AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Much Time Does It Take To Get Traffic From A Blog?

How much time does it take to get traffic from a blog? Blogging is notoriously slow for generating traffic, but once you do start seeing traffic that traffic is completely free! Plus, over time and with enough work, you can see your traffic massively “up-ticking”. Eventually bloggers can generate thousands of daily visits to their website completely free, if they stick with it for long enough and do the right things.

blog traffic how much time — blog traffic uptick

To make this a reality can take anywhere from a few months to a few years. In a very competitive niche you should expect it to take much longer. It also depends on the work you put in, too. If you’re blogging every day and actively promoting those blog posts you should see results faster than if you only post three times a week and/or if you don’t promote your posts.

Initially it’s advised to target long tail keywords with your post titles which gives you more opportunity for a ranking (due to low competition). This also gives you some authority with the search engines and, over time, pushes up your SEO score (Search Engine Optimisation).

How Much Time Does It Take To Get Traffic From A Blog – Promotion

However much content you create on your blog, you should definitely promote it as much as possible. Much of your content won’t rank on Google, especially if you choose shorter tail keywords which have a lot of competition. So don’t rely completely on the search engines to rank your content. It’s a nice bonus when your content does start ranking, but expecting it to will likely leave you a little disappointed.

Promote your content throughout your social media presence by placing links to it on your profiles and newsfeeds. You can also automate this process with the use of certain plugins, such as Revive Old Posts. I use this plugin plus a number of other ones to help with social media distribution and SEO. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for some of my favourites.

The other way you can promote your content is through an email list. Build an email list from your blog by offering a free giveaway of some kind. See don’t forget your email list for more on this.

How Much Time Does It Take To Get Traffic From A Blog – Link Building

Link building is another way to promote your blog authority and boost your online presence. It’s is a big part of SEO. Google uses the amount of incoming links as an indicator of your online trustworthiness. So if you want your blog to rank more prominently, it’s a good idea to build some authority back links from other sites within your niche.

The way to do this is to reach out to authority blogs in your niche and offer to write guest posts. Over time, as your content grows too, you should find people naturally linking to it. So write high quality content that will stand the test of time.

You can also build links by commenting on blogs in your niche. Or outsource link building to the professionals. I use this company for my link building strategy.

Your Niche

Your niche is going to be a pretty important factor in the time it takes to generate traffic. In a relatively uncompetitive niche, you can find traffic coming to your site organically within a few weeks if you’re creating regular content and promoting it. In a more competitive niche, it’s going to take longer because you’re unlikely to rank your content until you’ve built up some domain authority.

Still, you can promote content on social media and share to your list. If you’re willing to pay for a little extra traffic it can of course happen a lot faster. But organic traffic is definitely harder to come by than paid traffic.

Summary

It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months or even years to get organic traffic flowing freely to your blog. Initially there’s a lot of work involved in generating just a few hits (website visitors). But, over time as your content grows and you continue to share and promote it, you should find this growing.

Within a few weeks of creating and promoting content you should find a number of daily visitors are coming to your website. This will also depend on the amount of time and effort you put in and your ability to successfully promote your content throughout your social media platforms.

If you stick at it for long enough you should start generating traffic from multiple sources:

Organically through the search engines
Through your email list – sending out updates and informing your subscribers of your new posts
Through sharing on social media
Using share buttons and automated social media sharing software
From links others share to your posts
From your own back linking strategy

Efforts compound over time and as the search engines notice your growing authority and back link profile, you should be rewarded with a higher SEO score and continue to move up the rankings on the search engines, compounding the number of visits and hence shares and backlinks.

The Tipping Point In Affiliate Marketing

The tipping point in affiliate marketing comes when you’ve put in enough work to see some regular sales coming in. Once that happens, you can focus your time more efficiently, knowing which actions brought about those results. If you’re a blogger, the tipping point might come when you’re ranking on the search engines for many of your blog posts. This means you get free traffic and this allows you to make sales without paying for advertising.

With blogging, there’s a lot of work to be done initially and you generally wont rank your blog posts quickly. But if you put enough effort in, you should see some organic traffic coming to your site.

Many affiliates will use paid marketing rather than creating content and this gives you the opportunity to scale up once you’re got a profitable campaign. When your advert generates a profit, simply add more advertising budget. Once you’re paying $100 in advertising and making profit of $200, you have a lucrative campaign. Double your budget and make $400! Multiply this budget by ten and make ten times your profit!

The Tipping Point In Affiliate Marketing

Before you get to this tipping point in affiliate marketing though, you’ll need to work pretty hard, and usually for little, or nothing! I recently heard of a top affiliate (in our community) having recorded and tested over 60 video adverts before they found a winner. I’ve personally written over 700 articles on this website alone and although sales do come in automatically now, it wasn’t always so.

Over time with a blog you pick up traffic from multiple sources. Some of your content gets indexed on Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. and you get free traffic from the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. But you shouldn’t rely on this. You can also promote your content on social media too and build an email list of subscribers whom you can send to your new blog posts.

This is a lot of work and it can seem futile at times, which explains why so many affiliate marketers quit. The chart above indicates total blog posts and the impact that has on inbound traffic. As you can see, this chart indicates that traffic will surge once you’re past a certain number of blog posts (400). However, this isn’t definitive because different niches will have more or less competition and the algorithms are constantly changing. But it gives you an idea of the work needed if you’re going to be a blogger!

The Tipping Point In Affiliate Marketing – Replacing Your Income

Once you have passed the tipping point in affiliate marketing, you’re in a much better place to replace your income with your affiliate marketing efforts. This can take a long time but you can dramatically speed up the process when using high ticket and subscription products. With a high ticket product, you can earn much more from a sale. Subscription products pay out recurring commissions which means the same amount of work brings in a larger income.

Using an email list is also a good idea. Without an email list, you’re relying on paid advertising or organic traffic alone. This puts you in a vulnerable position and an email list gives you greater control over your traffic. See also email marketing for affiliate marketing. Paid marketing is expensive and organic traffic hard to obtain. So you either pay or work for your traffic. But once you have an email list of subscribers you can send out messages to your list without the cost or the work!

A list gives you leverage too. Once your list tips over a certain point, you should find your messages are having a greater effect and you can sell multiple items through a single email. Most affiliates will quit before they have even built an email list to 1000 subscribers. But consider that once you pass the 10,000 subscriber mark, you should be seeing a dramatic uptick in your revenue, especially when using high ticket and recurring income products within your sales funnel.

Summary

The tipping point in affiliate marketing is when you start generating sales for work you’ve done previously. This can mean either the work done in crafting a paid advert or in building a lot of content. When you start generating sales more regularly, you’re over the main hump! Before that, affiliate marketing can be a frustrating experience. But once you have some regular sales coming in, you can track those sales and focus on the actions which generated them. Before that happens you don’t have the data to show what works and what doesn’t; so a lot of what you do is “experimental”.

Once you’ve proved an advert, or created enough content to generate traction organically, you’re in a great position! For me, regular sales from blogging proved that blogging worked. This motivated me to do more! Whereas before, I was more uncertain of whether what I did made any difference at all! This uncertainty fuels procrastination and self doubt and seldom leads to positive action. But once you have more certainty, you can move forwards with more self assurance and in the right direction given the data you now have.

Getting Unstuck With Your Affiliate Business

Getting unstuck with your affiliate business can be tough. I’ve personally gone through many times where I was lost and confused, directionless and frustrated. In the beginning especially, it’s difficult to know which direction to take. What products to promote, how to promote them and how to manage your time online can all throw you into a state of confusion and overwhelm. It’s no wonder so many affiliates quit.

Affiliates who do well find products they a passionate about and build their business on a daily basis. The find a reason larger than the money and create a value behind what they do. Even then, they can get stuck with procrastination and overwhelm. See also how to overcome procrastination in affiliate marketing.

Getting Unstuck With Your Affiliate Business – Setting Goals

One of the best tools to defeat overwhelm and frustration is to set short, medium and long term goals. What do you wish to accomplish in the next 10 years as an affiliate? What would your life look like when you have succeeded? Then do the same for 5 years and then for 1 year. Finally, break your large goal down into daily actions which, given enough time will take to to your long term goals. Make these tiny steps easily achievable, so that you can keep a record of them on a daily basis.

When you are feeling stuck, focus on a tiny step which you can do right now, today, rather than the long list of things you might do in the future. Often if you’re stuck and frustrated, it might be because you are looking too far ahead to your long term goals. The result is frustration. Look only to the tiny step in front of you now, and take decisive action.

Once you make a habit out of doing the little things every day, the long term plan comes to fruition because you have created a strategy. Action is always the answer to frustration and overwhelm.

Getting Unstuck With Your Affiliate Business – Changing Your “State”

One of the best tools I’ve learned from the pursuit of affiliate marketing is to become aware of my mental state of mind. I can often find myself in a state of frustration and overwhelm. Sometimes it means I simply need a break, or I’m not in the right state of creativity needed for the work. But more often than not it can be changed by simply shifting my state. See also my post I’ve written on this topic controlling your state of mind.

You can change your state of mind very quickly once you have identified that you need to shift it. Take a break, have a cup of coffee, exercise, music, or a different environment can all effect on your state of mind. Set some goals and identify some mini habits you can create which can be done easily.

Just taking action in a tiny way can have a dramatic effect. I also notice I work better in a clutter free environment. As my desktop starts to fill up with stuff, it adds to my mental clutter.

Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is a state of cognitive overload and mental exhaustion that results from the volume of choices and decisions we make. Prominent leaders deliberately cut down on the number of decisions they have to make on a daily basis. For example, Albert Einstein reportedly bought several variations of the same grey suit so that he wouldn’t have to waste time deciding what to wear each morning.

If you’re constantly trying to re-invent yourself in your affiliate business, and jumping from one idea to the next, it’s possible you’re overloading yourself with decision fatigue. Pick a strategy and stick to it for at least 6 months. Don’t jump from one thing to another. If you’re a blogger, stick with blogging. Stop looking for the “magic bullet” if you’re jumping from course to course. Choose a direction and stick at it long enough to get some traction.

Plan your workday the day before. Don’t leave it to chance of how you’re feeling on the day. Have a set pattern of work which you know you’re doing each and every day. That way, you avoid getting stuck in indecision.

Purpose Versus Money – Shifting Your Mindset

Which would you choose purpose versus money? Everyone thinks that money will change their circumstances, it will, of course, but not as much as purpose does. Money comes and goes and it’s well known that lottery winners will often find themselves completely broke a couple of years after their win! Strangely, winning a lot of money doesn’t help you if you can’t manage and organise it!

So most people will assume, (wrongly) that they have an inexhaustible supply of money after a lottery win.

Money easily won is money easily lost. But purpose can last a lifetime and give you so much more. I’ve often found myself thinking about money, and dreaming that if only I could “get the money”, all my problems would be over. I’ve had a few good “wins” with money.

But the ebb and flow of money into and out of life never ceases. Even movie stars who earn millions of dollars will find themselves broke, like Nicholas Cage, for example. Or worse still, not be able to afford your taxes and go to jail, like Wesley Snipes did! Or maybe he just didn’t pay!

Purpose Versus Money – Shifting Your Mindset

With purpose, it doesn’t matter whether you have money or not – you’re motivated and directed. I’ve been broke with purpose and much happier than when when I’ve had money and no purpose. Purpose gives you meaning and direction in life and there’s nothing worse than feeling purposeless and directionless if you need some meaning to carry on in life.

So how do you find your purpose? This is something I’ve struggled with for years. Ultimately I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s how you want to spend your time, while making money and enjoying your life simultaneously.

With a “dead end” job, for example, life can feel unfulfilling and you can easily lack purpose and drive. A goal or a plan, even a little one, can give you the purpose that a job, a career, a relationship or a hobby can’t.

Purpose Versus Money – Shifting Your Mindset

Earl Nightingale said “success is the progressive realisation of a worthy goal”. So ask yourself if you could attain anything, in life, what goal would you set for yourself?

A good way to align yourself with a purposeful goal is to look at your values. How do you want to live? What do you represent in the way you manage yourself and your relationships? If you can find a common thread in what you do, that could be the answer. For example, do you like working with people, or alone? Are you more introverted or more extroverted in your approach to life?

Ikigai is a Japanese word which roughly translates as “reason for being”. Your ikigai can help you find purpose which lines up with what you love to do, how you can serve others and how you can earn from it. (See image above).

Summary

If you had all the money you would ever need in life, what would you do? Once you have travelled the world, bought all the material stuff you could ever dream of, and lived the life of a millionaire, what would you do then, after you have had enough of consuming? Because even millionaires kill themselves because they simply aren’t happy.

Purpose on the other hand gives you energy, ambition and focus. Once you find purpose, there’s nothing that will stop you from attaining your goals. So it is purpose which we truly need, rather than the money we attribute to happiness. A purposeful life can never be lost, but money always can be! Find a purpose behind they way you make money (which aligns with your values) and you’ll find a meaningful way to live.

Building Momentum With Your Affiliate Business

Building momentum with your affiliate business is the best thing you can do in the beginning. Initially it is hard finding your feet. You’re high in motivation and ready to get started but lack direction. That motivation can quickly turn into procrastination when you don’t get stuck into some kind of action plan. See also how to overcome procrastination in affiliate marketing.

From “the Slight Edge” – Jeff Olson “failure survival curve”

You need to build momentum to turn your motivation into habitual behaviour. Otherwise, it can quickly dissipate and you can find yourself stalling. Motivation isn’t consistent. One day you’re “up” and the next day you’re “down”. So even if you’re highly motivated at the start out of learning affiliate marketing, it often won’t last. How are you going to feel when you’re weeks/months in but still aren’t making any money? Will your motivation still be as high? The answer is likely to be a resounding “no”!

This might explain why so many affiliates quit (around 95%).

So how can you build momentum with affiliate marketing and stay the course?

Building Momentum With Affiliate Marketing – Motivation vs Habit

Motivation gets you started, habit keeps you going. As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’re likely to be highly motivated. Use this motivation to build good habits as quickly as possible. That way, you’ll last the course when other affiliates drop out, as they undoubtedly do. In the beginning these habits are likely to be absorbing information and setting up your tools – building a website or a sales funnel, and focusing on learning a marketing strategy. So the learning of information will take up nearly 90% of your time, with implementing your knowledge taking up around 10%.

Once you have figured some stuff out, and have decided on your marketing strategy and direction, this needs to shift. Don’t get stuck in learning mode because it doesn’t drive your business forwards. This is an easy trap to fall into because it’s fun and it feels like progress. But as soon as you are ready you should shift this focus relationships from 90/10 (learning to implementing) to one of 80% implementing your knowledge and 20% learning. That’s how to build momentum. Otherwise it’s easy to float about watching information videos forever, without actually building your affiliate business.

Building Momentum With Affiliate Marketing – Good vs. Bad Habits

It’s easy to create bad habits. Watching TV, eating junk food, drinking alcohol are examples of “bad” habits which are easy to create. It’s easy to create “bad” habits, but not so easy to create good habits. Good habits for your affiliate marketing business are like good habits for a fitness program. Going to the gym and working out is a good habit if you want to get fitter. With an online business you need to build habits out of the actions which move your affiliate business forward; money producing habits. Bad habits are browsing social media, getting stuck in learning/procrastination mode and dawdling online wasting time.

Since social media platforms are designed to literally addict you to them, it’s worth being very careful with your time online on these platforms. They will suck you in like a magnet! You can also fall into the trap of working on activities you like, but which don’t necessarily move your business forward. Making a website look beautiful, as opposed to driving traffic to it, is one example. So it’s worth taking the time to focus on the things you don’t necessarily want to do, but which move the needle on your bottom line. Once you have identified what those actions are, do them consistently and make a habit out of doing so on a daily basis.

Focus On Actions Not Outcomes

As a beginner, it’s more difficult to know just what these particular actions are. You’ll likely need to spend some time learning and implementing some tactics before you find something which actually works. Running advertising campaigns, creating content, building your sales funnel and so on are examples of actions you can do in an affiliate business. Initially there’s a lot to do and nothing much to show for your efforts. It’s at this point in time you’ll think of quitting. Take a look at the graph below from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits:

building momentum with affiliate marketing

This is often what an affiliate business looks like in terms of your results. Not much for ages and then “boom” it suddenly takes off! So in the beginning it pays to focus on your actions not your results (since you won’t have any results yet)! I still find this useful advice even now, years into studying affiliate marketing.

When I look to my results, I wonder why I haven’t done better. It puts me into a negative frame of mind and I stall. Doubt creeps in and I do less, not more! When I focus on the actions I need to take, I get more done and results will naturally stem from this positive outlook and doing rather than speculating and/or procrastinating – which tends to lead to a negative state of mind. See also controlling your state of mind for affiliate marketing.

Summary

Building momentum with your affiliate business is vital if you want to succeed. But you also need to build momentum with productive habits which actually move the needle of your income too. It can be easy to fall into traps such as spending all your time in “learning mode” without ever taking productive action. Or, you can waste time on actions which you enjoy, but which don’t necessarily move your business forwards.

At first it’s likely that you’ll need to try some actions out without knowing exactly what the outcome will be. This is known as “failing forwards” a necessary part of learning affiliate marketing. Without any “failures” you’ll never find a strategy you can implement which will lead you to success. See also failing forwards in affiliate marketing.

Once you get some success, such as your first email subscriber, website “hit” or even sale, focus on the actions which brought about your success. Over time, your success will compound and your focus will get narrower. You’ll learn through experience which actions bring about the outcomes you want. But without building momentum in your affiliate business first, this simply won’t happen!

Keep an eye on the long term outcome you desire from affiliate marketing, but maintain your focus on the daily actions which take you there!

Learn more about building an affiliate business and get started here.

Leverage With Affiliate Marketing

How to leverage with affiliate marketing? One of the best reasons to become an affiliate marketer is the leverage you can attain through selling affiliate products online. With a normal job, or employment, you are effectively selling your time. Stop turning up for work and you stop getting paid. This becomes a problem when you’ve built a career over many years. Your career now pays for your mortgage and family, but you’re trapped with turning up again and again.

With affiliate marketing you don’t see the money immediately. But if you stick with it for long enough, you keep getting paid even after you stop working.

For example, there’s over 700 articles on this blog now. Many of these are floating around the internet and making sales for me on complete autopilot. You simply can’t create this kind of leverage from a job, unless you have some kind of royalty payment for the work you have created.

Actors, Directors and writers get royalties for the work they have created. They receive payments long after completing their work. But for most of us, this isn’t possible from our jobs.

Leverage With Affiliate Marketing – Forms Of Leverage

There’s a few ways to leverage the internet to make money in your sleep. Selling affiliate products is one of the best ways because you can automate the process and you have a global audience to sell to.

Selling your time will always be a finite way to earn money. But selling products gives you the ability to create systems and strategies which work without you having to be there personally.

An affiliate business is a little like an online vending machine. With a vending machine, you fill up the machine with products and take the money out each week. But with an affiliate business, you don’t need to personally handle stock or remove cash from the machine.

There’s a few ways to sell affiliate products online and the main two are:

Using paid marketing
Creating content

This blog post is an example of a piece of content. If someone buys a product through my content, I make a commission. Paid marketing can be used to drive online traffic very quickly and scale up to a global audience. Both are forms of leverage because they can work while you’re not at work.

Leverage With Affiliate Marketing – Systems

Getting systems working for you, selling products online is the key to building a successful and profitable online business. Once you have found a strategy which works for you as an affiliate, keep doing it and your sales should grow exponentially as your systems work for you. With content, you can build more and more of it, so it goes to work on your behalf. With paid marketing, you can scale up by increasing your online reach once you find a profitable advertising campaign.

Subscription products are another good way to leverage the internet and generate sales in your sleep. Most affiliate products only pay you once, such as physical products. But with subscription affiliate products you can benefit from monthly membership commissions. This gives you even more leverage and a single sale can result in years of monthly recurring income. Multiple subscription commissions can give you a good income quite quickly.

One of the difficulties with affiliate marketing is getting going and learning a strategy which works for you. Many affiliates will quit in the early stages because they don’t see the long term benefits of continuing, especially if they struggle making the first sale.

But once you pass that milestone you have found a system of generating a passive income online. That’s worth more than a one-off commission because you can use that knowledge to repeat the sale again and again, and on autopilot to boot!

Leverage With Affiliate Marketing – High Ticket

For years I struggled with affiliate marketing because I didn’t know about this little gem! I sold products from Amazon which, as many affiliate know, isn’t the best paying platform to sell products from. Some products from Amazon pay affiliates as little as 1% commission. When you don’t make sales every day (if you’re a beginner for example), this is going to hurt when you finally make just $1 commission for all your hard work!

But with a subscription products or a high ticket affiliate product, that works counts for much more; either a recurring commission or a much larger single payout (or both).

By using a product suite, that is, a product range which includes both subscription, low cost, mid cost and high ticket products, you can get the best of both worlds. Access one through this link.

Leveraging The Power Of Email Marketing

Email marketing is a powerful way to generate leverage online. By building an email list of subscribers, and promoting subscription products to them, you get the best of both worlds – leverage through email marketing and recurring subscriptions! An email list is the best piece of kit an affiliate should invest in, besides their ongoing education. You can access an email autoresponder for free here (up to 500 subscribers).

An email list allows affiliates to automate regular follow up messages to their subscribers. By delivering value driven messages which help them with a certain problem, you build trust. Trust online can be thought of as a form of leverage too, since there’s so many untrustworthy websites trying to take your hard earned cash! Build trust with someone online (by delivering value) and you are much more likely to be able to sell them something if it meets their needs.

Email marketing lets to do this in bulk. It’s not uncommon for affiliates to build email lists into the tens or even the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Even if only a small percentage of these subscribers make a subscription (or high ticket) purchase, then you can see the potential of building an income in this way.

Summary

There’s many ways in which affiliate marketing can allow you to leverage systems to build an income from scratch without any products of your own to sell:

Through building content
Via paid marketing campaigns
Building an email list of subscribers
Selling subscription and high ticket items
Building trust through automation

Find a single strategy you can work with and start building! Access this resource to get started.

The Slight Edge

I’m just re-reading Jeff Olson’s The Slight Edge and it’s reminded me what a perfect accompaniment it is for affiliates. As a beginner in affiliate marketing many years ago, I struggled with procrastination. I wanted some “magic” solution to making money online which somehow meant I didn’t have to work very hard! I find myself back there, even now after years of blogging, creating content and running advertising campaigns.

I’ve had some success with affiliate marketing. But there’s always the next level of success, wherever you are at. But at some point, I stopped and as a result my sales dropped off. If only I had carried on with such vigour as I had initially. This brings me back to Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge. IN it, he describes this phenomenom with very precise insight.

Here’s a picture he uses in his book which describes what most people do. They work like hell to escape “failure” but once they are out of the danger zone of financial struggle, they become less motivated, and stop doing those things! Little by little, success falls away until you’re back on the line of failure. Only then do you pull out the stops and start working again!

If only we would continue doing what has worked, we would continue upwards towards greater success and achievement. The problem is, our motivation changes as we move away from struggle and poverty; especially if we have a strong “away from” motivation. An “away from” motivation is the opposite of a “towards” motivation.

The Slight Edge Away Vs. Towards Motivation

I’ve always had a strong “away from” motivation. I’m motivated away from poverty, lack and scarcity. But once I’m no longer in poverty, and have moved towards mediocrity, for example, I tend to slow down and work less!

With affiliate marketing you are your own motivator! So if you lack the motivation, you are much less likely to succeed. For example, those who tend to do well with affiliate marketing are generally strongly motivated; either towards financial freedom or away from a job which makes them miserable. For me, it was away from a miserable job. But once I was earning enough from affiliate marketing to quit my job, I was no longer motivated by it – I had quit!

Once you recognise your motivation for doing whatever it is you are doing, it can be really useful; especially if you fall into the success/failure curve represented above. If you stop going when things get easier, you’ll need to identify another form of motivation to keep you going! Otherwise you’ll keep falling back into the failure/survival curve and never break through towards the upwards curve of success.

The Slight Edge – Keep Going

In the beginning of my affiliate marketing journey it was quite difficult. I struggled to make any sales for some time. But as time worn on and I had built more and more content, I found sales dropping in organically, from the work I had done previously. This motivated me to keep going, building more and more content; because I knew it was working!

Getting to the stage of knowing what’s working is a massive achievement in affiliate marketing. It’s worth pursuing this stage with a “whatever it takes” mentality because once you get there, you’ve done 90% of the work. After that things get easier. See also my post what if affiliate marketing was a martial art.

In the image above is a graph from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear – another recommended book for affiliates. In this graph you can see what’s described as the “valley of disappointment”. This can easily represent the disappointing reality of the lack of results from your efforts in the early stages of affiliate marketing. You expect your efforts and results to correlate in a linear fashion. Sadly this is far from normal and you’ll likely need to work much harder than you expect for just mediocre results at first.

However, once you have some results, you can focus on those small actions which produce those results, since you should now be able to identify the 20% of causes which brought about your good outcomes/sales. See also the pareto principle. ]

Summary

It’s easy to dismiss affiliate marketing in the early stages, especially when you’re not getting the results you desire quickly. But stick with it and over time, if you persevere beyond what most people will do, you should start to see sales dropping in. When this happens you can track those sales back to specific actions which you took. Now you’re in a position where you can focus solely on those specific actions which brought about the sales. This gives you more leverage and depending on your marketing strategy you may even be able to automate this process and scale up.

At the point of success it’s easy to slow down and pat yourself on the back! Beware the survival/failure curve here where you can fall back and lose your momentum which has taken so long to build.

How Much An Online Sale Is Worth

I’ve often wondered how much an online sale is worth. To me, it’s worth far more than the dollars/pounds which I get paid in commission. Today, for example, I made a $30 commission. Not a lot you might say. But whenever a sale like this drops in, it gives me extra confidence that I can make another. It’s confirmation that whatever action I’m taking as an affiliate I can actually produce a sale!

My first online sale came from an article review I wrote and it was a magical experience. This was over a decade ago now but I still remember the experience. It showed me that not only could I make a single sale, but that I could make a living online.

A single sale proves (to yourself) that you can sell online. It helps you overcome your negativity and doubt that you can earn online. See also how to make the first sale as an affiliate. But it’s far more than that besides.

How Much An Online Sale Is Worth

How much is it worth to you to never need to work for someone else ever again? How much is it worth to you to never have to have a commute? Or to never have to deal with difficult bosses or co-workers? How much is it worth not to have to struggle with your finances?

For me making a sale online meant I could live on my own terms. However small the commission was. If I could make one sale online, I could make many more. An independent income meant I wouldn’t have to commute, work for as$*&ole bosses or do jobs I hated!

If I could make one sale, I could make many more. Once you understand that selling online can be automated, a small “win” online is worth much more than its dollar value. It means you have an escape route, should your 9 to 5 become unbearable. Or worse still, if you are made redundant; a common occurrence with the rise of artificial intelligence.

How Much Is An Online Sale Worth – Actual Value Of A Commission

Actually an online sale can be worth anything from a few dollars in commission to a few thousands in actual monetary value. It really depends on the products you promote. See my post on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

A single sale can be worth a lifetime of recurring commissions if you sell the right software or membership product to the right person. Digital business tools, for example, often carry recurring commissions. So a single sale of a business product can be worth a whole lot more than a single physical product sale, for example.

A high value business course or mentorship program, for example, can be worth thousands of dollars.

The Data – Where The Real Value Is

You’ve probably noticed corporations and governments have started collecting data? Whenever you purchase something in a shop, have you noticed that many establishments offer to email you a receipt?

Data is where the real money is because once you understand where sales come from, you can focus your attention on that aspect of your marketing. For an affiliate then, once they make a sale, they have some actual real world data. Not only have they proved that they can make a sale, which goes a long way to overcoming their own scepticism, but they know how they did it too.

Pareto’s principle states that roughly 80% of results come from only 20% of their causes. Once you have this data, you can focus 100% of your efforts on those 20%! This means affiliate marketing does get easier, despite what a beginner might experience. Initially it can be hard just making a sale. But once you have, you can zone in on the action that caused it, making it easier in future.

Summary

The real value of making an online sale is in the education it gives you. Once you have figured out how to sell online, you can rinse and repeat that success. You can even automate the process which can give you both financial and time freedom. You can work from anywhere globally with an online business and you don’t need any products of your own either!

So if freedom is a value of yours, building an online business ticks a lot of boxes. For more information and to get started online, checkout this video.

How To Make More Sales Online

Wondering how to make more sales online? If you’re an affiliate who has already made sales online, or you’re just starting out, listen up! In this article I’m going to discuss how to make more sales online through the various strategies which affiliates use.

Not all affiliates use the same tactics to make sales. Some write blog posts, like this one. Others upload videos to YouTube or TikTok, and some use social media strategies. Many use paid marketing to send traffic directly to their affiliate products, or build an email list and send out automated marketing messages via email.

Before you make your first sale online, you’ll need to employ some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the direction you choose, your marketing budget (or lack of it) and the effort you put in, you can make your first sale within a few weeks, or a few months.

How To Make More Sales Online – Organic Vs. Paid Marketing

I’m a fan of organic marketing and I’ve created a lot of content. On this website alone there’s over 800 blog posts. However, organic marketing comes with a massive downside. You’ll often need to work really hard, and for a long time before you see the fruits of your labour. When you do eventually make a sale, it’s more difficult to scale up, because you’re relying on passive traffic which comes in organically (without paying for it). However, you can track your sales, see where they come from and focus on promoting those pieces of content which generate the most sales.

Paid marketing is different in that you pay for traffic. Initially you’ll need to try some paid advertisements out to see what works and what doesn’t. Unlike content marketing, you can see very quickly what works. Despite the face that you’re spending money for untested traffic, paid marketing has a massive upside. That is that once you find a winning advert which consistently generates sales, you can simply add more budget and scale up. The downside is that many affiliates will give up before they find that wining advert which produces a consistent profit.

How To Make More Sales Online – Make Your First Sale First!

Your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone. See also how to make your first affiliate sale. Once you’ve made your first online sale, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. Before this milestone you can easily harbour some scepticism towards affiliate marketing and this doubt can hold you back. Once you have sold something once, you know you can do it again. This time with more clarity because you (should) know exactly how you’ve done it.

Make sure you track your traffic, leads and sales so that you know where a sale has come from. There’s nothing more infuriating that making a sale but not knowing which action caused it. Not only have you now got more clarity about how to make a sale, but you have a greater belief in yourself and your ability to actually do it. This can create a snowball effect, leading you to focus on the actions which created the sale and fuelling you with confidence.

It’s obvious to suggest at this point that to make more sales, do more of what brought you a sale in the first place. Without having made a sale initially, this is much more difficult. You’ve less experience to draw from and you don’t know which actions are going to lead to the sales.

How To Make More Sales Online – Before You’ve Made A Sale

Before you’ve made a sale, it can be easy to keep focusing on the fact that you haven’t made a sale. You become demoralised and disillusioned. Instead of focusing on the steps to make a sale, you focus instead on your lack of results. This leads you into a negative spiral of not-doing. You don’t want this! Instead of focusing on your lack of results, focus instead on the actions you are taking each day. Tick them off one by one and reward yourself for doing so.

For example, as a blogger, I focus on creating a blog post most days. In the beginning, I was getting hardly any traffic to my website. For each single organic visitor to my blog, I would rewards myself and have a mini celebration. Celebrate your small wins because they lead to the big wins eventually.

A single click on your website can eventually become 100 daily “hits”. Lead your website visitors to your email list and your subscribers to your affiliate products. Broken into small, achievable chunks, anyone can succeed with affiliate marketing given the right mindset. Breaking goals into smaller steps is the key to making more sales online. Make small achievements each day which are achievable. Don’t focus on the things you can’t control and don’t overwhelm yourself trying to take giant leaps. Small, incremental improvements over time is the key to success online.

Do What Works

It’s easy to say, just do more of what works. But that assumes you’ve already made a sale and know what works to generate sales online. Often we don’t. We need to try things out so we can discover what works. This is known as “failing forwards” in affiliate marketing.

If you’re selling with a paid ad, run more ads. If you’re selling doing organic marketing, create more content. But to get to the point of making those sales you’ll need to do a lot of “failing” first. Failing isn’t failing if you use it to get better with affiliate marketing. Each so called failure is actually a stepping stone towards success – given the right attitude.

There’s so many ways to make affiliate sales. Pick one and run with it until you make a sale. See my post on 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Pick one and get really good at it.

Turn Traffic Into Leads

Once you start generating traffic to a website or landing page, it’s just the beginning. You need to turn that traffic into leads. This is done by testing out a good lead magnet – a free giveaway which appeals to your target audience. You can increase your conversion rate from a website without creating a tonne more content too. Simply test out and measure different lead magnets and alter your call to action to give the best opt in rate.

With a higher opt in rate to your email list, you can turn the same amount of traffic into a larger number of sales. The email list is an important part of the sales process from a website. This is because on a website, most visitors only stick around for a few minutes – for many visitors it’s just a few seconds.

But get them on your email list and you can continue messaging them for several months or even years. See also the power of the email list.

Making More Sales Online – Tracking

Tracking is the key to making more sales online. Once you have collected data on what works, you can spend more time on those actions which bring about the most sales. Have you heard of the Pareto Principle? It states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of activities.

In affiliate marketing this is also the case. Much of the work in affiliate marketing is in learning which actions produce the best results. So with around 80% of your work, you’ll see no actual monetary benefit. Hence why so many affiliate marketers quit. But if you see this work as the important foundation to your learning which actions actually do work, you’ll see the bigger picture. Longer term affiliates can work far less hard and make more money because they put in the work beforehand. They have learned which actions produce the results.

Once they have done this (once), they can benefit from their hard work before hand. I like to think about affiliate marketing as a lot like kung fu (Since I’m a kung fu teacher). Kung Fu literally translates as “hard work”. But it really means the hard work you’ve done previously to attain a level of skill.

Affiliate marketing is like this too. The hard work you do adds up to knowing which actions produce the most sales. You can then focus on those actions only, once you start connecting the dots!

Meaningful Work

What is meaningful work for you? AI is removing jobs at an alarming rate. So what are we all going to do in the future? Will be be living the life of our dreams, living off the state? Or will the marching draconian machine have eradicated us all by then?

I’ve been on a quest to find enjoyable work for several years. This led me to becoming a stuntman and working in the movies. But the veneer soon wore off and I found myself wanting something else. The once promised land of movie magic soon faded away and it became just another job.

I looked to the internet as an alternative income source and tried several strategies for earning online:

Forex marketing
eBay (buying and selling)
Content creation (blogging, niche websites, videos)
Affiliate marketing

I ultimately settled on affiliate marketing. I had the best results with affiliate marketing and even though Forex marketing looked promising, I didn’t want to be tied to the computer all day, looking at charts. Affiliate marketing lets you set your own schedule and work when (and where) you like. You can become geographically and financially free, both ideas highly motivated me. But mostly I wanted a reliable income because being a stuntman hardly ever gave me that.

Meaningful Work – Affiliate Marketing

There’s lots of ways to do affiliate marketing too. You can run paid ads and automate the process and this is great if you want a lot of free time and flexibility. There came a time where the affiliate marketing was working, giving me an income, without me having doing very much. This sounds like the perfect scenario, but it comes with its own inherent problems. I’m not complaining of course, and this is a great problem to have.

But it does leave you in a little bit of a fix, especially if you’ve worked very hard for this scenario to present itself (and identify yourself with the struggle). The work gave me meaning – to escape the trap of poverty. What now? The motivation I put into affiliate marketing came from the reality of my own financial difficulties. When those circumstances changed, I lost the meaning and the motivation. But also I was busy focusing on things I still couldn’t afford – keeping me bound in perpetual dissatisfaction!

This is typical in human nature and once your income increases, rather than choose to live in appreciation and happiness, we shift our attention to the things still out of reach financially. The drive to make more money is an endless one, perpetuated within our society. How much is enough? A home, food and a dependable income are pretty basic things. But once achieved, we want more!

In Thomas J Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he talks about this in great detail. Once your income rises, you buy a nicer car and move to a nicer neighbourhood. Once in the nicer neighbourhood, you are subconsciously competing with your neighbours, raising your costs again.

Why Meaningful, Why Not Enjoyable?

All work can get dull when you do it enough, or if it no longer holds any meaning for you. But if work is meaningful to you, you won’t get bored because your motivation is intrinsic.

You want to work because the work has an alignment with your inner value system. Intrinsic motivation lasts much longer than external motivation. You can spend all day doing something you love.

Money only motivates you so far. Unless you’re super motivated by money, or you love your job, it will often only get you Just Over Broke (JOB)! So if you tie that intrinsic motivation to your work somehow, it won’t feel like “work” in the most mundane sense because you’ll love doing it!

Whatever you do, it can get dull. If you’re motivated externally, you’ll likely work only so much before you lose your motivation.

This picture is from Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge. It clearly shows the survival failure curve where many people reside. With intrinsic motivation, you’ll work much harder and for longer. This explains why it’s so difficult to succeed in a job you dislike/hate.

Summary

You’ve probably heard the saying “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”.

I haven’t found that to be exactly true but I definitely know the difference between work I choose to do and that which I feel I have to do.

Building an online business has given me the luxury to see the difference because you can ultimately earn an income online without having to keep showing up. The automation from an online business means you can set up your business so it works largely without input.

This was my intention for building an online business in the first place – a passive income. Once it happened, it gave me a clearer insight into the work I was choosing to do because I loved it, and the work I was doing only for the money!

When you can drop that kind of work it’s a beautiful thing. It means you can get clear on what you want to do (meaningful work), and create a more free and flexible lifestyle around your values.

No other work I’ve found has given me the ability to work when and where I wanted, and around something which is meaningful.

I believe meaningful work is going to be a fundamental necessity with the rise of artificial intelligence. Not just because your income will be controlled by the overlords, but for your own mental health and independence.