AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

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.

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.