AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Easiest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing

So what’s the easiest way to start affiliate marketing? Before I had much success as an affiliate, I wrote many pieces of content, built many websites and ran a lot of adverts. But there were a few things I didn’t do at first. When I started doing them, they made a massive difference to my affiliate marketing business.

Want to know what they are? Sure, I’ll tell you. But first I’m going to tell you what I did wrong and what to avoid doing. What NOT to do is just as important if not more than doing the right things.

When you’re starting out as an affiliate, you’ve got lots of enthusiasm and motivation. You’re fired up and going to win. Wouldn’t it be a great if you also had all the knowledge of someone who has failed many times and learned a whole lot too? That’s the main problem when you start out. You don’t know what the “experts” know. Because of this, you’re likely to make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time doing the wrong things.

Easiest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – What NOT To Do

So what shouldn’t you do when starting out? Sadly there’s a bunch of programs out there selling you on how easy affiliate marketing is. Let me tell you that affiliate marketing is not easy. So if you’re not ready to hear this, click away now! Look for the “easy” programs which promise the moon and always underdeliver!

But if you’re serious about success with affiliate marketing, this knowledge will arm you for greater prosperity.

After joining my first “earn money online” program I wrote and wrote, determined to make money through the adsense program. I made peanuts. I joined another program and was told to build websites to sell affiliate products. I built hundreds of websites, most of which failed.

The problem wasn’t the program or the strategy. Rather it was my mindset. I was jumping from course to course looking for the quick win. I wanted the magic bullet and with this mindset you’re always going to fail. There is no magic bullet, but there’s a few things which will give you an advantage.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Stick With A Strategy

Sticking with a strategy for a while is tough, especially when you’re unsure whether it will work. You really only have your “mentor’s” word for it that a particular course of action actually works. The rest is on trust and faith. So when this break down and you decide it’s a scam, you’ll stop working because you don’t believe in what you’re doing.

“Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right” – Henry Ford

So your course of action needs to have some faith and belief behind it. Doubt will kill your faith, motivation and desire. So choose a course with heart and work really hard when you understand what to do.

Don’t give up too easily and don’t jump from one shiny object to another. You’ll lose momentum every time.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Subscriptions & High Ticket Products

Ok, so it’s easy for me to say this makes affiliate marketing easier, because I stuck it out. That’s why the previous paragraph is so important. No amount of “hacks” and “fixes” will make up for a lack of hard work and you can still fail even taking my advice on this. But things dramatically changed for me when I started to use subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

A subscription product pays you again and again for each sale. So even with only a few sales, you start to see the potential of affiliate marketing. This gives you more faith and motivation, which is why it’s important to make the first sale to give you confidence in what you’re doing.

A high ticket product pays you many times the commission you would obtain from a standard product. With a low value item from Amazon, you can even make as little as 1% commission! It’s almost a waste of time promoting these kinds of products unless you’ve got a strategy which gives you thousands of sales very cheaply, which is tough.

Easiest Way To Do Affiliate Marketing – Build A List

This was something else I didn’t understand when I started out as an affiliate. So I wasted a huge amount of time trying to sell directly from a website. My traffic generation was pretty poor too (more on this in the next section).

From a website, it’s much harder to make affiliate sales. Most of your website visitors only land on your website for a few minutes. But get them on to your email list and your chance of selling is dramatically increased. That’s because you can build rapport with your subscribers, offer them value and build trust. On an email list you can make a sale even months or years after someone becomes a subscriber. Plus an email list puts you in control of your traffic, whereas you either rely on paid or organic traffic from the search engines otherwise.

Paid Ads Vs Content

The two main strategies to obtain traffic to your affiliate offers are content creation and paid advertising. The “easiest” one will depend on your own circumstances.

adwords - paid advertising for affiliates

If you’re on a budget, paying for advertising might be more difficult. But if you have no time, creating endless amounts of content doesn’t look like a good fit either! Content creation is much slower whichever way you look at it, so I’d have to say that the “easiest” route is to use paid advertising and send qualified website traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers. Then, sell a high ticket product “suite” with multiple products in it.

With a suite, you can earn from multiple sales from each customer, plus subscriptions. Whereas with a one-off affiliate product, you’re stuck trying to sell that one product again and again to make the commissions. So a product suite which contains subscriptions is the best option.

Summary

So that’s my rundown of the easiest way to start affiliate marketing. If you’re skipped to this section, shame on you! Here’s the run down of what I believe to be the easiest route for affiliates. That of course doesn’t mean that it’s “easy”. Affiliate marketing is still a challenge whatever way you look at it. So you’re going to need to pull out the big guns to make it work for you, and take full responsibility for it. But doing these things is recommended and knowing this years ago would have saved me a bunch of time and effort:

Use high ticket products and subscription affiliate products. This makes your journey easier by far
Build an email list and learn how to send emails out which build trust and help your subscribers
Use paid advertising, which is faster and scalable. I’m a content marketer, but it can take months or even years to get traction this way. So unless you have a passion and desire to create tonnes of content, paid ads is best!
Finally, join an online business coaching and mentoring course which gives you access to a community. With the right people around you, you’ll have a much greater chance of success. Join one here.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing

The best way to start affiliate marketing, in my humble opinion, is to build your knowledge and get help and support. Starting affiliate marketing alone is fraught with difficulties. I did this, and spent years struggling as a result. I jumped from one course to another, tried one tactic then another, and struggled for a long time.

Without proper help and support you will likely fail, as do the 95% of newbie affiliates who quit. Another useful thing to consider is the products you’re promoting as an affiliate. When I started out, I used low paying programs like Amazon and eBay which paid only tiny commissions. When I eventually did make an affiliate sale, it was for a tiny amount. If you choose to promote high ticket and subscription affiliate products, you can earn a lot more when you do finally break through and start making those sales.

Before your first sale can happen, there’s a lot to do. You’ll need to learn a lot and start out with some kind of marketing strategy. This is the period where most will quit because there’s nothing (tangible) to show for your efforts until you make a sale – which can be weeks, months (or even years) down the line after starting – depending on your marketing strategy.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – Products

It can be helpful to start with a product to sell or a topic you’re passionate about. When you align with your passion, interest or cause, you will have a much stronger reason to continue with your affiliate efforts, than if you were chasing money alone. The kinds of products you choose to promote have a large say in whether you’re going to be successful too. With some low value products, you’ll only make tiny commissions. Amazon, for example, pays as little as 1% on some of it’s products.

With digital products you can earn a lot more – often 30% to 40%. Then there’s subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commission. With recurring commissions you can earn a monthly income from each sale. This goes a long way towards making your affiliate business more profitable and more quickly.

Things really changed for me as an affiliate when I started promoting high ticket affiliate products. High ticket items can earn you ten times the commission of a standard product. So for what’s often the same amount of work you can earn a lot more.

Best Way To Start Affiliate Marketing – Help And Support

Most people aren’t affiliates. Neither do they own their own business. Most people are employees which means they have a totally different mindset than business owners. If you’re surrounded by like minded people, you’re much more likely to succeed with affiliate marketing.

As motivational speak Jim Rohn said “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”. So if you’re surrounded by people who don’t “get” affiliate marketing, think it’s a scam or that success is unobtainable to the likes of you, they will subtly (or not so subtly) sabotage your best intentions. They don’t want you to be different in many cases, nor do they want your success to out-match their own.

To succeed in affiliate marketing takes more than most people are capable of (95% quit). So surrounding yourself with positive people who want what you want is definitely a good idea.

A Job You Love

In work you love, you’re going to continue for much longer than you would if you only had a vague interest in it. If you despise your work, it’s going to last even longer. When you can align your passion with earning an income from affiliate marketing, you can sustain the necessary efforts for a lot longer.

So finding a niche you’re passionate about can be a great way to start out in affiliate marketing. The work becomes a joy and you’ll out work anyone in the same niche who is half hearted about it.

Working on your passions is much less like work! So it’s well worth taking some time to think about how you’d like to work in your affiliate marketing business. Whether that’s building a huge email list and providing value to subscribers, or building a blog or YouTube channel, think about the type of things you would enjoy creating content around.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Mistakes are going to be made with affiliate marketing. You’ll likely do a lot of work before making your first sale. But that work is super valuable because it will teach you something, if you look on it as a learning experience. Once you’ve made a sale, you can track that sale back to the efforts you made. But until this point, you’ll largely be going off any training or coaching you have received. So make sure you’re getting good advice!

As time goes on, and if you don’t quit, you’ll get more and more feedback from the work you’ve put in. Ultimately you can make sales on complete autopilot with affiliate marketing from the work you’ve done beforehand, and the understanding you attain. But this is work and it often goes unrewarded! This is why so many affiliates quit. They don’t see that it is their “failures” which are the pathway to success! “Failing forwards” is a term used by coaches and mentors because it’s necessary to fail before you can succeed!

Summary

So what’s the best way to start out with affiliate marketing:

Get help and support
Choose a topic/niche you love
Use high ticket and/or subscription products
Keep going and don’t quit!
Learn from your failures.

If you’re ready to start your affiliate journey you can access training and support and a number of products (including high ticket and subscription products) here.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers

Wondering how to do affiliate marketing without followers? Not every affiliate starts as a celebrity or with millions of followers. In fact, most start with nothing; no celebrity status and no experience of online selling. One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that anyone can do it, from anywhere in the world! All you need is a passion to succeed and the ability and desire to learn something new.

Not all affiliate marketers do the same things either. Some of them build a blog, others start a YouTube channel and some use paid marketing and build large lists of subscribers. So whatever your interests are, there’s a way to make it work for you! The key is to find a way which you like to work. That way, you’re much more likely to succeed with it because you’ll enjoy what you’re doing.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers

Most affiliates start with no followers. They build a following by either creating content or buying traffic, which they send to a landing page. From a landing page they can build an email list of subscribers, and from their list they sell affiliate products.

Not all affiliates use a list, but most of them do (and especially the most successful ones). An email list is one of the best and most cost effective ways to build an audience. On a website, or a blog, most of your visitors will leave within a few minutes. But on an email list, you can build a relationship with your audience over weeks, months and even years and decades.

Before starting as an affiliate it’s a good idea to decide what product you want to sell and how you can offer value through your messaging. Affiliates are essentially third party sales people who refer products and services online. They only get paid when someone buys a product they have recommended and sold through their affiliate link. Because there’s often a lot of work to do before this can happen, there’s a large drop out rate in affiliate marketing of around 95%.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers – Why Most Affiliates Quit

Most affiliates will quit because there’s so much to do (before you get rewarded) and a clear path isn’t always apparent. By finding a strategy you love, and can keep at for some time, you’ll give yourself a better chance than most. Blogging, video marketing, email marketing and marketing through social media are all ways you can attract an audience to sell products to.

But just selling for the sake of selling is hardly inspiring to most people. If you really want to succeed at affiliate marketing, find a cause to get behind and a way of helping and giving that lets you earn while you work at your passion.

A good example of a successful affiliate website is Martin Lewis’s Money Saving Expert website. MoneySavingExpert.com is an affiliate website which helps people manage their money. It offers advice on borrowing, cheap utility companies, debt management and delivers a whole host of other useful needs which help people. The site makes money through its recommendations, but the driving focus of the website is to help people with their needs.

When you can build a profitable website and help at the same time, you’re way ahead of the struggling affiliates who are more likely to quit.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Followers – Monetise Your Passion

Affiliate marketing is a versatile business model in which you can promote almost any product or service you can find online. As long as your product has an affiliate program attached to it, you can benefit from referring customers. If you can tap into a passion or interest which you have, so much the better.

Many affiliates struggle when it comes to choosing their niche. A niche is the topic in which you can create content to attract an audience. So if you have a particular interest or hobby, you can usually monetise it with affiliate products and build content in your area of interest.

Over time, as more and more people find your content, they can sign up to your email list and find your products. This can take some serious time and effort because you’re starting out with zero followers. But over time your work compounds and eventually you can create an email list into the tens of thousands of subscribers from only a few simply basic tactics.

List Building Tactics

You can build an email list in a number of ways:

Content creation – such as this blog post, for example or a video uploaded to YouTube
Giveaways – lists are often built with a giveaway. When someone signs up to your giveaway ebook, for example, you capture a subscriber.
Paid ads – paid advertising platforms are the fastest method of building an email list. Send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers.
Social media accounts – offer both paid and unpaid marketing strategies you can use to attract your audience.

Initially, a small list won’t amount to many affiliate sales, and you’ll need to learn as you go. Over time though, once your list gains traction and you build over 1000 subscribers, you should start to see sales dropping in. Some affiliates build their lists into the tens or hundreds of thousands. You can join my email list by finding a form or popup on this website. You’ll get email messages daily and you can unsubscribe at any time!

Get Started

Anyone can become an affiliate without any experience or any following. You will need to be committed and disciplined with your approach because most affiliates will quit! Ideally get help and support and learn from those who have already succeeded. Access an online business system and community here.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing

Getting organic traffic for affiliate marketing is much more difficult than simply paying for traffic. With paid traffic, you can turn your visitors on, almost immediately. It’s like turning on a tap! But with organic marketing you will need to do a lot more work. If you want organic traffic from the search engines, such as Google, or on YouTube, you’re going to need to create a lot of content.

With a lot of content on a blog, for example, you should start seeing some of your content getting indexed on the SERPS – search engine results pages. You will than appear on the searches and people will start visiting your website. But, this is often after a lot of work. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, and around 51 million YouTube channels. So you’re up against it – especially if you’re starting out. Before Google will index your content, you will need to have proved yourself. Unless you are regularly publishing high quality content on a blog, or YouTube channel, (and sharing it) it’s going to be difficult to get found.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Getting Found

One strategy to help you get found more easily is to create content for which there is less competition. Since the highly competitive terms are going to have a tonne of competing websites, it makes sense to find low competition long tail keywords. You can do this by using Google’s keyword planner which is a free tool.

Type your main “seed” keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives which have less competition on the SERPS.

How To Get Organic Traffic For Affiliate Marketing

The keywords which have large search volumes are typically much more competitive. To find those with less competition, look for lower search volume keywords. You can do this by clicking on the Avg. monthly searches tab until the search volume changes:

Next, head over to the Google search bar using a laptop and look for the numbers under your search query. Do a normal search for your keyword and a phrase match search too. You should see a number under your search:

Once you find a suitable keyword which isn’t too competitive, you can create some content for it and publish it on your blog.

Using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

To optimise your content, you can use an SEO plugin. I use one called Yoast SEO which helps me write search engine friendly content. You can also build back links to your content and publish your posts on social media. The more you do this, the more likely people are to visit your blog.

Keep posting content and over time Google will notice and reward you with a ranking. This can take some time, but it’s worth the effort because you can ultimately bring free traffic to your blog. Once you’ve got a large volume of free traffic you should start to see affiliate sales happen if you’ve set up your website correctly.

Targeting The Right Audience

Keep in mind before you set off creating a tonne of content that not everyone is going to be interested in your affiliate products. Most of the online marketplace is totally uninterested in what you’re selling. So if you’re going to make a bit effort in attracting a free audience to your site, make sure it’s the right audience for your affiliate products.

This all starts by knowing who you’re attempting to target with your content. The right content will have buying customers coming in in their drives. The wrong content will attract people who aren’t going to buy. An example might be a product review.

With a review you attract someone who is actively looking at a specific product. So they are much more likely to buy. Conversely, “how to” guides are less effective when you’re selling from content. People are looking for free information with how to guides, so they’re less likely to buy than from a product review. See also how to know your target audience and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Turning Organic Traffic Into Affiliate Sales

To turn your organic traffic into sales, you need to build an email list. Email marketing is super effective from a blog. On a blog, most of your visitors are going to leave within a few minutes. But once on your email list, you can build a longer term relationship with them.

To build a list, offer something for free to your blog visitors, such as an ebook. Once people start opting in to your list, you can offer them free information and lead them to your affiliate products. Built trust by offering value.

You can sign up to my email list on this website. Just find the form or popup and enter your details.

Organic Traffic From YouTube & Social Media

YouTube is another option to get organic traffic for affiliate marketing. You can use a similar strategy and upload multiple videos to build a channel. Again, you’ll need to upload a lot of videos to start getting organic views. By finding the keywords which have less competition, you’ll likely make faster progress.

Facebook is another option for organic traffic and there’s plenty of other platforms you can use for this too. With Facebook, you can create a group or a page and target specific keywords with your content. When people look for something specific which relates to your affiliate product, your page can show up.
Here’s an example of a page I created on Facebook which attracts traffic organically (check out my page here).

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing

If you’re wondering how to create an audience for affiliate marketing, this one’s for you. As an affiliate you need to sell products and one of the best ways you can do this is to build an audience of raving fans! Not everyone will like you in the online world, but if you can offer value and help people with a specific problem they might have, you can sell them products and they’ll not only love you for it, but thank you when they buy!

When you can put helping people in front of the sale, you’ll be doing your customers a service. If you try and sell first, you can easily repel them instead. What happens when you enter a store and the salesperson comes up trying to make the heavy sell? You are repelled by them! The same thing happens online. People don’t want the hard sell. They have plenty of time to shop around, especially online. So by helping them by giving value, they are attracted to you instead of repelled by you! This is what’s known as attraction marketing!

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Law Of Reciprocity

The law of reciprocity works online very well. When you give, there’s an almost irresistible urge to return the favour. Not everyone will buy from you, but this law is an important thing to know when you’re selling online. If you’re building an audience, you want to deliver value to your people.

That way they will get to know, like and trust you. Trust is a pretty important commodity online because everyone is trying to close the deal. When you’re giving instead when everyone else is trying to get, you set yourself apart and stand out to the online marketplace.

How To Create An Audience For Affiliate Marketing – Have A Point

What’s the point of you? Really? When you’re selling an affiliate product, you need to place yourself in-between the customer and the product. To do this as an affiliate, you need to offer something of value yourself.

When you have something to offer – such as information, insight and advice, you can use it to to attract your audience and sell them affiliate products at the same time.

Once you know your point, you can start building an email list of subscribers. Here’s the practical nuts and bolts of doing this.

Building An Email List

An email list is one of the simplest ways to build an audience for affiliate marketing. There’s many ways you can build an email list, such as from a blog, a YouTube channel, or through using paid advertising.

One of the quickest ways is to send paid traffic to a landing page and collect email subscribers. Here’s an example of a landing page I built which I use to build my email list:

create an audience for affiliate marketing

A landing page lets you optimise to give you a lead cost at the lowest possible price. Whereas sending traffic to a normal website would mean you’ll lose a lot more valuable subscribers. On a website visitors can browse around and click through your content. But on a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the “ace” up the sleeve of an affiliate marketer. On a website, people only browse for so long. After that they are gone forever. But once on your email list, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which helps you build trust and get your subscribers to know, like and trust you.

The key being to give value to your email list first, rather than just sell, sell, sell! If you learn how to do this well, and put helping before selling, your subscribers will know and trust you because of it. Then, if appropriate, they’re more likely to buy from you when you suggest an affiliate product.

Too many affiliates just spam out links to their list. That has always turned me off and eventually I stop opening the emails. Stand out by giving value driven messages. Give value, entertain and deliver on the promise you made when your subscribers signed up to your email list in the first place.

Building A List From Blogging

This blog helps me build my email list and the list is where I make my affiliate sales. Blogging can be a great way to help you build an audience through an email list. It’s much slower than paid marketing of course, but if you enjoy a certain topic, people will be attracted to your blog posts and you’ll get a few subscribers if you offer a great giveaway on your website.

You can checkout the offers on this site and sign up to my list. You’ll probably have noticed a pop up and some banners leading you to my list. Feel free to sign up and check out my emails; you can always unsubscribe if you’ve had enough of me!

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing

Wondering how to make content for affiliate marketing? Content marking is one of the best ways to make money though affiliate marketing. You can create content in written form through a blog or through video or images. But before starting your blog, or YouTube channel there’s a few things you should know if you want to make money from your content.

Not all content you create will make you sales. In fact, content marketing can be a bit of a “slow burn” for affiliates. With paid marketing, you can see traffic appearing straight away almost immediately. This lets you focus on adverts which are working, bring in sales, and cut off those which don’t. But with content marketing it’s different. You can spend weeks, months and even years creating content before you start getting sales. So it’s worth doing your homework before you set out writing or shooting videos.

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing – Set Out Your “Stall”

Content marketing is the “long game” in affiliate marketing. You can generate a passive income, but in all likelihood you’re going to need to build a lot of content first, before this can happen. To give yourself the best possible chance of success, it’s valuable to choose your monetisation method and look at the type of audience you want to attract.

Not all of your content will lead to sales, so you’ll be spending time and effort creating stuff that isn’t going to sell. To give yourself more chance of success with each piece of content you create, learn about your target audience or customer avatar. Before you do this, choose an affiliate product which you can get behind and wholeheartedly promote from your content.

Once you’ve chosen something to sell which floats your boat, you can start to get specific on the type of person you want to attract. This will help you create content with the sale in mind. Creating content without this strategy in place will likely result in a lot of wasted effort, and time, and perhaps money too!

How To Make Content For Affiliate Marketing – Customer Avatar/ Target Audience

Your target audience is the type of person who will actually want to buy whatever you’re selling. Most of the online marketplace won’t be interested in buying your affiliate product/s. That’s why it’s important to differentiate between those that do and those that don’t.

When you can get very specific about who you want to attract, you can create content specifically for those people. This gives you much more prospects of making those sales when they visit your website. See also how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet pdf.

Content Creation – Choosing Your Passion

Once you have chosen your affiliate products and defined your customer avatar, you’re in a much better position to get started creating content. It’s also a good idea to choose a topic you have some knowledge about or at least an interest in.

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s plenty of competition plus around 51 million YouTube channels. So if you’re going to attract an audience for your affiliate products you’re going to need to stand out. The best way to do this is pick a topic you can stick at for the foreseeable future.

Many would-be content creators drop out because they don’t get anywhere. That’s because they’re not passionate about their topic and the sole purpose of their content creation is financial. So if you can choose a topic which aligns with a bigger reason, you’ve already got a head start on many who will drop out.

Building Content

I’m a blogger and on this website alone there’s over 700 blog posts. Even so, I don’t make sales every day and it’s taken a long time before sales were dropping in on a regular basis. One of my main strategies is to create content targeted towards my customer avatar. For me, that is struggling affiliates or people looking to become affiliate marketers.

Once you know your target audience, look on Google’s keyword planner and type in your main keywords. You’ll then get a bunch of ideas for blog post titles. The same strategy can be used for a YouTube channel for video content. Because there’s a lot of competition for most keywords in this niche, I look for the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. That way, there’s more chance of me ranking my material on the search engines.

As time goes on and you create more and more content, you’ll build up authority with Google and they should give you better rankings. At first this can be tough, because there’s so many other people doing the same thing. But this is why you should align your topic with a passion or interest. That way, you’ll stick it out for much longer than your competition and have more chance of breaking through.

Still Wondering?

If you’re still wondering how to create content, you have probably not ironed out your particular niche in which you want to work. Think about your interests and passions. Look for a topic you can stick with for several months or years. Look for affiliate programs which interest you in that particular topic/niche.

As you gain experience in something, you have some information to draw from. I joined a number of affiliate marketing programs and wrote about what I learned. If you keep learning in a particular topic/niche, you’ll never run out of things to create content about.

Product reviews are a good place to start since you can talk about a particular affiliate product. Reviews work well for sales too because they attract people looking to buy that particular product.

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Showing Your Face

Wondering how to do affiliate marketing without showing your face? Often when someone works for an employer, they don’t want their employer to know they are working on a side hustle. So they don’t want to risk showing up on a YouTube video, for example. Or, they’re just shy about showing up in person online. There are some downsides to not showing your face of course. Trust is a big factor in the online world and people buy from people. So showing your face can be a contributing factor to your success online.

However, if you’re determined not to show you face, there are of course ways to do it. Blogging is a strategy I’ve used for years and I do have my face on this site on my about me page. But writing online is one of the best ways to show up without actually showing up!

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Showing Your Face

Here’s a picture of me on YouTube. Before I ran a YouTube campaign, I was massively shy about getting on camera and uploading my videos. If it’s only shyness that stops you from showing your face online, it’s well worth overcoming this fear. Sure you might get the odd troll on your videos but video has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to sell online as an affiliate.

A short video can convey a lot more information quickly than a long blog post too. You can build trust and connect with people much more easily through video.

But if you’re still not up for it, you can pay other people to show up for you. Fiverr.com lets you pay someone to shoot a video advert on your behalf. You can even pay actors to shoot a monologue.

There’s even a great software called doodly which allows you to create awesome videos using animation software.

using animation software for video without showing your face

How To Do Affiliate Marketing Without Showing Your Face – Blogging

I’ve always been a blogger and when I didn’t want to show my face online I stuck to blog platforms. Initially I used Hubpages.com and Blogger.com before buying my own domain names and hosting my own websites.

Blogging is a great way to build an affiliate business if you can find products which you can align with an interest or passion. It does take some time and you should expect to put in some work before those sales start dropping into your inbox! But blogging allows you to show up without. showing your face. It’s a great way to get started with affiliate marketing if you’re a beginner.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Plus you can do it without showing your face! Send paid traffic to a landing page and collect subscribers. Here’s an example of a landing page:

Some affiliate programs will offer you landing pages which are already built. Simply send paid traffic to them and build an email list. No need to show your face and your email messages are only text.

PPC – Paid Advertising

There’s lot of paid advertising platforms you can use without showing up personally. Google Adwords, for example, lets you create text based advertising which show up for specific online searches which you decide. Send traffic to a landing page and collect emails to build a marketing list.

Paid marketing has an advantage over blogging, which is much slower. With blogging, you can spend months or years building content without knowing how it will turn out.

With paid marketing, you get instant traffic and instant feedback. Once you understand which ads work and which don’t, you can increase budget on the relevant adverts to grow your sales.

Summary

So if you don’t want to show your face, you can still do affiliate marketing. However, you’re definitely placing a limit on your ability to connect with your audience; so if you can it’s worth getting over this fear.

If you don’t want your employer seeing your face online, that’s totally understandable. Many employers will feel threatened if they see you building your way out of your job with an online business!

You can use paid advertising, blogging, email marketing and many other ways to get your products in front of people without showing your face.

For more information on starting your own online business with affiliate marketing click here.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Here’s my list of the 10 benefits of affiliate marketing for affiliates. There’s huge benefits for companies who use affiliates for promotion, of course. If you use affiliates to drive sales it’s a win:win for a company.

You only pay the affiliate when a sale is made, you determine the commission structure and the advertising risk is taken by the affiliate, not you! But in this post I’m going to cover the benefits from the affiliate’s point of view. When I started out as an affiliate I wrote a list of the main reasons to be an affiliate marketer, and looked at it often, particularly when I was struggling.

My list kept me going because I knew it would pay off eventually – if I only kept going.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #1

One of the main benefits of affiliate marketing is that it can give you a completely flexible way of working. Back in the early 2000’s when I first discovered affiliate marketing, I was working as a stuntman. Work was sporadic and it completely scuppered any kind of normal work pattern. A phone call might mean I was away working for weeks. Then, when work dried up I was back to looking for part time, temporary and flexible jobs.

It was difficult holding onto a full time job because of the unpredictability of the work. Affiliate marketing is more flexible than any job, even though there are downsides to the sporadic nature of income you can earn as an affiliate in the early days.

Affiliate marketing gave me something to work towards in a way which suited my lifestyle. I choose my own hours, work from my laptop and use blogging to compound my work over time.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #2

Another major benefit of affiliate marketing is the ability to work from anywhere. Once you’re earning an income online, you can relocate to anywhere on the globe. Many entrepreneurs I met have relocated abroad and some moved to cheaper countries where they can work from their laptops and live very cost effectively.

I’m still in the UK but affiliate marketing has given me a “portable office” and I can work from anywhere. I’ve worked in hotels and cafes and often take my laptop with me when I get to work away.

The “work from anywhere” benefit of affiliate marketing means you can earn from anywhere in the world. All you need is a laptop and internet connection. This is super cool if you’re a fan of the nomadic lifestyle or like travelling regularly.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #3 – Passive Income

A passive income from affiliate marketing can mean a lot of things. In the early days for me it was just a small infrequent trickle. But, over time that turns into a greater stream/s of income. A passive income has huge implications for your freedom and peace of mind. I wasn’t chasing the big bucks by becoming an affiliate marketer. At first, I only wanted to escape the pain and suffering caused by financial difficulties.

As time moved on, a passive income allowed me to relax a little more about money and remove the main stressors from my life. For me, these were low paid jobs which were keeping me broke and making me miserable.

Since the stunt work was so sporadic, I wasn’t able to make a consistent living from it. Affiliate marketing gave me a flexible way of working which brought a passive income stream and allowed to to relax mentally and enjoy life more.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #4 – Income Potential

The income potential of affiliate marketing is unlimited and although many new affiliates will struggle, this gave me something to shoot for. 95% of affiliates will quit which proves that affiliate marketing isn’t easy. But many affiliates can build a full time income from selling other people’s products online. A few affiliates build multiple six, seven and even eight figure businesses from selling other people’s products online.

With high ticket and subscription affiliate programs, you can make substantially more than from selling low value items. Once you’ve learned how to sell a product once, you can do it again and again. Selling products online can be automated and scaled. When you’re working in the traditional sense, trading time for money, there’s always going to be a cap on what you can earn.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #5 – Quit Your Job

Quitting a job is one of the main reasons people become affiliate marketers. Once your affiliate income becomes consistently equal to or higher than your employment income, you’ve got the option of quitting. In a difficult job, you can even quit earlier if you’re able to survive on a lower income.

A job often carries a load of costs too, such as your travel costs, uniform, and equipment. An online business can be run from home which minimises your costs and you’ll save money from all those work related expenses, which can mount up.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #6 – No More Commute

No more commute. As a stuntman, I was commuting long distances from the north of the UK to London which often took 6 hours each way. This cut into my profits and made the stunt work much less desirable over time.

The expense of commuting can rapidly cut into your income (and happiness) so not having to commute is a big win for many.

10 Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing #7 – No More Difficult Bosses

If you’ve ever had a difficult boss, you know this is a fantastic win! Once you’re financially independent, not only can you sack your boss but you never need take another job again, ever!

Not that you need to quit your job. An independent income source can also give you an edge when it comes to negotiating your salary for example. You are working from a much more empowered position when you don’t need a job, than if you are desperately trying not to get fired!

#8 – Happiness

There’s a lot of versatility with an online business and there’s plenty of opportunity to turn it into a job you love which you’re passionate about. Money is one thing, but once your basic needs are met, it’s important to have a focus and direction which is nicely aligned with your values.

So choosing a topic you’re passionate about, and monetising it with affiliate marketing can be a great way to work at something you love while building an income simultaneously. If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

Happiness should be a priority in most people’s lives. Unfortunately it’s often the last thought after meeting all your financial needs. Why not align your passion with a means to earn an income? Affiliate marketing is one of the best vehicles with which you can do this.

#9 – Financial Independence

Being financially independent gives you more choice. You don’t need a job and this is empowering. It means you don’t have to have a job, and the shift in your mindset can mean you can negotiate better deals for yourself, coming from a place of empowerment rather than weakness and desperation. If you’re trapped by a job, it’s disempowering. Your fear of losing the job and your income makes you appear desperate. Employers can (and often do) take advantage of this power dynamic.

Once you’re financially independent, there’s a whole lot more things you’re going to say “no” to! Say no to a job, no to a commute. You can still say “yes” of course but what has been coined “Fuck You money” is pretty sweet!

#10 – Freedom

Freedom means different things to different people. But being financially and geographically free are two massive wins if you want real freedom. You can live anywhere with affiliate marketing and you can earn any amount. This can give you a lot of freedom.

Freedom of this kind can also be slightly unnerving, which is why many sabotage their efforts to attain it. Without the necessary discipline, this kind of freedom can be dangerous. Just read about lottery winners who become alcoholics and blow all their money within only a few years.

But it is often this kind of freedom which attract many affiliates to the business.

Real freedom is being able to spend your time as you choose, with whom you want. Most people don’t have this kind of freedom and given the choice wouldn’t spend their days with their colleagues at work or their bosses! Most people want to spend more time with their friends and families, travelling or simply spending time at home relaxing.

Top affiliates travel and spend time as they choose, carving out time for their business around their lifestyle choices. This is the complete opposite of working for an employer, where you spend most of your time at work, and only a small portion of your time doing what you want.

How To Earn From A Website

Wondering how to earn from a website? Websites are great money making machines! If you can get them to work you’ll have a passive income source. Plus you can work on your site from anywhere. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection. But how do you turn a basic website into a cash generator? In this article I’m going to cover some of the best ways you can do this with or without paid advertising.

One of the biggest hurdles to making your website profitable is traffic. Simply throwing a website up doesn’t mean anyone will see it. A website without a marketing strategy is not going to attract any visitors whatsoever. It’s a little like opening a newsagents in the middle of the desert. No shoppers equals no profits. Not all visitors are going to make your shop profitable either and many of your website visitors will never buy from you. You also need the right kind of visitors so you can make your online virtual shop profitable.

How To Earn From A Website – Monetisation

Let’s start with how to monetise your website. Businesses can use a website to find new customers. But without a business or product to sell of your own, what do you do to turn visitors into cash? There’s two main ways you can do this when you have nothing to sell: advertising and affiliate marketing.

With advertising, you place ads on your site. When visitors click on them, you earn tiny amounts in advertising revenue. Google Adsense is one of the best known places where anyone can use ads to make money from their website content.

Although you only earn tiny amounts from each click, with enough traffic to your site, and many clicks, this can add up. Plus, this is passive income once you’ve got it running properly.

The other strategy is to sell something from your site using affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online for a share of the profit. Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and promoting their affiliate link on their website. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.

How To Earn From A Website – Traffic

Setting up your monetisation strategy on a website is really the easy part. It can be done within a few hours. Simply place your affiliate banners on your site, or place the advertising code to allow adverts to show. The main factor in earning from a website isn’t the monetisation factor, although that’s an important part of it. The real issue which many would-be online marketers fail with is getting traffic to their site.

There’s many ways to attract visitors to your website including blogging, PPC (pay per click advertising), back linking, SEO (Search engine optimisation), use of social media, email marketing and so on. Unless you get the right kind of visitors coming to your site in large enough numbers, you won’t make much from it. So even with a well monetised site, it will just sit there and not earn any money!

There’s two types of traffic too. One of them is the kind that buys your products and the other will never buy. You want the former!

How To Earn From A Website – Knowing Your Audience

Since advertising on a website pays so little, it’s well worth putting something on your site which you can sell. Choose an affiliate product which aligns with your website topic.

Once you’ve picked a product to sell, and there’s thousands of affiliate programs to choose from, you can learn about your target audience or customer avatar. What is the customer avatar? Your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. They are the type of person who loves what you’re selling and will keep buying from you, time and time again.

With a website you have access to an international audience, assuming you can attract them to your website. So it’s important to identify those specific online visitors who are most likely to buy from you.

Otherwise you’ll waste a lot of time and resources attracting the wrong people who will never buy. Once you have done this, getting that segment of the online marketplace to visit your website becomes easier. If you don’t first identify those people, you’ll be spending money/time attracting anyone and everyone to your website.

How To Earn From A Website – Content Creation & SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways you can get people to visit your website at very low cost. However, it can also be a huge challenge getting your content seen on the search engines such as Google, Bing, Duckduckgo.com and so on. See also how to build a niche website.

Creating content to attract your target audience can take a lot of time and effort, and traffic is never guaranteed from the search engines. In a competitive niche, it’ll take much longer to get noticed. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s a lot of noise. To stand out expect to create a lot of content over several months or years. See how long does it take to make money blogging.

Paid marketing is a much faster way to get visitors to your blog. However, you risk capital trying to turn that traffic into sales. So if you’re going to run ads, it’s better to send traffic to a sales funnel instead, where you can follow up with email marketing.

Email Marketing

Most website owners use email marketing to help them sell affiliate products. On a website, there’s a form or popup which leads to a freebie giveaway. Once you sign up to it, you join an email list. Affiliates market their products to their list of subscribers. An email list is a powerful way to turn a normal looking website into a money generating tool. On a website, most visitors stick around only for a few minutes. But once on an email list, the marketer can send out automated messages for an unlimited time period.

I’ve sold products to my email list even years after a subscriber has joined it. This just wouldn’t be possible from a website alone. On a list you can also build greater trust through delivering value driven messages designed to help subscribers with a specific problem. Join my email list for more information on building an online business from scratch.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

With PPC – pay per click advertising, you spend money to send traffic to a website. Ideally you’ll earn more money back from selling your affiliate products than you spend in advertising budget. This can be tricky because much of the traffic you send to a website will leave without having taken any action. So to get around this problem, marketers use PPC advertising to send people directly to a landing page where they collect the visitor’s email address.

Now that visitor is an email subscriber and there’s a far greater chance they will eventually become a customer and buy one of your affiliate products.

Landing pages are a good idea because you can test and measure the response of the visitors. By cross testing different designs, you can optimise for maximum efficiency to lower the cost of obtaining a subscriber.

A landing page works well to get people on your email list because there’s fewer options for them them once they arrive on the page. On a website, there’s more options. The visitor can look around and browse your site. So they are less likely to take the action you want them to if you send them to a website, rather than a landing page.

High Earning Affiliate Products

Not all affiliate products are alike. Many affiliates will head straight to Amazon, since it’s a well-known affiliate site. But Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are pretty low and you’ll only earn a single commission from a sale. You can earn much more if you decide to sell digital products and those which carry subscription payments and high value. Subscription affiliate products can give you recurring payments. So each sale gives you a monthly income, not just a single commission.

High ticket affiliate marketing products pay much larger than average commission, so they are a good choice if you’re going to use PPC advertising, since you can more easily recoup your ad budget and make a profit.

Learn more about starting your own online business from scratch here and learn how to earn from a website.

How To Make The First Sale As An Affiliate

Wondering how to make the first sale as an affiliate? Your first sale is a massive milestone as an affiliate marketer. Many would-be affiliates aspire to become financially free and make thousands per month. But this can’t happen before you make your very first sale. The first sale is therefore a significant step to help build confidence in yourself and your marketing skills. Once you can make one sale, you can make many more.

So how can you make your first sale as an affiliate. Here’s a few key components which should help you gain traction.

How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Aligning With A Product

There’s many ways to skin a cat and the same is true of affiliate marketing. You’ll need a strategy to make your sale, but rather than talk about strategies I’m going to cover some important principles. You can ready my article 22 ways to sell affiliate products for some marketing ideas.

Firstly choose a product you actually adore. Unless you’re head over heels with a certain product, it’s going to be much harder selling it. When you’re aligned with a product, you can sell it without doubt, knowing it has huge value. Ideally choose something you have bought yourself too. If you don’t actually want to buy your product, how are you going to authentically promote it to others?

Find a product which is aligned with a topic or subject that’s close to you. That way, you can create some content around your product. Drawing people to your affiliate product is easier when you align yourself and your interests with your product.

How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Before Selling, Know Your Audience

Many affiliates will rush in pasting their affiliate link hither and thither. But this seldom works unless you have a carefully selected audience and you know who you’re selling to. Your target audience is key to selling affiliate products and if you don’t even know who they are, you’re going to struggle.

To define your target audience you need to brainstorm what kind of people will benefit and appreciate your product the most. Most people in the online world don’t give a jot about your product. But a small slice of the online marketplace will step over people to buy it from you. Your work in defining your target audience and customer avatar will shave potentially months or even years off your first sale. See customer avatar worksheet pdf and define who exactly you’re going to target with your advertising/content.

Choose A Strategy

Choosing a strategy can take some time. There’s many ways you can sell affiliate products, from paid advertising, niche websites, social media strategies to content creation. Depending on your circumstances you can pay for advertising and build an email list or build a resource such as a blog which draws in traffic organically.

You can of course do more than one strategy too. Build a blog up slowly while testing your paid advertising strategy. However, if you jump around too much, you won’t get traction in any area. So choose a strategy you can stick with for some time. If you’re a blogger, like me, pick a topic you love writing about. that way, blogging become more of a hobby and you’ll sustain it for much longer.

How To Make The First Sale As An Affiliate – Mindset

If you’re looking for a sale, but not doing the work, you could have a very long wait. So your strategy needs to be for the long term. Short sporadic efforts will seldom give you any traction as an affiliate, even if they give you a lone sale.

On the other hand, you can get lucky and make a sale by pasting your link on social media. Affiliate marketing is sometimes unpredictable and so your income from it will be unpredictable too. But the goal isn’t just the first sale and no more, the goal should be to learn how to make that first sale, and then make many more with this knowledge. So the “one-off” sale isn’t the long term goal, but it will act as a motivating factor when it comes in.

With affiliate marketing there’s often a lot of work that goes on where you don’t get an immediate paid reward for it. This can seem like a trial, but it’s well worth it when sales start coming in while you sleep!

A good analogy for your affiliate business is a Chinese bamboo tree. It takes several years of gestation before it breaks through the soil. After it does though, it can grow 90 feet in just a few weeks. Your affiliate business can be the same. Once you figure out how to make your first sale, you’re on easy street and can replicate this strategy and improve on it.

Set Your Intention

Affiliate marketing isn’t always easy and you’re going to come up with a number of problems trying to make your first sale. A good antidote to this is to set your intention so that no matter what you keep going. You can always have a break, give it a rest and come back to affiliate marketing. It’s a super versatile business model which is very forgiving. Around 95% of affiliates will quit and this is important to remember. They wouldn’t quit if it was easy!

Remember what affiliate marketing can give you too which can help keep you going when it gets tough:

Complete time and financial freedom
Financial independence and freedom from a job/boss
No more commute
Live anywhere earn any amount!

That’s pretty awesome and well worth the effort. On the other side of a whole bunch of work is that freedom. Keep this in mind when you think of quitting. Build your mindset such that doubt doesn’t exist and quitting isn’t in your vocabulary!

Fail Forwards

Fail forwards is a term I picked up in the community I’m a part of. Sign up to my email list to learn more about it. Failing forwards is something you have to do as an affiliate. It’s not a direct path to success from a particular straight road. Rather it’s a path of learning from your failures. Those failures are really stepping stones to success. If you can see your “difficulties” as those stepping stones rather than some massive calamity, you’re going to do much better than if you catastrophize over them!

Each “failure” teaches you something. If a strategy doesn’t work immediately, you should at least have some feedback. Affiliate marketing is about getting more and more feedback until you can simply zone in on those sales and do more of that. Once you have made your first sale, you can use your data/tracking to do the thing which brought it about.

This can take some time but the key is to never quit. If you keep at it, and keep failing, eventually you’ll stumble on a strategy which works for you. Once you do, consider it a massive success however small the sale commission is. That sale will keep you in the game! It’ll motivate you and inspire you. Once you’ve made your first sale, You’re unstoppable! Keep going and never quit!