AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money

If you’re thinking of selling stuff online to make money, this post is for you! There’s lots of ways to make money through selling stuff and the online marketplace gives you the opportunity to sell to anyone, anywhere. Even if you don’t have some “stuff” to sell of your own, you can make money selling other people’s products, too.

A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you use almost any product you can find online and sell it for a commission. Then there’s a clever business model called drop shipping, or direct selling in which you sell products from your website and have them shipped to the customer worldwide directly from the manufacturer.

Drop shipping and affiliate marketing offer the potential of building a scalable business from anywhere. The most important skill for these models is marketing. But if that’s not your bag, you can start where I started, using eBay or some other online selling space such as Facebook marketplace, Gumtree or Craigslist to sell unwanted items from your home.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money

I’ve long been a fan of selling stuff online to make money and before I discovered affiliate marketing (more on that later) I started selling my own stuff through eBay. eBay is a great place to start if you haven’t sold anything yet. Get an account by signing up to eBay if you haven’t already got one and list an item you’d like to sell.

Choose something from your house to get you going. Once you have figured out eBay, there’s many other ways to use the platform to sell. You can also find bargains on eBay by using misspell checkers. This little “hack” is a good place to start and you can find bargain items which simply don’t get the attention they deserve simply because the seller has listed the item badly!

I’ve written a post on this strategy here so check it out if you like the idea.

Another way to use eBay is to buy in bulk from a company such as Alibaba.com and sell multiple items through a single listing on eBay.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money – Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is a business model similar to affiliate marketing whereby you create a website and attract customers, usually through paid marketing methods. Place a product in your “digital store” and when someone buys it, you can send the product directly from the manufacturer to them, without ever having to touch the product yourself.

Using software you can even connect your website to the wholesaler directly to minimum the technical tomfoolery you’ll have to deal with!

For more on drop shipping checkout Shopify.com.

The main skill you’ll need for drop shipping is marketing since a website won’t attract any visitors without it. Another similar business model where you can get paid selling other people’s stuff is affiliate marketing.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is probably the simplest business model online and many people gravitate towards it as a means to earn an income online. With affiliate marketing you have less to do than with drop shipping, on the technical side.

With drop shipping you have to take orders and deal with customers. However with affiliate marketing you only need to refer customers to products through your affiliate link. This is done through a variety of marketing methods and you can choose the most suitable one for your particular situation.

Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program which anyone can join and promote any of the 12 million products on their website. The main skill you need to learn with affiliate marketing is marketing. Here’s a few of the marketing methods which affiliates use to sell their affiliate products:

Blogging
Email marketing
Paid advertising (pay per click)
Social media marketing
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

With affiliate marketing you have a huge choice in products to sell. Some of the best products to sell as an affiliate are those which pay high ticket commissions and recurring commissions, such as membership products and software products which carry subscription costs.

Considerations

If you’re going to be selling stuff online to make money, it’s a good idea to choose a strategy which can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With drop shipping and affiliate marketing, you can automate much of the process, more so with affiliate marketing. With an automated sales system, once you have started making sales online, you can increase sales simply by increasing the flow of traffic through that system.

For example, if you sell digital products, they can be accessed from anywhere globally without the need for postage and delivery costs. This gives the affiliate a larger chunk of the sale value in commission, since they are doing all the marketing. Digital affiliate products typically pay affiliates between 30%-40% commission, compared to 1%-10% for physical products.

High ticket and subscription products are the most profitable digital products to sell online.

Free Affiliate Marketing Ebook

Looking for a free affiliate marketing ebook? In my ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” I share some of the most important things I learned over my first several years as an affiliate marketer. Click here for access.

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to earn an income online. However, that being said, there’s many pitfalls with affiliate marketing too and a high drop out rate (around 95%).

In this post (and in my ebook) I share some of the common mistakes affiliates make and how to give yourself the best possible chance of success.

free affiliate marketing download — Access my eBook affiliate marketing for beginners for FREE here.

Free Affiliate Marketing Ebook – What Is Affiliate Marketing?

So what exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a simple business model which rewards affiliates (third parties) for sales of other people’s products online.

For example, I recommend a training course for new affiliates on this website. If you purchase the course I recommend, I earn a commission based on the sale. Affiliates can sell almost anything online providing the product has an affiliate program that they can join.

free affiliate marketing ebook — Click this image to download **Affiliate Marketing For Beginners** for free

One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon. Amazon can be a good choice for affiliates because it sells over 12 million items! So if you have a website already which attracts a certain audience, you can place certain products on your site and start selling quite quickly. For example lets say you have a Yoga related website which already gets traffic. You could place a Yoga product of some kind (such as a Yoga mat) on it and start selling it quite quickly.

People are familiar with Amazon and so there’s already a level of trust on the site. The downside of using Amazon affiliate products is that the commission level is pretty low with some of its products paying as little as 1% commission should you make a sale.

That brings me nicely on the the types of products you can promote as an affiliate. We know Amazon offers millions of physical products you can sell as an affiliate, but what about other types of product? Well I’m glad you asked that question!

Free Affiliate Marketing Ebook – Types Of Affiliate Product

The two main types of affiliate product are physical and digital products. Digital products can be a good choice for affiliates because there’s no manufacturing costs or postage costs.

Buyers of the product can download the item immediately – much like my free ebook download it here! This makes it the perfect product for affiliates because they can benefit from these reduced costs. Most digital products pay affiliates a much larger cut of the sale price because affiliates are doing the lion share of advertising (the largest cost for such products).

So with digital products an affiliate can earn much larger commissions -typically 30% to 40% of the sale price. Compare this with physical products and you see the immediate difference (most physical products pay between 1% and 10% commission).

Do you see how this information can shave years off your affiliate journey? I wasted so much time as a beginner affiliate because I simply didn’t know which were the best products to sell. What’s even better news is that you can also sell digital products which carry monthly recurring commissions too.

These are typically training courses or software products which offer ongoing value. Physical products simply can’t compete here because you only buy a physical product once, therefore you are only ever going to get paid once for the referral as an affiliate (per item sold).

There’s also high ticket products too, which typically sell for many times the cost of a standard item. As such they pay a whole lot more too. (More about this in my ebook).

Promotion Methods

One of the most common problems for affiliate marketers is getting enough traffic to their affiliate offers. With so many other affiliates online, it can be very competitive in terms of buying traffic or if you’re building content. With over 600 million blogs online, getting traffic for free from the search engines can be quite a task.

However, if you’re determined enough, there’s nothing that can stop you from building an income with affiliate marketing, whatever method of promotion you choose. However, if you want to build your business quickly, you’ll need to use some paid advertising.

Otherwise your choices are limited to content creation, which can take a little longer before you generate any traction. Blogging, or creating a video channel on YouTube for example are two methods of generating traffic for free. But this can take several months of content creation before you start to see your traffic growing in the numbers required to make consistent sales. More about this in my free ebook – download here.

Generally speaking, if you lack time, use paid advertising. If you lack money, create content.

Common Mistakes Newbie Affiliates Make

I made a lot of mistakes as a newbie affiliate. I simply didn’t know how many mistakes I was walking into! Shiny object syndrome for example is the name given to the chasing of a new course, rather than sticking to a specific strategy. I was a sucker for this and before I’d spend even a few weeks on one particular strategy, I would find another course which taught something different – a new “shiny object” which promised me easy riches!

But switching direction and tactic often only dilutes the effectiveness of any given strategy. You need to give affiliate marketing a chance for it to work. I was impatient and wanted it all yesterday.

I was a “busy fool” too! A busy fool, I later learned is a term given to the newbie affiliate who spends time on activities which although might be interesting and even fun, don’t move your affiliate business forwards. Unfortunately these activities are often the ones you will gravitate towards, rather than the ones which actually affect your earning potential with affiliate marketing.

I used to spend hours upon hours crafting a beautiful logo, when I had no traffic to my website. Or even months writing blog posts which virtually nobody found because I didn’t promote them! As an affiliate marketer you must always remember that affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. No sales means you don’t get paid! As I was from an employee background (as most people are), it’s easy to assume that time spent on your business equates to income, but it doesn’t. Only sales equate to income.

Summary

Download my free affiliate marketing for beginners ebook here. So let’s recap some of what I’ve shared in this post. There’s various products you can choose to promote as an affiliate but some of them pay better than others.

Digital products which carry recurring income are a good bet because you can earn ongoing income from each sale. This simply isn’t possible with a physical product. Then there are high ticket affiliate products too which can pay many times that of an item priced below $100, for example.

Promotion of affiliate products can take a couple of main routes: either paid marketing or free organic traffic can be sought. Ideally use the one which you can stick to for several months. Use paid marketing if you can afford it and have little time, or use content marketing if you have the time and inclination, and/or no marketing budget.

There’s several pitfalls in affiliate marketing which I discuss in more detail in my ebook. Shiny object syndrome is the desire to find the “magic bullet” which gives you an “easy path” (which doesn’t exist). Being a busy fool means wasting time online and not focusing on money producing activities.

You can also fall into the trap of getting stuck in learning mode – spending hour after hour watching training videos and thinking it’s going to move your business forwards on its own. Sadly this isn’t true and you also need to take massive productive action once you’ve acquired some knowledge. At first you will be learning, spending 80-90% of your time studying. But once you have some information you can use, switch this to 80% of your time implementing and 20% studying.

Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate

Can you really make money from your blog as an affiliate marketer? While blogging is competitive, plenty of bloggers make a good living through blogging. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, it can be tough getting your blog posts out there.

But if you love blogging, it can be a great way to earn an income if you stick with it for long enough. Many bloggers start off with great intentions and give up on the way; largely because they don’t see the results they want immediately. But if you’re prepared for the difficulties involved in earning from blogging, you’re already ahead. Are you ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Shakespeare’s play Hamlet puts it?

If so blogging could well be the answer as your next venture.

I’m personally a big fan of blogging and for a long time I struggled to make any money from it at all. But over time, your content compounds. You get links and shares, and your content will slowly grow. This puts you on the search engines as an authority over time and your rankings will increase steadily if you continue to provide good quality content.

Initially though it can be hard, to keep going while looking for the prize. The answer is to find a way to keep going for going’s sake, rather than for the income. As a wise mentor of mine said “The man who likes walking will always go further then the man who wants to get somewhere”!

Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to monetise a blog. Simply find a product you would like to promote and which aligns with your blog topic, and promote it! You can promote a product through links in your text, banners and through an email list. It’s advisable to do all of these.

The more ways you have to promote your affiliate product on your blog, the better. You’ll probably see my pop up offers on this blog, for example. My ebook is one of the best ways I build an email list through blogging. Grab your copy of it here.

A good affiliate product can be hard to find so make sure you spend some time finding something you genuinely believe in and which is a good fit for your blog topic. If your product is badly aligned with your topic, your audience won’t see it as valuable, however good it is.

To find an affiliate product within your niche, do an online search for “{your topic/niche/keyword} affiliate program”, so for example if you’re topic is golf, here’s what you might type into the search bar:

Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – List Building

Once you start building an email list from your blog, you can grow your list into the thousands and tens of thousands of subscribers over time. This is important for bloggers because you’re going to be working hard creating content to attract your visitors.

When they leave without taking an action, that visitor is usually gone forever. Offer them a freebie giveaway such as an ebook and it lets you collect their details. You can now email them when you create new content and send them to it.

An email list is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products and build trust with your audience. By building trust with your list, by offering value through your blog content, you gain their trust. When you trust someone, you’re much more likely to buy from them, especially online.

To build a list from a blog you can create an eBook which helps you audience somehow. See my post on ebook lead magnet for more on this topic. Or, join an affiliate program which offers a lead magnet you can use from your blog.

Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate – Traffic

We’ve talked about monetising your blog with an affiliate product, and building a list from your blog to increase your website traffic and build trust with your audience. What we haven’t yet discussed is actually attracting traffic with your content.

make money from blogging as an affiliate

Without good content you’re going to struggle getting eyes on it. So make it a priority to create content which is of use to your customer avatar / target audience. If you’re unfamiliar with those terms, simply put your target audience is the small sub section of the online marketplace who is going to be most interested in your content and your affiliate product/s.

Once you understand who these people are, you’re in a better position to post content which they can relate to. So spend some time looking through the customer avatar worksheet to get an idea of who you’re talking to.

The next step is to create some content for your blog. With a new website, you’ll likely not be able to rank your content on the search engines very easily. So you can start by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. (SEO = Search Engine Optimisation). To optimise your blog posts gives them more chance of ranking on the first page of the search results (Google etc.).

Keyword Research

Before writing anything on your blog, it’s a good idea to find the kinds of things that are already being searched for in your topic/niche. You can use Google’s free keyword planner for this job. Type your main keyword into the planner, and look for longer tail derivatives with less competition on the SERPS (Search Engines Results Pages).

The more competition there is on Google for your particular term, the less chance you have of ranking for it. So by finding the “low hanging fruits”, you have a greater chance of ranking your content on them, even if only for long tail keyword terms.

For example, the title to this article for instance is “Make Money From Your Blog As An Affiliate”. That’s 8 words long! Generally speaking the longer “tail” the keyword is the less competition on Google for that particular term.

If I were to choose a more competitive term such as “Affiliate Marketing” for example, I would have a snowball in Hell’s chance of getting a page 1 listing on Google! You can get a general idea about how competitive a term is by doing a simple Google search for the term and then in quotation marks (“like this”), see below:

Article Promotion

Once you’ve published a blog there’s multiple ways you can get your content in front of people. Definitely you shouldn’t rely on Google picking up your content – it might never do so!

But the more you continue to create high quality content (and share it), the more likely this eventuality is. With a new website, you’re probably going to get less of your content ranking on Google’s first page than a seasoned blogger with thousands of articles and high domain authority. But you have to start from somewhere!

So how do you get people to your content if it doesn’t show up on the search engines? You promote it yourself throughout your social media presence. Share your posts on Facebook, Linkedin.com Twitter/X and so on. Ideally set up profiles on multiple social media profiles and build your network of suitable connections (who are likely to show interest in your topic).

You can automate this process with plugins too, such as Revive Old Posts and Postplanner for example. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. Also, as I’ve mentioned already you should share your new content with your list as you grow it.

Summary

So there’s a fair amount involved if you want to make money blogging. Ideally set up your “stall” by deciding on your particular topic/niche in which you want to create content. Focus on who you are targeting with that content and how you can solve/help people with their problems through your content.

With a carefully aligned product, and a good focus for your content which is aligned with your values, it should be easier to earn an income given you’re working on something meaningful to you.

It is much more difficult making content in which you have no interest, except for the “end product” of the monetary reward. Blogging takes time and effort and is often not rewarded financially for several months. So you need to choose a topic where you can sustain your interest for at least that amount of time and ideally indefinitely.

Once you’ve found your topic, choose carefully a product which offers huge value to your audience and one which you yourself would genuinely subscribe to. The higher the value of your product, the more you can earn from it. Ideally find a affiliate product which pays you recurring commissions. With blogging sales are often sporadic initially while you build momentum. So having subscription products which pay you a recurring commission can give you a much needed faith and momentum.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training

In this step by step affiliate marketing training, I’m going to discuss the main things you need to learn as an affiliate. You can also sign up to a free video training series on this website.

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways you can earn from the internet. You don’t need anything of your own to sell and you don’t have to deal with any customers. However, you do need to attract customers in order to get paid. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t earn any money. But on the flip side, once you get the hang of selling, you can sell more and more products without actually doing much more with the power of automation.

It is the early stages of learning affiliate marketing where most new affiliates will quit. So it’s worth being prepared for this stage. Think of affiliate marketing as a personal journey, with a tasty prize waiting for you at the end! If you remember that prize when the journey is tough, it keeps you going!

Many affiliates will quit because nothing seems to be working straight away. But initially you should expect to try out some strategies without making any sales. But think of this as feedback rather than “failure”. There’s no failure in affiliate marketing if you take this viewpoint; only feedback and learning.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – Products/Niche

A lot of courses will tell you to choose a product and then think about a way to promote it. There’s thousands of possible affiliate products to choose from and so this can be quite daunting. So instead, it can be a good idea to choose your niche first.

A niche is a topic/area in which you’ll be building your affiliate business. You’ll be spending some time in your niche, creating content and promoting your products. It’s a good idea to choose a niche in which you have some interest or passion. A niche you’re passionate about is much more likely to become successful than one in which you have no interest.

As an example, I choose a niche I was uninterested in; mushroom harvesting! I spent 6 months building a blog on the topic but eventually gave up on it. Imagine blogging about something you have no interest, for months! Hardly the kind of business you want to be involved in. Compare this to something with which you have a passion for. Now imagine creating content around your passion, whether video content or a blog. It’s much easier and more fun to do this and that means you’ll be able to sustain your efforts for much longer.

So, have a think about a topic or interest you have, or would like to have. Then look for a product within that niche which you would like to promote.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – Finding A Product To Promote

There’s thousands of products you can choose from, in fact millions! Amazon alone offers 12 million products for affiliates to promote through its affiliate program.

However, before you rush in and choose an Amazon product to promote, you should do your homework! Amazon affiliate commissions are some of the lowest in the industry and although Amazon is popular and trusted site, it’s not the best bet for affiliates. Affiliates get paid as little as 1% commission on certain products from Amazon and although the top earning products pay 20% most of Amazon’s products fall within the 1%-10% commission band.

Clickbank is another possible venue to find affiliate products when you’re starting out. Clickbank houses thousands of digital products and these can be good for affiliates because they offer larger commissions. Digital products typically pay between 20% and 40% commissions, far more than physical products. Subscription affiliate products are also a good bet because they pay out recurring commissions. So for each sale you can earn a recurring monthly commission, rather than a one-off commission.

Some other product marketplaces include:

JVZoo
Rakuten (formerly linkshare)
CJ (Commission Junction)
ShareASale
PartnerStack
FlexOffers

To find an affiliate product in a particular category, simply have a search online for “{insert your niche/keyword} affiliate program”.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing Training – High Value Products

The best products to choose are often the most popular and this can mean there’s a lot of competition with other affiliates. However, choosing unknown products which haven’t yet proved themselves can be a problem. They might not sell, or offer much value to the customer. So it’s wise to choose your product carefully.

Ideally it should be something which offers huge value – the more value the better because it will stand the test of time, give you larger commissions and your customers will be happy! Happy customers keep coming back and this is particularly important if you choose a subscription product to sell which offers recurring commissions.

Some products even have multiple items within a range. This is good news for affiliates because they can benefit from later purchases from their referrals. So a low level commission can turn into a high ticket commission if you have products which sell for much larger cost within your sales funnel.

Certain affiliate programs have this option built in. Access one here.

Marketing Your Product / Customer Avatar

One of the biggest hurdles for most new affiliates is getting enough people in front of their affiliate offers. This starts with traffic – either to their website or their landing page where they can collect leads.

Traffic can be bought or you can attract people by creating content. One of the most important factors to understand before you set out to attract traffic is your customer avatar or target audience. The internet is vast, with trillions of people browsing every day. Only a small percentage of those online users will be interested in your particular affiliate product. So before setting out with a marketing strategy, it’s useful to carefully identify who exactly you wish to attract to your offer.

When you understand your customer avatar and target audience very well, it can shave years of struggle off your affiliate journey. Your “customer avatar” is the type of person who will buy, and continue to buy from you. Get to understand their age, location, interests and hobbies to help you zone in on them as a specific demographic. Once you do this, it is much easier to attract the right kind of people to your offer.

Traffic – Paid Or Organic?

The next step to take is to start marketing. Without marketing your affiliate business is dead in the water. You need traffic (and the right kind of traffic) in order to sell your affiliate products. No sales equals no money! Remember affiliate marketing is a performance based business and although this means there’s no limit or cap to what you can earn, this can also work against you too!

Initially taking action in your marketing efforts can be daunting. After all, you don’t have the experience of a seasoned affiliate so you won’t know which adverts work and which don’t. You don’t know how many blog posts or videos to upload before you’ll make a sale. The key here is to keep taking actions on a regular basis. Trust the process and stick with a marketing strategy which you can sustain for several months at the least. If you don’t have a marketing budget, you’ll need to do content creation. If you don’t have time for content creation you’ll need a marketing budget.

You can also do a little paid marketing and some content creation. Be aware however that content creation is a much slower method of generating traffic than paid marketing.

Summary

As a new affiliate it’s worth getting help and support and joining an online community. You can access training and support here. You’ll be able to take a step by step training on the inside of the platform.

To make money as an affiliate you need to join an affiliate program and successfully promote and sell an affiliate product. Once you’ve done this once, you have the key to doing it again and again. So the first step for a newbie affiliate is to figure out how to actually make that first sale online.

Here’s the basics:

Join a training program and choose a niche
Find a product you would like to sell
Settle on a single marketing strategy (for at least 6 months) whether paid or organic; understand who your customer avatar is
Stick with it and keep going, learning as you go.
Don’t stop until you make that first sale, however long that takes
Rinse and repeat

As you learn you can tweak your action steps the more you sell. Over time, you’ll get better and better at selling and be able able to automate the selling process.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

What is the best way to do high ticket affiliate marketing for beginners? Before I found a high ticket program to promote, I wasted a lot of time as an affiliate. I joined Amazon’s affiliate program which is notoriously badly paid! Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 10% commission on most of its items! This is pretty poor. But I didn’t know this when I started out. I made all kinds of moves to sell products. When I finally made an affiliate sale I made a measly commission which was hardly worth my effort.

It’s no wonder 95% of affiliates quit if my own personal affiliate journey is anything to go by. But I was desperate to make affiliate marketing work for me and despite a lot of efforts which led to nothing, I eventually found a high ticket affiliate program in 2014 which proved to be legit. You can join the program through signing up on this website. Or learn more here.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Digital Products & High Ticket

The benefit of promoting a high ticket program is the much larger commissions you can receive when you make a sale. In addition there’s a lot of other benefits too such as:

A product range – gives you the ability to earn lifetime commissions from each customer, when they buy another item from a range
Subscription products – lets you earn ongoing commissions per sale
High ticket items – give you the largest possible commissions for digital products online
A built in sales system – means you don’t have to personally close high ticket sales. It’s done for you with a built in sales team and automated marketing system

Digital products typically pay much more per sale than physical products. While physical products will typically pay 10% at the most, with a digital product you can earn a lot more (usually 30%-40%). Digital training programs which offer help and support for online business building are some of the most desired products you can promote online. How much is it worth to you if you could learn how to completely replace (and automate) your income through an online business?

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Who Should Invest?

With a high ticket product range, you will typically pay more to buy more help and support. The more you can do personally, the less you pay. Whereas the more you want “done for you”, the more you’ll have to invest.

High ticket investment also brings with it larger levels of commission, too. So if you invest in the top level products from a range, you stand to earn more should you make a sale of that particular product.

However it’s worth noting that high level investment in a high ticket product range is no guarantee of success. In order to profit from online sales as an affiliate, you need to make sales yourself. You can of course get help and support with this process, to give you a better chance of success.

When you invest in an education program, you’re investing in just that – your education. It’s no get rich quick scheme which guarantees you riches! In order to make sales you also need to invest in some kind of marketing strategy, ideally using paid marketing methods which are scalable.

Investing in a high ticket sales funnel is no magic bullet for online riches, but it does offer a greater opportunity to affiliates than simply trying to sell low value products.

A Plug And Play System – Step By Step

A high ticket sales funnel gives you the ability to sell high ticket items through an automated sales system which is pre built with your affiliate links already in place. All you need to do is follow the step by step training to set up your website and sales system. Once created (which takes a few days), you effectively have a ready made sales system in place ready to sell.

From this point your focus should be marketing your sales funnel, which is taught through the training modules and online classes. Should you invest further you can access personal one on one support and “done for you systems” which require less set up time of your own.

Whatever your level of “buy-in”, you’ll still need to learn marketing – driving targeted traffic towards your offer. This can be done in multiple different ways such as blogging, video marketing and pay per click advertising. The fastest and most scalable method is paid marketing.

Sliding Commission Structure

According to your level of investment you can access a range of high ticket items which offer a sliding scale of commission levels. You don’t need to promote the high ticket items yourself. This is done through automation and the built in sales team.

Your only job as a marketer is to drive targeted traffic towards your sales funnel. Collect emails and let the automated email delivery service deliver marketing messages with your affiliate links in them.

Learn more and get started here.

The main benefit of using a digital marketing system like this is that it gives you the maximum commission per customer. Whereas most affiliate products only pay you once, a product range gives you commissions for each purchase your referral makes; even if it’s years after their original purchase.

Subscription affiliate products carry recurring commissions, too. This has a compounding effect over time as you get better at attracting customers.

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing

It’s not easy overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing. The limitations are in the way we think, rather than in our businesses. You can’t grow a business beyond the level of thinking you bring to it. So it is our thinking which determines the invisible “glass ceiling” of our business. We all have certain fears and restrictions within us which determine the way we do things. With affiliate marketing if we let these things stop us taking action, they will limit our business and our cashflow.

Here’s a few common questions about affiliate marketing which are frequently asked, for example:

“Can I do affiliate marketing without a website?”

“Can I do affiliate marketing without a laptop?”

“Can you do affiliate marketing completely for free?”

While these are valid questions, they also imply limitations. While you can do affiliate marketing without a laptop or without a website, and completely for free, they are all examples of limitations which will potentially stop someone from attaining the level of success they really want. A better question might be “How can I succeed with affiliate marketing?” or “What do the top earners do in affiliate marketing?“, or “what should I do to succeed with affiliate marketing“.

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing

I’ve definitely experienced these kinds of limitations myself when it comes to building an affiliate business. One of the most prevalent ones (for me) is definitely spending money. When I started learning about affiliate marketing I was terrified of spending money, (because I didn’t have any), so I did everything for free. I bought a couple of (cheap) courses to learn some things, but largely I went it alone.

Perhaps you can relate? While you can do affiliate marketing on the cheap, it’s definitely worth paying for some help and support at the very least. It’s also worth paying for an email autoresponder and a website of your own. Even if you’re on a tight budget, not doing so will severely hamper your progress.

Then there’s paying for advertising which can allow you to build an affiliate business much faster than with cheap and free marketing methods, which are slower and less reliable. But what if you can’t afford a marketing budget or to invest in getting coaching and mentoring? What then?

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing – Failing Forwards

Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Fear is a powerful emotion which masquerades as “safety”. while our brains are keeping us “safe”, they are also keeping us from growing. To grow an affiliate business requires you to step outside the comfort zone which you are familiar with. You must fail in order to learn! Failure isn’t an option, it’s compulsory!

There’s a saying in affiliate marketing known as “failing forwards”. It means trying stuff out so you can learn from it.

When a child starts to learn to walk, they get up and fall over again thousands of times. But they never give up! But that’s just what affiliates do and the 95% drop out rate is testimony to this.

The problem we have as affiliates is that we are largely working alone. This means we never get to see our comfort zone, we only experience the results of whatever action we are focused on. So it’s easy to fall into a groove we are comfortable with, without ever seeing ourselves as the problem.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Overcoming Limitations In Affiliate Marketing – What Limits Are You Placing On Your Actions As An Affiliate?

What limits do you place on your actions as an affiliate? Do you stop working when you’re tired? Have you set a limitation on what you will spend on marketing, or on training/education? Have you invested in yourself and getting help and support, or are you skimping on it to save some money? Do you have a marketing budget? What products do you promote and why? Ask some pertinent questions in the following areas of your affiliate business to uncover some possible reasons why you’re holding yourself back:

Are you investing time/money in continuous education?
Do you have a marketing budget, however small?
How much time do you spend every day on your affiliate business?
Do your circumstances limit the time you can spend on your business?
Are finances limiting your ability to grow your business?
Can you spend more time/money on your business?
Do you have a good support network who encourages your business growth and helps you personally?

Identify an area of your business/thinking which is somehow limiting. List 10 things you can do about it.

Some Simple Steps To Push Your Comfort Zone

There’s lots of things you can do to “nudge” your comfort zone towards growth even when you’re faced with limiting circumstances:

Access a free autoresponder service if you don’t already have an email list
Start an Adwords/Microsoft account and set a marketing budget as little as $1 a day!
Write a blog post each day/week
Access training and support
Upload a video each day/week to YouTube/TikTok
Read a page of a self development book each day

What you resist persists and it’s likely that the very thing you are avoiding is the thing you need to do to grow yourself and your business. One simple way to identify your weakness is to look at the things you avoid doing!

Words Become Things

Thoughts become words and words become things. Another useful way to identify your limits is to start observing the things you say both to yourself and others. Our limitations often come over in the things we say, the excuses we make and the fears and limitations we discuss.

Stop giving your thoughts and words to limitations and give them to faith and belief instead. When you can unpick your limiting beliefs you can start to unravel the limitations you’re bringing to your affiliate business.

Your business will never outgrow the limits of the thinking you bring to it. If you’re thinking small, and in terms of limitation, there’s no doubt this will effect your affiliate business too.

Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill: “Mind control is the result of self-discipline and habit. You either control your mind or it controls you.”

Summary

To overcome limitations you must first identify them. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know you have it. Your business will never outgrow the limitations of your thinking.

Start by looking at the reasons your business isn’t doing as well as you might like. This may come out as a list of excuses. Write them down and identify some of the limits you might be holding in your mind.

Then write out ten possible actions you can take to change the situation. It’s likely that some of these actions will be uncomfortable. That’s a sure sign they are the things you must do!

Take some gentle steps to soften your resistance to these steps by breaking them down into tiny micro commitments in the right direction. For example, you might not have a large marketing budget, but you can afford to run an advert at $1 a day just to soften your resistance and get the momentum needed. You can also learn from the data you collect, even if the test doesn’t result in a sale/commission.

What other micro steps can you take towards overcoming the resistance you have and your invisible barriers to success which show up as fear?

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the pitfalls of affiliate marketing? It’s easy to see the up-sides of affiliate marketing. It’s a business model which can allow you to become financially independent and choose how and where you work! Earnings are potentially unlimited and you can work from anywhere in the world from a laptop!

However, with such huge benefits, it’s unsurprising that there’s many pitfalls of affiliate marketing as well. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business where you only get paid if you sell. Most new affiliates will struggle to sell anything within their first few efforts and this leads many to quit before they’ve given it a proper chance. There’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing which means only a tiny few will actually make it work for them to generate a reliable income.

The journey to making your first online sale is definitely a challenge and it’s much more difficult if you go it alone. So it’s worth getting help and support if you’re going to take it seriously and give yourself a proper chance.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing – Getting Off The Blocks

Getting started as an affiliate is easy. Simply join an affiliate program and learn how to promote your affiliate link. Sounds easy. But in reality there’s a lot to learn and implement, and most of the time it won’t result in a sale. As you try things out in your marketing efforts, you might expect things to work more easily than they do in reality, and this can be pretty tough and it’s where a lot of people drop out.

What you want to happen and what actually happens are very different. But if you can keep going for long enough it gets easier. Once you’ve made a single sale consider it a major break though. At this point you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it once. This can help you overcome a lot of mental baggage. If you’re full of doubt it’s much more difficult than if you’re full of self belief!

I’d say one of the major pitfalls of affiliate marketing is this beginning stage. You are likely to be sceptical and full of doubts and fears. Plus, you haven’t proved it to yourself yet or taken any action. So you’re not only encumbered by doubt but also inactivity. You need to take a lot of action to blast yourself through these barriers. This takes a lot of belief and conviction, which is part of the problem if you don’t have it! Not only do you need huge self belief but you also need to consistently take action amid the lack of tangible results.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing – The First Sale

The first sale is a major milestone and signifies a huge effort on your part, unless of course you had a lucky early win, which is possible of course. A “lucky” win might be a win without much effort. But this can also be a negative because if you believe every sale will come so easily, you’re going to be disappointed later when this success isn’t easily repeated.

Once you start proving it can be done to yourself, you’ve overcome a major barrier to success; your own scepticism and doubt. To scale this success up to larger success is now possible but this requires more effort, time and/or marketing budget. If your first sale is made through paying for advertising, you can easily scale up and repeat it. But if it’s organic, it can be more difficult to scale up.

Ideally you can make sales in your sleep with affiliate marketing and build a scalable income without having to deal with customers or handle products. But in reality this takes a lot of effort and/or a large marketing budget. If your traffic source is organic, it can take months before you see regular traffic, leads and sales. If you’re paying for traffic, it’s going to cost you!

Psycology

The psychology of affiliate marketing is quite interesting. It will definitely help you if you understand some of the psychological pitfalls before you start. Most people learning affiliate marketing haven’t come from a sales background and so their past employment can actually work against them. For example, if you have a technical role in a job, you get paid for turning up and doing the work. No matter how well a company does, the workforce gets the same pay packet each week. This can lead you to imagine the same is true of affiliate marketing. However, it doesn’t work like this as an affiliate. You only get paid when you sell something.

This means you need to focus on those actions which create this result. But most people aren’t programmed this way. Most people gravitate towards the activities which are comfortable and familiar!

Being a “busy fool” is therefore a thing to be avoided as an affiliate. A busy fool can spend all day on the superficial activities which although might be enjoyable, don’t move their business forwards.

When results aren’t forthcoming, it’s easy to blame your marketing strategy or product and therefore move on to another “system”. Again, this is human nature looking for an easier path. This is known as shiny object syndrome and before you make any ground or headway with a particular affiliate strategy, you’re off looking for the next “shiny object”. See also affiliate marketing psychology.

Summary

While affiliate marketing can allow anyone to earn from anywhere, there’s many pitfalls with the business model and most would-be affiliates don’t make it work for them. With a 95% drop out rate, you know it’s not going to be as easy as some make out.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means if you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. It can take an enormous amount of effort just to get off the “blocks” with affiliate marketing and although it gets easier the longer you do it, most people think it’s going to be easier than it actually is.

If you have a long term view and are prepared to do the work it can be a great solution. The flip side though is that you can replace almost any income with affiliate marketing. There’s no limit on what you can earn from it. If you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing and making it work, get started here.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business?

Are you struggling with your affiliate business? I was too, but in 2014 I joined an online community and got help and support. I learned how to get traffic, convert traffic into leads and sales and stay the course when things got tough. Having others around you on the same path is vital for your success with an online business. It gives you belief and holds you accountable. Without a strong support system, it’s easy to look to friends and relatives for support but unfortunately this can have a negative effect, as your circle are seldom online entrepreneurs and often they don’t see your vision.

Here’s a few of the things I learned which helped me overcome my affiliate struggles and get my business on track.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Email Marketing

Before I got proper help, I was struggling to get traffic to my websites. This is one of the major problems for affiliate marketers. Unless you get traffic, and the right kind of traffic, in the right numbers, you’re never going to succeed with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Get enough people to your offers and you’ll sell something eventually.

Of course not all traffic is equal and you need to know who to attract to your products. Attract the wrong kind of traffic, and no amount of visitors will give you a sale. More about this later. The first “gem” I learned was the power of email marketing. I didn’t have an email list and this gives you a major disadvantage. Without an email list of subscribers, you’re relying on your website traffic converting into sales.

This can be difficult even if you attract the right kind of (buyer) visitor. Most online users will require a number of touch points before they make an online purchase. So if they only interact with your website once, most will leave without buying anything.

An email list puts you in greater control of your traffic and allows you to make a number of connections with potential customers and over a long period of time. On a website, most people leave within a few minutes which means you only have this time to sell to them, if you don’t get their email address.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business – Products

Before I got help, the products I was selling paid only peanuts. I sold books from Amazon, for example, which only paid a few cents for each sale I made. Plus I wasn’t selling products in the volume I needed in order to replace my employment income.

But even with only sporadic sales, some products can allow you to replace your current income much more quickly. For example, if you promote products which pay out recurring income, a few sales quickly adds up to give you a rolling monthly income. With one-time commissions, you only get paid once per item, so you need to sell in larger volumes.

Subscription products, such as training courses and digital software are a good example of those which pay out recurring income. They are also good products to choose because they are vital for businesses. Email autoresponders, business training and other software which helps online businesses are good examples of products which people will subscribe to potentially for years.

High Ticket Items

Another example of a game changer for affiliate marketers is high ticket products. High ticket affiliate products pay out much larger commissions than standard products which affiliates often choose. When I started affiliate marketing, I assumed a lot about what people buy online, much of which was false. I would sell things which I personally bought online, and which I could afford.

My mentor taught me to look at what the wealthy buy online and focus on selling those kinds of items instead.

With a low valued item, say one valued at $100, you can only earn around 40% commission maximum (if it’s a digital product). Physical products pay much lower levels of commission (usually from 1%-10%). But with products valued at $10,000 and above, each sale brings a much larger rate of commission – whether your product is digital or physical.

Help And Support

Consider two affiliates each working towards replacing their employment income so they can become full time affiliate marketers. One of them surrounds themselves with mentors and coaches who have already achieved this, the other goes it alone and only has the support of their friends and family. Which one has the best chance of success? Of course it’s the one with the mentors and coaches.

I tried everything alone for a long time, thinking I would save money if I did it all by myself. The problem with this approach is that there’s many pitfalls with affiliate marketing and most aren’t prepared for them. So when things don’t work out, 95% of affiliate marketers will quit.

Finding other affiliates and mentors who can keep you on track and offer support and accountability is vital if you’re going to succeed online. It’s simply too difficult otherwise. No one succeeds in a vacuum doing everything alone.

Get help and support – find an online community here.

Affiliate Lead Generation

Affiliate lead generation is the act of collecting leads, usually in the form of an email address. Some affiliates build their own list of leads and then deliver email messages to their subscribers promoting their affiliate products. Or, you can also send leads directly to an affiliate company if you’re working on a pay per lead basis.

In my personal experience as an affiliate I’ve built my own email list through offering some giveaway on my website or landing page. The benefit of using a landing page is that a landing page is a web page designed for the specific purpose of collecting emails. Whereas a website is different in that there’s more choices on a website.

On a website, visitors can have a look around and browse your posts. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to “tweak” the details on the page to optimise the rate at which visitors opt in. This allows them to drive down the cost to acquire a lead.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Why Generate Leads?

Affiliates use lead generation to build an email list of subscribers. By sending out useful email messages which deliver some kind of value, they can build trust with a subscriber. It can be a challenge to sell an affiliate product directly from a website. A website visitor only sticks around for a few minutes on average, often less. Plus they only have one opportunity to buy from you if they never return.

Since most online shoppers will need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website online before they buy, it makes sense to connect with visitors more frequently through the use of email marketing.

Affiliates therefore have a greater opportunity to sell their products through email marketing than they would from a website alone. With email marketing, an affiliate can sell a product to a subscriber days, weeks or even years after they have joined an email list. This just isn’t possible from a website so a good way to optimise your affiliate sales is to capture emails from a website by offering a giveaway of some kind to deliver value to those who opt in.

The Lead Magnet – A Legitimate “Bribe”

The lead magnet is a legitimate bribe with which you can attain the details of your website visitors. A lead magnet should resonate with your customer avatar/target audience and also align with whatever product/s you are selling through your email list.

On this website I offer my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners as a giveaway when visitors join my email list. Access here. A lead magnet could be anything but many affiliates choose an ebook or a course which can be delivered automatically via email.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Communicating With Your Leads

Once you start attracting leads to join your email list you’ll want to give them some useful information which will be beneficial to them. If you’ve ever joined someone’s email list, and all they do is spam you with products to buy, it’s unlikely you’ll keep opening their emails for long!

But if you offer them some genuine value through your email messages, and if they are a good fit for you, they are likely to open your messages more regularly. They might even start to trust you!

Trust online is a powerful thing (especially online) because there are so many people wanting your hard earned cash, it’s worth building trust by genuinely trying to help your subscribers somehow.

If you build trust first, and sell later, people are much more likely to keep opening your email messages, trust you and buy from you if it’s appropriate to their needs.

With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages ready to be sent out on autopilot when someone subscribes to your email list. You can access an autoresponder here for free.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Control

There’s another powerful reason to build an email list of subscribers too. To get visitors to your website requires either a considerable amount of work (in building content) or a considerable sum of money in paid advertising. If you use content to acquire traffic, Google can shift the algorithm any time and you can easily lose your rankings overnight, meaning your traffic can quickly drop.

Or, if you run out of advertising budget and stop paying for traffic, your visitors will drop off almost immediately.

Building an email list gives you control over your traffic so you’re not as reliant on either Google for traffic or a paid advertising budget. Some affiliates will build their list to over 100,000 subscribers! A single email sent to their list can mean hundreds or even thousands of link clicks which could mean either traffic to your website post or a sale of an affiliate product.

Control over your traffic is huge for affiliates because without traffic you can’t make any affiliate sales.

Summary

Affiliate lead generation is a powerful tool. On a website most visitors leave within a short period of time. This gives an affiliate only a small window of opportunity to make the sale.

But if the affiliate collects leads from their website, it gives them more opportunity to sell through email messages. Once someone joins your email list, you can follow up via email over days, weeks, months and even years and decades. This gives you more opportunity to give value, built trust and sell your affiliate products.

Since most online consumers will require between 6-8 touch points before they make a purchase, it makes sense to use email marketing so you can achieve this.

Affiliate Earning Websites

Affiliate earning websites are websites set up specifically to generate an income through affiliate sales. Anyone can earn with affiliate marketing even without their own product or anything to sell.

This is done by joining an affiliate program, getting a unique identifying link, (known as an affiliate link), and promoting that link online. This can be done in many ways, not just from a website. You can promote your affiliate link through an email message, through an advert or throughout your social media platforms too. You can upload videos and promote your link that way.

However, the reason many affiliates choose to build a website is that it offers an affordable way to generate traffic. An affiliate website, set up with all the bells a whistles, may be set up to sell in principle. But without traffic, it won’t sell anything.

Traffic is a major key to selling with affiliate earning websites. But it isn’t the only factor in generating an automated income online.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Types Of Traffic

Not all traffic is equal. Some people come to visit a website and only want to find some information. Other visitors might want to buy something, but the intent of most online users is in gathering information. After all, the internet is an information gathering tool.

To build an affiliate earning website which generates sales, you’ll need to attract the kind of traffic which converts into sales. This can be done by paying attention to the search terms looked at by visitors immediately before finding your website.

So for example, you might have searched for the term “affiliate earning websites” before finding this page. Each search term has a particular intent behind it. For an affiliate website you want your search terms on your website to attract buyers.

A good example of a search for someone wanting to find some free information is “how to sell an ebook from your own website“, for example. “How to” queries tend to signify that the visitor is looking for information, not wanting to buy something.

Someone looking for a review of a product, though, is very different. Product review websites tend to be a good idea for affiliates for a simple but powerful reason: the visitor is looking for something specific to buy. A good example of a buyer intent search term might be “Modern Wealthy Review“, for example, a product I promote on this website.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Knowing Your Audience

Since there’s millions of people online at any particular time, you can easily attract the wrong kind of visitor to your affiliate website. To avoid wasting your time creating the wrong kind of content, or paying for the wrong kind of advertising, to get traffic to an affiliate earning website, it’s useful to know who you intend to attract.

To get very clear on your target audience or customer avatar, spend some time figuring out who you can best serve with your affiliate product/s. What kind of person would be likely to be interested in buying from your affiliate website? Where do they live? What searches are they performing online? How old are they and so on.

When you can answer these and more questions about your customer avatar, you can begin to either create content to attract them, or pay for advertising to get people to land on your website. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf to help you work on your customer avatar.

Knowing your audience, and specifically, the audience who is most likely to buy from you, can shave years off your affiliate experience.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Attracting Traffic

Now you have spent some time on your customer avatar, you know who you would like to attract. There’s two main ways to attract people to an affiliate earning website: either through content marketing or with paid marketing. With content marketing you create content on your website which attracts your target audience. With paid marketing, you use an advertising platform to send traffic to your site directly. See also content creation vs paid marketing.

While paid marketing is very fast, you can also spend a lot before you start selling. So it’s wise to start with a small marketing budget you can easily afford to lose, while you test and measure your results. The advantage of paid marketing is that it’s super fast and it’s pretty much like turning on a tap for traffic. Plus, you can scale up too, once you’re running a profitable campaign which gives you a good return.

Organic marketing, on the other can be very slow. You’ll need to create and promote a lot of content before you start to see even a trickle of traffic. The benefit of content marketing is that it’s free to do, although it does take time and effort. The good news though is that over time, your work compounds and the small trickles of traffic slowly grow into streams and rivers.

Affiliate Earning Websites – Email Marketing

Most affiliate earning websites have an offer you will find somewhere on the website. Often this will be obvious when you visit the site and it might take the form of a popup offer, promoting a free ebook or course.

This is a strategy which is very beneficial for an affiliate earning website – email marketing. By building an email list of subscribers, the affiliate has greater control over their traffic. They can send out regular messages to their subscribers which either promote their content or their affiliate products (or both).

Affiliates build trust with their subscribers by delivering value driven messages while promoting their products. See also don’t forget your email list.

Touchpoints

To earn from an affiliate website you need to join an affiliate program and promote your product from your site. Since most website visitors only stick around a few minutes, it’s definitely worth building an email list as I mentioned. An email list gives you a much longer period of time to let your subscribers build their confidence in you and of course offers more opportunities to buy from you too.

Studies have shown that the average online user will need 6-8 touch points before they buy from you, especially if they don’t know you. A website doesn’t offer this but you can communicate with visitors who have signed up to your email list more frequently. You can also use retargeting to place advertising in front of visitors who have left your website.

Your choice of product is an important part of building an affiliate earning website and has a lot to do with your success. Ideally choose products which are already proven to sell and which offer huge value to your audience.

Summary

As you can see there’s a lot to think about with an affiliate earning website. The easy part is setting up your website with affiliate links within it. It’s much more difficult bring traffic towards your site which converts into sales.

To increase your conversion rate you can spend more money on traffic or create more content, build an email list or use retargeting – to bring visitors back to your site. Ultimately though you need to attract visitors who have an intention to take action on your site. This can be done more simply after understanding who you want to attract to your site – see the customer avatar worksheet for more on this.

You can get started with a “plug and play” website through this training program.