In this “affiliate toolkit” I’m going to include some of the tools which have helped me to earn an income online. When I found affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s I struggled for a long time. I tried to do everything on my own and for free! It wasn’t a great plan for success in hindsight and I was fortunate enough to find an online community of affiliates and coaches who helped me to succeed.
But many affiliates aren’t so lucky. There’s a lot of struggles to be overcome before you make that first online sale. It’s no wonder that there’s such a high drop out rate among affiliate marketers. The success rate of affiliates is a measly 5% according to the latest statistics. This means 95% of new affiliate marketers will fail and drop out! That’s a huge amount. I don’t want that for you – I want you to keep at it and succeed. These tools should help!
Affiliate Toolkit – Training, Education & Product Suite
You can’t build a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage and likewise with your affiliate business. Without a solid understanding of what you’re doing, you’re likely to fail. Success in affiliate marketing is therefore build on your education. I ran into affiliate marketing hoping to “make it” quickly. I was in for a big shock! Make it a priority to get the best education, help and support and you’re setting yourself apart from the 95%.
In 2014 I found this online business community and coaching program. It has helped me immensely with coaches, mentors and other community members holding me accountable and helping me to stay motivated. Make no mistake, building an affiliate business is a massive undertaking and you’ll need all the help you can get! Access here.
Affiliate Toolkit – Email Autoresponder
I struggled along for a few years without getting an email autoresponder. My main strategy was organic traffic and building niche websites. It took a lot of hard work to build sites and get even only a tiny amount of traffic. The traffic seldom turned into sales and I was frustrated for a long time!
You can avoid a lot of these problems simply by getting an email autoresponder. An email autoresponder makes your life as an affiliate a whole lot easier. It lets you collect email subscribers and build a list while communicating with your subscribers. Over a longer period of time, an email list can grow into one of your best assets as an affiliate and it gives you more control over your traffic.
Paid traffic is expensive and organic traffic is difficult and time consuming. What ties them together is an email list which can be used in combination with either paid or organic traffic to make that traffic work harder for you!
When you have a list of subscribers you can build more trust and communicate your message over a longer period of time. Get free access to an email autoresponder here.
Affiliate Toolkit – Mindset
Your mindset as an affiliate is one of your greatest assets or your biggest liabilities! I didn’t understand how important mindset was when I started as an affiliate. Most affiliates quit because the outcome doesn’t meet their expectations immediately! The affiliates who persevere and ultimately create a lot of freedom in their lives are the ones who learn from these setbacks instead of throwing in the towel.
When you’re at rock bottom, that’s where the learning really starts! With the right mindset, setbacks are learning opportunities and failures and stepping stones to success! One of the best resources I found for mindset development is a book by a guy called Stuart Lichtman.
Stuart Lichtman was an MIT professor who created what he called the cybernetic transposition technique. The short version is that this allows you to align all parts of the brain to accomplish a seemingly impossible goal. The main problem with goals is that competing parts of yourself get in the way and stop your from achieving them. With Stuart’s cybernetic transposition three step process, you learn to become super focused on the outcome you want to achieve. Access the book here.
Landing Pages
One of the best tools you can use as an affiliate is a landing page builder. I’ve already mentioned the power of email marketing. With email marketing you can grow your list and sell affiliate products by building trust and delivering value in your email messages. Since most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website, you need several touch points in order to make a sale online.
To get people on your email list you need to send targeted traffic to either a website or a landing page. A landing page is far better, particularly if you’re using paid marketing because you can convert a greater percentage of visitors into subscribers than you ever could from a website.
Why? Simply because on a website someone has a lot more options. You can browse around, click on a number of web pages and generally have a good look. But on a landing page you can’t. You can only do two things on a landing page: sign up, or leave!
Landing page software lets you build an email list incredibly quickly in conjunction with paid marketing. You can optimise your landing pages for conversions and even cross test between similar designs and layouts to find your best performing one. Access a landing page software here.
Summary
So those are my top recommended tools for affiliate marketers who are getting started online. Here’s a quick recap of the best tools you can find for online success:
- Training, Tools, Help & Support and a product “suite” – Access here.
- An email autoresponder – access for free here.
- Goal setting and mindset – Access here.
- Landing page software – Access here.
Depending on your affiliate marketing plans and goals, you may not need all of these tools. If you’re a blogger, or looking for free and cheap marketing strategies, you might not need the landing page builder. As a priority I’d recommend getting help and support and a step by step setup procedure which you can access here.
