AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Why Your Money Mindset And Affiliate Business Are Intricately Linked

There’s a few reasons why your money mindset and affiliate business are intricately linked. For starters, if you’re running a (mental) program of a lack mentality or poverty mindset, you’ll likely try to save money on training, products, information and services. This can mean you choose the cheapest possible products, or not pay for training at all. For years I tried to learn affiliate marketing by watching free videos on YouTube.

This can lead to more frustration and uncertainty as each self proclaimed internet “guru” preaches a different strategy! Cheap autoresponders can often get lower engagement rates, because they are linked to spammy emails. Doing everything “on the cheap” isn’t a great strategy, as I found out at great cost. Time is far more important than money and we all only have a limited amount of time.

Still, that’s no help if you’re struggling financially. So I’ve created a few links for cheap and free stuff on this site to help such as the free autoresponder for affiliate marketers.

Why Your Money Mindset And Affiliate Business Are Intricately Linked – Products

For a long time I struggled financially. So when I bought something online, it would be a very cheap product, such as a book from Amazon. Because of my poverty consciousness, I believed everyone else had the same lack and limitation. So I chose to promote low cost items from Amazon and eBay.

Those were the things I bought myself, so I expected others to want them too. There’s two main problems with this mindset. Firstly, not everyone is just like you. We don’t all want the same products. Second, there’s all kinds of products to sell as an affiliate. Selling the cheapest ones is counter productive for affiliates because you earn the lowest commissions from them!

When I switched this mindset and started promoting high value products instead, things began to change for the better. I was able to make much larger commissions from fewer sales.

Why Your Money Mindset And Affiliate Business Are Intricately Linked – Investing In Yourself

I didn’t have the money to invest in myself and my online education for quite some time. However, in 2014 I discovered an online education program and I made the decision that I had to invest. The cost of not doing so was greater than the risk! Only when I realised this did I start to invest in myself and believe in the possibility of earning a real income online.

The catch 22 of affiliate marketing is that most people look towards affiliate marketing because they lack money. So they don’t invest in their education. Their results reflect their lack of understanding and whatever they try nothing seems to work.

I was in this position for several years before I finally started invested in myself.

If your belief is linked to lack, you avoid spending. But it’s a self fulfilling prophecy because you carry this belief forwards into your life, skimping on your education. Most university degrees cost tens of thousands in education fees. But somehow most don’t see their online business education in the same way.

Running Paid Advertising

I’ve spent quite a bit on advertising over the years and I have to say I’m still battling with this one. A poverty mindset brings with it fear of spending. So if you’re trying to build an online business with paid advertising, and fear losing money doing so, you’re more likely to lose. There’s a saying in the trading profession that “scared money is lost money”. It means that money you’re terrified of losing is more likely to be lost. This is because you’re attached to it.

The affiliates who do well online start out with a small marketing budget that they are prepared to lose. That money isn’t “lost” if you learn something from the data you collect and have a plan (for that knowledge) going forward.

Of course if you don’t have a marketing budget at all, you’re probably better off creating content as an alternative. If you’re wavering and insecure about fear of loss with a marketing budget, you are probably spending too much. Again, with the right help and support, this is much easier. It’s very difficult learning paid advertising without the help and support of long term affiliates and marketers.

Belief & Confidence

I have definitely struggled with confidence when it came to building an online business. But confidence and belief are a form of (spiritual) currency and are definitely linked to a poverty/wealth consciousness. As the Henry Ford quote reminds me “whether a man thinks he can or he can’t, he’s right”.

Some people have no money but have more happiness (and joy) than the wealthiest in society. This is testimony to the power of a positive (and happy) mindset. If you can’t be happy without money, you won’t be happy with it!

Your mindset around money/belief/confidence can be beneficial or a detriment to your online business in lots of ways. If you don’t believe something is possible, it’s unlikely you’ll even try.

Mindset Shift

As a beginner I was full of doubt. I wasn’t sure in what direction to take my affiliate business. Should I blog, should I do paid ads? I didn’t know. The not knowing meant I became confused and disillusioned. Nothing happened but I ultimately became a blogger, hence this blog post. Over time, I wondered whether blogging was actually going to work for me. I wondered whether it would make me any money.

But once I got into the swing of things, and started enjoying blogging, I let go of this anxiety. Low and behold, things started happening and I started making those nice affiliate sales. When this happened, it gave me new found confidence and motivation, so I was able to double my efforts.

Confidence and belief can work magic on your affiliate business. When you start seeing results, you’ll be renewed and encouraged. Before that, it can be hard finding your feet.

Summary

So why are money mindset and your affiliate business intricately linked? If you have a poverty mindset, you’ll skimp on your education. This is the foundation of your affiliate business because all your actions will stem from what you know. If what you know is flawed, it’s likely to reflect in your results.

Doing everything on the cheap, like I did, might mean you think in those terms. I thought people only bought products I could afford. But my mentor told me to aim high. There’s millionaires online buying helicopters, for example. Why not aim at selling those products instead of the ones which pay you so little?

Lowly aimed goals reflect low expectations and often come from a lack and limited mindset. Aim higher and stretch your beliefs. If you fall short from a lofty goal, you’ve still out performed a mediocre goal.

Beliefs built on a mindset of abundance are more likely to produce results of abundance. Those built from a poverty consciousness always perpetuate lack and limitation through their very nature.

Best Mindsets For Affiliate Marketing

So what are the best mindsets for affiliate marketing. Obviously a mindset of poverty, lack and limitation is going to affect your affiliate efforts. So you need to be positive and mindful that you’re creating a positive nurturing environment for yourself, so that you can grow alongside your affiliate business.

A negative environment will seldom help you to grow your business. Conflict and pessimism should be avoided, but will no doubt arise at some point. So you need some strategies in place to help you when you’re not feeling at your best.

Having a positive expectation in your affiliate business will help you focus on the activities you need to do. Once a negative mindset takes hold, it can become very difficult maintaining the work needed to grow your business. So your mindset is fundamentally important to the growth of your affiliate business.

Best Mindset For Affiliate Marketing – A Growth Mindset

A growth mindset allows for all possibilities. You may not have all the answers now, but you know if anyone can build a profitable online business with affiliate marketing, you can too.

You’re definitely going to face some setbacks with an affiliate business. So you’re going to need to be equipped with certain strategies to remain focused and positive, when things get tough. You may have to learn these as you go, but a negative attitude seldom helps, so remaining positive about the future is paramount to your success.

A limited mindset thinks in terms of limitation. You define yourself by what you know now and identify yourself with a limited version of who you can be. A growth mindset means you’re able to change and become whatever you decide.

Best Mindsets For Affiliate Marketing – Types Of Products/Poverty Consciousness

As a beginner affiliate I promoted many low value products. Because I only bought low cost items online myself, I assumed that everyone was broke because I was broke, and my circle of influence (friends) were broke too! Here’s the perfect example of poverty consciousness.

This becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because after promoting low value affiliate products online guess how my affiliate commissions looked? Yep, they sucked. Even when I started making sales online, which took a lot of effort, they were tiny commissions. My mentor taught me to sell high value products instead. With the internet, it’s easy to forget that you have the world at your fingertips. This means there’s multi-millionaires buying items worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So why promote a $10 book which offers a $0.10 commission? It makes no sense when you think about it logically. But that’s what I was doing! Sell high ticket affiliate products and you stand to make heaps more per sale.

Best Mindsets For Affiliate Marketing – Helping Vs. Getting

This was another huge shift for me as an affiliate. For a long time, I was focused on getting rather than giving. I thought I could “gear” the system and earn money simply by throwing up a few websites and “flogging” some products. My websites offered little in the way of value to anyone and I was just focused on the “getting”!

Most of my website failed miserably and they were soon kicked off Google (and the other search engines). In the bin with the other spammy, affiliate 3-5 page websites which offered zero value and only promoted someone else’s product.

I like to use the example of Martin Lewis’s website Money Saving Expert when it comes to giving value. His is an affiliate website, although most won’t know it because the main focus of the site is delivering value to consumers who want to save money on their bills, credit cards, mortgages and utilities etc.

When you give value, people respond. If you try and get, they don’t! Simple really but a mistake I made for a long time before I got some better advice from my mentor.

Aligning Yourself With The Right Products – Ikigai

Here’s another pattern of behaviour I had which didn’t serve me when it came to selling affiliate products online. I chose products I didn’t care about because I was only focused on the money. When I found products I genuinely found valuable and helpful, things began to change.

ikigai - aligning your interests with your products

It’s about alignment and integrity. Once you’re aligned with a passion and purpose with your affiliate business, and genuinely care about what you’re doing, beyond the money, the magic starts to happen!

Aligning yourself with products you genuinely endorse because you personally have found them super valuable, means you are “selling” with integrity.

Attraction Marketing – Selling Without Selling

Attraction marketing was a concept which was alien to me for some time. It means attracting people to your products through providing value and service, rather than trying to sell. Again, Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website is the perfect example. People visit the site looking to save money, get out of debt and find lower cost deals. They find all the above on his site and purchase various products from it (through the affiliate links).

There’s a transaction being made here but it’s one in good faith. A service is being provided to the consumer which is greater than the money taken! So people go out of their way to find Martin Lewis’s site – attraction marketing. Do you think that would be the case if his site didn’t offer any real value and only tried to sell you something? I doubt it.

The internet has changed the face of shopping. The pushy salesman doesn’t cut the mustard anymore (maybe they never really did). On the internet you can find a better deal. It’s a consumers market.

So trying the hard sell online doesn’t really work. Give value instead and keep giving value. When it comes time for someone to buy, and you’ve been giving value month after month to that person, they’ll likely choose you. You’ve already proved that you’re genuine, trustworthy and given them loads of value (more that the price they are paying)!

Producing Not Consuming

Here’s another important mindset shift you can make as an affiliate. Producing rather than consuming. Have you ever noticed that most people are consumers not producers? We consume the television programs, movies, food, information online, podcasts, videos and on an on. What are you producing? When you switch gears to spending most of your time consuming, to spending your time producing, you are becoming a giver rather than a receiver.

This little mindset switch seems obvious, but it’s amazing how often I fall back into old habits of consuming, rather than creating new content for my affiliate business like this post, for example. It’s a lifestyle habit for most people to only consume, without producing anything of value. As affiliates, you can connection your content to products and services from which you can earn an income. But only if you create enough content, or provide enough people with some kind of value first.

For more insights into mindset shifts you can make when building an online business, checkout this video.

If Affiliate Marketing Was A Martial Art?

What if affiliate marketing was a martial art? What would the various ranks mean as an affiliate? In the martial arts you get ranked with belts. The belts system is a Western concept which is still used to determine someone’s experience and expertise as a martial artist.

A black belt denotes that someone has been training in a martial art for many years. They are the “experts”. Whereas a white belt means they are a complete beginner. Different martial arts have different ranking systems and use different coloured belts (or sashes).

When I trained in Karate, a white belt was followed by a yellow, then orange then blue, brown and eventually black belt. You progress up the level of black belts in terms of Dan levels. A first dan black belt is the first black belt you receive. As you continue with your training, you move to second Dan, third, forth and so on. Colours on belts can even be segmented with stripes which denote a greater level of expertise in a certain colour.

What If Affiliate Marketing Was A Martial Art? The White Belt

Like with affiliate marketing, many beginners in the martial arts start out only to drop out a few weeks or months later. They get their white belt and their gi (suit), but a few classes struggling can prove to be too much. Often the beginning phase is difficult because you’re feeling nervous and meeting new people. You are shown things to learn and you might even have a hard time as the seniors get the better of you while sparring. You have to keep turning out to lessons, even when you don’t feel like it.

If you decide to give a class a miss, it’s so much more difficult turning up again the next time, after having missed a week/session. Keeping your momentum going and turning up for class after class is the toughest thing to master initially. The same is true of affiliate marketing. You keep turning up to online meetings, time and time again. You keep taking steps forward. If you manage to get into this “flow”, you’ll progress enough to get your first belt!

In the martial arts this means you’ve stayed long enough to have a grading. In affiliate marketing, you’ve set up your website and maybe even managed to run an advertising campaign. You’ve collected your first email lead and started building your email list. Or, maybe you’ve managed to get a hit on your website. Congrats – you’re now a Yellow Belt! Congratulations for keeping up this momentum!

What If Affiliate Marketing Was A Martial Art? The Yellow Belt

The yellow belt denotes that you have reached a level of proficiency beyond that of a complete beginner. It’s your first coloured belt, so be proud of it! As a martial artist it means you have proved that you know a few of the techniques. You’ve probably even remembered what they are called in Japanese/Chinese/etc. As beginers come in, you can even help them now and this helps you solidify your practice and your place in the school/community. You’re now part of the group and you have overcome the main hurdle of integrating yourself and building momentum.

Immersion is critical for learning a martial art and building an affiliate business. If you’re only dipping your toe in, now and then, you’ll always feel as though you’re outside the group. If you’re an affiliate, immerse yourself in an online community and keep turning up. Keep doing what you’ve been building up on and you’ll eventually come to get your next belt – the orange belt! This is another level of seniority in the martial arts. In affiliate marketing it might denote that you’ve made your first sale, perhaps.

This is a major turning point in affiliate marketing because it is testimony to your momentum and efforts you’ve been putting in. It helps you build belief and confidence in what you’re doing. You’re getting more proficient and things are getting easier.

What If Affiliate Marketing Was A Martial Art – The Orange Belt

Congratulations you have attained your orange belt! Your now more proficient and at ease with what you’re doing. In the affiliate marketing business you’ve made your first sale which is a major milestone. Be proud of this and mark the occasion. You’ve proven that you can actually make a sale online, something some beginner affiliates never do.

Your first sale in affiliate marketing is such an important milestone because you’ve proven it can be done. Your previous doubts about whether affiliate marketing actually works are laid to rest. This can give you new motivation and belief. Still, don’t be resting on your laurels because a single sale won’t replace your income yet.

You can also fluke a sale, and get lucky. It doesn’t mean you’re over the hill just yet. Keep going and commit to the journey, doing what is necessary to move your affiliate business forward each day. Reward yourself for each small step you take.

The first sale is also important not just because it gives you confidence. You’ve also learned how to make a sale, and you can use this data to examine your efforts and focus on the most productive actions which created this outcome. This can lead you to create further successes more easily. You can now use pareto’s principle (the 80/20 rule) and make your efforts more worthwhile by focusing on what works the best!

The Green Belt

If you make it to green belt in a martial art, you’ve stuck it out for longer than most will. With an online business, this shows you’ve got what it takes to keep going even when your mind is telling you to take it easy.

At this stage it can be easy to get a little cocky, and rest on your laurels. You’ve put in the hard work now, so you can simply coast for a while, right? As an affiliate, you’ve maybe got some results and you want to celebrate for a while too perhaps?

Don’t celebrate for too long, you’ve got work to do! Remember the momentum you’ve built up so far can easily come crashing down if you stop! The benefit of an online business is that you can use automation to make sales. Once you’ve made some sales it can be the time to do some strategising.

what if affiliate marketing was a martial art

The steps you take to make your first sale online, are often not the same as those you need to grow and scale your business. So it can be easy to get stuck doing the same things over and over, expecting those results to scale up. But if you’re not using a scalable marketing strategy, you’ll simply get stuck at a certain level of success.

For me, I’ve been a little stuck in my habit of content creation. Which has worked in generating sporadic sales. But ultimately I want to have a scalable business, which means using paid marketing of some sort.

In the martial arts, the green belt zone can be where you get a little cocky too. The hubris of beating lower ranked students can push up your confidence and make you lazy and arrogant!

The Brown Belt

The brown belt is the level of seniority directly below the coveted black belt. I would say, the black belt in affiliate marketing reflects having worked for a long time mastering some marketing method. In terms of results, a good outcome in affiliate marketing would be to have a scalable 6 figure business.

The brown belt is a significant one which denotes you’re now deeply entrenched in the affiliate business/martial art. For an affiliate I would like to think the brown belt shows you’ve reached a level of understanding and achievement where you are able to make a living from it which matches or exceeds that of a job/full time income.

You’ve mastered a marketing method and are now fine tuning it or scaling up to reach a larger audience more quickly.

Black Belt – 1st Dan

If you get to black belt in a martial art it should mean you’ve been training hard for many years. You are at a level where techniques spontaneously arise according to what your attacker does, and without preconceived thought. In terms of affiliate marketing, you’ve mastered a marketing strategy and this enables to to generate an income largely on autopilot from anywhere in the world through selling other people’s products.

Well done, it’s always worth the journey to arrive at a nice view!

The journey is never over and the first dan black belt really denotes the beginning of the martial arts journey. You’ve stuck it for several years and now it’s time to fine tune what you have learned. It’s a shame that many black belt martial artists consider this the “peak” and quit shortly afterwards. This is often because they have attained the desired destination which they originally set out to achieve. But there’s always another mountain peak around the corner!

Even a journey of 1000 sales begins with a fist step.

You Have Never Failed Until You Quit

There’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing – around 95%. This means only 5% actually stick at it and not all of them make a profitable business out of it. But affiliate marketing is very forgiving. You can always start again another day. So you have never truly “failed” until you quit. Even then, you don’t have to call it a “failure”. Affiliate marketing just might not be right for you. So moving on can be a good decision – everyone is different!

How you view “failure” is an important thing to note, too. Top earning affiliates have “failed” more time than most will even try. They see “failures” as learning opportunities, rather than absolutes. Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. Instead, learn from your “failures” and see them as stepping stones to greater understanding and ultimately more success.

Before I had any semblance of consistent success with selling affiliate products I struggled for several years. Not months, but years. That being said, I was mostly working only part time as an affiliate, around employment. I suspect this is true for many affiliates. Here’s some of the reasons I think this is the case.

You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – Why Affiliates Fail

So why do so many affiliates quit? Affiliate marketing is the easiest business in the world to get in to. Just join an affiliate program and hey presto, you’re an affiliate. Making sales online is another story though. So even though it’s easy to get set up with an affiliate link, the hard part is actually getting someone to buy through it.

This is where, I suspect, most affiliates hit a wall. They can’t generate sales and through the process of trying to get information to learn, they are inundated with information overload. There’s millions of affiliates trying to sell you on their “system”. So just getting simple information is pretty difficult. Once you show an interest, your email inbox will fill up with affiliate links for you to buy products through! You’ll likely jump from one system or course to another, trying to piece together some kind of strategy to sell.

Even with consistency and hard work, those sales don’t come easy; especially at first. You’ll likely be battling with some doubt and scepticism too, which doesn’t help. Friends and family (well meaning as they might be) will likely put you off and try to convince you to avoid “the scam”.

You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – Keep Going

If you manage to keep going past the doubters and overcome your own scepticism, you still have a journey ahead of you. The first major milestone is your first online sale. Once you make your first online sale, consider yourself way ahead of the people who quit. Even a small commission is worth celebrating because you’ve proved you can do it! This is no small feat and this success can give you belief and motivation. Belief is the most important asset to your succeeding at affiliate marketing, in my opinion.

Without it you simply don’t try. As Henry Ford is quoted as saying “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he is right”.

My doubt and scepticism held me back for some time too. Once you start seeing results, not only does your doubt disappear but your motivation and belief grows.

This is a major turning point because it should fire you up to focus on those activities which produced the sale. The more sales you get, the more data you have that a particular strategy is working for you; the stronger your belief in that strategy.

You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – The Valley Of Disappointment

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, there’s a great image I’ll share here.

He calls it the plateau of latent potential. As time rolls on as an affiliate, you expect your results to be linear and match your efforts. But this isn’t true. In fact, most of your work as an affiliate amounts to nothing at least initially. Pareto’s principle states that 80% of results will usually come from 20% of your efforts. This is very true, so as a beginner in affiliate marketing, your job is to find out where that 20% lies.

When you start out, you might very well be doing everything right, but still you don’t know which efforts produce the sales (until you actually make those sales). You won’t know, until you’ve been at it for some time, either. It’s during this time where affiliates will start to drop out. (On the image above this is shown as “the valley of disappointment”). Here, affiliates only see their efforts amounting to nothing, not that they are discovering what doesn’t work (and building their knowledge).

At a certain point, once you understand how to make sales, you can shift and focus your efforts on the 20% of activities which bring you 80% of your results. This is another major turning point for affiliates. Once you get to this stage, things really begin to take off. Again, look at the graph above and you see results rising exponentially.

The Problem

The problem is, most new affiliates don’t know this and are desperately trying to get results without having any data or experience. Instead of studying, they quit. It’s super frustrating when you’re at this stage as an affiliate because you desperately want to make those sales. Taking a step back and focusing on failing forwards is key. Failing forwards refers to trying out things which may not work, but which bring you closer to finding those things which do.

Only by going through a lot of testing things out and trying things you haven’t done before can you learn. The analogy I talk about in my previous article “don’t quit your affiliate business” is that of a toddler. A toddler never thinks, “ah well I guess walking isn’t for me”, even after many fails at standing up and placing one foot in front of the other. They know they can, and just keep trying. They have absolute belief in themselves and keep going until they achieve it.

The same is true of the 3% of affiliates who build profitable businesses online. No amount of “failures” will stop them from reaching their goal.

How To Overcome Procrastination In Affiliate Marketing

How to overcome procrastination in affiliate marketing? If you’re an affiliate you’re probably no stranger to procrastination. Staring at your computer screen waiting for inspiration for your next post, or the next action is hardly the best idea. When these moments hit me I know it’s time to unplug. I also get stuck thinking about my affiliate business, wondering what I “should” be doing. Looking at those who are far ahead of me, it’s easy to become down hearted.

So what’s the answer when procrastination comes alone and rears its ugly head? There’s two strategies I use to escape the dreaded anxiety and frustration of doing nothing while wishing things were different! Here’s my answer:

Write down long term goals – a good long term goal helps you focus on what you want to achieve. It focuses your mind and puts your ideas down in a tangible form, getting you out of your head.
Focus on the tiny, inconceivably small action you can do right now, today, rather than the long list of things which you cannot. I wrote a little about this in my post controlling your state of mind.

How To Overcome Procrastination In Affiliate Marketing – Your State

It’s worth mentioning how I find myself in those states of procrastination and frustration. It’s often the result of looking at others who have better results than myself. I find successful affiliates/people and become disillusioned by my lack of success, by comparison.

I forget to celebrate my own small successes and instead focus on where I “could” be, or worse still “should” be. Attaching myself to achievements far beyond where I currently am, I immediately feel disempowered. Judging myself and condemning myself like this leads to frustration and anxiety. It’s a downward spiral which leads me to doing nothing about my situation.

The more I procrastinate and focus on the results I don’t have, the more frustrated I become and the less I do as a result. It’s almost a paralysis by over analysis.

The answer to shift this paralysis is through shifting your mind. Instead of focusing on the many things out of your control, focus on the one thing in front of you which you can achieve, now, today.

How To Overcome Procrastination In Affilaite Marketing – Shifting Your State

Shifting your state can be done in many ways and I discuss this in more detail in my article “controlling your state of mind“. Depending on where you are in the emotional guidance scale it might take many forms:

Vigourous exercise
Choosing a better feeling thought
Writing in a gratitude journal
Making a cup of tea
Choosing a different activity
Breaking your existing state somehow

If you’re in a state of frustration and procrastination, it’s worth noticing the things you have given your attention to preceding that particular state. For me, it’s things such as focusing on celebrities, watching the news or focusing on results I don’t have yet. When I do this, I put myself into a negative state and criticise and judge myself for not having achieved.

To shift this negative state, I focus on something I can do right now, even if it’s just to meditate for 10 minutes. Moving yourself up the emotional guidance scale (see picture above) is always going to be beneficial. It’s definitely one strategy how to overcome procrastination in affiliate marketing.

Take Small Steps – Micro Habits

It’s easy to want to jump forwards in time to where you are making a fortune with your affiliate business. You focus on your lack of results and this makes you feel lousy! “Why am I not at the top of the mountain yet” you declare! The answer is because you haven’t yet taken the first step yet.

But in your state of frustration, you’re hardly likely to take that first step, because you’ve put yourself in a negative state thinking about the peak of the mountain, rather than the first step towards basecamp!

Instead of thinking of all the things you’ll have to do in one moment, focus only on the tiny “baby” step in front of you today. Master doing that every day and pretty soon you’ll be at the basecamp! Motivation gets you going, but habit keeps you going. Once you look up to the peak, you become demoralised and become tempted to quit. Keep moving forward each day and look only to the baby step in front of you in the “now”.

Celebrate Small Wins

Most people will quit with affiliate marketing. Any endeavour which is worth achieving is going to present some difficulties. To motivate yourself forward consistently, you need to present yourself with achievable targets and celebrate them when achieved. Do this over and over again for long enough, and you’ll eventually succeed.

If you’ve haven’t seen the film Touching The Void it’s highly recommended viewing for inspiration. In 1985, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates reached the summit of Siula Grande, a major peak in the Cordillera Huayhuash in the Peruvian Andes. Simpson is injured while climbing down and takes a huge fall while Simon tries to lower him down. Simon assumes he is dead, but in fact he falls into a crevasse and survives the fall of more than 200 feet.

The film is narrated by Joe and Simon. Joe drags himself for three days without food and with almost no water. With a broken leg he crawled and hopped for five miles (8 km) back to their base camp. In the film Simpson explains how he focused on reaching a certain point on the horizon and gave himself a strict deadline to achieve it; the thought of the actual full journey was too much to contemplate. He made it back to basecamp only a few hours before Yates and Richard Hawking intended to leave the base camp and return to civilisation.

Simpson’s survival is regarded by mountaineers as amongst the most remarkable instances of survival against the odds.

Don’t Quit Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. One of the best pieces of advice you can hear as an affiliate is simply “don’t quit”. Most affiliates quit. In fact, around 95% of them do which means only a tiny percentage of affiliate marketers actually make it and build an income online. But don’t be put off by this statistic. Affiliate marketing is an easy business to get into. There’s a very low barrier to entry and pretty much anyone can “give it a go”.

You can start for next to no cost. All you really need is an internet connection and a laptop. This means anyone with a laptop can try it, for next to no risk.

To succeed, you need to stick with it when others quit. Most people will experience some adversity and use it as an excuse to quit. The 5% who succeed, use this adversity to get better.

Don’t Quit Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Failing Forwards

Failing forwards is a term I first heard after becoming an affiliate marketer. A good analogy is of a toddler who is learning how to walk. He first starts getting up and falling over again! Again and again the toddler falls over! But he doesn’t let the adversity define him! He keeps going until he has managed to actually stand! Then, little by little he begins to walk. At no point does he think “this walking lark just doesn’t work“!

This is the same experience of an affiliate marketer. Only, with affiliate marketing you’re trying out some kind of marketing strategy. Initially, most of the efforts you put in will result in a less than successful outcome. This is tough and you’ll be tempted to give up. But when you see that some affiliates are making a nice, passive income from affiliate marketing, it can keep you going. (One of the benefits of joining a community).

If you keep going long enough, you should experience your first sale. This is a great moment and it should be celebrated. From this moment, you have proved to yourself that it can be done. You have some actual real world experience and you’re no longer hanging on the advice of some “guru” or coach!

The experience of failing forwards in affiliate marketing is what every affiliate experiences – trying things out until they reach a sale, or they quit!

Don’t Quit Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Your “Why?”

A strong enough “why” will overcome almost any “how”. So ask yourself why you’re doing affiliate marketing. Is it for the independent income, the time and geographical freedom? Do you long for more free time to spend with your family? Or, are you sick and tired of the commute or a crappy work situation or difficult boss?

When you’ve tried everything you can thing of, and those sales still aren’t coming in, you’re going to feel like quitting. It’s in those moments you need to pull out your “why” list! Here’s some of my reasons for continuing when things get tough:

I can choose when and where to work
I can turn away employment I no longer want to do (choice)
I work how I like, and can put my friends/family/hobbies first
No need to ask the boss for time off – I am the boss
No more commuting long distances and in rush hour for employment
I’m in control of my own destiny

Your “why” in affiliate marketing is pretty important because it’s going to be tested. When things aren’t working out, you will look for reasons to quit. But your “why” keeps you motivated and reminds you why you’re working so hard.

If your situation is pretty ok as it is, you’re probably not going to have the resilience and motivation to keep going if things don’t go your way quickly. Many successful affiliates have a huge motivation to free themselves of corporate life, or from lack and poverty. This is often motivation by the pain of their circumstances, or of giving themselves no other choice but to succeed.

Feedback – The Key To Success

Your results from your affiliate efforts is your “feedback”. How you interpret that feedback is the key to success. If you have no results or feedback to draw from, you probably haven’t been an affiliate for very long. This can be the most difficult part of affiliate marketing; when you’ve run ads, built a list, created content and still have nothing tangible to show (in terms of sales). Most affiliates will quit before they have built their email list to even 1000 subscribers. This just goes to show the short term view of many affiliates.

Once you understand that affiliate marketing can reap rewards for you long after you stop, if you put in the effort beforehand, it’s highly motivating. It’s also a very forgiving business and you can always start over again. The real value is in your understanding, not the results per se.

I like the analogy of the Chinese bamboo tree, which is a lot like affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for 4-5 years. If you didn’t know the type of plant it was, you would be forgiven in thinking that it wasn’t going to grow at all! During this time it needs feeding and watering. But once it breaks the surface of the soil, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.

Affiliate marketing can be a lot like this plant. It needs feeding and watering and the results don’t sprout up immediately. But if you feed your mind with belief, get help and support in your affiliate journey, the rewards can be amazing if you keep going for long enough.

How long this is will depend on the methods you employ. Use your feedback to adjust and craft your actions. No feedback means you need to fail forwards more. Try new things, join another course. Using paid ads? Try content marketing. Tried content marketing? Use paid ads?

Access a training and education course here and get started.

Summary

Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. There could be many reasons why you haven’t had the success you crave yet. But quitting only guarantees that you won’t win! Here’s some of the advice which helped me go from a struggling affiliate to generating regular and consistent sales:

Get help – join a community where you can ask questions and get support and advice
Use recurring income products – rather than “one-off” sales which only pay you once per sale (subscription and memberships)
Choose to sell products which pay more – digital and high ticket items pay much more than physical products
Learn from your feedback and use your “failures” as stepping stones to deepen your understanding and learn what works.

Best Ebook For Affiliate Marketing

There’s no best ebook for affiliate marketing and they all have something to offer. In my ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners”, I share the main things I wished I had known when I started out as a beginner affiliate. You can access it by clicking on the link below:

In this post, I’ll share the main things I learned from my affiliate struggles. My reason for creating this ebook was to help others on the same path who could benefit from my experience.

Best Ebook For Affiliate Marketing – Types Of Products

When I started out as an affiliate, I bought a couple of courses which taught various online marketing strategies. One of them taught me to create written content. Another one taught me to use paid advertising.

I made a few mistakes which meant my affiliate marketing journey wasn’t an easy one. One of the main things was to believe that everyone was like me; broke! I had no money for advertising and most of the products I bought online were of little value. So I would promote products that I bought such as books from Amazon or low value products from eBay.

But this short sightedness cost me dearly and I only made tiny commissions when I did finally make affiliate sales. My mentor taught me to find high ticket products instead. A high ticket item is worth hundreds or thousands, rather than just a few bucks. As a result, I made my first high ticket commission.

Best Ebook For Affiliate Marketing – Shiny Object Syndrome

While you’re going to want to try out a few courses as a newbie, it’s important to stick with a certain strategy and master it. Shiny object syndrome refers to a common problem with new affiliate marketers. When you’re a beginner, you’ll probably want to sign up to many affiliates’ email lists. This means you’ll be rather inundated with email messages promoting their courses. One course promises far faster results than another and you can easily fall into the trap of believing them!

I jumped from one course to another, each one promising more than the last. In each case my results were the same – I struggled. When you struggle, you look for another answer. The next shiny object in your inbox usually offers this! This is definitely not a strategy for long term success. Because I didn’t sustain any effort for long enough to get traction, I became perpetually trapped in the paradigm of looking for the next “shiny object”! Don’t do it! Find a course which offers support and stay the course. Most affiliates quit so your chances of success increase the longer you stick the course!

Best Ebook For Affiliate Marketing – Subscription Products

Another thing to consider is to sell products which offer a recurring income. I sold items which paid me only once (and which paid peanuts). So when I made a sale, the income was teeny tiny! Now I have learned to sell subscription products and memberships.

These keep paying you long after you made the sale. These are a great idea for beginner affiliates because the first main hurdle is making that first sale. It can take a while to actually generate your first sale online. When that sale gives you a recurring commission, month in and month out, it’s far better and more motivational than a one-off.

Choose high value items to sell, such as business tools and memberships which people actually need for their business. When a customer needs a product, or it’s very valuable, they are much more likely to maintain their subscription for life. Don’t sell small cheap items, especially physical items because they pay the least. So you’ll need to sell thousands of them just to make a small income. Sell high ticket and subscription items which continue to pay you commissions for years.

Getting Traffic Online

Most affiliates struggle with getting traffic to their website and this was a big problem for me. Get help with your marketing methods and learn from a coach or mentor. It’s worth the cost to get the best instruction and education you can because it will pay dividends later. Access an online course here, where I found mentors and coaches who have helped me.

targeted traffic for affiliate marketing

There’s two main ways to get traffic to your website/landing page: paid traffic and organic traffic. Organic traffic is much more difficult to obtain and much less scalable than paid traffic. But paid traffic is costly. But if you use a high ticket program you’ll more easily recoup your advertising costs. Or use organic strategies if you’re on a tighter budget.

Before you rush off on a strategy to get people coming to your affiliate products, spend some time learning about your customer avatar. That’s the kind of person who would likely buy your product. Most people online won’t buy your product, but certain people will. It’s those you want to spend your hard earned advertising budget on; not the people who will leave without becoming a customer.

Build An Email List

I spent hours upon hours online building content and trying to get people to my website organically. Most of that time was a complete waste! Most of my websites failed miserably! Paid marketing is far better if you can afford it because organic traffic is difficult to obtain and even more difficult to scale up to larger numbers. Whether you pay for traffic or you build content, an email list puts you in control of your visitors.

Build an email list of subscribers who are interested in your products/service. This is done through a website or landing page by offering something of value in exchange for your visitor’s email address. Once you have built an email list, you can send your subscribers to your content for free! Some affiliates build email lists into the tens and hundreds or thousands of subscribers. So a single email can mean many sales.

Summary

I’m not saying my ebook is the best ebook for affiliate marketing! I wouldn’t be so arrogant! But I hope it will shave years of struggle from your affiliate experience and show you that it is possible to make a great income from affiliate marketing.

You can access it here by clicking on the image below. Or join my email list to learn more about affiliate marketing.

Free Ebook Make Money Online

My online journey started with a search for “free ebook make money online”! I tried all kinds of strategies and business models before I finally found something that worked. So it’s fitting that I write this post and share a free ebook. Click on the image below to download this ebook completely free:

Free Ebook Make Money Online – Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. For me it was the most powerful too. After trying various online earning strategies such as eBay, Forex trading, Google Adsense and affiliate marketing, it was the latter which worked the best for me. With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products to sell and you don’t have to deal with any customers. You simply refer customers to other people’s products online.

So the main skill you need for affiliate marketing to work for you is marketing. This can take many forms such as blogging, content creation, social media marketing, email marketing or paid marketing methods. Because there’s so many ways to do affiliate marketing, it can suit most people. Working all hours? Use paid marketing. No money? Build content instead.

When I first started out I had no money for advertising. So I created written content on a free blogging site; Hubpages.com. My very first sale came from a review I had written. I knew then that affiliate marketing was the way to go.

Free Ebook Make Money Online – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of products to choose from in affiliate marketing. I made a lot of mistakes when I started out and wasted a lot of time. Hopefully my ebook will clue you up to the things NOT to do. For example, I used low value physical products which paid peanuts. So when I eventually did make a sale, it paid next to nothing in commissions.

I’ve since learned to promote products which reward me for the lifetime of a customer. With physical products – you only get paid once as an referrer. But with certain products, such as those which carry memberships, you can get paid over and over again for your referrals. This is particularly important as a beginner affiliate because you’ll need some positive feedback to keep going initially. When it’s a tiny one off commission, it’s more difficult. But when you see a regular income coming from your efforts quickly, you’ll see the huge potential of selling other people’s products online.

Get Help – With Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts

It can be very difficult starting out as an affiliate marketing. You’re going to be bombarded with information and your email inbox gets rammed with the offers you’ve signed up for. This can become overwhelming and the result is inaction. I joined a community in 2014 who helped me to stay consistent in my efforts and believe in affiliate marketing as a real career path.

Without that support I doubt I would have continued for long. You can join an online community, get products to sell and support and coaching- just sign up to my email using a form somewhere on this website for more information.

Getting help and support is pretty underrated. I believed I could do everything by myself when I started out. But affiliate marketing is pretty vast. You can spend years jumping from one strategy to another without getting traction. So aligning yourself carefully with the right products and marketing strategy can shave years off your affiliate journey.

Summary

Download my free ebook below and learn how to make money online:

Here’s the main things I learned over struggling with affiliate marketing for a few years:

Organic marketing is very slow and it can take months or years to gain traction
Use paid marketing if you can – it’s fast and more scalable
Use an email autoresponder. Get one free here. Building an email list puts you in charge of your traffic.
Subscription products pay you over and over again. It much easier to build a sustainable income with these kinds of affiliate products.
Use high ticket products – they give you more leverage, you earn more and it’s easier to access the costly marketing platforms with them.
Get help – affiliate marketing is tough by yourself. Especially if you’re surrounded by people talking you out of doing it!

Selling eBooks From Your Own Website

Selling ebooks from your own website is quite simple. First create your ebook and save it to pdf format. Then upload it to your files on your website. On a WordPress website you can click on Media and then click “Add New Media Files”. Then upload your pdf and copy the url to your clipboard.

Click on select files and upload your pdf from your laptop or computer.

Once you have your pdf file uploaded, you’ll want to create a sales page for selling your ebook. If you haven’t already got one, you can create an ebook cover using Fiverr.com fairly cheaply. Here’s one I had done using Fiverr:

how to sell an ebook from your website — Click on the image to see my sales page.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website

Once you have created a sales page, you’ll need to add a payment method. I use Paypal for this. You can create a Paypal button which sends your customers to the ebook once they have gone through checkout. You’ll need a Paypal account to do this. Once set up head over to Paypal.com/buttons.

You’ll need to be logged in to Paypal to create a button for your website. Click on the payment button you want to use. I use buy it now.

how to set up a buy it now button on Paypal

Fill out the details for your button and then click on optional settings:

You’ll come through to a page which looks like this:

Check the box for “Don’t request a customer shipping address” and fill out the two fields below that on the page. You’ll need to create a page on your website for when customers cancel checkout before the purchase. Here’s my “cancelled checkout” page. For the successful checkout page, send your customers directly to your ebook pdf url.

Copy the code once you have completed the checkout button and past it on your sales page near your ebook image.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website

Once you have finished, you should have a sales page which looks something like this:

Make sure the details on your sales page match the inputs you have created with your Paypal button. You can check out the sales page I created for my ebook here.

Selling Ebooks From Your Own Website – Traffic

That’s the easy part! Now you have created your sales page, Paypal button, cancelled checkout page and uploaded your ebook to your website, you’ve almost done. You’ve created a potentially automated source of income. Congratulations! Now you just need to send thousands of hungry buyers to your page!

I’ve written a lot about how to send organic traffic to your website and how to use paid advertising. Checkout paid advertising versus organic marketing too.

My favourite way to drive traffic for free is to create a lot of content on my website. Pdf’s are particularly good because you can target the main keywords with which you want to rank your ebook for. PDF articles are much less competitive on the Google search algorithm. So if your PDF is in a particularly unsubscribed to niche, you can win a lot of free traffic should your article rank highly on Google. See also find low competition long tail keywords.

PPC Advertising – Running Paid Ads To Your Ebook

The fastest way to drive traffic though is through using paid advertising platforms:

Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing)
Facebook
Google Adwords
Other social media platforms (Linkedin, X, etc.)

A good place to start is with Microsoft advertising. Set up a campaign which targets people searching for keywords which relate to your ebook. So for my ebook (on affiliate marketing), that would be things such as “affiliate marketing for beginners”, “step by step affiliate marketing”, “affiliate marketing for dummies” and so on. Test and measure advertising carefully with a small marketing budget. Once you find a “vein of gold” which brings in consistent sales and you’re making profit, you can slowly start to increase your budget.

Summary

The setting up of the page to sell your ebook is fairly easy. Getting targeted traffic to your sales page is the more difficult part of selling online.

Before I became an affiliate marketer, I tried (in vain) to sell an ebook and struggled to make sales. I couldn’t get people (in enough volume) to my website because I didn’t understand how to attract the right customers.

So before you spend a huge amount of time writing an ebook which might not even sell, it’s worth getting some help and support in the most important part of selling online: marketing. You can even sell other people’s products as an affiliate while you’re learning. So you can save a lot of time and effort without even using your own products!

Access an online training and education platform which offers products to sell and help and support with your marketing efforts here.

Controlling Your State Of Mind

Controlling your state of mind is particularly important when you’re building an online business, but it’s also useful in life in general. Once your affiliate business has given you some positive feedback, you have faith it in and in yourself. But before this happens there’s often a whole lot of worries and anxiety. You might be wondering whether affiliate marketing actually works? This thought alone is enough to send you down the spiral of uncertainty and disbelief – hardly the place of empowered action!

The opposite side of the coin is of course faith, belief and positive action. But this action won’t happen from a thought pattern of frustration and scepticism. So if you’re struggling to get started, indecisive of your next step or stuck in procrastination mode, the key is to get started doing something. But when you’re frustrated and disillusioned, how do you get started?

The answer lies in changing your state of mind. It’s the smallest most inconceivable step which is totally invisible. When you’re trying to take a positive step, but something holds you back, it’s often your mindset which needs to change.

Controlling Your State Of Mind

My mentor explained to me that controlling your state is one of the most important things an affiliate can learn. As an affiliate, (or in any worthwhile endeavour), you’re going to experience some set backs. When these set backs come, how you deal with it will determine your ultimately success.

Most affiliates quit because of some small setback. Unfortunately they quit too early. If you keep going long enough you’ll experience some small win. This can change your feedback loop. You have now achieved something notable. If your “win” is making $1000 a month, for example, but you haven’t started doing anything, you’re going to get very frustrated when it doesn’t happen. If your win is to build the website, you can acknowledge your achievement much more quickly. Celebrate small wins and give yourself a pat on the back.

Small steps are within your control when building something big such as an internet business. Write a blog post, join a course, run an advert. Frustration happens when we focus on the wins we would like to have way down the line. We look at our lack of results and become disillusioned. This reinforces our negative state. It’s a downward spiral which leads to no action, and no results.

To reverse this pattern of negative feedback, look for small steps and achievements you can do right now, today. Do them. Then reward yourself for having taken some small action. This reinforces the positive self esteem needed to sustain the efforts longer term.

Controlling Your State Of Mind – Negative Versus Positive Feedback Loops

In my worst days, I look at others who have achieved far more than me. I wonder why I am such a loser for not having achieved as much as them! This only serves to make me feel worse. I say things like, “what’s the point”? “I’ll never get there” and so on. I look at the whole mountain I think I need to climb. I become demoralised and as a result get nothing done that day. I have a “pity party” instead of shifting my mindset.

On my better days, I focus only on the small step in front of me. One of my business mentors told me to focus on the activity not the results. Once I get the small step done, I am already in a better state. I’ve taken positive action towards my goals.

Negative feedback loop – look for results I don’t yet have, become disillusioned, do nothing

Positive feedback loop- focus on a small step I can achieve today, now. Reward myself and feel empowered.

The size of the small step will depend on your current state of mind. So if you’re in a low state of mind pick something very small. I often write a blog post as my daily routine. A single blog post doesn’t make an online business, but through making it a habit, you create momentum. The same is true of more leveraged online business strategies such as paid advertising, list building and so on.

Small Shifts, Big Results

In Atomic Habits (James Clear) there’s a great image I often share in my blog posts. This is the “plateau of latent potential” and shows the journey of an affiliate marketer quite well, I believe.

The valley of disappointment is where most affiliates quit. Despite putting in a lot of work, they don’t see any results. So they quit. If only they had seen this graph they would think differently.

Making daily habits out of meaningful activities which move your affiliate business forwards is paramount to your success. But to install these habits in the first place is the work of shifting your mindset so that your actions can be consistent over time.

Long term consistency beats short term intensity, every time! To maintain the efforts needed to succeed online you need to have a positive mindset amidst adversity. When no results show for your efforts, most will quit. But when you control your state, it is your intention and enthusiasm which keeps you going, rather that outside assurance. See also why motivation doesn’t work and why you need to build habits.

Summary

Learning to control my state of mind has definitely been one of the most important skills I’ve learned from affiliate marketing. In many ways it’s much more important than earning money online. It’s a life skill which can have so many uses.

Noticing your mental state and what you’re giving focus to is a good stepping stone. Make daily habits out of looking at information which excites and motivates you, rather than that which demoralises and disempowers you. Watch motivational videos, read motivational books. Removing the overload of negative information online and on television is a good place to start!