Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

Can you really do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget and how does doing it on the cheap affect your chances? The good thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get started for absolutely nothing. All you need is to join an affiliate program and find a means to promote your affiliate link for free. Doing everything for free does come with a number of limitations. However it’s definitely a possibility for those who can’t afford large marketing budgets or high ticket product ranges.

hostgator

If you have a little cash to spare, it’s well worth getting yourself a domain name that you own and getting your own hosting. This will only set you back a few dollars a month. A domain name can be bought (I use this site) relatively cheaply (Less than $13 a year) and a hosting service can be bought for $3-$5 a month.

The next investment that’s worth your money is an email autoresponder. You can get access to one for free here which gives you up to 500 subscribers for nothing!

Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget

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If you don’t have the cash for a website of your own at least get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing. An autoresponder allows you to collect email subscribers from a website, whether you own the website or not. Collection of email addresses puts you in greater control of your traffic: the number one issue for many struggling affiliates.

Without a website of your own there’s a few strategies you can still use. See also how to promote affiliate links without a website. YouTube for example is a great option if you’re on a tight budget. Many YouTubers have build a huge following simply by upload content that they have created. Building a YouTube channel does take some time and effort, but it’s worth it when you can attract a following to promote your affiliate products to.

affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget
Click here to view my YouTube channel

Free blog sites are an option too, if you’re shy about getting on camera. Hubpages.com WordPress.com, Medium.com and Blogger.com are all places you can go to get your content online and attract a following for the selling of affiliate products.

Affiliate Marketing On A Shoestring Budget – Target Audience

The main thing you’ll need to do to attract an audience for affiliate marketing on a budget is to create content. The main two ways to make affiliate sales online are paid and organic marketing. Organic marketing notoriously takes a lot more work and time. There’s also other methods which you can use such a social media methods. See my post on unpaid social media marketing.

target audience for affiliate marketing

If you’re going to go down the content marketing route, it’s well worth spending some time on defining your target audience or customer avatar first, before you start. Creating content is time consuming and it can be demoralising when a lot of work doesn’t amount to much.

To make the most of your content creation strategy, it’s a good idea to know who exactly you’re marketing towards. This will save you a whole lot of time and effort, wasting content on the wrong audience. Visit my post on the customer avatar worksheet pdf and work your way through it.

When you know very well the type of person who will buy, you’re already a better marketer. It’ll shave years off your journey!

– Choosing Your Niche

If you’re on a budget, it’s probably going to be a good idea to get good at building content – either written on in video format. To create and upload video upon video or blog post upon blog post, potentially for months, is a tall order. You’ll need to have at least an interest in your chosen topic for this to work, and ideally a passion for it.

A while ago I chose a topic I was uninterested in and for 6 months wrote blog posts on it. Before I lost the plot, I completely abandoned the site and it soon fell by the wayside. It wasn’t a total failure because I learned not to choose a topic I had zero interest in, (just because I though it might make some money)!

affiliate marketing on a shoestring

“The man who likes to walk will go further than the man who wants to get somewhere”! The same applies to content creation. Choose a topic you love and can get passionate about. Otherwise it’s going to be a much harder journey and you’re more likely to quit en-route.

Imagine upload videos or blog posts in your chosen topic for several months on a regular basis. If this makes you feel good, then it’s the right topic. Otherwise you might want a rethink. That’s how long it is likely to take; with over 600 million blogs on the internet and 113.9 million YouTube channels (in 2023) to compete with.

– Product Choice

Product choice has a great deal to do with your success as an affiliate and particularly when you’re going the organic route. If you can afford some paid advertising, to get traffic more quickly, it’s worth doing. But use a budget you’re happy to learn from, rather than earn from because initially you’ll likely spend budget without getting a return (other than data and knowledge).

There’s a vast range of products you can choose to promote as an affiliate and some affiliate programs do require you to already have a following. Whether that be a high traffic website or a large list of subscribers/YouTube subscriber base etc. But most programs will be happy to let you join them without any such requirements.

high ticket products - affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget
High ticket products like this Golf Cart Hovercraft pay much more than most affiliate products!

Amazon is the go-to website for new affiliates but Amazon’s commission structure is fairly low by industry standards. For example, some of their products pay as little as 1% commission on a sale. With organic marketing, you’re likely to start out with the odd sale, sporadically.

So when that sale amounts to very little, it can be difficult staying positive about your affiliate business. But if you choose digital products, you can earn more like 30-40% commission which can be more worth your while.

In addition, you can also promote subscription digital products too. These are definitely worth considering because they can pay recurring commissions from each sale. Checkout also my article on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

– How Does A Budget Affect Your Chance Of Affiliate Success?

Doing everything on the cheap will definitely affect your chances of success with affiliate marketing. If you can, invest in a training and education program which “plugs” you in to a community too. You can access one here.

Having like minded people to hold you accountable will definitely help you succeed online. It can be tough maintaining the drive to keep going when results don’t come quickly, especially with content creation.

When you start looking for results in your business, you stop working on it. If you doubt yourself, this effects your motivation and drive. You can’t always be on “top” form, however high your motivation is on any given day. So make habits out of doing the work to keep the momentum going. See also the the power of micro habits which is a useful post for content creators.

affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget

Summary

If you’re starting out as an affiliate I would recommend you get your own website and hosting and an email autoresponder at the very minimum. Then create content on your website or build a YouTube channel which helps your audience in some way.

Promote products through your channel and build your email list by offering some freebie giveaway on your website/channel such as an ebook you’ve created (here’s one I made earlier!).

Content marketing is a slow method of getting traction as an affiliate compared to paid advertising, so expect to be working for some time before you break through and start making those sales. To speed up your journey considerably get an email autoresponder and build an email list. Use subscription affiliate products and high ticket products which pay you recurring commissions and large one-off commissions respectively.

Those are some of the best ways I know to do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products. If you know any other methods I’d be grateful for your comments!

Access more training and resources through this course.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home

There’s lots of people wondering how to make money online from home so here’s a short beginners guide. While there’s plenty of ways to earn online one of the simplest and most popular ways is through selling other people’s products and services; a business model known as affiliate marketing.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners

With affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program, get your unique affiliate I.D. or affiliate link, and promote it online to earn commissions on products you sell. One of the most popular affiliate programs available is Amazon’s.

Yes, Amazon that popular website which you’ve probably already bought from, has an affiliate program. When you join the program you can access an affiliate platform where you can create an affiliate link to over 12 million products on the site.

But before you rush off to Amazon, you’re going to need some help in the actual promotion of your affiliate link. This is the “crux” of the affiliate marketing model; getting your affiliate link in front of the right audience, and in large numbers.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – The “Right” Audience

It’s worth noting too that Amazon isn’t the best paying affiliate program. Some products on Amazon pay as little as 1% commission, so you’ll need to sell a lot of them, and very cheaply, in order to make a profit.

However, there’s other products and services which pay much more; such as digital, subscription and hight ticket products. For more info find the form on this website and sign up to the free video series. You can also download my free ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” too, just click here for access.

target market - who to find for your products

Anyway, I digress! Back to the right audience. When you’re selling an affiliate product online you need a strategy to get your affiliate link in front of as many people as you can. But most people online aren’t going to want the toaster, or dinner set you’re promoting, for example. In fact, the bulk of online traffic wants something totally different and most are browsing for information, not products. So finding the right “slice” of the online marketplace to put your affiliate link in front of is paramount to earning online through affiliate marketing.

To do this we can zone in on what we affiliates call the customer avatar or target audience. The target audience is the small slice of the online marketplace who is actively looking for what we are selling. So for example, product reviews are a good idea for affiliates because they attract people who are looking for a specific product, which we can then sell though our affiliate link.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – Choosing A Marketing Strategy

There’s many ways to sell other people’s products online with affiliate marketing. Some affiliates choose blogging, others use video. Some use paid marketing and build a large list of subscribers. But most successful affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they promote their products to.

Having an email list is one of the most important things for affiliates because it allows them to collect a large number of subscribers who have shown an interest in their topic/niche.

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A list also puts the affiliate in greater control over their traffic, which is necessary to attract buyers for your products. You can use a website to collect emails by offering some free information to your website visitors. Some affiliates use specific landing pages to collect email subscribers and this is a good idea.

A landing page is a specific web page built specifically for the purpose of collecting email addresses. It’s much more efficient than a normal website because there’s less choice for visitors. They either sign up or leave, whereas on a website, they can browse around.

Generally an affiliate will choose a marketing strategy which suits their available time and resources and their budget. Here’s a few strategies:

  • Content marketing : blogging, video blogging
  • PPC – pay per click marketing – using a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords
  • Social media marketing – sharing content on social media, pasting your affiliate links in your profile etc.
  • Paid social media marketing – using a social media platform to run paid ads
  • Email marketing – list building lets you collect emails from a landing page/website using a free giveaway such as an ebook

How To Make Money Online For Beginners – How Long Does It Take?

If you’ve read this far you’re probably asking how long this is going to take to make any money from selling other people’s products. The timescale will differ according to how much time you can put in and your marketing strategy. With a large budget and if you’re using high ticket affiliate products, you can start generating leads and sales very quickly, within a few weeks with a paid marketing strategy. But if you’re choosing another route, such as blogging, you’re in for a longer journey.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners

Blogging or any other content creation strategy involves creating a lot of content and building a digital “asset”. Once built such an asset can generate free leads and sales without paying for traffic. However it can take several months to get to this stage and the time will depend on your input and the relative competitiveness of your niche.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, although many promote it as such, so you should expect to work at it consistently for several weeks or months before you can see sales dropping in. Once you have put that work in though you can benefit from the automation of online selling, according to your marketing strategy. With a scalable strategy (e.g. paid marketing) you can build a large 6 figure enterprise quite quickly with enough investment capital. If you’re only looking for an extra income you can do this too, even with only a few hours each day.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn an income online through the selling of other people’s products and services. Anyone can become an affiliate and earn an income this way. Simply join an affiliate program and get some training. Training is well worth your time if you’re going to take affiliate marketing seriously. It’s the best investment you can make on this path because everything you do will be based on what you know (or don’t know) about how to successfully market a product online.

Access my free ebook here and a free video series to learn more.

How To Make Money Online For Beginners

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.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money

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.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money

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.

Selling Stuff Online To Make Money

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).

beginners guide

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.

free affiliate marketing ebook

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.

what is affiliate marketing

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.

e-commerce sales boom

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.

make money from your blog as an affiliate

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.

make money from your blog as an affiliate

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.

aweber

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.

make money affiliate marketing

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:

make money from blogging

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.

step by step affiliate marketing training

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.

step by step affiliate marketing training

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.

amazon - a trusted site

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.

amazon for affilaites

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.

target - customer avatar

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.

step by step affiliate training

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.

high ticket affiliate marketing for beginners

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.

high ticket affiliate marketing for beginners

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.

high ticket affiliate marketing for beginners
Watch this video and get started here.

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?”

overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing

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.

the slight edge

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.

overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing

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:

overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing
  • 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

overcoming limitations in affiliate marketing

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.

motivation vs habit

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.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing

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.

Pitfalls Of Affiliate Marketing

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.

aweber

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.

struggling with your affiliate business

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.

struggling with your affiliate business

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.