AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?

Is affiliate marketing right for you? Wondering whether you’re a good fit to become an affiliate marketer? Affiliate marketing has a whole host of benefits you can enjoy if you’re prepared to work hard at it and make it work for you. You can work alongside another job until your business starts to generate profit. This is one of the best benefits, a I see it. Affiliate marketing is super flexible and you can choose your own hours and work from anywhere with a laptop and internet connection.

Affiliate marketing offers performance related pay. This means that unless you start generating sales, you won’t make any money! In the first instance this can be a little daunting. But once you start seeing sales come in, you’ll be glad there’s no ceiling to what you can earn. To start generating sales you’ll need to put a lot of work in beforehand, building systems, choosing your products and getting everything set up. This takes some time and commitment and during this time you’re not even selling anything! So you won’t get paid!

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?

Affiliates who succeed are very focused on building their business. It takes time and patience and you’ll need to be disciplined with your time. If you’re better at being told what to do by an employer, for example, it may not work for you. The affiliates who generally succeed have a very strong “why”. That it, they have a burning desire to succeed and earn online, be their own boss, sack their job off, and/or ditch the commute.

People who are highly motivated can endure a lot more than those who are simply “giving it a go” on a whim. This is important because affiliate marketing isn’t that easy!

So if you don’t have a strong desire for one or more of these:

free yourself from your employment, or
build another income stream, or
work on your own terms
become your own boss
Have geographical freedom
Become financially independent
Become financially free
Spend more time with family
Choose your own working hours

..then affiliate marketing probably isn’t for you.

Since 95% of affiliates quit, it’s a good idea to be informed before taking a direction on your affiliate business; especially if you don’t think you’ll stay the course. The 5% of the people who succeed with affiliate marketing stay the course and commit to the journey!

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You – Affiliate Marketing Vs. Employment

It’s definitely worth holding on to your job (if you have one) if you’re considering building an online business. A job gives you financial stability and you will need to invest in your online business is you’re serious about it.

While employment gives you stability it doesn’t necessarily give you freedom. Many people feel trapped in a job, building their life around it. With an online business, you can build it around your life! But you’ll need to get into profit first before you can enjoy the benefits of owning an online business and this can take some time and investment.

Many “digital entrepreneurs” have invested heavily in their online education, sacrificing things which most would never do. They re-mortgage houses, sell cars, even cancel their Netflix to inject money into building their online businesses! Heaven forbid! So, it can take some sacrifices in order to grow your affiliate business to a level where you can replace your income.

But ultimately once this happens, you can go full time with an online business and scale it up to a five or six figure income if you wish. This can give you both time and financial freedom since you’re no longer trading time for money. You’re using a different business model and selling products online instead. Since this can be automated, you’ve escaped the need to trade time for money in a job when this happens.

Characteristics Of Entrepreneurs

Online entrepreneurs are self motivated and self disciplined. Since you’re effectively a “solo-preneur” as an affiliate, you’ve got a lot to do and you’re going to have to do it! No one else will do the work for you!

This can be a challenge especially when you don’t see clearly the action steps you need to take. This is where an online business training resource can help you. It can give you the direction and training you need, even if you’re starting from no knowledge and as a complete beginner.

The “fuel” for your entrepreneurial journey is your self belief, goals and aspirations. As Henry Ford said “whether a man thinks he can or he can’t, he’s right”.

If you’re not great at working alone and motivating yourself, an online business might not be the best fit for you.

If you’re thinking about building an online business from scratch you can access an online training course and community here.

Summary

Is affiliate marketing right for you? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing. You can run ad budgets into tens of thousands on a monthly basis, making multiple high ticket sales. But you can also start blogging, and become a content creator.

Whether you have a huge budget or a tiny one, you can still do affiliate marketing. It can be part time or full time and you can choose hours to suit you. But ultimately you’ll want to be making some money from your efforts before too long. When this doesn’t happen this is where many affiliates drop out and quit. Around 95% of them drop out which means there’s only 5% who actually succeed long term as affiliates.

These people are highly motivated, self disciplined and have a very strong “why”? – Their reason to carry on through the disappointment and “failures” takes them to the levels where they can command their own salary, scale their businesses and quit their jobs.

Learn more and get started with your own affiliate marketing business here.

How To Generate An Email List

Wondering how to generate an email list? One of the best things you can do for success online with any business is to generate an email list of subscribers. With an email list you can remind people of your products and services over a much longer period of time than is possible just from a website. If you’re an affiliate marketer, building an email list is definitely something you should do.

On a website, most visitors will click away within a few minutes, and they are often gone forever. But if you can capture their email details, you can continue to send them messages. You can follow up with them over weeks, months and even years and decades.

To generate an email list you’ll need an email autoresponder. You can get one for free by clicking the image below.

How To Generate An Email List

Once you have access to an autoresponder you’ll be able to create a sign up form from within the software. You can then grab the code for the form and paste in into your website. If you don’t have a website, you can create one for free using a free building platform such as Weebly.com. Or use a landing page software (I use this one) which lets you create super fast landing pages. More on this later.

With your form in place, you can collect subscribers from a website. However, to encourage people to opt in, you’ll need to offer something of value. This can be an ebook, a video course or some kind of pdf digital download. It should be something your subscribers can access immediately once they have entered their name and address on your form.

This is known as a lead magnet. A good lead magnet will offer huge value so people are more likely to sign up. It should also encourage the right kind of people to sign up – those who are likely to be interested in what you have to sell (your target audience or customer avatar).

How To Generate An Email List – Benefit Driven Headline

Your form should have a clear benefit driven headline. This means that it’s immediately apparent as to the benefit for the visitor. Your website visitors are interested in WIIFM – What’s In It For Me! So avoid overly long titles and headings which talk about features of your giveaway download. Here’s a landing page I created with a clear benefit driven headline:

You might see some forms on a website which simply say “sign up to my newsletter”. The benefit of such a title isn’t immediately apparent this kind of headline. Ask yourself why you would sign up and you get the point! Without a strong motivation for your visitors to hand over their details, (to get your freebie) fewer of them will do so!

Traffic To Your Form

There’s various ways to get traffic to your form on your website or landing page. The fastest method is to pay for advertising and if you’re going to do this you really want a professional looking landing page. A professional landing page builder will be faster and more slick than a free website or a blog.

Landing pages are designed specifically to generate leads so you can build your list quickly. If you were to send paid traffic to a normal website, many of your visitors will simply browse around and click through your content. But a landing page only gives two options: sign up or leave. This means you can optimise it to make the most out of your advertising dollars!

Another way to generate traffic to your form is through blogging. This article, for example, is a piece of content which can attract traffic from the search engines. Content generation takes some time and effort to build up, and you’re not guaranteed traffic from Google. But you can promote it yourself too in many ways including posting on social media sites. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some helpful software.

Using Popups On Your Website

You can also use popups, drop downs and other kinds of plugins which give your website visitors more options to join your list. On this site, fore example I have a standard form, a pop up and a drop down opt in.

This gives me three opportunities to offer someone visiting my site a chance to opt in. As annoying as those pop ups are – they work. This is why so many marketers use them on their websites.

I use a tool called Icegram Engage which is a free plugin which lets you create a drop down menu. Aweber offers pop ups and a combination of different styes of opt in form.

You can of course link through to landing pages in your text as well. Checkout one of my landing pages here.

Using Social Media For Lead Generation

You can also use various social media platforms for lead generation too by sending people from it to your landing pages. You can set up your profile to showcase your giveaway offer and link through to a landing page. Quora.com, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc. can all be used in this way.

First set up your profile to offer a clear call to action, sending people to your landing page/website. Then you need a strategy to attract your target audience to your profile page. On Quora you can do this through asking and answering questions in your niche.

On Facebook you can join groups where your target audience might be hanging out. Interact with the groups and get to know people in it. Over time they will visit your profile page and see what you have on offer.

PPC – The Fastest Way To Build Your Email List

Pay per click advertising is definitely the fastest way to build a huge list of subscribers. With other cheaper methods, there’s a lot more work involved too. Blogging for example can take months of work just for a few visitors, who may not actually subscribe to your list!

Paid advertising platforms such as Facebook, Adwords (Google), YouTube, Bing etc. can all be used to target a specific type of person who is most likely to be interested in your offer. This is your target audience or customer avatar. So for example if you’re selling golf equipment, you’ll want to target golf enthusiasts through your advertising. If you were to target everyone, without zoning in on your perfect customer, you’ll likely waste a lot of money in ads.

A good place to start is with Google Adwords, or Bing. Both these platforms allow you to place ads and put them in front of online search queries which specifically relate to the offer (and product) which you are promoting through your email list.

You can also target people through the many paid marketing platforms via criteria such as location, age, sex, interests, online searches and a number of other demographics.

Cross Testing A Landing Page

But of course you’re going to need to spend money to send targeted visitors to your website or landing page. If you’re doing so, it’s much wiser to send them to a landing page where you can capture their email address more easily. On a website there’s more options and so you’re more likely to lose your visitors as they scroll around a website.

On a landing page too, you can cross test different pages to find the best performing ones. With a landing page software, this is much easier to do than to manually do it yourself.

With cross testing, you compare one landing page against another with the same target audience. When more visitors opt in to one page, over another, you will know which one to spend more money on. You can keep doing this over and over to get your lead cost down as much as possible.

Summary

Generating an email list can take some time but it’s well worth the effort. You initially need an autoresponder software (get one here). Once you have designed a form, you can place some code on a website and this allows you to capture the email address of your visitors. But to do so you’ll need to offer something in return – such as a downloadable course or ebook, for example.

The best way to collect emails in bulk is to send paid traffic to a landing page where you offer your visitors a freebie giveaway of some kind which relates to your product/service. You can use a landing page software to split test your landing pages and find the best performing one which gives you the cheapest lead cost.

Once you start building your list, you should also create a follow up series of emails which provide some kind of value to your subscribers. Build trust and offer value through your email marketing campaign and you’re subscribers will more likely want to buy from you when the time comes and if your product is a good fit for them!

Better Than Clickbank

What’s better than Clickbank? After all, Clickbank has thousands of affiliate products to promote. Whatever your niche, Clickbank will have some product available that you can promote! Despite the huge variety on Clickbank, and the fact Clickbank offer larger commissions than most physical products available, there’s also a lot of rubbish on the site too! So if you pick up a product which doesn’t sell, you could waste a lot of time trying to promote it.

Clickbank offers some subscription affiliate products too, which can be found using CBengine.com. These pay out recurring commissions which are definitely a good idea for affiliates. With recurring commission products, you can make more from fewer sales!

High ticket commissions are available on Clickbank.com too and these are a good idea. However in a competitive niche it’s more difficult to sell. Here’s one in the niche of trading, a well subscribed and heavily competitive niche:

See the number in the top right on the picture above? $2,528.43? That represents the average commission earned per conversion including up-sells, recurring commissions, order bumps and re-bills. See below:

This means you don’t earn that money when you make a sale right away. It includes all the subscriptions products and up-sells which typically come in later if your customer sticks around. But what if there was a way to earn these kinds of commissions from a single sale?

Better That Clickbank – High Ticket Products

Most affiliates will choose a Clickbank product which sells for around $100 – since that’s most of their inventory. This means they make only $40 on a sale. Unless they choose to sell recurring income products, they’ll need to make sale after sale to make their affiliate business profitable. This can be tough, especially when your profit is only $40 per sale. It means if you use paid advertising you’ll need to spend less that that per sale to be profitable.

But with high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn $500+ on a sale, giving you larger room for finding a profitable ad campaign. Some products offer both high ticket and recurring income too, which gives you far more scope to be profitable when running paid ads.

Here’s a few high ticket products you can find on a site called Hammacher Schlemmer:

Hammacher.com pays 8% to affiliates which means the Mini Monster Truck could make you a cool $14,800 commission for a single sale! There’s many other high value products on the site too which could earn you over $10,000 for a single sale:

Better Than Clickbank – High Ticket Digital Products

Of course not everyone is in the market for a Killer Whale Submarine worth $90,000! Most people I expect would pay off their mortgage with this kind of money. But with an international audience it pays to think big! As an affiliate you have the power to sell to anyone online!

High ticket digital products are much more relevant in today’s marketplace for a larger audience. Although some people will be buying a $90K submarine, many more are looking to build digital businesses so they can escape their employment grind and work for themselves online. Consider how many struggling affiliates are out there compared to billionaires looking for submarines!

This is why high ticket digital business courses offer one of the best opportunities for affiliates. Here’s a run down of some of the commission structure for online business training:

Learn more about this product range and build an online business from scratch here.

Better Than Clickbank – Business Tools

Some of the best products to promote online are business tools used by affiliates themselves. Think about it. You’re more than likely to maintain your membership with a business tool such as an autoresponder, especially if you’re business becomes profitable.

With such a tool you can also benefit from recurring commissions. So a single sale can generate months and even years or decades worth of commissions.

aweber - business tools offer recurring commissions — Get the Aweber autoresponder here.

There’s tonnes of business tools available for affiliates to promote which include products such as:

Aweber – autoresponder
Convertri– landing page builder
Hosting providers – for website hosting
SEM Rush – SEO Tool for website builders and affiliates

See also subscription affiliate programs for more of these types of products.

Summary

So there’s a tonne of products out there which are better than Clickbank! That’s not to say Clickbank isn’t the right choice for you. Your success as an affiliate doesn’t only depend on the product you promote but also on your method of promotion.

Ideally find a product which is suitable for you to promote which you have some connection to. It’s tough promoting products you don’t believe in because there’s a disconnection there; a lack of integrity. It’s also much more difficult sustaining the necessary effort promoting something you have no interest in.

So your choice of product is pretty important as an affiliate. See also best niche for affiliate marketing.

By choosing products you align with which also offer recurring commissions and high ticket commissions, you give yourself a greater chance of success with affiliate marketing.

Access an online training and mentoring program for affiliates here.

What Is A Funnel In Affiliate Marketing?

What is a funnel in affiliate marketing? A funnel is the term used for the process of capturing a potential customer and sending them on a customer journey through to an affiliate product. A sales funnel begins with a marketing “engine” where people are sent through to a landing page from an advert. On a landing page, a visitor’s email is captured and they begin the process of a marketing campaign. This campaign is designed to ultimately sell an affiliate product.

The funnel looks something like this in concept, an upside down cone shape. As a visitor clicks on an advert they come through to a landing page. Here’s an example of a landing page designed for a particular need:

Once a visitor enters their details into the landing page, they will automatically receive an email follow up. This email is the beginning of the marketing campaign which is used for the process of selling affiliate products online.

What Is A Funnel In Affiliate Marketing: Follow Up

The funnel starts with an offer on an advert, and this is usually also shown on the landing page for congruence. This offer will relate to the end product but also to a need which is fulfilled through the free giveaway. In the above landing page, the giveaway is a free video series. This is often called a “lead magnet” and it is used in exchange for the visitor handing over their email so they can receive email messages.

The subscriber will then receive information relating to their interest in a number of email follow ups. Over the course of several messages, they will also be shown a product. Usually this product is an “entry level” item.

Once someone in the funnel makes a purchase, they can be offered other related products which offer greater value. As an affiliate your job is to find suitable subscribers to send into your sales funnel. The follow up process is automated to provide value and sell affiliate products.

Follow up messages can be send over a long period of time. Often for weeks or even months and years. Email messages are used to build trust and send out value to help subscribers with a specific need or problem.

TripWire Funnel

A tripwire funnel refers to an offer which is triggered by the sale of another product. So when a subscriber buys something, another product is automatically offered to them.

The further down the funnel a subscriber goes in terms of product, the more expensive the products become. This allows affiliates to pitch products at customers who are most likely to be interested in them, and avoid trying to sell to those not ready to buy.

As subscribers move through the funnel, they might make purchases according to their needs and understanding of your product range. So initially the email messages are designed to increase their awareness and interest in what you have to sell.

Why Use A Funnel In Affiliate Marketing

Many affiliates simply sent customers directly to products through their affiliate links. But a funnel is much better because it allows them to build a more long term relationship with their subscribers. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. But once inside a funnel, they are given many more opportunities to buy.

Subscribers can make a buying decision even months or years after joining an email list and entering the sales funnel.

As an affiliate, if you’re paying for advertising, it’s much more cost effective to send visitors to a landing page where you can collect their details and follow up.

Learn more and build your own funnel here.

Summary

A funnel in affiliate marketing is the process of sending potential customers into a email marketing campaign from a landing page. From there, they receive a number of automated messages helping them with a particular problem and recommending certain products which may be of help.

Once they purchase a product, they may be offered another product, triggered by the sale. This is known as a tripwire funnel, where a sale triggers another offer.

A sales funnel is useful for affiliates because it allows them to build a longer term relationship with potential customers by offering them useful information and helping them with a particular problem. Most online consumers will require multiple touch points before buying something. A sales funnel gives them this and allows affiliates a greater length of time to make a sale.

How To Earn From Blog Writing

If you’re wondering how to earn from blog writing, this one’s for you! There’s a couple of main ways to earn from a blog. You can monetise a blog with your own business, if you have one, a product you own, or with affiliate marketing or advertising. So if you have nothing of your own to sell, you can sell other people’s products (affiliate marketing) or use ads on your blog and earn a percentage of advertising revenue.

The main problem for bloggers though isn’t necessarily the monetisation. It’s the traffic. With over 600 million blogs on the internet there’s a huge amount of competition. So getting your blog found among the noise is not easy. Most bloggers will start out with zero traffic unless they have some kind of following already from somewhere else. If you’re starting from scratch, as most new bloggers will be, you’ll need to create a lot of content to start getting traction.

Depending on your blog niche, it can take months or even years to build up your traffic and start getting followers. That’s even before we talk about monetising your blog. So in the first instance, choosing your topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – Your Niche

“Choose a profitable niche” is often the advice you’ll hear when it comes to blogging. But that could be many niches and profit only comes after you’ve built up your blog and started generating traffic and sales/ad clicks. So it’s worth looking at what is meant by “a profitable niche”.

What is a profitable niche? A profitable niche is one in which you can generate sales and make a profit. With blogging, your traffic is going to come from multiple sources and mostly for free. Ideally it will come from the search engines (Google, etc.) but also you’ll want to find other methods of finding visitors such as social media, email marketing and perhaps even some paid marketing.

Your niche needs to be something you align with and have at least an interest in, if not a passion for. That’s because it’s going to take some time generating content on a regular basis over the course of months and even years. If you can’t imaging doing this in your chosen topic, then it’s probably not the niche for you.

The other advice which is often handed out is “choose a topic you love”. If you love your topic you’ll work much harder on it and for longer. But you also need to align your topic with some kind of monetisation strategy. See also choosing your blog niche.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – Monetising A Blog

Let’s say you’ve spent the last 6 months creating some awesome content in your niche and have built up a fair few daily visitors from the search engines. How are you going to make money from these people?

Without anything of your own to sell the two main options are affiliate marketing and advertising. With advertising you place code on your site which converts to adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn a share of ad revenue. Adsense is one program you can use for this but there are others. With this method of monetisation, you’ll usually only earn tiny amounts for each click on your ad space. This means you need a huge volume of traffic (and free traffic) to make this profitable.

With affiliate marketing you can earn more, but only with the right products and if you make the sales. So you might even test different strategies out to see which works best. But to see any meaningful results you’re going to need traffic first. So it’s best to start out with your monetisation methods in mind before you start out. Otherwise you could waste a lot of time blogging only to realise you’re not going to make any money from it.

To monetise a blog with affiliate marketing, you need to find a product which aligns with your topic which you can sell on your site.

Turning Visitors Into Sales

To turn blog visitors into customers you need to:

Get them to your site through content creation – blogging, blog promotion, etc.
Get them to sign up to your email list – offer some free giveaway on your site
Offer them value through your email messages – built trust
Promote your product – sell an affiliate product

Most visitors don’t buy from a new website they have just landed on. Purchases online are often made after a number of touch points with a product or service. Amazon might be the exception here because they have built up trust with so many people over the years. But a new website is different, the visitor doesn’t know you. How many touch points does it take to make a sale? This depends on a number of factors but you can gain your visitors trust by offering them something for free in exchange for their email address.

Then make sure you continue to build trust by sending out useful and informative emails which help them somehow with a particular problem. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy. But also an email marketing campaign gives you the opportunity of putting your products in front of your visitors more regularly and giving them continuity. More “touch points” and trust equals more sales.

How To Earn From Blog Writing – SEO

SEO is an important part of blog writing and it means Search Engine Optimisation. To get more traffic to your blog means writing with the search engines in mind so that Google ( and other search engines) can appropriately index your content and rank your articles/site appropriately on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages. Get an article to the top of Google for one of your search terms and your traffic can make a sudden leap upwards.

But since there’s so much competition online for blogging, you’ll likely not achieve this immediately. You’ll need to build some trust with Google first by creating some quality content on a regular basis and over a long period of time. This can be a frustrating period and you shouldn’t rely on the search engines entirely for your results. Make sure you promote your articles and give them the respect they deserve with your own promotion methods.

You can do this in a number of ways such as through setting up automated blog post sharing on social media and placing social media share buttons on your site. You can also use SEO tools to help you rank content on the SERPS. See best blog plugins for WordPress for a list of useful plugins for bloggers.

Choosing Long Tail Keywords In Your Niche

As a new blogger, you probably won’t get your articles ranked for the best keywords in your niche. After all, with over 600 million blogs on the internet, you’ll have some stiff competition and many of them have been around for years. But still, it’s a good idea to look at Google’s keyword planner for ideas for blog post titles. This will show you other keywords which are already being searched for on Google.

The best keywords have a huge amount of monthly searches and of course it would be nice to see all that traffic on your site! But unfortunately those keywords are well catered for with older domains which have huge authority with Google (and thousands of backlinks).

But the “low hanging fruit” of long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty are your chance to get your content ranking more easily. While there’s no guarantees with ranking your content, you have a much better chance if you aim at the keywords which are less competitive. To find them you can scroll through Google’s keyword planner and look for long tail keywords with less traffic.

Write quality articles for these terms and of course use a good SEO plugin (such as Yoast SEO) to help you.

Summary

Blog writing can be a great way to earn a living. But there’s a lot of other blogs out there to compete against. To give yourself the best chance of success with blogging, choose a topic you can write about for an unlimited amount of time! Many bloggers will quit when they don’t make any money. So your best opportunity is to find a niche which you would love to write about, whether or not it makes you any money!

“The person who loves walking will walk further than the person who wants the destination”.

The same applies to blogging. If you love what you do, you’ll go the extra mile. If not, you’ll likely give up before you get the traction you desire. You also need to align your passion with a suitable affiliate product in order to make money from blogging. See also what are the best affiliate products to promote.

How To Make Money Sending Emails

Wondering how to make money sending emails? Most people don’t know that they can make money through sending email messages. All you need is an email autoresponder and an affiliate product to promote. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission. With enough sales and enough email subscribers on your list, you can automate sales from a growing global audience.

Here’s a little more about how all this works.

How To Make Money Sending Emails – Affiliate Marketing

If you didn’t know about a business model called affiliate marketing, let me explain. It’s a referral based business model in which third parties refer customers to products and services available online. You don’t need any of your own products to become an affiliate marketer and you can join many programs completely for free.

Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once inside the back office, you can get an affiliate link and promote any of thousands of products from Amazon. If you make a sale through your affiliate link, Amazon pays you a commission based on the sale.

How To Make Money Sending Emails – Email Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the simplest business model you can use to promote almost anything you can find for sale online. Join the associated affiliate program, grab a link and start promoting. One of the simplest ways to promote affiliate links is through email marketing. Anyone can learn how to do email marketing and all you need is an email autoresponder and somewhere to collect subscribers from – such as a website or landing page.

Place a form on a website with a simple piece of code, and hey presto, you have a means to collect email addresses from a website.

How To Make Money Sending Emails – Landing Pages

Here’s an example of a landing page where I collect subscribers who join my email list:

Landing pages are web pages specifically set up for the purpose of collecting email subscribers. They’re much better to help you make money with an email list than a normal website. On a normal website, there’s lot of options but on a landing page there’s only two: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to optimise their landing page for the most amount of subscribers at the smallest cost.

On a website you can browse around and look at a lot of content. Most visitors will leave within a few minutes never to return. Since it takes several touch points for online website visitors to make buying decisions, it’s much better to get them on an email list, especially if you’re paying for visitors.

How To Make Money Sending Emails – The Ad Platform

To find suitable visitors to join your email list, you’ll need to actively send website visitors to your landing page. This can be done through organic traffic or paid traffic. The fastest way to do it is through using a paid marketing platform. With paid for platforms you put ads in front of your target audience – the people most likely to want your product.

They click on the ads and that takes them to your landing page where you collect the email details. To do this successfully, you obviously need to offer something valuable, otherwise nobody would give away their content credentials! This is known as the lead magnet!

Once inside the email list, subscribers become “leads”. You then send email messages to your list of leads automatically with a pre-written queue of regular email messages. Messages should be designed to help subscribers with a particular problem while recommending certain products and services for them to buy.

How To Make Money Sending Emails – The Lead Magnet

The lead magnet is the information you offer as a “legitimate bribe” to encourage your visitors to opt in to your email list. It can be an ebook, a video series or a newsletter but it should be targeted towards your perfect customer avatar or target audience.

A good lead magnet will attract a specific audience which is aligned with the products you will promote through your email marketing campaign. So for example, I promote online business tools and training resources for the complete beginner. One of my ebooks is this one: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners:

A good lead magnet attracts a congruent audience which is aligned with your affiliate product.

The Affiliate Product/s

Of course to make money sending emails you need to sell something to your email list. This is the affiliate product you choose to promote. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from. Ideally choose a product you love and have some interest in outside of the obvious financial motivation. That way, you can create email messages which relay the value of what you’re promoting more ethically and authentically.

With a product you have an interest in, you can also build an authority website which can give you a free traffic source to your landing page. In a subject you have no interest in, this can be more difficult.

Any product which is connected to an affiliate program can be sold for a commission. Find online products and services in almost any area. Just do a simple online search for “{your subject} affiliate program” and you should find products to promote.

Different Affiliate Products

There’s many different types of affiliate products you can promote and not all of them pay the same. For example, physical products will typically pay between 1% and 10% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of low priced items to make a good amount of money. If you choose higher priced items, you can sell fewer items and still make more money. High ticket affiliate products allow you to sell a single item and make thousands of dollars from each sale. (see image below).

Digital products can be sold through email marketing too. They typically pay much more that physical products too. Digital products will pay from around 30%-40% and sometimes more. You can find many digital products on a site called Clickbank.com.

Subscription affiliate products are a good idea too. They will pay recurring commissions. So a single sale can give you a regular income. Products such as online business tools are vital for running online businesses. They are therefore good to promote for affiliates because affiliates will continue to receive monthly recurring commissions for the lifetime of the customer they have referred.

Generate Value Through Email Messages

One of the best ways to generate affiliate sales through email marketing is through offering a valuable service through your emails which is connected to the products you can promote. The more value you can offer your email subscribers over a longer time period, the more likely they will get to know, like and trust you through your emails.

When this happens, and if your product/s meet their needs, you have a much better chance of selling to them. As your email list grows over time, you can build up a subscriber base into the hundreds of thousands. Messages can be pre-written and automated too.

Ultimately, making money through email messages can be one of the easiest and simplest ways to make money. There is work upfront which needs to be done but through using automated tools and software, anyone can learn this style of online selling.

Access a step by step course which gives you everything you need to set up your own online email marketing business from scratch here.

Affiliate Marketing Beginners Income

What does affiliate marketing beginners income look like? As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’re going to need to put a lot of groundwork in before you can earn anything. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model and no earnings can be guaranteed. So initially you won’t earn anything as a beginner.

However, once you figure out a method of selling an affiliate product, your income can increase quite dramatically and fairly quickly; especially if you focus on using scalable marketing tactics and promote high ticket and subscription products.

Here’s a graph showing statistics from around the world of affiliate marketers income. As you can see, most affiliates earn below $10k a year. As a beginner, you should expect to spend some time learning how to sell affiliate products before you can see any tangible results from your efforts.

Statistics for affiliate marketers around the world: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304867/affiliate-annual-revenue-marketing-efforts-worldwide/

Affiliate Marketing Beginners Income – Your First Sale

As a beginner in affiliate marketing one of your first priorities is to make your first sale online. This is a massive achievement. Once you have done it, you know it can be done and you can repeat this success. This is extremely beneficial to your belief. Since affiliate marketing is performance based, and you don’t get paid unless you make a sale, it can be frustrating for new affiliates getting their affiliate business “off the blocks”. If they don’t really trust the process or believe it can be done, they are more likely to quit, before they have any evidence that it works!

This is also the stage where you’re learning. You’ll need to put some time and effort in before you can reap the rewards. Sadly around 95% of new affiliates will quit in this time. That’s often because they have not seen anything for their efforts. But during the learning phase of affiliate marketing you’ll need to put a lot of effort in for sometimes no financial rewards.

The reward is there, even if it’s not a financial one. If you can see your “failures” as learning experiences, you can use them to move forward. If not you’re more likely to quit.

Affiliate Marketing Beginners Income – Belief and Effort

Belief in what you’re doing and your efforts are intricately related. If you’re uncertain of your direction or the viability of your business, you are less likely to work hard and give it your all! This is why the first sale is so important. Armed with the knowledge that affiliate marketing does actually work, and that you have made a small success, you know for sure you can repeat this success. This is hugely motivational and when you see more sales coming in from your efforts, you’re more encouraged to do the work.

But when you’re new to affiliate marketing you are likely to be full of doubt and fear. You don’t know the right steps to take and this uncertainty can lead to procrastination. This state of being certainly doesn’t lead to your being proactive in your affiliate business. You’re much more likely to quit at this stage.

Belief leads to action which leads to feedback. So if you don’t believe you can make affiliate marketing work, you’re not going to put in the work. When you are hugely motivated and have evidence that it works yourself, you’re going to do more of what works. As a beginner you don’t have this knowledge or this belief.

Scalable Strategies And Products

There’s many directions you can take as an affiliate. Depending on your particular circumstances and preferences, you could choose a number of different tactics. Blogging, paid marketing, email marketing, social media and video marketing are all tactics used by affiliate marketers to sell affiliate products.

High ticket items give you much larger commissions as an affilite

Blogging can take some time and paid marketing strategies are much more scalable. That is, you can reach a wider audience more quickly if you use paid marketing. With paid marketing, once you are profitable you can more easily scale up by increasing your budget.

To use paid marketing strategies though you’ll need a profitable business model and one of the best ways to do this is through the use of high ticket products and recurring income products.

Summary

An affiliate marketing beginners income always starts at zero! As a beginner you only start making money when you start making affiliate sales. This can take some time and effort and everyone has a different experience according to their marketing strategy and products they choose to sell.

As you start generating sales your income can go up quite quickly if you’re using paid marketing and building an email list.

This will also depend on the products you promote too. High ticket products pay more than most and subscription products give you a recurring income. The most profitable digital products are often business related training and education courses. These are a good choice if you want to maximise the potential of your efforts.

If you’re interested in starting out in an affiliate business, access a training course here.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money?

Is affiliate marketing a good way to make money? While it can take some time initially to set up an affiliate income, ultimately you can earn passively from your affiliate links once you have established a traffic source and learn how to generate sales. It is this initial setup time where many affiliates drop out. This is a shame because affiliate marketing can be used to replace an income from a job and free up your time. But expect to work at it for some time before this can happen.

Is affiliate marketing a good way to make money? Most people make money by trading their time for it in a job. But this means if you stop working you stop getting paid. With affiliate marketing instead of trading time for money, you are setting up systems which sell products online instead. Once you have learned how to automate and scale these systems, you can generate money almost completely automatically!

But this requires some setup first and belief in what you’re doing too! If you’re unsure whether your going to make any money from affiliate marketing, it can be difficult to continue when you don’t see the results yet!

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money – Business Vs. Employment

Making money in affiliate marketing is done through the referral of products and services, mostly online. Affiliates are third party referrers who only get paid when a product is sold through their affiliate link. So initially there’s some time which affiliates should spend learning their craft. You can’t skip this phase and become a successful affiliate.

95% of affiliates will quit during this phase because they don’t see immediate results from their efforts. But if they would only continue and use their “failures” as stepping stones, they would eventually see the bigger picture. Once you have made a sale online as an affiliate marketer, you have essentially figured out how to automate your income! Initially though it might cost you $100 to make just $1 in commission. But once you figure out how to make $100 from only spending $50, you can move on to generate any income you want from affiliate marketing.

This is by no means easy and this is why so many people struggle with affiliate marketing.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Good Way To Make Money – Blogging

You don’t have to spend money to make money with affiliate marketing. However, the less you spend, the more time you’ll likely be spending on content creation. Blogging is a form of content creation in which the affiliates creates content for their potential customers on a website.

As people visit their content, they can offer up affiliate products to their visitors. Over time with enough content and visitors, you can start to see sales coming in, even when you’re not working. This is very nice when it happens but it can be a long time after you have started.

Bloggers can spend months creating content to attract an audience. In a competitive topic, it can even take years to attract the volume of visitors required to make a consistent income from selling affiliate products.

Still, blogging can work wonders and it’s a cheap way of generate sales online if you’re an affiliate. You can work on your own schedule and around existing work, as with other forms of affiliate marketing. Ultimately affiliates create systems which sell products online around the clock, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Once this is working, bringing in money, it’s hard to compete with it through trading time for money in a job. But before that can happen there’s a lot of work which needs to be done.

Summary

So, if affiliate marketing a good way to make money? If you’re prepared to roll your sleeves up and build an affiliate business then yes, affiliate marketing is a great way to earn money. Once you have built online systems and strategies for attracting traffic and making sales, they can happen automatically.

You can make sales in your sleep. But before this can happen there’s a lot to be done. Whether you’re running paid ads or building content, it takes time to learn the ropes of affiliate marketing. There’s a large drop out rate of around 95% so don’t go into affiliate marketing thinking it’s plain sailing! There’s definitely work involved upfront.

But ultimately you can generate a passive income from affiliate marketing from your previous efforts. This doesn’t happen in a job and although in a job you get paid immediately, you still need to keep turning up for work or you don’t get paid. With affiliate marketing your systems can continue working for you, even after you stop. So you can make sales automatically and without having to turn up to work!

If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing you can access an online program here.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn?

If you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate you may be wondering “is affiliate marketing easy to learn?” Affiliate marketing is definitely not easy and you should expect to take some time to learn the ropes. At first you will need to learn some kind of marketing strategy. Depending on the strategy you choose, it can take weeks or months to get traction.

For example, one of the fastest ways to get traction as an affiliate marketer is through the use of paid advertising. With a large advertising budget and some high ticket products to sell, your affiliate journey can be shorter. But there’s still a huge learning curve and this will take some serious effort.

Most people come into affiliate marketing because they’re looking for more money, so they don’t necessarily have a large budget for advertising. If that’s the case for you, you may want to look at other, less expensive advertising options, such as blogging. Blogging is very much slower than paid marketing and although you can see some great results through blogging, you should expect this to take some time and effort too.

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means your new blog probably won’t get a huge amount of visitors easily. You’ll need to learn how to promote your blog and how to write blog posts with the search engines in mind so they get found.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn? PPC Vs Organic Marketing

PPC (or Pay Per Click) advertising is the easiest method if you want your affiliate journey to be faster. With paid marketing you can set up an advert and get traffic to a website within hours. With content creation (e.g. blogging), it can take months before results of your efforts can be seen. This can be disheartening for beginners and many will quit. There’s only a small success rate in affiliate marketing of around 5%. This further suggests that affiliate marketing is not easy.

Even with paid advertising campaigns, you’ll need to test and measure different ads to find a winner. Once you do, paid marketing can easily be scaled up. Simply turn up your budget. With blogging this isn’t possible and it’s much less scalable. So ideally choose a marketing method which suits your personality. If you’re not incredibly patient, blogging probably isn’t the route for you!

However, paid advertising incurs more costs and you’ll need a good product to make a profit while running paid ads. Expect to run ads which don’t work while you find your feet. Again, this can be tough and you likely won’t hit a winner on your first outing.

Is Affiliate Marketing Easy To Learn?

The up side is that if you are a patient person and determined to succeed with affiliate marketing, there can be great rewards. With content marketing, you can earn money passively from content you created previously. Paid advertising can give you a globally scalable business quite quickly once you’ve put in the groundwork.

But you should expect to put in this work if you’re going to be anywhere near successful as an affiliate. With a 95% drop out rate, you can see that it’s not or everyone and it’c certainly not as easy as some make out.

The people making it out to be easy are usually those who are also promoting a program! So it’s buyer beware! Programs only offer education (and often products to sell too). They don’t guarantee you anything in terms of earnings. Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model which means you only get paid when you make those sales. In the early months as an affiliate this can be hard, because you can put in a lot of work for what seems like nothing in return. But think of this as your foundations and you will have more chance of success.

Summary

Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t easy and you should expect to put in several months of work before you have a chance of earning from it, as a minimum. You may of course get lucky and make an easy sale, or even more! But perpetuating this trend is much harder than landing a “one off” sale, for which you did little work.

Affiliate marketing is a globally scalable business model which can produce some great rewards. If you treat it seriously as a real business, you can earn some serious money from it. Treat it like a part time hobby and you’ll earn a hobby income from it!

Access a training resource to get started here.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

Is it possible to make money with affiliate marketing? It’s entirely possible yes. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties promote other people’s products for a share of the profit, mostly online. Once you join an affiliate program, you get a unique link which identifies you as an affiliate for the program. Your job is to promote that link in any way you known how to send customers through. Once someone buys through your link, you make money.

The most difficult aspect of affiliate marketing is to find a method of selling through your affiliate link in large quantity. Once you figure out how to sell an item once, you can repeat the sale many times with different customers. Since there’s a global audience at your fingertips online, you can promote to pretty much anyone who is online.

Affiliates get to know who to place their links in front of – what is known as their target audience. This is the thin slice of the online marketplace who are most likely to want your product. Once you learn how to place your affiliate links in front of your target audience en-mass, you can sell thousands of products and make money from each sale.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? How Affiliates Make Sales

Affiliate marketers make sales in a number of ways by placing their affiliate links in front of potential customers. They attract an audience online through using various strategies such as:

Blogging – writing content on a website or blog platform
Video blogging – uploading content to YouTube or TikTok
Email marketing – affiliates build huge email lists of subscribers and promote their products out to their list
Paid ads – There’s a variety of ad platforms online such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube.
Social media platforms – there’s also various other methods of advertising including paid and unpaid social media marketing.

You can choose to promote almost any product you can find online too, as an affiliate. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can promote that product for a share of revenue.

One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon’s. Amazon is a trusted website and has thousands of products to choose from. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and make money from product promotion if they can generate sales.

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing?

So yes, it’s entirely possible to make money with affiliate marketing. However, it’s not easy and many affiliates will quit. In fact there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing with only around 5% of affiliates sticking with it to make a regular income. But it’s also a very available business model which can be found by anyone with a laptop and internet connection. The low barriers to entry means that anyone can “give it a go”. This, in part can explain why there’s such a high failure rate in affiliate marketing.

You can join an affiliate program for free, and start promoting your link. No other business model is so cheap and easily available for the masses. But the catch is that this also means there’s a huge amount of people attempting to sell online too. Other affiliates can flood the market and this means there’s a lot of market noise of other promoting the same products as you!

As the business model gets more popular, this also means more competition online from other affiliates. But many will drop out when they don’t see immediate success. So if you stick at it your chances of success are far greater than the rest!

Is It Possible To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Stick At It And Get Help

I started out learning affiliate marketing over 10 years ago and had a heap of problems. The main difficulty is in marketing. There’s two main ways you can market a product online; using either paid marketing methods or content generation.

Since there’s so much content online (over 600 million blogs for a start) this means there’s huge competition for content marketing. But there’s many platforms to choose from such as YouTube, Google, Linkedin, Facebook and all the rest. Plus, there’s many different products to choose from too. So if you’re able to find a niche which is relatively uncompetitive, your chances of success are greater.

Your job as an affiliate is to figure out how to sell other people’s products through your affiliate link. Once you do it once, you can do it many times. Ultimately affiliate marketing can give you a passive income, particularly if you choose to sell subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions.

Training – The Best Investment You’ll Make As An Affiliate

Getting some help, support and training is the best investment you can make as an affiliate. Consider it an investment in the foundations of your “sky scraper” affiliate business. Without strong foundations, your business will likely crumble.

If you want to make a few sales here and there as an affiliate, you might make some extra cash on the side. But affiliate marketing can be used as a vehicle to build huge six, seven and even eight figure businesses on. If you go about it in the right way, affiliate marketing can replace your existing income and set you up for life!

Access a training resource and get help and support in building a from scratch affiliate business here.