AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work?

So how long does it take for content marketing to work? By “work”, in this instance, I mean how long does it take to start producing an income from content? Content marketing can take many forms. You can create a YouTube channel or build a blog, for example. So the time it takes will depend on many variables which I’m going to define in this post.

Generally though, it will take several months to start seeing a regular stream of traffic from content marketing if you create content regularly and promote it well. How you monetise that traffic will determine how much money you can make from it. The type of traffic you attract through your content will also have a bearing, and the relative competition in the niche you choose will massively impact your success, or lack of it.

So let’s have a look at some of the variables involved in creating content and getting paid for it!

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – SEO & Content Promotion

Typically SEO (search engine optimisation) is very slow. So if you’re relying on your content getting ranked on Google, Bing, Yahoo or on YouTube and other search engines it can take a few months. Your content may never rank too, which is a consideration. In a competitive topic/niche, there’s thousands or even hundreds of thousands of competing websites or videos. So even with awesome content which out performs others, you’re up against high authority domains and channels which will out perform you because they’ve been around much longer than you.

They may have tens or hundreds of thousands of back links which have accumulated over many years. So competing with these high authority sites can be incredibly difficult. So if you’re in a competitive field it’s going to be useful to self promote all your content. This can be done through sharing on social media and through building an email list of subscribers.

Content promotion, when done well will massively speed up your progress. If you simply publish your content and sit back waiting for it to show up in the rankings, you’re going to be very disappointed! It may never show up! So once you have published some content, always promote it through sharing it as much as possible.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Your Choice Of Niche/Topic

In a competitive topic, such as money making online for example, it’s going to be very competitive. With a lot of competing content out there and some high authority channels and domains taking the top rankings for many of the best keywords. A new website won’t rank anywhere near the top of Google for the top keywords.

There’s ways round this of course and one way is to find and target long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty.

You don’t have to rely on Google for your traffic either. You can publish your content throughout your social media presence and create a strategy for finding visitors there.

In a less competitive niche, you’re going to be able to rank your content more easily, so you can attract traffic more quickly to your content. If you have a particularly “out there” niche, and therefore little competition, you might even find yourself getting visitors quite quickly.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – Targeting “The Right” Traffic

Not all traffic is equal, so if your aim is to get targeted traffic to your website, or channel, you’re going to need to determine who that is specifically. Targeted traffic is super important, especially if you’re monetising your website with a specific product or service. Some content will attract buyers and some will only attract “browsers”.

You really want the buyers coming to your website so before you create content, make sure you know who they are. For example, a review of a product will attract people looking to purchase that particular product. This kind of visitor is very likely to buy from you if you can attract them.

On the flip side, “how to guides” don’t attract such specific buying traffic. More likely they will take your guide and leave without having made a purchase.

How Long Does It Take For Content Marketing To Work – How You Monetise

You can also monetise a website or video channel without selling products from it using advertising placed on your content. This can be done through using Google Adsense, for example, or a similar service. With advertising on your content you get paid for each click on an advert. Your type of content will determine how much a click is worth, with more competitive topics paying more.

If you use affiliate products to monetise your content the targeting of your content is more important, since whatever you create will attract a certain type of visitor; and you want buyer traffic.

Your choice of affiliate products too is important and needs to match your niche. So in a golf niche for example, you would promote some golf related course, training or physical product to your visitors.

This can be done through the use of email marketing. This can dramatically speed up the process of making sales from a website/channel. By choosing subscription products (which carry recurring income) and high value products, you can become profitable more quickly, too.

Using Email Marketing To Speed Up The Process

Email marketing is another “ace” up the sleeve of content marketers. By offering a freebie giveaway on your content, such as an ebook, you can encourage content visitors to subscriber to your list.

An email list gives the content marketer a means to interact with their visitors on a more regular basis and build a longer term relationship. On a website, visitors only stick around for a few minutes. So they are less likely to make a purchase. But get them on your email list and you can follow up with them for months and even years.

This can dramatically speed up the process of selling from your content alone.

Your Content

Your content of course is massively important in the equation of generating an income from content creation. If visitors are impressed with it, they are much more likely to take further action on your site; share it, sign up to your list or purchase a recommended product, for example. This is a massive signal to Google (and other search engines) that your content is valuable.

If people like your content they are likely to share it and link back to it. This gives you a natural looking link profile which is a major SEO signal to the search engines. If you continue creating valuable content for long enough, you should see your content begin to rank on the search engines, further boosting your visitor numbers.

This has a compounding effect over time as more people get to your posts, more will share it and purchase from you/sign up to your list. See also the magical compounding effect of blogging.

Not only do you need to create awesome content which is share-worthy, but you need to actively promote it, too. How well you do these two things are a huge factor in how long it will take you to get a high volume of traffic, leads and sales through your content.

Summary

So, how long does it take for content marketing to work? You could create a post and publish it on social media, attracting a buyer straight away, (in theory), assuming you’ve set up your site/channel to sell something. But long term consistent traffic, leads and sales will take much longer than the odd “lucky win” you might get. In most cases it’s going to take months of consistent publishing and sharing of your content before you see this. In my experience of blogging, I started seeing the odd sale early on, within a couple of months. Over time, they become more consistent as I continued building content.

These are the main factors which will determine whether the timeline of your success:

Your content quality, and action steps towards creation and promotion
The relative competition on the search engines in your particular niche (more competition means it will take longer to become established)
How you monetise your content and the type of traffic you attract is a big factor; ideally use high paying products and recurring income products
Whether you use an email autoresponder – an email autoresponder will dramatically speed up the time it takes to earn consistently from your content so you should definitely get one. (Get one for free here).

Because it can take so long to create and share sufficient content to make your efforts worthwhile, it’s definitely worth choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy working in. Imagine still working 3 months down the line without having made any sales. Are you still going to love what you do? See also how to choose a niche for affiliate marketing.

how long does content marketing take to work

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps

Breaking down big goals into smaller steps is an important move. Ideally spend some time getting clear on your long term goals. Dream big, because if you aim small you’ll only hit small! Once you know what you want, break long term goals into smaller and smaller parts. Eventually you have them broken down into steps you can take immediately, right now, today.

Keep taking those steps and make them part of your daily routine. Unless you do this, and keep doing it, your big dreams will likely stay just that; dreams.

In Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, he explains that it is the small steps we take every single day which count. We all want the giant leap forwards in life; the breakthroughs, the sudden giant success, but those who achieve in life know that it’s the daily things you do which count over the long term, not the things you wish for.

The breakthroughs come often because of the tiny achievements we have made on a daily basis over time, not from giant leap forwards which comes without any work!

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing a big goal could be financial and geographical freedom and the ability to quit your job and work from anywhere in the world. That’s a big goal. So you join an affiliate marketing training course and start out promoting something. After a few months you wonder why nothing is happening and so you quit. This is a story which is familiar to many in the affiliate marketing space and around 95% of affiliates quit.

But those affiliates haven’t understood the power of micro habits, or the slight edge. The beginning is always going to be hard. The main problem is people are looking for the “magic bullet” the “instant win” and the giant leap forwards before they’ve put the work in. They want “evidence” that what they are doing will lead them to the promised land of financial abundance and plenty! When they don’t see that evidence, they lose confidence in their direction and stop trying. Quitting is a sure fire method of failure!

Henry Ford said “whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”. So if you’re looking for evidence that something works before doing the work, it probably means you don’t believe you can achieve it. Affiliate marketing does work, but you just have to keep going when everyone else quits to see the first shoots coming through the soil.

Breaking Down Big Goals Into Smaller Steps – The Chinese Bamboo Analogy

The Chinese bamboo tree is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and for breaking down large goals into smaller steps. The plant gestates under the soil for several years. So if you were unfamiliar with the type of plant it is, you would be forgiven for thinking that it’s not going to grow! During this time it needs to be fed and looked after and given the right nutrients. After 4-5 years gestating under the soil surface, it can grow 90 feet in a matter of 5 weeks time.

chinese bamboo Breaking down big goals into smaller steps

With affiliate marketing this is also true. At first you need to set up your website and your email marketing service. You need to study a marketing method and get people to sign up to your email list and visit your website. Initially, you will only see one or two visits to a website, for example.

See this as a win and celebrate it when it happens. Then you’ll start to see people signing up to your email list. See this as a win, and celebrate it. This is the point where many new affiliates will quit. “What’s the point?” they think, “I’ve not made any money yet and I’ve put in all this work”.

But these are simply the shoots of your Chinese bamboo tree coming through the soil. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 email subscribers on their list. This is because they don’t see the bigger picture. Long term affiliates build email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. They make sales every single day on complete autopilot. But they stuck at it when they only had a couple of people landing on their website. They kept going because they understood the long term implications of it, and of quitting!

The Power Of Compounding

Taking daily steps towards your long term goals has power over a long period of time. Admittedly, you don’t see the results for a while and it can be tough keeping going when there’s nothing to show. Joining the gym is a good example of this. Most people will join a gym in January after a period of over indulgence in the festive season. They keep up their New Year’s Resolution for a bit, but then there’s nothing to show for it.

Gyms know that most will drop off by March and so they charge a membership fee – see the compound effect of selling subscription products! The main problem is you don’t see results immediately. Even after a few months, your results won’t look amazing. It’s the small daily steps which you continue to do which have a powerful effect over the longer term. Once you start looking for results, you’re in trouble.

The small changes in your body after going to the gym for a few weeks won’t look like much. But compare this to what it would look like if you did nothing!

Summary

Big goals are important because they get your excited, inspired and motivated by a vision of your future you would like to attain. When you choose goals which inspire and enthuse you, they are the right kind of goals. Goals you don’t believe will happen, aren’t good goals because you don’t really believe in them. If you don’t believe in a goal, you won’t take any action in making it happen.

Once you have a clear idea of what you want to attain and written it down, it’s time to start chopping down your large goal into small achievable pieces. If it’s a fitness goal, make a daily schedule you can stick to. But make it so tiny that it would be difficult not to keep it up when you’re not feeling like it. See also what’s better than goals. Micro commitments help you keep the momentum going to achieve your larger goals. They are so tiny, that you can even do them when you’re feeling super uninspired, which will always happen.

For more on goal setting checkout a great book I found online about cybernetic transposition by a guy called Stuart Lichtman.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products

There’s a compound effect of selling subscription products. One of the best ways to earn online is through selling subscription products which carry recurring commissions. You don’t need your own membership products either, because you can sell existing products through joining an affiliate program.

Most affiliate programs offer you the opportunity to earn through product referrals. Amazon, for example, is a popular choice for new affiliates. However, many affiliates struggle and quit before they even make their first sale. That’s a shame because affiliate marketing can be life changing if you persevere with it; especially if you use the power of compounding to your advantage.

With most products, such as physical products you’ll find on Amazon, you only get paid once (per sale). So you need to keep selling in bulk in order to make your affiliate business profitable. But with subscription products, each sale gives you a recurring income.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products – Which Products?

The best subscription products to choose are those which offer the most value to customers. If a product is good, and meets the needs of a customer, they will continue using it; potentially for years. If you sell such a product and it carries a recurring commissions, you can build a passive income for life. Even if a product only pays you $20 a month in commission, it’s still a recurring income. 10 sales would give you $200, 100 sales would give you $2000 a month and so on.

Here’s a great product I sell on this website Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder service which I’ve used for years. It’s an awesome product because it’s essential for the building of an online business. You don’t even need an online business to benefit from using an email autoresponder. Any business can benefit from it.

An email autoresponder collects emails and delivers automated messages to your subscribers. If you sign up on this website you’ll get automated emails from me with information about starting an online business and affiliate marketing. An autoresponder is not the only product which pays recurring commissions to its affiliates. Checkout subscription affiliate programs for more products to choose from.

Business tools, software and memberships are good examples of products which are useful. Not all of these types of products offer recurring commissions though so check with your affiliate program for the commission structures.

The Compound Effect Of Selling Subscription Products – How To Sell Subscription Products

Aweber is a great tool to help you sell affiliate products online too. Most affiliate marketers use some kind of autoresponder which allows them to collect emails and deliver messages automatically. On this website you should see I have some giveaways such as my free ebook. If you sign up, you join my email list and get access to my ebook. You’ll also receive email messages about the topic of affiliate marketing.

This simple method is used by thousands of affiliates to build their email lists and sell affiliate products through recommendations. Once you have an offer (a free giveaway) you can promote it online through various marketing strategies such as:

Blogging/video blogging
Pay per click advertising
Social media
SEO – search engine optimisation

A common method of selling affiliate products through email marketing is to use landing pages to collect emails and paid marketing to send targeted traffic towards it. A landing page is a web page specifically designed to collect emails through the offer of a “lead magnet” – a freebie giveaway which you can access online through your email inbox.

Knowing Your Target Audience

Your “target audience” is the section of the online marketplace who is most likely to be interested in your product. It’s important to define who this is because there’s millions of people online who simply aren’t interested in whatever you’re selling! So if you attract the wrong audience, you’re unlikely to sell anything.

When you know very specifically who you’re selling to, you can define them in your marketing campaigns and talk to them in terms of their pains and needs.

For example, if most of your customers are over 30 years old, it’s going to be a waste of your marketing budget placing adverts in front of the under 20’s. This can save you a considerable amount of marketing budget (and time). If you have a locally based store or business, it’s a waste placing advertising which is going to show outside your catchment area.

Summary

Subscription products which are super useful and even vital to business owners are the best ones to sell. These kinds of products are necessary for the running of a business. So once a customer is using them for an established business, they are unlikely to ever stop using these products. If you have referred the product to those customers, you can earn a recurring commissions for the lifetime of their custom.

This is far better than selling a standard affiliate product which carries only a “one-off” commission. Recurring commission products give you a greater opportunity to build a real income online through referrals. Each sale gives you a income, rather than just a “one time” commission. Providing the customer maintains their membership/subscription, you’ll continue to receive a recurring income from it, rather like getting a royalty payment.

What’s Better Than Goals?

“What’s better than goals” is a good question? After all, it’s coming up to 2024 (currently Dec 28th 2023 as I write) and it’s the time for New Years Resolutions! Those commitments are seldom kept though. By March most have stopped going to the gym and their lives haven’t changed much. But why is that? The main reason is that the little daily habits you’ve built up over decades are moving in greater momentum than the new ones you’re trying to replace them with.

So you join the gym with good intentions but alas, you haven’t built up the momentum yet. To get to the point of habit, you need to overcome the inertia of your past habits. That is, not going to the gym, eating whatever you want and slobbing out instead of working out. To get into a good habit of going (to the gym) takes consistent steps over a long enough duration for the action to become habitual.

When it does, it feels wrong not to go. The problem is most people don’t stick with their new goals and most drop out. Gyms know this of course which is why they charge a monthly subscription. Once you’re tied in financially, it provides an incentive to maintain the membership, even though you don’t go anymore! By March, your membership becomes a token of your gesture to get in shape and before long you cancel!

What’s Better Than Goals? Micro Commitments/Mini Habits

Micro commitments or systems of behaviour are better than goals for a couple of good reasons. The problem with goals is that you can change your mind when faced with the actual actions you need to take on a regular basis. You think about the goal and decide (in the moment) that it’s not so important after all! With a micro commitment, your focus is on building a new behaviour, not attaining a specific long term goal. These are also known as Mini Habits or Micro Habits. There’s a few great books on this topic: Mini Habits: Stephen Guise, Atomic Habits: James Clear and The Slight Edge: Jeff Olson.

A mini habit is such a small commitment to your long term goal that it’s a no brainer to do it. An example from Stephen Guise’s book Mini Habits is a single push up a day. A single push up is something pretty much anyone can do. Plus, it’s far easier to do it than to go to the gym. You can do it from anywhere (you can do one now!). Once you’ve done your pushup, you’re off the hook for the day. The simplicity of a micro habit is that it gets you to use the power of inertia. Once you’re on the ground doing your push up, you’re much more likely to do two, or three.

Why Goals Fail

Goals fail because when we are in the mood for writing goals we give ourselves a hard task, since we’re inspired. In the right mindset, we can set ourselves some pretty tough objectives, because we’re feeling strong. But when you’re hung over, tired or grumpy, how are you going to feel about doing the 30 minutes on the treadmill you have promised to yourself? Or the 30 minutes of weightlifting? When the inertia of old habits and behaviours meets your new “designated goal” on a bad day, you’re unlikely to carry out the new habit; especially if you haven’t built up momentum with it.

what's better than goals — The Chinese Bamboo tree can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks but gestates for 4-5 years beneath the surface of the soil!

With a micro/mini habit, the objective is to set yourself a ridiculously easy task you can do every single day, no matter what your state of mind is.

A mini habit can apply to any type of goal whether it is to do with your health, business, relationships or something else. A single push up, a blog post or a phone call are all examples of a mini habit which you can apply to your life. By applying this strategy and making your mini habit easy, you establish a new behaviour. Once it’s become ingrained and you can maintain it for long enough it becomes an automatic behaviour.

Behaviours are much more powerful than goals. Brushing your teeth, taking the bins out, washing the dishes. These are the kinds of things which get done no matter what. So no matter how much of a bad day you’re having, you do the behaviour. Over time it becomes powerful because you can add to it, little by little.

The Power Of Inertia

The long term idea of mini habits isn’t that those mini habits will make a massive different immediately. They probably won’t. After all, how much is one press up going to do? The power of a mini habit is in the long term power of inertia in creating the outcome you truly desire. So for example, if your long term goal is to get in shape, a mini habit would help you install a new habit of doing a press up/push up every single day.

Once that habit is installed, and you’ve been doing it for long enough, you won’t feel right unless you do it. At this point you can add to the habit, now that it has been successfully installed. Some days you’ll want to do more than one push up, if you’re feeling good. The bad days you can just do the one, and it’s ok, you’re off the hook for that day!

Over time, you can use your new behaviour to set new behaviours around it. For example, after a month of doing your one push up, you might find you’re doing 10 a day, rather than just one. Now add a sit up to it, just one per day too.

Summary

It’s easy to write out some lofty goals, only to drop them when you’re struggling with a hang over or having a bad day. It’s far easier to install micro habits which require only a tiny commitment each day, than to struggle with a lofty commitment you’ve made beforehand (when you were feeling positive).

Will power is finite and will let you down when your old habits meet your new plans on a bad day. Create tiny micro commitments instead. This will give you more opportunity to shift your mindset over time. You’re less likely to fail when you’re not feeling like it because your mini habit is ridiculously easy. On a good day, you can over perform. On a bad day, simply meet your minimum requirement, whatever that might be.

Give yourself at least 30 days of your new mini habit before changing it. You can add to the action (in terms of repetition), but you mustn’t fall off the daily routine. If you do, consider using a smaller habit which you can sustain over the longer term.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing

Organic marketing vs inorganic marketing, or paid marketing; which is best? The best thing about organic marketing is that it can attract free traffic, while the best thing about paid marketing is that it’s super fast. Both organic and inorganic marketing have their benefits and drawbacks and you might choose a particular strategy based on your personal needs and circumstances.

If you lack time, paid marketing is fast and scalable. Once you have a paid marketing strategy which consistently produces a profit, you’ve got it made! Simply scale up by adding more to your marketing budget and make more sales. This is the position every affiliate marketer wants to get into: where they pay $10 on advertising and make $20! Once you’re in a profitable equation such as this, you can scale up easily, and spending $10,000 on this advertising campaign should produce $20,000 worth of sales (assuming the equation holds).

But on the flip side of this coin, you can spend thousands just getting to this point. Many affiliates quit because they can’t find a profitable campaign with which to scale up. So if you spend all this cash on marketing and then quit, you’ve lost a lot. But if you learn from each campaign and stick with it, eventually you should get to this point. At this point you’ve effectively built a money tree! Just pump money in and get profit out! It’s the dream of many entrepreneurs.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing

But if you don’t have a large budget and money is a concern, you can go another route when building an online business or selling affiliate products. You can build content. Content creation is the organic method of generating sales with an business. This blog, for example, is an organic method of generating traffic. Organic marketing requires you to build content and then promote it. Over time, as you make a habit out of the building and promotion of your content, you should start to see people coming to your website (for free).

The upside to this is that older content can work for you as much as newer content can. This creates a compounding effect of generating traffic from multiple sources: social media, search engines, back links, blog commenting, forums and so on. As you continue posting highly useful and relevant content (relevant to your target audience), you start to see more and more visitors coming to view your content.

This doesn’t happen straight away of course and many affiliate will quit because they don’t see the longer term picture here. Results don’t show immediately like with paid marketing. You can’t control the flow of traffic quite as easily as with paid traffic. Some days there’s less traffic and other days there’s more.

Organic Marketing Vs Inorganic Marketing: Which Is Best?

Many online business owners will recommend to build up organically first, and only pay for marketing when you’re making money from your business. This can be good advice but it also depends on your business model. With high ticket affiliate marketing, (multiple income products including high ticket items and recurring income items), it’s easier to use paid marketing from the get-go. You have a greater chance to earn back your marketing budget more easily (and make profit). If you’re selling low valued products, this can be more tricky because you have less margin to play with when you sell something.

It also depends on your particular circumstances. If you’re working in a highly paid job, but have little time for content creation, paid marketing is better. If you have the time and are creative it can be better and more enjoyable to create content instead of paying for marketing. You can of course do both. Use organic marketing and a little paid marketing once you start generating sales. If you reinvest your profits back into your marketing budget, you get the best of both worlds; organic sales and a potentially scalable business through paid advertising too!

If you’re persistent enough to maintain a habit of content creation, it can ultimately give you free traffic and sales. You’ll also save a heap of costs not running paid advertising, so sales become more profitable. However, organic marketing can take months or years to come to fruition. Paid ads work straight away.

Summary

There’s good points and bad points of both organic and inorganic marketing (paid marketing). Paid marketing is fast and you can see immediately (well, almost immediately) whether a campaign is working for you or not. This comes with the downside that you’ll need to test your advertising before you find a profitable one. This can get costly too and many marketers quit even after spending a huge amount in marketing costs. Once you find a profitable campaign though you can add more budget and have a scalable and profitable business pretty pronto!

Organic marketing is slower and less scalable than paid marketing. But with organic marketing you can ultimately make sales for free once you have enough content working for you. Building content takes time and effort and there’s no guarantee of getting a ranking on Google for it either (in the organic search results). There’s huge competition for organic content and so it can often take months or years before your efforts are rewarded by free traffic and sales in enough quantities to build a profitable business from it.

The upside to organic marketing is that once you’ve put the work in, your content is doing the work for you, generating traffic, leads and sales. That’s a great position to be in if you have the capacity to put the work in upfront with often nothing much to see in terms of results in the early days (weeks, or months)!

A Life on Your Own Terms

Not everyone is motivated by money and when I got involved in affiliate marketing I wanted flexibility and a life on my own terms. You can choose your own hours, work from anywhere (from a laptop) and work in many different ways too. “Digital creators” sell products and services through their online presence. This can be done in many different ways and affiliates can do all kinds of activities to earn a living online. They can run advertising, build email lists, use social media or create content, such as this blog post. I fell into blogging because it was a low cost method of generating content online and I had plenty of time, but little in terms of funds for a marketing budget.

With blogging, you create written content on a website. Over time, as your content grows and grows, you will start seeing organic traffic coming to your website. This is what I wanted. I wanted traffic for free. Plus, I enjoyed the process of blogging. It felt cathartic. Initially with my blogging I struggled. I would write a few posts, share them and sit back waiting for something to happen. Nothing did!

It wasn’t until blogging had become a habit for me that things began to materialise.

A Life On Your Own Terms

Blogging is a slow method of generating online traffic, unlike paid marketing which can turn on traffic immediately. However, once you hit a certain point with blogging, organic traffic starts coming automatically. So when you start selling affiliate products, your commission is 100% profit because you’re not spending money on advertising. It may come a little slower with content creation, but if you have the aptitude for it, blogging can work wonders.

A single blog post won’t accomplish much however. This is the problem in the beginning. You want results quickly but it doesn’t work like that. So, many bloggers or content creators give up too easily. You need to make content creation a habit. Over time, your habit starts paying you.

Initially this is quite frustrating, at least that’s how I found it to be. I kept looking for the results, even only after a small amount of work. I would go through sporadic spirts of action and then quit. Then, a month later, a sale would drop in! “It works”! The sales would then give me confidence in blogging again and I would craft some new content with my new found belief!

Only after months of inactivity I had missed the opportunity to build months worth of content, which would have accelerated the sales.

A Life On Your Own Terms – Belief

It’s belief which drives action and this is particularly true when approaching an online business. The problem is we want results so we can prove that “it works” before we actually do any work. I spotted my own cynicism and realised the obvious conflict here. If I doubted that my online business worked before it proved itself to me, how much action and activity would I really put in. And would my doubt be (subconsciously) sprinkled throughout my content anyway, therefore putting off potential buyers!?

Certainly this was true and in the midst of recording a video some time ago I realised my own doubt was coming across. In a video recording there’s a lot of information. Someone’s tone and their pitch can all convey their own doubt. So what’s conveyed in a script for example is only what the marketer wants you to hear. A lot more is conveyed unconsciously if they are afraid or full of doubt, for example (which I was). Only when I realised that this was the equivalent of my driving with my breaks on (in marketing terms).

I realised the importance of belief, and in particular self belief when it comes to conveying an idea online, or selling a product.

A Life On Your Own Terms – How To Work On Beliefs

Beliefs can hold you back in life, not just in business. So if you say to yourself it can’t be done, or you’re not worthy somehow, your subconscious mind is listening.

Working on your beliefs is the “unseen” work which needs to be done if you’re holding yourself back in any way. How will you take the appropriate action if you don’t believe it will reap the rewards you desire?

As Henry Ford is quoted: “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”

I’ve written a post on the best mindsets for affiliate marketers. You can also access my ebook on money mindset too. In it you’ll learn some important ideas and steps you can take to reprogram your subconscious mind for greater success.

Summary

A life on your own terms, flexible working, geographical and/or financial freedom are all possible reasons people build online businesses. For me, it was a life on my own terms, at least financially. When you have an income source which gives you financial independence, there’s a lot of don’t have to’s which come with it:

Don’t have to have a boss ever again!
Don’t have to commute!
Never need a job again!
No more crappy jobs!

If you’re interested in learning affiliate marketing for greater control and freedom in your life, checkout my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners Here. You’ll also access a free video series which set me on the right path for success online after a lot of struggle and hardship in my early years as an affiliate.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor

There’s a few reasons you need an affiliate mentor. Firstly, there’s so many avenues to take as an affiliate, you can easily get lost. There’s thousands of products you can choose from and many marketing methods you can use. When you’re learning, you make mistakes. All of this adds up to a difficult experience for most people who try to earn from selling affiliate products.

If you create content and try to sell from your content, you never know how long you need to keep going for. Most quit before they even make their first sale. An affiliate mentor acts as a “touchstone” to help, instruct and guide you. A mentor can hold you accountable for the actions you take. If you’re alone with your endeavours, there’s no-one to hold you accountable except you!

Your friends and family may even try and talk you out of doing affiliate marketing! A mentor is someone who has succeeded and their presence gives you confidence in your direction.

Without belief, you’re going to struggle, because everything comes from belief. If you doubt you can make it as an affiliate, you’ll soon give up.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor – You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

As a beginner I started out with a couple of cheap “how to” courses. They both taught different things, so I was immediately at odds with my marketing methods. One taught paid advertising, and the other taught organic marketing . By jumping from one strategy to another, I wasted valuable time. Each time I changed tact, I lost momentum. An affiliate mentor can help you choose the best strategy for you, according to your situation.

I also sold cheap items from eBay and Amazon and barely made anything in commission even when I did make a sale! This is incredibly demoralising, when you finally make a sale but you earn next to nothing for it.

I learned the best products to sell which gave me recurring and high ticket commissions. Before I found a mentor, I wasted a tonne of time selling low value physical products.

Why You Need An Affiliate Mentor – The Traps Of Affiliate Marketing

A good mentor can help you become aware of the many mind traps of affiliate marketing. Jumping from one course to another for example is one such trap. If you think there’s an easy way to do things, a “magic bullet” for affiliate success, you’ll believe all those marketers who tell you so and you’ll keep jumping ship when things get tough looking for an easier way. That’s not going to help you in the long run. Affiliate marketing can be tough, but you need to stay the course and overcome the difficulties you encounter to get anywhere with it.

Being a “busy fool” is another one. A busy fool spends time on those actions which although perhaps enjoyable, don’t move your affiliate business forwards. A mentor will hold you accountable to the tough tasks and present the hard truths about time wastage.

Getting stuck in learning mode is another affiliate trap. It feels productive learning and indeed it can be. But once you’ve learned enough, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned and put the theory to practice. Without action you won’t get anywhere with affiliate marketing. Once you know your direction, take action and shift your learning:implementing ratio to 80% implementing and taking action to 20% learning.

Summary

For me, finding an affiliate mentor completely changed things in affiliate marketing. I learned to build an email list, whereas before I was relying on organic traffic for my sales. I learned to promote subscription and high ticket items, which gave me residual and larger commissions. Being part of an online community gave me accountability and I was able to reach out and ask for help. Two community members helped me overcome my fears when I nearly quit several years ago. This help and support is vital because you will run into difficulties and doubt the journey.

If you’re alone, you’re much more likely to quit and 95% of affiliates do so. If you’re ready to get started you can do that here.

How To Find An Affiliate Marketing Mentor

Wondering how to find an affiliate marketing mentor? I found a group of mentors and coaches who helped me with my affiliate marketing business. You can access them by signing up on this website for the free videos and joining the community. Or checkout this page and apply for mentorship with me.

An affiliate mentor can help guide you and learn a number of things within your affiliate business such as:

Developing a daily structure to building your business
Setting and achieving goals
Holding you accountable to your action steps
Walking you through the set up process and technical issues
Mindsets needed to overcome the ineviatable hurdles

How To Find An Affiliate Marketing Mentor – Social Media

If you have a look on Facebook you’ll find a number of groups which have been setup to help struggling affiliates too. Type affiliate mentors into the search bar at the top and apply to join groups which look suitable. Quora.com can also be a good source for mentors and coaches. Type affiliate mentor into the search bar and look at who pops up.

There’s also the Warrior forum (Warriorforum.com) you can check out. This website is a forum for digital marketers and can be used for help and advice with affiliate marketing issues. There’s thousands of posts and over a million members. Ask a question using the search bar and see what comes up.

Youtube of course is another goldmine of information and a good source when you’re having affiliate issues. I use YouTube often when I get stuck with a technical issue and there’s a tonne of free videos which can help you out.

Failing Forwards

Not every mentor is a good fit and you’ll need to look for someone you “click” with. Mentors and coaches can help you overcome your fears and uncertainties which are a large part of the problem when you’re a beginner. If you’re afraid to do anything or uncertain of your next step, it’s going to hold you back.

However, even with a mentor you can still struggle and it’s a good idea not to rely too heavily on someone else. You should take 100% responsibility for the results in your affiliate business. A mentor can only point you in the right direction but you have to do the work.

A bit part of affiliate marketing is failing forwards! This term refers to getting your hands dirty and trying out methods and strategies you might not have used before. This is going to give you the experience you need which no mentor can help you with. Make a habit out of taking daily steps which make you feel uncomfortable. Keep failing forwards and over time you’ll have some experience which will help you more than a mentor ever could.

Nothing beats experience in affiliate marketing and the top affiliates have failed many times and experienced many setbacks. Don’t think it will be any different for you!

Access A Mentorship Program

You can join a mentorship program through this link. You’ll meet a personal mentor of mine who I met back in 2014 when I was struggling with affiliate marketing.

Stuart has been a huge inspiration to me and has taught me a number of principles which I use to this day:

Become a creator, rather than a consumer. Most of us are stuck in “consumer” mode when we spend time online, absorbing content but never producing it.
Don’t be a busy fool – the busy fool spends time online which doesn’t move the “needle” of your income, wasting time on the unimportant tasks which maybe enjoyable but which don’t move your business forwards
Failing forwards – failing forwards means getting out of your comfort zone with affiliate strategies and tactics. You’ll never learn if you don’t fail first!
Shiny object syndrome – refers to the habit of jumping from course to course looking for the “magic bullet” – the “easy” way doesn’t exist. Stick to a course of action for the duration until you master a strategy.
Goal setting – zoom in and out of your longer term goals and make daily habits which align with your future plan
Intentions – set a strong intention for your affiliate business and repeat it to yourself often so it becomes an automatic “red flag” in your subconscious mind. A good read on this is Stuart Lichtmans’s book on Cybernetic Transposition.

Best Lifestyle Business

Which is the best lifestyle business for a new startup? Lifestyle businesses can be run from anywhere, and even without your own products or service. Business models such as affiliate marketing and drop shipping allow anyone to earn using an existing business model and/or product. Simply refer online traffic from anywhere and generate sales. Earn commissions based on your referrals. There’s many ways you can do this and your individual approach will depend on a few things such as:

Your marketing budget and business model
Your individual interests and passions
The time you have available

Best Lifestyle Business – Blogging

Blogging is a great way to build a lifestyle business, for example. With a blog, you create written content on a website to drive traffic. To make sales from a blog you need to offer something of value to your visitors, such as an affiliate product. See also how to monetise a blog.

One of the best approaches to blogging is to find a topic you have a passion or interest in. Build content up over time and share your content on social media. Blogging can be competitive and most niches are already well subscribed. In a popular niche, it will typically take much longer to build up a following than in a less competitive one.

Many bloggers give up so it’s well worth researching your topic before you set out. You have a much better chance of success as a blogger, if you start out with a topic you love. If you’re going to be a blogger, it can typically take several months before you see a nice return on your investment. See also how long does it take to earn from a blog.

Best Lifestyle Business – Affiliate Marketing

One of the best ways to monetise a blog is with an affiliate product. There’s all kinds of affiliate products available for you to sell online, so there’s plenty of choice. However some products pay much more than others. Take for example a typical product from Amazon.com.

Most of Amazon’s products will pay affiliates between 1% and 10% commission for a sale. That’s pretty low by industry standards so you’ll need to shift a lot of product to become profitable. Digital products can offer a lot more in terms of commissions and typically pay between 30% and 40% commission on a sale.

You can also choose to sell subscription products. These are often found with software products and memberships. With a subscription sale, affiliates can earn a lot more because of the recurring commissions. See also subscription affiliate products. High ticket affiliate products pay much larger commissions than most. These are often training and education products but also they can be high value physical products too. See high ticket affiliate products for more information on this.

Best Lifestyle Business – Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is a similar business model to affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you refer a customer to a product through your unique affiliate link. With drop shipping, your customers order products online through you (or a website you own) and you organise their delivery directly to the customer from the manufacturer. This can be done easily through the use of API plugins on your drop shipping website.

Building a drop shipping or an affiliate marketing website is fairly easy – especially with certain “done for you” courses/programs. Shopify.com is one of the best places to find for help building an e-commerce store for drop shipping. As with affiliate marketing, setting up your monetised, digital “storefront” is only the beginning. The store itself is only a means to deliver a product or value. To get customers to your store is the real “meat and bones” of building a lifestyle business that really works. So it’s worth getting some help with your marketing if you’re going to build a lifestyle business.

Best Lifestyle Business – Marketing

Marketing a digital “shop” online is what you’ll spend most of your time focused on when it comes to building a lifestyle business. Whether you use paid marketing, blogging, social media or a video channel, (on YouTube for example), is your choice.

Some online business owners recommend starting out building traffic organically before spending money on advertising. Once you’re earning some income from your e-store, you can reinvest that money back into advertising and begin the process of scaling up.

With certain business models, it is unrealistic to use paid marketing from the offset. If you’re selling low valued products, for example, it can be difficult to run advertising campaigns and come out in profit. But with a high value sales funnel, which has subscription and high ticket products within a product range, it’s more realistic. With such a business model, recouping your advertising budget quickly is much more realistic and attainable than if you’re selling low value items.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best tools you can use whichever lifestyle business model you decide to choose. With an email marketing system, you can collect emails from a website and deliver automated messages which help your subscribers in some way.

You can then redirect subscribers to your products/services or back to your content. With an email autoresponder, many affiliate marketers will collect thousands of subscribers through a website or a landing page.

By automating delivery of email marketing messages, marketers are able to build up a business through promotion of products through their list. If those products carry recurring commissions and high ticket commissions it can be done much more quickly through the use of paid marketing.

If you build an email list only organically (such as from blogging or video blogging), this can take a little longer.

Ikigai

One of the best ways to approach a lifestyle business is through aligning your beliefs, values and interests with an approach which suits your lifestyle. Ikigai is a Japanese term meaning “reason for being”.

When you align your values with your business, you are much more likely to maintain the efforts required for success in the long term. If you rush in and take the wrong approach it can be easy to burn out or give up when results don’t manifest immediately.

For example, there’s a huge drop out rate among new business ventures, especially online. The affiliate marketing success rate, for example, is around 5%. When you love what you’re doing online, you have a much greater chance of success than if you’re indifferent or if you are only interested in the outcome.

As the saying goes “if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life”. If you can make what you love doing pay, so much the better!

Starting An Online Business PDF

Starting an online business pdf. You can download this pdf h ere. Back in the early 2000’s I never thought about starting an “online business” as such. I just wanted to make a bit of extra cash from the internet. I tried many strategies including Forex marketing, buying and selling, eBay and blogging. I eventually found a simple business model known as affiliate marketing was working the best for me.

With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products because you can promote existing products through your own marketing efforts. All you need to learn is an online marketing strategy to promote the products of your choice. There is huge choice as an affiliate marketer, which can be a problem. For example, your choice of affiliate products can either help or hinder you. There’s thousands of affiliate products to choose from online and some pay much more than others. So your product choice is an important one.

Similarly there’s a huge choice in advertising methods. You can use paid marketing, email marketing, SEO (search engine optimisation), blogging, social media, video marketing and so on. So again, you can get swamped in choice and stuck in procrastination mode. That’s why you need a guide and ideally a mentor.

Starting An Online Business PDF

In 2014 I found a mentor who taught me a different way of doing things. Up to then I was really struggling with my marketing strategy and making money. I had chosen poor paying products that I myself had bought off Amazon and eBay. I assumed that because I was skint, everyone else was! This was my first mistake.

My mentor taught me to find high cost items as an affiliate which pay a lot more. So for the same amount of work you can earn ten or twenty times the amount of a low value product sale. It sounds obvious now, but when I first started out, I didn’t know any better and got carried away with my own enthusiasm. I didn’t know the best way to do things, so I wasted a lot of time trying stuff out and failing a lot!

aweber - starting an online business pdf

I built an email list, which I hadn’t done before this point. An email list is one of the best investments you can make as an affiliate. It lets you collect subscribers through a website and deliver value driven messages to them via email. It gives you greater control of your traffic, which can take time to obtain through either paid means or by building content. It also allows you to build trust with people through automation by delivering value. It’s much easier to sell someone a product (especially online) when they are already thinking well of you.

Starting An Online Business PDF – Products

I also learned to choose digital products to sell over physical products. With a physical product you can only earn once per sale. Plus, physical products pay much less than digital ones. A typical physical product will tend to pay 1-10% commission compared to 30-40% for a digital product. Added to that a digital product can carry a subscription service. With subscription sales you can earn a recurring income from each customer. These add up and give you a regular income quite quickly once you learn how to sell them. With a physical product you only get paid once and you need to sell in bulk to make the business viable.

Plus, you’re handing your hard earned marketing efforts over to the product owner, who can benefit from repeat custom after your referrals has bought through your affiliate link. With subscriptions you can continue earning for the lifetime of a customer.

A product range is even better, especially if it contains both subscription products and high ticket items. High ticket affiliate products give you much more commission per sale, since they are worth much more than the typical affiliate product.

Join My Email List

If you’ve read this far you’re probably keen to get started building your own online business from scratch. You can join my email list by signing up on this website. Follow the email links to the free video series to get going. You’ll get access to the same free video series which I found several years ago (back in 2014). It led me to an online business community and gave me a step by step setup process which was easy to follow. Once you’re set up the next step is to choose a marketing strategy. I tried a few strategies but settled on blogging quite early on, although I’ve used some paid strategies too.

Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an online business and if you choose a number of high ticket items for your sales funnel, it makes this much more viable. With a high ticket product range you can recoup advertising budget and become profitable much more quickly. Once you are, you can easily scale up with paid advertising. With content marketing it’s much more difficult to scale up, although your traffic comes in for free, so you’re not spending a marketing budget.

Jump on my email list here and access my ebook “affiliate marketing for beginners”. You’ll get my ebook and access to the free video series.