AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Selling Without Selling

Selling without selling online can be done through attraction marketing. Marketing is a means of interacting with potential customers through multiple means.

You can find customers, for example, by uploading a video to YouTube, running an advert or writing a blog post. Because the internet is a buyers market, trying to sell to someone with “the hard sell” doesn’t really work that well!

Instead, you can attract people to your website by providing valuable information which they want. Attraction marketing uses many means to interact with a potential customer by giving them value. Ultimately, after you have delivered huge value you build trust with people and they are more likely to buy if your products/service is something of use to them.

Think of it this way; would you buy from a random website, or from someone who has been giving you value for several weeks through an email course? The answer is you would more likely buy from someone you know; the person who provided the information to you. So, getting people to know, like and trust you is priority number one for marketers. They do this by providing information which is of use to their subscribers.

Selling Without Selling – Emails

Everyone sells something, even if it’s their story. Aligning yourself with something you genuinely believe in is the best way to sell without selling. When you are aligned, you can sell without selling because you’re simply being honest and genuine. Nobody likes the hard sell, or to think they have been “sold” to!

So the best way to sell online is to attract people by providing value through blog posts, videos and email marketing messages. Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell online providing you don’t try and sell first. Instead, provide value first and genuinely try and help your subscribers. When you win their trust and they get to know, like and trust you, they are more likely to buy from you.

This is usually done from a website or landing page. The marketer offers something in exchange for the visitors’ email address. Usually this is an ebook or free course. Once the website visitor opts in, the marketer can deliver the course and build trust through regular email messages.

Selling Without Selling – Value First, Promotion Later

Once you deliver on a “value-add” proposition, there’s a thing called the law of reciprocity. This is what attraction marketing uses to make sales. The marketer gives, (in abundance) and offers products/services which give even more. So if an email subscriber is a good fit, they will likely buy from you. If not, that’s fine too.

The benefit of email marketing is that people can come back years later to buy from you. But on a website they only have a small window of opportunity to buy. After that they are gone forever.

I’ve had subscribers buy from me even years after joining my email list.

Mike Massey

Mike Massey is a martial arts business owner but he has also written a number of books on the subject of marketing for martial arts schools. I mention him because it’s a perfect example of the law of reciprocity. A few years ago I was struggling with building up my martial arts school (I teach Kung Fu), so I found him only through his many marketing videos and blog posts. I joined his email list and got many emails detailing how I could build my school up.

He mentioned things such as running camps, creating a syllabus and doing gradings and multiple ways to build my online presence. I used some of what he taught to great effect and all the information was free because I had joined his email list. Great guy thanks Mike! When he sent me an email promoting his book “Small Dojo Big Profits”, I bought it! I knew the value he had given me already far exceeded the cost of the book. Plus I couldn’t remember every recommendation he had made. So having all those tips together in one place seemed like a good solution.

Mike Massey is a great example of selling without selling. He gave me huge value that was tangible in my own life (for free)! So I bought from him and in no was was he “selling” in the traditional sense of the word!

Summary

Attraction marketing is the means of selling without selling. Like the example of Mike above, you can offer value through blog posts, ebooks, physical books, videos and information. People will find you when they are trying to solve their problems. Be the solution for them and lead them to products which help them further!

Selling in the traditional sense doesn’t really work online since it’s a buyers market and nobody really likes being “sold” to. They would rather do their research and find out what works for them, than trust a sleezy salesman!

When their research leads them to you, and your products, you’re selling without selling!

Attraction Marketing Strategy

What’s an attraction marketing strategy? Attraction marketing refers to a strategy whereby you attract customers through helping them with information, rather than trying to sell them something. For example, celebrities endorse a product, and so you buy it because you know of/admire that particular celebrity.

They haven’t particularly “sold” it to you, rather recommended it. In the same way a blogger might deliver value to you through their blog posts, or their email list. After some time of receiving free information from a useful blog/newsletter, you might consider something that’s on offer, such as an book or course from that particular person because they have gained your trust.

Here’s an example from something I’ve bought online. I found a guy called Mike Massey through his blog. He’s written a tonne of information on marketing a martial arts school. Since I have a school, I was looking for information on promotion when I found his blog. I signed up to his email marketing list and he delivered loads of useful information. I used some of that info to help enlist more students and grow my class. So when Mike sent an email mentioning he was selling a book, I bought it! He had already won my trust and I had already received more than the value of the book from him!

Attraction Marketing Strategy – Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great tool which any business can use with an attraction marketing strategy. You can grab a free autoresponder software using the image below.

With email marketing you can queue up a number of automated messages which are helpful and relevant for your audience. Get people to join your list by offering something for free on a website, such as an ebook or free email course. By delivering value driven messages, you build trust. When you do offer something for your subscribers to buy, you have hopefully won their respect through your previous messages. Attraction marketing seeks to build trust through delivering value first, rather than sell directly through pushy sales techniques.

On the internet it’s a buyers market anyway, so pushy sales tactics don’t work very well. No body wants to be sold to or feel they were pushed into a purchase.

eBooks, Blogs, Video

Ebooks are often used in attraction marketing to encourage website visitors to opt in to an email list. The ebook itself should offer huge value to a subscriber and acts as the “lead magnet”. It “magnetises” leads into your email marketing list.

Blog posts too can be used for attraction marketing. I’ve written over 700 blog posts on this website, for example. Some of them rank on the search engines and bring people to my website. As I share and post my articles around the internet, more and more visitors come to my site.

If they like the content and decide to join my email list, I send them more information about building an income online. You can also attract an audience with video. Upload regular useful video content which is designed to help your target audience with their problems and challenges. Most of the content I create is designed for those wanting to earn online. They either have an affiliate business already or are wanting to get started.

Summary

A good attraction marketing strategy draws in traffic from the internet with useful information which your customer avatar seeks to learn. This can be through blogging, video or paid promotional adverts. You then offer more value through free giveaways on your website, and get people to join your email list. As you deliver more and more value through your email marketing campaigns, you get your subscribers to open your emails and you build a relationship with them through delivering value driven messages which help them.

When it comes to promoting your product or service, it’s a no brainer for those subscribers who are a good match for your product. You’ve already given them more value in your content than the cost of your product/service!

A good attraction marketing strategy seeks to build trust first by delivering value. Sales come naturally as a by product of this value.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Any Experience

How to do affiliate marketing without any experience? You don’t need to be an experienced affiliate marketer to sell something online. If you’re a beginner you have something which nobody else has – your unique perspective. People buy from people when they shop online so you can leverage your own distinctive viewpoint by creating something which comes naturally to you. The key is to be genuine and find a way to express yourself through digital means online.

Affiliates do this through blogging, video, social media interactions and email messages. You don’t need to be an “expert” in order to sell online. You only need to be yourself (if you know who that is!). Single mum’s for example, attract a unique audience because of their life experiences. Burned out professionals who transition to online business attract another “niche” of online shoppers.

Who would relate to you and your own unique story? Your story is your superpower and is unique to you. If you can put your uniqueness in front of people, and attract a specific audience, you can promote something which you genuinely believe in which will help them too.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Any Experience – Selling Without Selling

To sell something online you need to join an affiliate program and promote a specific product. The product you choose is massively important. You need to choose something which you genuinely believe in and which aligns with who you are. When you do this, you’re in a much better position to sell without selling. I’m no salesman, so I like the idea of selling affiliate products from a website without having to be “salesy”!

In fact, I love the idea of being able to help people through my blog posts and email messages. If someone buys something it’s not because I “sold” it; rather it’s because I helped them and built some trust.

That’s the best thing you can do as a newcomer to affiliate marketing. Figure out a way of helping people through your messages. Whether you choose video, blogging, email marketing or paid advertising, if you align your intention with your inner values and believe in what you’re doing, it’s very powerful. Much more so that just making a “buck” online!

Top affiliates help and inspire. The give value and the affiliate commissions they earn are a byproduct of that service. Look at Martin Lewis’s website MoneySavingExpert.com. That’s an affiliate website and it makes money through referrals. But it also delivers huge value in terms of what it does to help people with their money, bills, mortgages and credit cards etc. Value first, commissions second!

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Any Experience – Ikigai

Your Ikigai is your “reason for being”. Ikigai is a Japanese term and it is useful to know what your ikigai is if you’re going to become an affiliate marketer. Your ikigai is where your values meet your purpose and your way of interacting in the world (and making money). When you can make money from purposeful work through affiliate marketing it’s a wonderful thing, very unlike “working” in a job you have no passion for. I’m sharing this because for a long time I just tried to “make affiliate marketing work” but I didn’t realise that I was completely out of alignment with my values.

When you’re working in alignment with who you are, work is enjoyable and you feel good about it. When you’re working only for the outcome, it doesn’t feel good because you only want the end goal – the money!

Be The Genuine Article – “YOU”

Being you isn’t that easy, especially in public. There’s so many pressures to become some kind of “guru” once you put yourself out there. But people don’t relate to the guru’s, they relate to ordinary people with their own unique perspectives and problems.

George Burns said “Acting is all about sincerity, if you can fake that you’ve got it made”!

Sincerity goes a long way online too. So figure out who you are and what you stand for and believe in, and be more “you”!

When you are “you” you’ll naturally act in ways that are genuine and sincere. Find a way of expressing yourself online whether through video, chat, email or through a blog. Choose products you love, and genuinely want to promote because you believe in them, not just for the cash! When you love what you do, you’ll enjoy the process and then you’ll enjoy the ride.

Not everyone will gravitate towards “you”, but the ones who “get” you will!

Summary

This post has been more about the “inside” job of affiliate marketing rather than the nuts and bolts of actually selling online. I’ve done a tonne of posts on how to actually sell online. Checkout my post on 22 ways to sell affiliate products if that’s what you’re after.

But I genuinely believe this is the crux of it in this post. Once you can figure out a way to serve, not sell, you can figure out how to do affiliate marketing well. Align your values, interests and genuine “you” with a product you can get behind genuinely and you’re half way there!

Once you have figured out how you want to serve people, you can serve them through your products and create a value add that’s irresistible to the right people.

How To Make Organic Sales Online

To make organic sales online you need to attain your traffic for free! That’s no mean feat and it can take some time and effort to achieve it. But when you do it means you’re not laying out any marketing budget in order to get those sales. Those sales come in free: which means 100% profit is yours! What’s even better about organic sales is that once you have done the work you’ll have a pool of content which gives you an ongoing “draw” of traffic which grows exponentially over time.

In this post I’m going to outline the steps needed to build content which can give you a consistent flow of traffic. This is an ongoing process and I do it using blogging, but you can also use videos/images or other content depending on your preference. Once you start to get people visiting your blog/channel/profile, you turn that traffic into leads by offering a freebie giveaway in the form of a lead magnet. A lead magnet could be an ebook, a course or some other valuable giveaway you can offer to your visitors.

How To Make Organic Sales Online – Your Customer Avatar

You won’t make an organic sale online without people coming to visit you somehow so you need traffic. But before we get carried away building traffic we also need to define the kind of visitors we want. After all, we aren’t just interested in traffic, we want sales too. That means we need to investigate who exactly we want to attract – out customer avatar. The customer avatar worksheet will help you define who your target audience is. When you are clear on who they are, you’re in a much better position to create content which serves their needs.

target audience - the first step in attracting traffic

When you create content which isn’t a good match for your perfect customer, you’re wasting time by attracting people who are less likely to buy. An example of a good piece of content might be a product review. A review is something someone reads just before they buy something. So for an organic sale, attracting people with a review makes a lot of sense.

How To Make Organic Sales Online – Writing Content

The next step is to write content for your customer avatar and put it on your website. But again, we want to write content which gives you the most traction. Without sharing your content, nobody will see it so you definitely want to promote it as much as possible. But if you could also get your content ranking on the search engines, it would make a massive difference to your traffic.

To do this with any level of certainty is pretty difficult, especially if you’re blogging in a popular topic which has lots of competition. So you’re going to need to be smart about it and find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. You can do this using Google’s keyword planner. Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives of it.

With a longer tail keywords (3,4 or more words) it can be easier to rank your content because there’s much less competition for longer tail. You can find these keywords using the keyword planner and then write content for them.

Content Promotion

Share and promote your content because it might not rank and that means zero traffic! Keep writing new content and make a habit out of it. Over time, Google will reward you if it thinks your content is useful and of high quality. This can take a while so be patient. It’s not uncommon for it to take months of work before you start to appear in the search results. So sharing your content yourself is a very good idea. Share your posts on social media sites and use automated software which helps you to do this. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of the plugins I’ve found helpful.

This all takes some time and effort and for a while it may seem like it’s for nothing. But remember your goal here – making organic sales! When that happens you’ll be glad you stuck at it.

Another strategy other than ranking for long tail keywords is to write attractive headlines which get a lot of shares on social media websites. Use Buzzsumo.com to identify top trending articles which go viral on social media and use that information to write your own sharable article titles and content. Then post your content throughout your social media presence. This tactic can help you get organic visitors through social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter (X) and so on.

How To Make Organic Sales Online – Visitors Into Leads

Turning visitors into leads has already had a mention. Create a lead magnet which is useful for your customer avatar. Give it away on your blog website and make sure you list the main benefits of accessing it on every page of your website. So wherever your visitors come from, they will see your offer and can easily opt in to your email list.

Not every visitor will subscribe but some will. Once you get a website visitor to subscribe to your email list give yourself a pat on the back! Celebrate small wins because they will lead you to the big wins of making organic sales online!

A lead magnet must be clearly visible and explain the main benefits of subscribing not the features. A feature of a free ebook might be that it’s 28 pages long, for example. But the visitor doesn’t care about most features they only care about WIIFM – What’s In It For Me! So explain in a short headline the most important benefit.

How To Make Organic Sales Online – Leads Into Sales

Once you start capturing your visitors’ emails you can follow up with email messages over a much longer time period. This just isn’t possible directly from a website as most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes – hardly long enough for them to begin to trust you.

An email list gives you the opportunity to build trust with your subscribers over a longer period of time. Don’t go for the sale in every email. Deliver value first and sell later. Without trust the subscribers won’t even be opening your emails, so you’re hardly going to be able to sell anything to them!

When subscribers trust you they are much more likely to buy from you, if you’re offering something that’s actually useful to them. Here lies another important factor in that you must choose a product which is actually of huge value to your customer avatar. Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult to sell it. Make sure you believe in what you’re promoting through your email messages. Otherwise your scepticism and doubt will come across in your messages or your copy.

Summary

The process of turning organic traffic into online affiliate sales is done through:

Identifying your target audience
Creating content which helps them and which has the potential to rank/get shared on social media
Tuning those visitors into leads – getting them on your email list by offering an enticing free offer in exchange for their email
Promoting products which align with the needs of your audience

There’s a lot of work to be done in this process but remember what you get at the end! Free traffic, leads and sales. that means you’re not paying for advertising. This can be tough initially but over time your work compounds and you are essentially creating multiple strategies to bring in new customers with each piece of content you create. You can improve on your results by choosing to promote high ticket affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. If you use this kind of product, you earn more for each sale you make, increasing the potential of your efforts.

Content Creation Versus Paid Marketing

With affiliate marketing you can do two things for your marketing; either content creation or paid marketing. Many affiliates advocate focusing on organic marketing before you use any paid marketing at all to generate traffic. But with a good affiliate business system, paid marketing can be more effective because of the high ticket products and subscription products within the sales funnel. It can mean you can have a profitable business up and running relatively quickly through the use of paid marketing.

By testing advertising campaigns to the point of finding a winning advert, you can spend only a little on your advertising budget until you find a winner (then scale up). Once you’re breaking even on your ad budget, making the spend back on the first product sale (within a range), you’re on to a winner! Now you can generate recurring income from the subscription product, and benefit from profit from any later purchases (e.g. high ticket products purchased later in the funnel).

Your marketing is effectively free once you break even on the “entry” level product. But what if you don’t have such a great sales funnel with a range of high ticket items and subscription items in it? What then?

Content Creation Versus Paid Marketing

What if you don’t have a huge marketing budget and/or a high ticket sales funnel? If you’re selling low value affiliate products, you can’t afford to be testing out advertising when you can only recoup a little on your product range. Short of finding more lucrative affiliate products, your alternative is to create content and drive traffic organically.

To drive traffic organically you’ll need to create a lot of content and promote it as much as possible. This requires quite a lot of work. Blogging, for example, can be done and it can take months or even years to generate the kind of traffic that leads to a lucrative business. Or you can create a video channel on YouTube or build organic visitors through Facebook or Instagram, for example too.

The benefit of content creation is that your content can last a lifetime and it can bring in customers for years to come. Once there’s enough content you’ve created, and if you’ve done a good job in promotion, that content compounds to generate more and more traffic over time.

The downside if this is that it isn’t immediately scalable. But the upside is that it creates passive trickles of traffic which continue to grow the more content you create.

Content Creation Versus Paid Marketing

You can of course do a combination of both content creation and paid marketing. Ideally start by creating content and once you start generating revenue, use some of that revenue to grow your business using paid marketing. While paid marketing is fast and scalable, it’s also expensive. Also you can get through a lot of budget without necessarily making any sales. This isn’t great if you don’t have that more to lose! So it can be wise to start out building content.

Content creation does work over time and although it can take a lot of content to start seeing traction with affiliate marketing, it compounds and speeds up over time. You can’t directly scale up your content as with paid marketing, but it’s free to create. So if you have the time and inclination to create content, that could be the best way to go, especially if you don’t have a massive marketing budget and a high ticket sales funnel.

Blogging vs. Ads

I’m a big fan of blogging and have blogged for years. It’s a nice way to spend time and generate content for an affiliate business. It’s also super cheap to do and less risky financially and it’s only your time you’re spending, not your money!

However, if you don’t have the time to blog, and time is a factor, it can be of benefit to use some paid advertising if you want things to happen more quickly. If so, it’s worth having some large value products in your sales system and some recurring commission products. Paid marketing can be costly and it’s worth getting help and support if you intend on going this route.

So, which is best? Paid marketing or organic marketing? I would say that if you’re working a full time job and don’t have much time, use paid advertising for your affiliate business. But if you do have time, consider building up your business more slowly using content. Find something you enjoy doing and work on it consistently.

Getting Website Traffic Without Paying

There’s lot of ways of getting website traffic without paying. In this article I’m going to share some of my favourite ways to get free traffic. Firstly, I use a strategy of getting traffic from the way I build websites. It’s known as niche website building. Although today the domain name of a website isn’t such a ranking factor as it used to be years ago, it still is a factor. So building keyword domains can help you rank for those terms, especially if there’s little competition for the keyword you use.

Take this website, for example. I built this site around the keywords “Affiliate Marketing Mentors“. If you do a Google search for that term, you should find my site somewhere near to top. Although it’s recently taken a dive and is on the second page. But, for a long time I was ranking number one and picking up some free traffic for the term “affiliate marketing mentors”.

Keyword domain names can and do work to bring in free traffic from the search engines.

Getting Website Traffic Without Paying – Long Tail Keywords

Another strategy I use in conjunction with the keyword domain names is long tail keywords. Using Google’s keyword planner, I find keywords which contain three or more terms within my niche.

Then I head to Google and do a simple search for that particular keyword, both within quotes and without. This gives me a couple of numbers which you’ll see when using a laptop (this doesn’t show on a mobile phone). Those number denote the number of competing pages on Google for those particular search terms. So a low number means less competition.

Using this information, I browse the keyword planner looking for long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. When I find a good one, I write content for it and use an SEO tool (Yoast SEO) to help me write it.

Long tail keywords give you the best opportunity to rank for your articles, especially if yours is a new website without much authority. Write many pieces of useful content and make them as high quality as you can. Over time, your domain authority should grow if you do this and some of your content will rank on Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo and the other search engines.

Getting Website Traffic Without Paying – Promotion Of Content

Now you have a bunch of content on your site it’s time to promote it! Don’t rely on Google ranking all your content – it definitely won’t! Some if it will get ranked if you concentrate on creating quality content and finding those long tail keywords with low competition.

But you should also promote your content via every means you can. That includes posting it on your social media profiles and sharing via your email list. You can also automate the process of sharing posts on social media. I use a plugin called Revive Old Posts which lets you do this. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some other plugins which help. Another one is to use a social media share button. This helps encourage visitors to share your content when they land on your website.

Anything you can automate is worth doing when it comes to promoting your content.

Getting Website Traffic Without Paying – Link Building

Link building is a big part of SEO (search engine optimisation) and so it’s worth taking the time to do, or paying someone else to do if for you!

Google uses your incoming links to determine how to rank your website in terms of authority. If you don’t have many links pointing to your website, Google will likely see it as a sign your website isn’t valued by other bloggers and online users.

If you make a good job of writing content for your site, you should start picking up some link naturally over time, as you post and share your articles. But you can also link build yourself through writing guest posts on other people’s blogs who are within the same niche as you. You can also post comments on their blog posts and many bloggers will let you link back to your blog when you do this.

Link building is a double whammy because you get traffic from those links directly and you should increase your domain authority with more links. Greater domain authority means your rankings increase and you get more traffic.

Getting Website Traffic Without Paying – Video

Yes video. It’s definitely worth uploading short videos and tagging them with titles which are less competitive. Use the same strategy as with the long tail keyword articles.

YouTube and TikTok are obvious places to upload videos to and you can get much faster results with video over time if you make a habit out of this. YouTube is less competitive than Google, for example and often videos will rank above written content, especially for keywords with fewer competing websites.

Posting a YouTube/TikTok video is another win because you can also build a back link at the same time while drawing in more traffic through your chosen keywords.

Types Of Traffic

It’s probably worth a mention that not all traffic is equal and the kind of traffic you want is that which leads to sales. Since most online traffic doesn’t lead to a sale, you will want to focus on the kind which does! That means getting to know your target audience so that you can create the kind of content which they are interested in. You can spend a huge amount of time and energy creating content which doesn’t lead to a sale. So align yourself with what your customers want and create content specifically for them!

target audience - getting website traffic without paying for it — target arrow

For more on this topic checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet pdf.

When you know who you are targeting with your content, you’ll waste less time creating content which isn’t relevant for your target audience and attract the right kind of visitors to your website.

Build An Email List

I mentioned the email list briefly before but it’s worth another mention. It’s one of the best and cheapest ways to drive traffic without paying for it. Collect subscribers from your website by offering some giveaway freebie. As your list grows you can send them to your newer content and back to your affiliate offers.

An email list puts you in charge of your traffic and although you need to build it first to take advantage of it, you can do this naturally with organic traffic over time. You just need to make sure it’s in place on your website with an attractive offer showcasing the benefits of your offer.

Summary

So there’s a few strategies you can use to get website traffic without paying. Here’s a quick recap:

Build a niche website around a specific (uncompetitive) keyword in your niche
Write long tail keyword targeted articles on your blog to attract your customer avatar (people who want what you have)
Share and promote your content widely – use social media platforms (you can also automate some of this with plugins ; see best free blog plugins for WordPress)
Build backlinks – backlinks can be built using guest posting or blog commenting. This has a two fold benefit in that it increases your authority and brings traffic directly from the blog/link you post.
Upload videos to YouTube and or TikTok and use long tail keywords in your title. This also means you can build a back link each time.
Rinse and repeat – keep going and make a daily habit out of this practice and your traffic will compound over time as your content and authority grows.

How To Earn Passively From Affiliate Marketing

Wondering how to earn passively from affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible businesses whereby anyone can earn a passive income. It does however take some work to get to this point and there’s a few things you can do to give yourself an advantage.

Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows you to earn through the sale of other people’s products online. Join an affiliate program, get your affiliate link and start promoting. It is the promotion stage of affiliate marketing which trips most would-be affiliates up. Too many quit because they don’t give enough attention to getting the right training and support when it comes to promotion.

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products:

Blogging
Pay per click advertising
Email marketing
Social media
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Offline advertising

But to earn passively from affiliate marketing you need to be selling products. No sales means no commissions, so it’s vital you get a marketing strategy going which works. When it does start working, those sales can be coming in night and day and without you trading your time. This is the magic of affiliate marketing.

How To Earn Passively From Affiliate Marketing

To earn passively you need those sales to come in on autopilot. This is done through either using paid marketing or through building content. Enough content and enough free traffic and even small commissions can give you a nice affiliate passive income. To use paid marketing can be more difficult so it’s worth using a digital affiliate business system. The benefits of an affiliate business system are that you can earn considerably more per customer than for most affiliate products.

Most products only pay you once. But using an affiliate business system gives you the ability to earn through up-sells and subscription products for which you earn recurring income. This is one of the main secrets of top affiliates – they use subscription affiliate products. When they make a sale, they continue to earn for the lifetime of that customer.

With a one-off commission, you need to keep selling over and over again. But with recurring commission each sale adds to your monthly recurring income, which is passive once you’ve made those sales.

How To Earn Passively From Affiliate Marketing – The Use Of Automation

Automation is the key to a passive income when selling products and services online. With affiliate marketing you don’t need any products of your own and you can sell almost anything you can find online. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can join that program and sell that product as a third party referrer.

Products can be sold through the use of automated systems which is another “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Using either content, or paid marketing, you can collect email subscribers from a website and send out automated messages. Here lies another one of the affiliates tricks – the ability to automate delivery of marketing messages to thousands of subscribers simultaneously.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build trust online and sell affiliate products. Combined with the sale of subscription products, email marketing gives you a huge advantage when it comes to generating a passive income online with affiliate marketing.

Breaking Even On Advertising

Earning passively is much easier the more customers you have. With an online business you have access to a global audience. But to reach that audience with your subscription products is going to cost a fair amount in marketing, if you use paid marketing. Paid marketing is much faster than organic marketing (content creation). With content, you can expect to work for several months just to get a small amount of traffic. Paid marketing is faster and you can get instant traffic in a matter of hours. The only problem is that paid marketing is expensive.

Much of the traffic you pay for won’t buy from you, so to find a profitable strategy takes some “tweaking”. Run paid advertising and sell an “entry level” product from your product range. This allows you to break even on your advertising budget. You’ve now got a customer for free and you’ve sold a subscription product – which means recurring income.

With a high ticket product range, you can also earn from up-selling to existing customers too. A high ticket product range gives you more opportunity to either break even on your advertising budget, or make a profit. With recurring income subscription products, you pick up a passive income from each customer. So your job as an affiliate is to find an advertising campaign which lets you break even or make a profit on the first item in the sales funnel.

Earning Passively From Content Marketing

Another way to earn passively from affiliate marketing is through creating content. Although this is a much slower strategy than the more scalable paid marketing route, it’s still a viable option if you have the time and inclination to build content – either through blogging or using video.

Given the time and resources you can build an information resource online which attracts a lot of free traffic from the search engines. This website, for example is a blog website with over 700 articles on it. It generates free traffic from the search engines and people sign up to my email list and purchase affiliate products.

The main problem with organic traffic is that it takes a lot of time and effort initially to build your resource. But once you have built it, it can bring in free sales on autopilot night and day! It’s a cheap alternative to using paid marketing if you don’t have a large marketing budget and a high ticket sales funnel.

Benefits Of An Affiliate Business System

What are the benefits of an affiliate business system? When I started learning affiliate marketing I had a lot of problems. I struggled to make sales and when I finally did make a sale it was for peanuts. I didn’t know that Amazon and eBay were the worst payers for affiliates and I had partnered with both of them. Amazon pays as little as 1% for a product referral so when you only make sporadic sales (as I did) it’s a hard pill to swallow when you only make $1 after all your hard work, or even less!

I later joined an affiliate business system which you can find by signing up on this website. Here’s a few of the benefits you get from a good businesses system.

Benefits Of An Affiliate Business System – Support

One of the major hurdles with affiliate marketing is keeping going when the future doesn’t look very bright. On your own it’s much easier to quit and in my case the people around me hindered rather than helped. They would rather I quit affiliate marketing and got a real job (like them)!

support from an affiliate business community

So when I turned to friends or family for support with my affiliate marketing efforts, they were more than likely to put me off it completely! Luckily I stayed the course and found a group of mentors who gave me the help and support I needed. Affiliate marketing isn’t easy – as I once thought it was. I got help with tracking, running advertising, setting up everything so my advertising could be measured. I simply wouldn’t have been able to do this without weekly webinars and question and answer sessions.

The other thing you can get with a support system is accountability. When you’re alone, it doesn’t matter whether you do the work or not (except to you of course). There’s no one to be accountable to except yourself! Once I joined a community I could find an accountability buddy – we help each other and hold each other accountable!

Knowing you’re not alone is another massive boon for an affiliate. There’s more promise if you see others on the same journey. This is especially useful when things aren’t going that well, in the beginning. It keeps you motivated!

Benefits Of An Affiliate Business System – Business Structure

The business system structure is the best reason to use an affiliate business system. With most affiliate products you sell, you only get paid once. A one time sale is not as good as a subscription sale where you get recurring commissions each and every month.

With a good business system you benefit from low ticket, mid ticket and high ticket sales as well as subscription products which pay you recurring commissions. Once you make a sale, you benefit from the lifetime commissions you can earn from that customer. So if they upgrade to another product, you get the credit. A built in sales team closes sales on your behalf too, so you’re not personally selling the high ticket items; just referring customers to the “entry level” product.

Since a digital business system offers digital products, the commission structure is much better than with physical products too. With a typical physical product you can only earn between 1% and 10% commission. But with digital you can earn from 30%-40% commission on each sale.

Benefits Of An Affiliate Business System – Setup

When you go it alone with affiliate marketing everything is your responsibility. An affiliate business system gives you a step by step setup procedure with ready made affiliate websites, banners, sales funnel, emails and product suite.

So you only need follow the step by step to setup your website and sales funnel. Once completed you have a ready made business setup, ready to make sales and earn commissions. At this stage you need to learn a marketing strategy, which you can learn through the training.

benefits of an affiliate business system

A business system which offers multiple high ticket items and recurring income products is much easier to make profitable, than low value one-off commission affiliate products; especially when using paid marketing.

With organic marketing it can take much longer to make affiliate marketing profitable, because of the competition. But a high ticket system gives you more opportunity to use paid advertising and get profitable. Paid advertising is much quicker and more scalable than organic marketing methods.

Training

Getting the right training, mentoring and help and support is one of the major keys to success with affiliate marketing. Even with a high ticket sales funnel with a number of products including subscription products, affiliates can still struggle. That’s why getting the right support is paramount to your success.

Training with a good affiliate business system includes not just recorded webinars and training videos but also live Q&A sessions and access to one on one affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring sessions.

Trainings and mentorship with successful affiliates who have actually succeeded themselves with affiliate marketing can help you immensely because they know what you’re going through!

Standard recorded trainings aren’t really enough for some of the more difficult aspects of marketing such as understanding your customer avatar, setting up tracking and split testing of adverts, for example.

While you can learn these things alone, browsing YouTube videos, it’s much harder and there’s a lot of conflicting information which can lead you astray.

For more information and to get started with an online business system which offers all these benefits check this link.

Getting Paid Online For Referrals

Getting paid online for referrals is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Affiliate marketing as it’s known, is a way to generate income by recommending products and services which you don’t personally own.

A good analogy of affiliate marketing is a friend recommending a nice restaurant. Only with an affiliate recommendation, you earn a commission if your friend visits the restaurant. When you buy a product from a blog, it’s likely that the blog owner is an affiliate. They get paid when someone buys something through their unique affiliate link.

So how do you become an affiliate and start getting paid online for referrals?

Getting Paid Online For Referrals – How To Start

Anyone can become an affiliate and you only need to join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Share your link online and make sales by finding customers who want the particular product you are promoting. Amazon, for example, is one of the best known affiliate websites and anyone can join and promote any of the thousands of products available on the site.

It’s also a good idea to join a course which can give you some help. Most affiliates will struggle at first if they don’t have a marketing technique which they know works. Once you find a strategy which works, you can do more of the same. There’s several methods of promoting affiliate links online such as:

Blogging
Pay per click advertising
Video marketing
Social media marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation
Email marketing

Getting Paid Online For Referrals – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular methods of selling affiliate products online. By collecting subscribers from a website, affiliates can send out automated messages and promote their particular products to a growing number of people. Email marketing is a good method of marketing because it allows you to speak to a lot of people and automate the process.

Getting Paid Online For Referrals – Attracting Customers

To attract the right kinds of online users to your content, you need to first understand who to target your marketing towards. Since most of the people online aren’t going to want what you’re selling, it pays to focus solely on those who are likely to buy. This is known as your target audience – the small “slither” of the online marketplace who is interested in what you have to say and sell!

To attract the right customers to your products you need to know what kind of information they are looking for online. So for example a product review will attract someone looking for a specific product. Whereas a “how to” guide will likely attract a different kind of online user. One of these users is looking to buy something, and the other is only looking for some free information.

Since most online users are using the internet as a means of sourcing free information, it pays to understand who you should target with your content by understanding your customer avatar. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Paid Vs. Organic Traffic

To attract people online you can either pay for advertising or build content (or both). Organic marketing is free traffic which comes through the search engines and without having to pay for it. Typically it is much more difficult to obtain organic traffic in large quantities than it is to pay for it.

Still, organic traffic is free so many people seek to obtain it through creating a lot of content. Blogging is an example of an organic marketing strategy. Although it’s a very cheap means of generating traffic online, it’s quite slow and difficult to scale. Paid marketing on the other hand is faster to start and more scalable.

Choosing Products

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from online. Amazon alone has hundreds of thousands of products available to sell. However, Amazon’s pay structure is not the best for affiliates and they can earn as little as 1% commission for successfully selling a product. Digital products will generally pay much more (between 30-40%) and then there’s high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions.

Ideally choose a product you can fully get behind with your marketing strategy. If, for example, you’re going to become a blogger, choose a topic (and product) which you can enjoy building content around. So if you have a particular interest for example, your blog could be built with content on your hobby. Choose a product which would appeal to your audience.

Collecting Leads From A Website

Collecting leads from a website is one of the best things you can do as an affiliate or small business owner. A lead, (or an email address), gives you access to your website visitors email inbox. That is hugely valuable because it gives you more opportunity to promote your business or product/s to that particular visitor once they give you their details.

On a website, most people only stick around for a few minutes. After that they are gone, probably forever! But once you collect their email address, you can keep in touch with them potentially forever! Once on your email list you can follow up with potential customers with automated email messages for months; even years and decades. This just isn’t possible from a website alone!

Collecting Leads From A Website – An Autoresponder

An autoresponder service lets you place some code on your website which creates a form. You can offer something on your website such as a free giveaway. I use a free video tutorial on this website as my giveaway but you can use ebooks, files or downloads. To access the giveaway the website visitor enters their details into the form. Their “freebie” is then delivered to their email inbox.

aweber - collecting leads from a website

You will often see discount codes, ebooks, pdf files and free courses being offered on various websites online in order to collect subscriber information. Once you join someone’s email list, you will start receiving automated marketing messages promoting their products/service.

Collecting Leads From A Website – Building Trust

Many of these companies will follow up with aggressive marketing campaigns designed to sell you their wares! This can often push the potential customer away, knowing that if they open an email message from a certain company, they will be inundated with marketing messages! As a result, many subscribers stop opening messages.

To get your subscribers to open your messages more frequently, make a habit out of sending out helpful messages which genuinely help your subscribers with a problem they have. That way, they will be more inclined to open your messages when they arrive.

Build trust, rather than trying to sell from the get-go! Once you build trust with your email subscribers, you’re more likely to get subscribers to open your messages. When subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you.

A Valuable Giveaway

A valuable giveaway is something that your website visitors are going to want badly enough to hand over their details for! With so many websites and bloggers touting for your email address, consumers are becoming more discerning! They don’t want a million spammy emails in their inboxes! So they are getting more picky!

It’s not enough to have a valuable giveaway, you must also make sure your visitors know about it. Make your subscription option clearly visible on each page of your website and highlight the main benefit of signing up to your list.

“Join my newsletter” might not be enough of a benefit in the eyes of a website visitor. So make sure you’re offering something super valuable and that your visitors know it straight away!

Collecting Leads From A Website – Traffic

Once you have your lead generation tool set up on your website, you’re going to want to attract more targeted visitors who will want your giveaway. I do this through blogging and in particular by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

By making a habit out of creating content aimed towards a specific type of person, you can bring more targeted visitors to your website. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Generating organic traffic to a blog takes some time and commitment. But it’s worth doing because ultimately it can give you free traffic, leads and sales. Make sure you’re sharing and promoting your content and make a daily ritual out of it. There’s also a number of useful plugins you can use to automate the sharing of your posts and help you with your SEO. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Putting You In Charge Of Traffic

Traffic is hard to obtain and you either need to create a lot of content for traffic or pay for it. So building an email list of subscribers is one of the best things you can do to put you back in charge of the traffic you’ve worked so hard for (or paid for).

Without an email list, you’re at the whim of Google or of paying constantly for traffic. But once you start building a list and building trust with your email list, your subscribers are much more likely to open and digest your email messages, putting you in a position of authority.

Build trust first, sell later! The consumer is much more in charge in the online world and can spend a lot of time collecting information with which to make a purchasing decision. The “pushy” sales tactic is therefore not a good one if you’re trying to build trust with customers. Instead, lead with value and position yourself as an authority in your particular field.