Affiliate mentoring is an important part of becoming a successful affiliate. Without it, you’re choosing to go it alone. Even the top affiliates have been mentored, so it’s important to park your ego and ask for help.
Before I found a mentor, I was the same. I was determined to go it alone and prove I could do it all by myself! But I spent years on bad strategies and tearing my hair out trying to make things work. Don’t make the same mistake – affiliate mentoring will save yourself a lot of problems.
Why You Need Affiliate Mentoring
Affiliate marketing is a pretty vast topic. There’s many ways to do it and if you’re not careful you can spend a lot of time on a strategy and still get nowhere. There’s many courses too which will take your money and still not give you the personal coaching you really need. I took many of them over several years. Read about them in my digital profit course review.
Once you hit a bump in the road, it’s far too easy to give up without someone to reach out to. An affiliate mentor is a “touchstone” to help keep you on track, motivated and buoyed up by the belief it is all possible. When you are on your own and things get tough, you can quit more easily. Your belief can drop and when your uncertainty takes over, it becomes much more difficult to maintain forward momentum.
With a mentor guiding you, your belief is much stronger. When you have a strong positive belief in what you’re doing, you can sustain your efforts for much longer. This is definitely needed with affiliate marketing, which can be a tough business.
Affiliate Marketing As A Beginner
As a beginner in affiliate marketing I spent a lot of time working on strategies which are now redundant. Back in the early 2000’s, I bought several online courses which taught affiliate strategies for building traffic. Some of them worked but mostly the results I got were disappointing.
This is the reality for many affiliates who start out with huge optimism. Over time, when they don’t see results from their efforts, they quit. But this is a mistake. They just need an affiliate mentor to help them breakthrough; and this can take some time depending on the strategies you implement.
Up to the point of the breakthrough, there’s a lot of time spent on learning and implementing strategies. If this time period is several months or even years before you see consistent results, many people will quit, thinking this is the “reality” of affiliate marketing and that it’s all a scam!
Affiliate Marketing Growth – An Analogy
I love this analogy for affiliate marketing and I even heard it from one of my mentors. The Chinese Bamboo tree needs a lot of nurturing, more than most plants. If you didn’t understand the tree’s needs, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was dead, and throw it away! This is similar to the path of the affiliate marketer and of those who quit too early.
In the first year of growing the Chinese Bamboo tree needs water and fertile soil. But we see nothing in terms of growth. The same is true in the second year, third and forth year of the plants development. In the fifth year the Chinese bamboo tree grows just 80 feet in 6 weeks! Of course the first few years of the trees development were vital to support the exponential growth of the fifth year.
The same is true of the path of the affiliate marketer. Setting up your foundations are vital to your growth. If you jump around from one strategy to the next, you’ll never see growth. If you’re impatient and throw a seed away before it takes route, you won’t see the magnificence of the bamboo tree!
Types Of Affiliate Mentoring
There’s various ways to get mentored in affiliate mentoring. You can access pre-recorded videos, download ebooks, purchase books online, join email lists and interact with 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring sessions online. If you’re lucky you can even meet mentors personally in live sessions and even befriend them!
The most common affiliate mentoring is through pre-made materials you can find online. However, there’s so much of this material available that it can be difficult to discern one “guru” from another. Who is telling the truth about affiliate marketing and which way is the “best” way to do it?
Conflicting advice on affiliate marketing can be a major problem when you’re getting started. No sooner have you joined one program when your inbox is filled with the next best thing – promising faster results for much less work! So you jump on to that course only to find the same problems! How can you navigate such a minefield of disinformation?! The answer is to get a mentor you trust, and stick with them, taking the action steps they advise!
Q & A Webinars
Some of the best mentoring I’ve received has been through question and answer webinars and seminars where I can ask questions directly to the host. Mastermind webinars too are really powerful and being part of a group of people is very powerful for your belief in what you are doing.
Without a community for support, you’re forever looking at videos and scraping the internet; trying to make sense of something all by yourself!
Affiliate Mentoring 1 to 1
In 2014 I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing mentoring. I met Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek during a live SFM meeting in London. Since then I’ve met many mentors (through the community) who have helped me build an online business through their support and encouragement.
If you’re going it alone in the affiliate journey, I highly recommend joining this community. Access a free video series to learn more about The SFM here.