In this affiliate marketing pdf, I’m going to share some of the main keys to affiliate marketing success. You can download this document here.
Affiliate marketing sounds simple, and really it should be: “Share other people’s products online and earn a commission based on the sale”.
But sadly affiliate marketing isn’t all that easy. In fact you can easily get lost down countless rabbit holes when learning affiliate marketing. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too, and countless affiliate products you can choose from. So this little guide is a roadmap to hopefully help avoid some of the main problems I encountered during my affiliate journey of several years.
Affiliate Marketing PDF – Overwhelm
One of the main problems when you come to learn affiliate marketing is the sheer overwhelm of information. Countless affiliates will be trying to “help” you by selling you their products. When you start researching affiliate marketing your email inbox will be full of emails about various products and services available.
You must remember that these helpful affiliates are also on a commission. They’ll earn commissions from selling you their suggested products and services (as will I). So take your time, there’s really no countdown timer on those products and the price hasn’t really been slashed by 70%! Those “one time” offers will usually still be there if you don’t take them straight away!
Shiny object syndrome will also have you jumping from course to course. I did this too since each course offered an “easier” outcome at a better price. But once you find a course you like stick to it and keep going. Ideally join an online community where you can get 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and training.
Join A Community & Get Training
I struggled for years before finding an online community who could help me. A community of people who are ahead of you on the affiliate journey is worth its weight in gold. Going it alone is too hard, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing – which as a beginner you most definitely don’t!
Consider any other profession. You simply wouldn’t consider walking into a court room to defend a client without a huge amount of study as a lawyer (and passing your bar exam). Or performing surgery on a patient without first qualifying after 5 years of medical school. But unfortunately in affiliate marketing, there’s an assumption that anyone can throw up a website and suddenly start making heaps of cash for very little work!
Therefore it is your training which is the most valuable thing in your affiliate marketing career. Consider it the foundations of your “skyscraper”. If you’re only building a small shed, you won’t need such strong foundations. But if you are wanting to build a substantial income from your affiliate business, it’s worth getting your foundations right from the start.
Choosing Products To Sell
Not all affiliate products offer the same kinds of commissions to affiliate marketers. Amazon products for example pay affiliates 3-11% on a sale. Digital products pay 40-60% on average. So you can see there’s a huge difference here. There are also products which offer ongoing commissions too.
Subscription products and software type products offer affiliates the possibility to earn recurring commissions from each and every sale. High value products sell for over $1000 and many of these types of products are also digital so offer 40% commissions and above. See highest paying affiliate products list.
Some products offer a range of up-sells. This means if you refer a customer initially to the entry level products, you can benefit from sales made even years later to your existing customer. There’s also multi-tier affiliate products which reward affiliates for sales made by their referrals.
Given all this knowledge, would you still want to earn only 3-11% on a low cost physical product? Or would you look for digital products which paid more and offered other benefits such as recurring commissions, multi-tier commissions and high ticket commissions?
Affiliate Marketing PDF – The Sales Funnel
Once you have a sales funnel with your chosen products in it (start here), you can focus on promoting your funnel. There’s many ways to promote your products as an affiliate marketer. With a funnel, you send people to a landing page where you collect their email details. You then follow up with a number of automated emails promoting your affiliate products and building a relationship.
There’s other ways too of course. You can promote products directly through advertising and from a website. However, it’s far better to collect emails because this allows you to build a relationship and keep in touch with your subscribers.
From a website, you only have a small window of opportunity to make a sale. But once someone is on your email list, you can follow up with them over months and even years and decades. Someone can purchase from you years after they have signed up to your email list.
Promotion
Depending on your sales funnel you can promote your products in a number of different ways: blogging, video blogging, paid advertising, social media platforms and on an on. Ideally choose a strategy you can stick to depending on your own personal circumstances and the average value of a customer.
For example, if you can only make $100 per customer, it’s going to be much more difficult to monetise your business with paid marketing. The room for profit is quite tight. But with a high ticket sales funnel which contains large value items and recurring income products, it’s much easier to do so. Your personal circumstances will also dictate your marketing strategy to some extent too. If you’re very busy in a career, it’s going to be better to use paid marketing and use a high ticket sales funnel.
If you’re more time rich but purchasing such a funnel is out of your reach, free marketing strategies might be a better option.
Time Management Self Management & Despair
At some point you’re going to get pretty pissed off with your affiliate business! Things take time to get moving with affiliate marketing and results don’t show immediately. Usually there’s going to be a lot of work you’ll need to do before you start seeing the results you’re looking for. With free marketing strategies such as blogging this is all the more so.
You either spend time or money or both and often the light doesn’t appear (at the end of the tunnel) until you’re thoroughly hacked off. This is why you need to create good time management skills and develop a mindset of “whatever it takes”. If you start out looking for results before doing the work you can get disappointed and quit. Instead, create a positive feedback loop quickly by rewarding yourself for work done and even the smallest of successes.
Create habits on a daily basis which feed into your longer term goals. Take regular breaks and avoid burnout by paying attention to your mental state and looking after yourself.
You can download this affiliate marketing pdf here.
For further training and to join an all in one affiliate business system and community click here.