think the company disappeared eventually. This thread in the Warrior Forum was all I could find that resembled the original keyword academy.
If anyone had any success with this strategy I’d love to hear from them. I know I didn’t and I created many websites using their system. Perhaps it took longer than I had expected. Anyway the fact that they’re no longer around probably answers that question!
The course had a monthly fee attached to it and I think I was a member for about a year. But I never made any money, perhaps a few pennies (cents) here and there but Adsense didn’t really work for me. You really need a lot of traffic to make it work and Google probably geared their algorithm away from content which was only geared to make money for the website owner.
Affiliate Marketing Gurus
Having followed many affiliate marketing gurus for several years I was becoming rather dismayed. I considered that maybe the only way to make money online was to build your own course and become the “guru” yourself.
After all, I’d spent a lot on these courses overall, but still wasn’t making any money online. Perhaps the gurus were fakers and knew their ideas didn’t work. They were just taking advantage of poor saps like me! Such were my levels of my scepticism!
A few years into my affiliate marketing journey, and after going through several courses and following their instructions, this guy popped up on my news feed while browsing Facebook.
I’d kind of had enough of “gurus” by this point but knew I had to keep going or I’d be stuck working crappy jobs forever. At the time I was a struggling stuntman and juggling multiple jobs in between stunt contracts. See my about me page.
But Stuart seemed genuine and so I signed up and bought his course.
The SFM Mentors
The SFM Mentors offers an education platform and online business community for budding entrepreneurs. It’s led by it’s two founders (affiliate marketing gurus you could say) Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek.
What’s different about The SFM Mentors is their dedication to their members and the levels of support offered through their program.
I was able to use an existing business model which is offered through their program. This strategy showed me some of the shortcomings of previous strategies I had relied on for years such as:
- Relying on Google rankings and organic traffic to make affiliate sales
- Building content relentlessly in the hope that “one day” it would get traction
- Choosing low value affiliate products from programs like Amazon and eBay had huge limitations – both in earning potential and in marketing opportunities.
The SFM business model uses multiple earning strategies which can be used to generate income through an affiliate product range:
- High ticket digital products – pay out the most (40%+ compared to 3-11% commissions for physical products)
- Recurring commission affiliate products – keep paying for sales you made previously.
- A range of products – not just a single product means you can earn for sales closed even years after your initial referral
- Multi-tier commissions – earn commissions from sales made by your referrals (at higher levels of membership)
- A built in sales team – closes sales on your behalf meaning you can focus on marketing rather than selling.
With a sales funnel like this one it opens up the possibilities to use paid marketing and scale up more quickly than with the painful organic strategies I had struggled at for years!
Affiliate Marketing Support
Affiliate marketing gurus Stuart and Jay have also built a huge global community where affiliates meet up and help each other learn affiliate marketing. One of the huge benefits of their community is the support which is in place for its members.
Live Webinars And Q & A Seminars
With regular live webinars and online meetings, The SFM offers ongoing training and even 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring to its members.
Affiliate Marketing Gurus
If you’re looking for affiliate marketing gurus to follow, I would recommend Stuart and Jay if you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing. But don’t expect them to tell you it’s an easy thing to do!
It definitely isn’t easy and it does take time and effort to get any results with affiliate marketing. It took a long time for me to generate any traction online, even with affiliate marketing mentors to help.
If you’re interested in learning more about The SFM, you can access a free video series here or join their Mentors All In program to get started straight away.
