AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses

If you’re looking for low cost marketing ideas for small businesses, look no further! I’ve implemented many of these strategies to build a successful affiliate business from my laptop and many of these are useful for any business, large or small. So whatever size your business is, these strategies can help you build new trickles of customers at very low cost.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Website Obviously!

If you don’t already have a website, it’s an obvious starting point. You can purchase a domain name from namecheap.com for less than $10 a year and hosting can cost under $5 a month. There’s also totally free website building sites such as Weebly.com so you can totally set one up for free if your budget doesn’t allow. Ideally though, you’ll want a domain you own and your own hosting.

If you haven’t yet started building a website, you can build it in such a way to start generating traffic for free too. Checkout my article how to build a niche website for more on this topic. A niche website can be built around a specific keyword phrase so as to rank on the search engines for that particular phrase. When done well, this can give you a dramatic traffic boost at very low cost. This website, for example, was built on a specific keyword to attract visitors.

If you have a physical business which is based in a specific place, this works all the better. There’s far less competition in a specific place. So buying a domain name with your place name in it can make all the difference. For example I built a website for a friend which had the town name in it: http://scarboroughwingchun.co.uk/. You can do this for your business too, to give yourself an advantage when it comes to ranking for your main keywords.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Blogging

Once you have a website built, you can use many strategies to attract people to it. Traffic generation at low cost is best done by creating content on your site – blogging. However, there’s around 600 million blogs on the internet so in almost every topic there’s huge competition. One way around this is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Most keyword phrases, and particularly the shorter ones have too much competition on Google to have a chance at ranking. So by finding the phrases which have the lowest competition, you have a much better chance at ranking your content on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages.

Once you start ranking your content, your domain authority goes up. This can lead to more and more of your content getting found, even if you’re using more competitive terms as you continue to add content to your blog.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Free Google Places Listing

Google offers locally based businesses a free listing through Google My Business (formerly Google Places). This is well worth the half hour of your time to create.

As long as you can verify your business address, you can create a listing for your business. Google will send out a postcard with a code so you can do this.

You can also do the same thing on other search engines such as Bing/Microsoft. These types of listings will often come up before any others (even paid ads) when you do a locally based search, so it’s well worth creating one.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a must for any business. It’s super cheap and super effective. You will need an email autoresponder to collect email addresses from your website and deliver emails automatically. To do this, you need to offer something of value from your website in exchange for your visitor’s details. For example, on this website I offer information for learning how to build an online business.

Once someone joins my email list, my autoresponder follows up with an email marketing campaign which is completely automated. Email follow ups should offer some kind of value to your subscribers. You can keep them informed about your products and send them to discounts and offers.

Email marketing is very effective because it allows you to build a longer term relationship with your visitors. Whereas on a website, most visitors will leave within a few minutes, you can keep in touch via email for months or even years. See also the power of email marketing.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Business – A Facebook Business Page

A Facebook business page can be built absolutely for free so this is well worth doing. Use a specified keyword phrase appropriate to your business to give your listing more traction. When people search for a particular phrase which matches your own, they are more likely to find your listing. Here’s an example of a page I created for my online business:

Look for “Pages” on your Facebook side bar and click on the pages icon. Fill out all the fields and input as much information as you can to give your listing the best chance. You can also promote your page and place your blog content on it once you have built it.

Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Quora

Quora.com is a question and answer website with millions of users. It can be used to bring people back to your website. To do this you need to create some useful content on your website first. So building a blog is a good strategy to be used with this one. Once you have some content on your website, you can use Quora to answer questions relevant to your content.

Then, link to your content in your question. Quora does allow this if it’s relevant in answering the questions. Read their terms and conditions though because you can easily get answers removed if you start spamming your links. See also using Quora to drive traffic.

YouTube

YouTube is another great way to find people who are looking for information relating to your products and services. By uploading information videos to YouTube, and tagging them with relevant keywords which relate to your business, you can attract free traffic organically. YouTube is a daughter company of Google, and Google itself sometimes markets YouTube as the second largest search engine on the web.

Organic traffic is much harder to obtain than paid traffic. But if you have the time and energy to create some informational videos, uploading them to YouTube regularly can give you a nice stream of traffic back to your website. Make sure your traffic is well targeted though before you spend a huge amount of time. See customer avatar for more on targeting.

Low Competition Niches For Blog 2023

What are the low competition niches for blogging in 2023? Unfortunately most blog niches are well subscribed to. Those with the least competition tend to be more difficult to monetise anyway. So perhaps the best question to ask isn’t which is the best niche for blogging with low competition, but which niche is the best for you.

After all, blogging is most definitely not a quick fix. It can take months or even years to break through with blogging and start earning regular traffic and sales. If you’re starting a blog from scratch, expect a long journey. That journey is going to be much more pleasing and enjoyable if you choose a topic which you actually enjoy writing about.

Low Competition Niches For Blog 2023 – Sub Niches

So you might be thinking that your favourite topic is simply too competitive. If this is the case there’s always a sub niche. A sub niche can be where you strike a balance between something you can monetise and less competition. An example of a sub niche for the “making money online” category is affiliate marketing, for example.

You can find sub niches within a competitive industry by delving down and looking for more specific areas of the larger topic. So for the health and fitness niche, you might choose Yoga. For the Yoga niche you might choose chair Yoga for rehabilitation, for example. A sub niche can be great for a couple of reasons:

There’s always fewer competing websites (less competition) in a sub niche compared to the bigger niche
Having a more specific niche means your audience is more targeted. This can be a good thing for sales if you’re selling something specific.

Low Competition Niches For Blog 2023 – Finding Your Niche

Imagine you’ve been writing your blog posts for six months now. How do you feel? What ideas have you been writing about? Are you ready for another six months of this? This is a good question to ask yourself because it’s likely to take much longer than you expect before your blog starts generating income.

So it can help to brainstorm ideas before you actually decide on your niche. Writing in a niche you hate, is going to make it very difficult to sustain the necessary effort required to make it work.

I once built a blog around the obscure topic of mushroom harvesting! After several months I was completely demoralised and my blog hardly made a thing!

Although my blog ranked and got some traffic, it didn’t make any money and I soon lost interest. In a subject you’re passionate about, you can keep going for long enough to overcome the competition and get traction.

Blog Niches – Things To Consider

There’s a couple of things to consider when choosing your niche. One is how you will attract traffic to your blog. In a very competitive topic, such as making money online, there’s going to be a lot more competition than in an uncompetitive niche such as pets or hobbies.

By niche’ing down to a sub niche you can cut out some competition and get a slice of the market more easily. But ultimately it’s going to be the passion and enthusiasm which gives you an edge, so choosing a topic which you love working on is going to play a part in your success.

The other main consideration is how you will monetise your blog. Initially, you want to create a lot of content to attract traffic. This can take some time and serious commitment, so make sure you’re ready for this! Not all topics are as easily monetised as each other, so it can help to start by looking for your monetisation method before you start. With affiliate marketing, you’ll want to choose a good product to sell from your blog. Even with a lot of traffic you can still struggle to make money with a bad product. So this is a vitally important factor too!

Niches To Choose From

There’s hundreds of niches you can choose from. Here’s a short list to draw some ideas from:

Wearable Technology.
Home Security.
Glamping.
Online Dog Training.
Maternity Clothing.
Eco-Friendly Products.
Vanlife.
Garage Gym.
Pets.
Hobbies.

Ideally choose a topic you align with, delve down and find a niche within the niche, where you’ll find less competition. Prepare yourself to build a lot of content in your topic and find a way to monetise it before you start. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so there’s going to be competition in nearly every niche. Find a topic you can create an unlimited number of posts on and get to work! Good luck!

Best Niche For Affiliate Marketing 2023

So it’s 2023 and you’re wondering what’s the best niche for affiliate marketing! I’ve done a few posts similar to this one so feel free to check them out using the search bar on this website. Your niche is such an important aspect of your affiliate business and it should be something you align with personally.

I have tried many niches and many of them failed. My personal advice is to choose a niche you can get passionate about and enjoy working in. I’ve picked the wrong niche so many times and ended up working hard at something I didn’t really enjoy. This makes it so much more difficult, especially if you’re faced with the high levels of online competition that we have in 2023!

So imagine yourself making money as an affiliate and loving what you do. If that seems impossible in the niche you choose, you’ve probably picked the wrong one. Another way to help you decide on your niche is to choose a product to promote first. Although many “guru’s” advice is to pick a niche you love, it also makes sense to choose one you can monetise well.

Even in a topic you adore, you can struggle making any money from it. So although money shouldn’t be the priority when starting, and passion perhaps should, you also need to think about the money side too. I chose a niche which ended up being difficult to monetise, and which I hated too!

Best Niche For Affiliate Marketing 2023 – Top Paying Niches

The top paying niches are typically also the most competitive niches too. So you’re going to be spending a lot of money promoting your products, or a lot of time building content in your niche. So make sure you’re going to enjoy the journey because there’s lot of competition from other affiliates out there. These are generally considered the best niches for affiliate marketing in terms of revenue potential:

Technology
Wealth Building
Health and Fitness
Fashion and Beauty
Lifestyle
Hobby
Pet Care
Travel

Now, you can build a sub-niche in any one of these too. A sub-niche is a niche within a niche and this can be a good idea especially if you’re niche is very competitive. So a sub-niche for the “Health and fitness” niche, for example might be yoga. A sub-niche for travel might be “budget travel for seniors”, for example. Sub niches are good because you can get very targeted traffic (which is good for sales) and there’s less competition.

Content Or Paid Ads?

The best niche for affiliate marketing will be individual to you, too. Not everyone loves writing loads of content, and not everyone is great on video. Your marketing strategy and interests can help you decide on how you’re going to build your affiliate business. Will you pay for advertising or build content? Are you good at writing or video? Do you have a large marketing budget, or are you going to go for content marketing? All these factors will have a bearing on your choice of niche and your approach.

If you’re going to create a lot of content, with a blog, for example, remember you’re going to do better if you choose a topic you enjoy writing about. You can sustain your efforts far longer when you’re writing in a topic you love. Choose a topic you’re disinterested in and it’s going to be tough, especially in a competitive niche.

Since affiliate marketing is getting all the more competitive, it pays to do your research before you start down a path. Ideally choose a topic you’re interested in and/or have some knowledge about. If you can overlap your passion and mission with your vocation, so much the better! You’ll last longer, your work will be more impactful and you’ll shine out among the competition more, too.

Best Place To Do Affiliate Marketing

Where is the best place to do affiliate marketing? Affiliates do all sorts of different things in order to make sales. Some affiliates will become bloggers; writing content which gets found from the search engines (e.g. Google). Others build landing pages and drive traffic from advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook or YouTube.

Some affiliates will upload content to YouTube and build a channel over a long period of time; getting their traffic organically for free. Whereas others will run a single advert using only one video and find thousands of subscribers by sending their visitors to a landing page and collecting email addresses.

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing from using social media sites, blogging, email marketing and through running paid advertising. Depending on your particular niche, product/s and available time, you could choose any one of them. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Linkedin and all the many social media sites all offer an potential opportunity for affiliates. So what’s the best place to do affiliate marketing?

Best Place To Do Affiliate Marketing?

There’s a lot of decisions to be made for affiliates. Those decisions will have a bearing on how successful they ultimately become, too. The products you choose, the niche you pick and how you market your products will all have a impact. So where’s a good starting point? Depending on your circumstances and situation, you might choose your strategy depending on your marketing budget. With a large budget, you can afford to purchase more traffic and test and measure some paid for marketing strategies.

In this case, you’ll probably want to invest in some ad campaigns. You can run banner advertising, use platforms such as Bing (Microsoft), Google Adwords, Facebook etc. Ideally run paid advertising to a landing page and collect email subscribers.

This gives you more opportunity to sell to your visitors over a longer period of time. If you send paid traffic directly to your products, you can easily lose a lot of customers (and money in the process). But collect their email address, and you can build a longer term relationships. See why use landing pages.

Best Place To Do Affiliate Marketing – On A Budget

On a tight budget and with no money for ads, you’ll need to get creative on your marketing strategy. Blogging and social media strategies might be more suitable if this is the case. See also unpaid social media marketing strategies.

Blogging is another option if you’re on a budget. Blogging is a longer term strategy for affiliates but it does work if you’re committed. But if you’re impatient, it probably isn’t for you. Bloggers can take some time before they start generating traction. It can be months or even years, depending on how competitive their particular niche is.

Ideally get an email list which you can build up over time, whatever your marketing strategy is. This gives you more leverage and better control over your traffic. Whether you use paid traffic or earn it through content generation, you’ll want to make the most of it. Get a free email autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

Intrinsic Motivation

Another consideration of the best place to do affiliate marketing is from a place of intrinsic motivation. 95% of of affiliates will quit which means to be in with a chance of winning with it, you’ll need to stick at when all the other affiliates quit! To stick with affiliate marketing for months or even years without results is an incredibly difficult thing to do. If your only motivation is the money, you’re surely going to find an easier way to make the stuff – especially if you struggle, which most new affiliates will.

How to be intrinsically motivated? Find a way to offer value through your affiliate business which is in itself hugely motivating to you. For me, that means creating helpful content to help other affiliates. I enjoy the process of learning too, so I often share psychology related material which I am learning about – such as the right mindset for affiliates. Find a strategy which you can enjoy the process of. I like blogging, for example, and I find it therapeutic.

Even without the income from blogging, I would probably keep doing it! If you can find a way to build an affiliate business and work in a way you love, you’ve found some intrinsic motivation which will keep you going long after all your competitors have quit!

Summary

There’s literally hundreds of ways to do affiliate marketing and everyone is different. So ultimately the best way to do affiliate marketing is your own way and a way in which you can succeed, whatever that means for you!

Done For You Affiliate Marketing Business

If you really want a completely done for you affiliate marketing business, you’ll need to buy an affiliate website which is already making money. Sites such as Flippa.com let you do this but a high earning affiliate website can set you back a hefty price. The more money your site earns, the larger the price tag you should expect to pay.

Here’s a couple of examples from Flippa.com, one site earns $4,112 per month (net profit) and the other $14, 447, Here’s what they are selling for:

If you want a cheaper site, expect to earn less from it. There’s other options of course for “done for you” affiliate marketing businesses. You can buy a business system which gives you larger profits. A high ticket business system, for example, can let you earn $1,000 per sale for products you can sell as an affiliate.

With such a business model, it’s much easier to learn paid marketing techniques and scale up. But you’ll still need to actually learn the skills and make those sales yourself, which can be done if you’re willing to roll your sleeves up and learn how to become an affiliate.

Done For You Affiliate Marketing Business: The Typical Affiliate Program Vs. High Ticket

The standard affiliate program can be joined for free. But you’ll need to build a website, and/or landing page. You’ll need some kind of marketing strategy to build your business up from scratch. In a competitive field it can take years to build up your traffic from a blog, for example.

A much faster way is to buy a business system which gives you all the bells and whistles:

Ready made sales funnel
Pre-written email templates
Product range – including high ticket products and subscription products
Training and support
Access to training and a community of online entrepreneurs

With such a business model, you can move directly to the marketing aspect of your business, learning from scratch. You have a business model which is already working, which is your greatest asset! A sales team automatically up-sells on your behalf and you have all the tools and software needed to build a from the ground up online business that works.

What A “Done For You Business” Isn’t

It’s important to keep in mind with this kind of business you’re still an affiliate. So unlike an already earning site from Flippa, for example, you’ll need to learn how to drive traffic to your website/landing pages.

This is of course much easier with a high ticket business system which has multiple products within a sales funnel. With a standard affiliate product, you can only earn one time from each sale. But with a product “suite” you can earn multiple times: from each individual sale, from subscription products and from up-sells closed in-house by the sales team.

But although a “done for you business” offers the tools, products and software you’ll need, you’ll still be responsible for driving leads into your business, which you can learn through the training.

Standard Affiliate Journey

Doing everything by yourself as an affiliate is how many affiliates get started online. But this can be a long and difficult journey. You’ll need to find a product to sell, build a marketing strategy, create your own emails and begin to learn the ways you can drive traffic. That’s a lot of stuff to do and without a good understanding of what you’re doing, you can easily lose momentum and give up along the way. That explains why around 95% of new affiliates quit.

With a mentor, guidance, and a system and strategy already in place, you can cut your learning time right down. When you only have to focus on marketing, you’ll save yourself a huge amount of time and resources. So if you’re looking for a low cost online “done for you” business system, checkout this video and see if you might be a good fit.

Is It Necessary To Have A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

Is it necessary to have a website for affiliate marketing? While the answer to this is no, it’s definitely a good idea. You can run a profitable affiliate business without a website. But like any business the more tools for advertising you have, the better. You’re definitely limiting yourself if you choose to not have a website.

Websites are tools you can use to either send paid traffic to, or through blogging, build free traffic over time. You can also simply use a landing page builder, such as convertri, for example. Send paid traffic to a purpose built landing page and collect emails. Build a subscriber base and send out automated messages to promote your affiliate products.

Or you can use a social media platform to send traffic directly to your affiliate offers. Or use paid banners on websites to do the same. There’s many ways in which affiliates promote their products. Checkout my post which covers 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Pick out the ones without the need for a website if you don’t want to build one.

If you’re going to use paid advertising to promote affiliate products, many platforms will require you to have a compliant website, rather than send traffic directly to a third party product (which you don’t personally own). Here, not having a website can limit you. Or an affiliate program might ask how you generate traffic. In some cases, if you don’t have a website, (or a large email list) you can’t gain the credibility needed to access some affiliate programs.

Is It Necessary To Have A Website For Affiliate Marketing? Benefits

This website has been built as a blogging site. Over time, (and with considerable effort I might add), I’ve been able to generate a nice steady flow of traffic to it, mostly from the search engines. This is a long process but well worth the time if you’re prepared to put some work in. Free traffic doesn’t come easily, especially today with the huge amount of competition online. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet, so there’s a huge volume of content that is being churned out regularly.

Another site I’ve built is defy9to5.com which was built as an authority website for advertising purposes. Google’s advertising platforms (YouTube and Google Adwords) require you to own a compliant website. There are some requirements which may change when using a paid ad platform such as Google or Facebook. Things like disclaimers must be on affiliate sites, privacy policy, T’s and C’s and cookie notices and so on.

If you’re just starting as an affiliate and attempt to send paid traffic to a third party website (through your affiliate link for example), you can easily be refused. Even links on a website can lead to an ad disapproval. Google terms this “bridging” and they may stop your ads for it. Hence why a compliant website is so important when you’re starting out with paid advertising.

Is It Necessary To Have A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

While it’s not essential to have a website to do affiliate marketing, you can certainly benefit from using one, especially if you’re on a budget. A website can give you credibility compared with a messy affiliate link. A website can allow you to run paid campaigns more easily and even give you free traffic.

Without one you can still be an affiliate and one of the best ways to promote affiliate products without a website is through a landing page. Landing page software lets you build and test different lead capture pages and build an email list. Or, if you don’t want to spring for a landing page software, there’s other ways you can promote affiliate links too.

You can use your affiliate links in your social media profiles, for example. Put them in your email signature. Link them to domain names to give you more authority and credibility. Free strategies for promoting your links are time consuming and can be frustrating. Paid marketing is by far the best way because you can see the results very quickly and they are scalable. But with paid ads, you’re going to need some credibility to even use the ad platforms. This often means owning a website which is compliant with the ad platform you’re using.

Summary

Like with any business, the more tools you have to bring in paying customers the better. A small business owner might run an ad in the local paper. They might have a Google My Business listing and some business cards. They probably have a website to promote their business, too. By building a portfolio of advertising mechanisms, they are able to test each one to see which one brings in the most business and at the lowest cost.

But by limiting their potential customer base to only word of mouth, for example, they cut themselves off from their full potential and remove their ability to grow and scale their business using tools at their disposal.

Wealth Mindset Coach

If you’re looking for a wealth mindset coach, checkout my new website money mindset coach and sign up to my email list. You’ll get daily inspiration in the form of mindset questionnaires, pdfs and ideas for new income streams. You can also access my ebook Shift Your Money Mindset:

So why would someone want a mindset coach anyway? In this article I’ll explain why your money mindset is so important and why it can be your greatest asset or biggest liability.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Affiliate Marketing

Since this website is about affiliate marketing I’ll give it a quick mention here. Affiliate marketing allows anyone to make money differently. Most people get a job to create a steady income. They build their lives around that job, and become dependant on it. A job only pays you when you are working. If you stop working, you stop getting paid. So it’s the ultimate trap.

If you’ve ever felt trapped in a job you’ll understand what I mean. If you start a family and get a mortgage, you’re all the more trapped by your income source. But with affiliate marketing you can escape this trap. You can earn money through the sale of other people’s products and services. What’s even better is that you can ultimately keep getting paid when you stop working, if you’ve put in the work beforehand and are able to generate traction.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible forms of independent income and anyone can do it in their own time around existing employment.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Your Subconscious Mind

If you’ve ever felt stuck in some way, you can be assured that the subconscious mind is playing a part in it. Even with huge effort, unless you change things on the “inside” you will come up against some subconscious programming which is too powerful to overcome with your physical efforts alone. You may have been thinking things such as “the rich are greedy”, “I don’t deserve financial freedom”, “I’m not worthy” and so on. If so, you’ve probably been programming your subconscious mind with ideas which stop you increasing your financial abundance.

If you have such conflict internally, you’ll sabotage your best efforts to create more abundance. To get under the “hood” of your subconscious mind notice how you think about money, wealth, the rich, and yourself. There’s likely to be some negative ideas there. How was your early years and what messages did you hear from your parents around the subject of money?

Most of your unconscious programming went in before you were 10 years old. This means you’re acting out programs which you’re totally unaware of. The first step is to bring more conscious awareness to this programming.

Wealth Mindset Coach & Financial Intelligence

Most of us haven’t been taught financial intelligence. Most people earn their income, pay their bills and spend what’s left. The wealthy think differently. They know to pay themselves first, before they pay anything. This means they automatically set aside money for savings before anything else.

Over time their savings grow and they have money for more opportunities such as business ventures, property or investments.

This habit also teaches them to live below their means – when most will do the opposite. The wealthy know that this discipline will put more money in their savings and investments, even if it means living to a lower standard than they potentially can.

You can spend some time learning about how you spend money with a simple strategy. Simply carry a pen and notepad for a week and jot down everything you spend money on. From your groceries to small purchases. You’ll learn a lot about your spending habits. It’s crazy how we can become accustomed to spending a fortune on entertainment, booze or tobacco, and neglect to learn about our financial intelligence or invest in our health.

Assets & Liabilities – Robert Kiyosaki

In Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad, he outlines the differences in how the poor and the rich think. Most people think their car, for example, is an asset. But Kiyosaki says that real assets bring money in while liabilities cost money. So in fact a car is a liability. A house can also be a liability too, if money flows out because of it. Assets are things like businesses, property and investments which make money. Liabilities are things which cost money. The wealthy know to reduce their liabilities and increase their assets.

Access my free ebook “Shift Your Money Mindset” here.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Wondering how to grow your affiliate marketing business? There’s many ways you can grow your affiliate business. By focusing on getting more traffic and sales, you can grow a business. But there’s other ways to grow your business too, and it’s by growing and developing yourself.

Your business will never outgrow the thinking you’re bringing to it. So if your thinking is somehow limited, your business will reflect that. One way to grow your mindset is to get around other affiliates through an online community of growth orientated online entrepreneurs. Learn more here and get a mentor.

“You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with” – Jim Rohn. Are you surrounded by entrepreneurs who are pushing you to grow and exceed your expectations. Or are the people around you limiting you with their ideas, habits and beliefs?

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – The 80/20 Rule

Pareto’s principle states that the 80% of your results come from only 20% of your activities. As an affiliate marketer your job is to discover what 20% of your activities are generating most of your results and do more of that! If you’re new to affiliate marketing you might be at the stage where you haven’t got results yet. If so it’s a case of following some training and “failing forwards”. This means keep trying things to give you feedback. Armed with some positive feedback you can use Pareto’s principle – the 80/20 rule.

This rule is very significant to affiliates because a lot of work can amount to not much in the way of results. But once you discover a strategy which gives you sales, you can focus your work on those areas. This is why tracking your sales is so important. If you don’t track sales, you can’t focus on the activities which brought about your results.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Focus “On” The Business, Not “In” The Business.

As someone who has transitioned from employment into affiliate marketing, I’ve made the same mistakes a lot will make. It’s easy to become a technician in a business, doing the day to day superficial activities which make you feel like you’re busy (and productive), but which don’t drive your business towards the heights you really want, or “move the needle” as Sabri Suby puts it in his book “Sell Like Crazy”.

This is an easy trap to fall into for affiliates and I’ve personally wasted a lot of time on small activities which don’t “move the needle”! But by becoming aware of this, you can see the bigger picture and focus on more meaningful action steps!

Another great resource you should get is

In Michael Gerber’s book you’ll discover some of the reasons which hold you from growing your affiliate business and what you can do about it.

How To Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Small Steps Grand Vision

While just dreaming about your large affiliate business won’t make it so, just taking tiny steps might not get you there either. While daily actions steps are fundamental to your success, it’s also important to zoom out and see the larger picture. For example, is your current strategy scalable? Are you using high ticket and subscription products which give you a greater outcome for the same/similar amount of work? Are you using an email list and building a source of traffic which you control, rather than simply trusting Google for traffic? Are you getting the help and support of a community/mentors and coaches?

It’s useful to look at why you started affiliate marketing in the first place. Was it to make a small income or a large one? Is your current strategy taking you to where you want to go? If the answer is “no”, it might be time to pause and have a think.

I’ve personally found that I become overwhelmed with too much information. It stalls me, so the first thing I do every day is write a blog post! That way, I’ve already done something useful before I can get confused and overdosed with information. But still, blogging isn’t as scalable as PPC (pay per click) but it’s not as expensive either!

Focus on the big picture often (of what you want to create with your affiliate business for your life), but zoom back into the day and take the small daily step towards your vision! Grow “you” as well as your business and grow your thinking because that’s the ultimate “glass ceiling” of your business.

Technical Stuff

There’s loads of technical stuff on this website too. Checkout some of my posts of the things you can actually do to promote and grow your business technically:

How to get generate website traffic free
How to increase your opt in rate
How to grow your email list
PPC vs Organic traffic
High ticket affiliate marketing products
Subscription affiliate programs

But I’d say your mindset is the most important asset or liability you can bring to your affiliate business:

Get help and support and access to a range of high ticket and subscription related affiliate products.

Summary

So, how can you grow your affiliate business to levels beyond your imagination? Well, your imagination is the limit and if you continue to think the way you are, you’ll likely experience similar results. To change your thinking, read the books I’ve recommended in this post. Join a community and get help and support. Surround yourself with those who think bigger than you and who have achieved what you want to achieve. Continue to upgrade yourself by attending regular webinars and connecting with like minded people who lift you up!

On the “ground” (the technical stuff), you can implement strategies and techniques to increase your website traffic such as PPC (pay per click) advertising, creating content, sharing on social media and building an email list. Keep learning and improving and when the results start flowing, focus on the 20% of your actions which bring about those results! Affiliate marketing can be tough, but so are you! Before you know it, you business will be booming!

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources

Welcome to my affiliate marketing tools and resources page. I started learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s and over the last several years I’ve picked up several tools and resources which have helped me massively.

On this page I’m going to list the tools I’ve found the most helpful in building an affiliate business.

So here’s a few affiliate marketing tools and resources to help you on your affiliate journey!

Webinar – Access this affiliate marketing webinar
Sign up for a free video series – what types of affiliate products are the best!
Get access to an autoresponder completely free!
Access the best landing page software
Need more traffic – get a push notification software here
Get help and support with an online business from scratch here.
Help with SEO, content marketing, link building etc, access here.
SEM Rush – tools for any SEO challenge

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources – Training & Mentorship

One of the best products I’ve bought online is access to an online training and mentoring community. Still today, I learn from this group of online marketing, affiliates and mentors through various online groups. You can access through clicking on the image below.

You’ll find Stuart on the video. I met him in 2014 and he’s been a huge inspiration to me in affiliate marketing. One of the best things I learned was that I could achieve far more in less time if I chose to promote high ticket and subscription affiliate products, which I now do from this website.

Checkout this video here to meet Stuart and get started with the training. Even though I was already an affiliate when I found Stu, I decided to start from scratch and empty my “cup” again. He also offers a great starting place if you’re completely new to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Tools And Resources – Email Autoresponder

An email autoresponder has also been a massive game changer for me. I didn’t understand how affiliates were able to make such large numbers of sales. When I started using email marketing, this changed. With an email list, you can build a relationship over a longer period of time with subscribers. This is much more difficult from a website. Most website visitors are gone in a few minutes, usually forever! So capturing their email address is key to long term success.

You can access Aweber, the email autoresponder I use here. It’s totally free for up to 500 subscribers (at the time of writing). Stick with it until you have at least 1000 subscribers since this before this is the point most affiliates will drop out.

Landing Page Software – Allows You To Cross Test And Optimise Your Sales Funnel

The landing page building is another awesome tool any serious affiliate should invest in. This tool is super fast and this means you’ve more chance of lowering your lead cost. You can also split test and copy existing websites and pages you already own and duplicate them to create funnels easily.

Push Notification Software

A push notification software allows your visitors to opt in to new posts you publish directly from your website. So if you’re a blogger, this is a “must”. I’ve had a heap of traffic, leads and sales simply from adding this plugin to my site.

It’s a little like having an email list, only people sign up to get notified of new content as you publish it. When they log in, if you’ve published a new post, a notification appears on their desktop and leads them back to your website.

Start for free and as you collect more subscribers your rate goes up. It’s worth it though if you’re publishing regularly on your blog! You’ll get a lot more repeat visitors coming back to your site.

SEO Outsourcing Help

I’ve never been great at link building so outsourcing this has been a huge relief. I used this company and they did a great job, building content and back linking to my websites. They were super helpful and not at all “salesy” on the phone.

Plus they have some free tools and are always able to give you a free assessment if you’re looking to outsource some of your SEO.

SEM Rush

SEM Rush offers a great platform for anyone wanting more online visibility, especially from SEO. There’s a huge bunch of resources within the platform and it’s especially helpful if you’re optimising content and looking for free traffic.

SEM Rush offer tools for research on your competition, keyword research, link building, on-page, off-page and technical SEO. They’ll analyse your best performing pages and find those which are laying just beneath page one of Google. This is one of the best tools because it lets you focus on a strategy for SEO which gives you quick results by letting you know the best pages to improve for maximum exposure for the smallest changes.

Presell Page For Affiliate Marketing

The presell page for affiliate marketing is a page created to “warm up” a customer before sending them to a sales page/product. A good example of a presell page is a product review. Product reviews attract customers who are already in the last stage of the buying cycle.

They are simply looking for some information about a product before they make the final decision to buy something. So if you create a great product review about some item you’ve personally bought and benefited from, that would make a great pre-sell page.

In this example the customer has read your review of a product. They might even relate to your experience and trust your article if you’re genuine and sincere. In this scenario, they are much more likely to go on and purchase the product, having read your favourable review.

If they had only seen the sales page, they may not have all the information they needed to make the final decision to buy. So they might have some more questions which need answering before they make that decision.

This is why the presell page for affiliate marketing is so important. One affiliate might send someone directly to a product, through a paid ad, for example. If the customer isn’t certain about their purchase, they will look for a review of it! They find a review article created by another affiliate (the pre-sell page) and that affiliate makes the sale! Hence the power of the pre-sell page.

PreSell Page For Affiliate Marketing – The Pre-Sell Video

The pre sell page concept is used well on YouTube too with a pre-sell video. With a video you can set the scene for building rapport, communicating to your viewers through use of pain points of your target market customer persona.

If you target your advert carefully, and do some work on your customer avatar, you can find people and speak to the pains and problems they have, building rapport. Once you connect with your viewers they are much more likely to take some positive action, such as sign up to your email list or purchase the product you recommend.

The Pre-Sell Format

The pre-sell format is as follows:

Intro
Hook
Problem
Solution

In a YouTube video, the into is pretty important. After a few seconds most people will click “skip video” to get to their content. The rest who stay are who spend your advertising budget on. So you need to pre-qualify them as interested parties before you pay to show them your advert. The first few seconds of a video advert usually has an intro and a hook.

You’ll then see the problem presented (associated with a pain point). In the video ad I created on YouTube, the pain point was one I experienced struggling getting work and paying the bills. The solution presented is the internet business I found and the call to action in my video is to join my email list and access the free video series I offer!

Summary

It’s definitely worth using a pre-sell page for affiliate marketing. Sending traffic directly to a sales page doesn’t always result in a sale.

Think about the information the customer consumes just before they decide to buy something. Often this is a review or some piece of information which assures them the product is genuine. Is the product going to be a suitable fit for their needs?

Think about what you look at just before you buy a product/service online. Notice your own behaviour and it can give you clues you can use in your affiliate business. For more marketing tips visit digital marketing mentors or sign up on this website to learn about building a from scratch online business.