I’ve often wondered how much an online sale is worth. To me, it’s worth far more than the dollars/pounds which I get paid in commission. Today, for example, I made a $30 commission. Not a lot you might say. But whenever a sale like this drops in, it gives me extra confidence that I can make another. It’s confirmation that whatever action I’m taking as an affiliate I can actually produce a sale!
My first online sale came from an article review I wrote and it was a magical experience. This was over a decade ago now but I still remember the experience. It showed me that not only could I make a single sale, but that I could make a living online.
A single sale proves (to yourself) that you can sell online. It helps you overcome your negativity and doubt that you can earn online. See also how to make the first sale as an affiliate. But it’s far more than that besides.
How Much An Online Sale Is Worth
How much is it worth to you to never need to work for someone else ever again? How much is it worth to you to never have to have a commute? Or to never have to deal with difficult bosses or co-workers? How much is it worth not to have to struggle with your finances?
For me making a sale online meant I could live on my own terms. However small the commission was. If I could make one sale online, I could make many more. An independent income meant I wouldn’t have to commute, work for as$*&ole bosses or do jobs I hated!
If I could make one sale, I could make many more. Once you understand that selling online can be automated, a small “win” online is worth much more than its dollar value. It means you have an escape route, should your 9 to 5 become unbearable. Or worse still, if you are made redundant; a common occurrence with the rise of artificial intelligence.
How Much Is An Online Sale Worth – Actual Value Of A Commission
Actually an online sale can be worth anything from a few dollars in commission to a few thousands in actual monetary value. It really depends on the products you promote. See my post on high ticket affiliate marketing products.
A single sale can be worth a lifetime of recurring commissions if you sell the right software or membership product to the right person. Digital business tools, for example, often carry recurring commissions. So a single sale of a business product can be worth a whole lot more than a single physical product sale, for example.
A high value business course or mentorship program, for example, can be worth thousands of dollars.
The Data – Where The Real Value Is
You’ve probably noticed corporations and governments have started collecting data? Whenever you purchase something in a shop, have you noticed that many establishments offer to email you a receipt?
Data is where the real money is because once you understand where sales come from, you can focus your attention on that aspect of your marketing. For an affiliate then, once they make a sale, they have some actual real world data. Not only have they proved that they can make a sale, which goes a long way to overcoming their own scepticism, but they know how they did it too.
Pareto’s principle states that roughly 80% of results come from only 20% of their causes. Once you have this data, you can focus 100% of your efforts on those 20%! This means affiliate marketing does get easier, despite what a beginner might experience. Initially it can be hard just making a sale. But once you have, you can zone in on the action that caused it, making it easier in future.
Summary
The real value of making an online sale is in the education it gives you. Once you have figured out how to sell online, you can rinse and repeat that success. You can even automate the process which can give you both financial and time freedom. You can work from anywhere globally with an online business and you don’t need any products of your own either!
So if freedom is a value of yours, building an online business ticks a lot of boxes. For more information and to get started online, checkout this video.
Wondering how to make more sales online? If you’re an affiliate who has already made sales online, or you’re just starting out, listen up! In this article I’m going to discuss how to make more sales online through the various strategies which affiliates use.
Not all affiliates use the same tactics to make sales. Some write blog posts, like this one. Others upload videos to YouTube or TikTok, and some use social media strategies. Many use paid marketing to send traffic directly to their affiliate products, or build an email list and send out automated marketing messages via email.
Before you make your first sale online, you’ll need to employ some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the direction you choose, your marketing budget (or lack of it) and the effort you put in, you can make your first sale within a few weeks, or a few months.
How To Make More Sales Online – Organic Vs. Paid Marketing
I’m a fan of organic marketing and I’ve created a lot of content. On this website alone there’s over 800 blog posts. However, organic marketing comes with a massive downside. You’ll often need to work really hard, and for a long time before you see the fruits of your labour. When you do eventually make a sale, it’s more difficult to scale up, because you’re relying on passive traffic which comes in organically (without paying for it). However, you can track your sales, see where they come from and focus on promoting those pieces of content which generate the most sales.
Paid marketing is different in that you pay for traffic. Initially you’ll need to try some paid advertisements out to see what works and what doesn’t. Unlike content marketing, you can see very quickly what works. Despite the face that you’re spending money for untested traffic, paid marketing has a massive upside. That is that once you find a winning advert which consistently generates sales, you can simply add more budget and scale up. The downside is that many affiliates will give up before they find that wining advert which produces a consistent profit.
How To Make More Sales Online – Make Your First Sale First!
Your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone. See also how to make your first affiliate sale. Once you’ve made your first online sale, you’ve proved to yourself that it can be done. Before this milestone you can easily harbour some scepticism towards affiliate marketing and this doubt can hold you back. Once you have sold something once, you know you can do it again. This time with more clarity because you (should) know exactly how you’ve done it.
Make sure you track your traffic, leads and sales so that you know where a sale has come from. There’s nothing more infuriating that making a sale but not knowing which action caused it. Not only have you now got more clarity about how to make a sale, but you have a greater belief in yourself and your ability to actually do it. This can create a snowball effect, leading you to focus on the actions which created the sale and fuelling you with confidence.
It’s obvious to suggest at this point that to make more sales, do more of what brought you a sale in the first place. Without having made a sale initially, this is much more difficult. You’ve less experience to draw from and you don’t know which actions are going to lead to the sales.
How To Make More Sales Online – Before You’ve Made A Sale
Before you’ve made a sale, it can be easy to keep focusing on the fact that you haven’t made a sale. You become demoralised and disillusioned. Instead of focusing on the steps to make a sale, you focus instead on your lack of results. This leads you into a negative spiral of not-doing. You don’t want this! Instead of focusing on your lack of results, focus instead on the actions you are taking each day. Tick them off one by one and reward yourself for doing so.
For example, as a blogger, I focus on creating a blog post most days. In the beginning, I was getting hardly any traffic to my website. For each single organic visitor to my blog, I would rewards myself and have a mini celebration. Celebrate your small wins because they lead to the big wins eventually.
A single click on your website can eventually become 100 daily “hits”. Lead your website visitors to your email list and your subscribers to your affiliate products. Broken into small, achievable chunks, anyone can succeed with affiliate marketing given the right mindset. Breaking goals into smaller steps is the key to making more sales online. Make small achievements each day which are achievable. Don’t focus on the things you can’t control and don’t overwhelm yourself trying to take giant leaps. Small, incremental improvements over time is the key to success online.
Do What Works
It’s easy to say, just do more of what works. But that assumes you’ve already made a sale and know what works to generate sales online. Often we don’t. We need to try things out so we can discover what works. This is known as “failing forwards” in affiliate marketing.
If you’re selling with a paid ad, run more ads. If you’re selling doing organic marketing, create more content. But to get to the point of making those sales you’ll need to do a lot of “failing” first. Failing isn’t failing if you use it to get better with affiliate marketing. Each so called failure is actually a stepping stone towards success – given the right attitude.
There’s so many ways to make affiliate sales. Pick one and run with it until you make a sale. See my post on 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Pick one and get really good at it.
Turn Traffic Into Leads
Once you start generating traffic to a website or landing page, it’s just the beginning. You need to turn that traffic into leads. This is done by testing out a good lead magnet – a free giveaway which appeals to your target audience. You can increase your conversion rate from a website without creating a tonne more content too. Simply test out and measure different lead magnets and alter your call to action to give the best opt in rate.
With a higher opt in rate to your email list, you can turn the same amount of traffic into a larger number of sales. The email list is an important part of the sales process from a website. This is because on a website, most visitors only stick around for a few minutes – for many visitors it’s just a few seconds.
But get them on your email list and you can continue messaging them for several months or even years. See also the power of the email list.
Making More Sales Online – Tracking
Tracking is the key to making more sales online. Once you have collected data on what works, you can spend more time on those actions which bring about the most sales. Have you heard of the Pareto Principle? It states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of activities.
In affiliate marketing this is also the case. Much of the work in affiliate marketing is in learning which actions produce the best results. So with around 80% of your work, you’ll see no actual monetary benefit. Hence why so many affiliate marketers quit. But if you see this work as the important foundation to your learning which actions actually do work, you’ll see the bigger picture. Longer term affiliates can work far less hard and make more money because they put in the work beforehand. They have learned which actions produce the results.
Once they have done this (once), they can benefit from their hard work before hand. I like to think about affiliate marketing as a lot like kung fu (Since I’m a kung fu teacher). Kung Fu literally translates as “hard work”. But it really means the hard work you’ve done previously to attain a level of skill.
Affiliate marketing is like this too. The hard work you do adds up to knowing which actions produce the most sales. You can then focus on those actions only, once you start connecting the dots!
What is meaningful work for you? AI is removing jobs at an alarming rate. So what are we all going to do in the future? Will be be living the life of our dreams, living off the state? Or will the marching draconian machine have eradicated us all by then?
I’ve been on a quest to find enjoyable work for several years. This led me to becoming a stuntman and working in the movies. But the veneer soon wore off and I found myself wanting something else. The once promised land of movie magic soon faded away and it became just another job.
That’s me doubling Jack Whitehall on Bad Education The Movie
I looked to the internet as an alternative income source and tried several strategies for earning online:
I ultimately settled on affiliate marketing. I had the best results with affiliate marketing and even though Forex marketing looked promising, I didn’t want to be tied to the computer all day, looking at charts. Affiliate marketing lets you set your own schedule and work when (and where) you like. You can become geographically and financially free, both ideas highly motivated me. But mostly I wanted a reliable income because being a stuntman hardly ever gave me that.
Meaningful Work – Affiliate Marketing
There’s lots of ways to do affiliate marketing too. You can run paid ads and automate the process and this is great if you want a lot of free time and flexibility. There came a time where the affiliate marketing was working, giving me an income, without me having doing very much. This sounds like the perfect scenario, but it comes with its own inherent problems. I’m not complaining of course, and this is a great problem to have.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
But it does leave you in a little bit of a fix, especially if you’ve worked very hard for this scenario to present itself (and identify yourself with the struggle). The work gave me meaning – to escape the trap of poverty. What now? The motivation I put into affiliate marketing came from the reality of my own financial difficulties. When those circumstances changed, I lost the meaning and the motivation. But also I was busy focusing on things I still couldn’t afford – keeping me bound in perpetual dissatisfaction!
This is typical in human nature and once your income increases, rather than choose to live in appreciation and happiness, we shift our attention to the things still out of reach financially. The drive to make more money is an endless one, perpetuated within our society. How much is enough? A home, food and a dependable income are pretty basic things. But once achieved, we want more!
In Thomas J Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he talks about this in great detail. Once your income rises, you buy a nicer car and move to a nicer neighbourhood. Once in the nicer neighbourhood, you are subconsciously competing with your neighbours, raising your costs again.
Why Meaningful, Why Not Enjoyable?
All work can get dull when you do it enough, or if it no longer holds any meaning for you. But if work is meaningful to you, you won’t get bored because your motivation is intrinsic.
You want to work because the work has an alignment with your inner value system. Intrinsic motivation lasts much longer than external motivation. You can spend all day doing something you love.
Money only motivates you so far. Unless you’re super motivated by money, or you love your job, it will often only get you Just Over Broke (JOB)! So if you tie that intrinsic motivation to your work somehow, it won’t feel like “work” in the most mundane sense because you’ll love doing it!
Whatever you do, it can get dull. If you’re motivated externally, you’ll likely work only so much before you lose your motivation.
This picture is from Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge. It clearly shows the survival failure curve where many people reside. With intrinsic motivation, you’ll work much harder and for longer. This explains why it’s so difficult to succeed in a job you dislike/hate.
Summary
You’ve probably heard the saying “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”.
I haven’t found that to be exactly true but I definitely know the difference between work I choose to do and that which I feel I have to do.
Building an online business has given me the luxury to see the difference because you can ultimately earn an income online without having to keep showing up. The automation from an online business means you can set up your business so it works largely without input.
This was my intention for building an online business in the first place – a passive income. Once it happened, it gave me a clearer insight into the work I was choosing to do because I loved it, and the work I was doing only for the money!
When you can drop that kind of work it’s a beautiful thing. It means you can get clear on what you want to do (meaningful work), and create a more free and flexible lifestyle around your values.
No other work I’ve found has given me the ability to work when and where I wanted, and around something which is meaningful.
I believe meaningful work is going to be a fundamental necessity with the rise of artificial intelligence. Not just because your income will be controlled by the overlords, but for your own mental health and independence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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? 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. 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 motivationto 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?
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.
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.
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.
