AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Modern Wealthy Review

Here’s my Modern Wealthy review. I’ve been an affiliate for some time now and I met Stuart Ross, creator of the Modern Wealthy course in 2014. Back then, he and his business partner Jay Kubassek created an online mentorship program called the SFM (Six Figure Mentors) which helped aspiring entrepreneurs break into the digital marketing space with software, business tools and of course products to sell.

More recently Stuart created “Modern Wealthy”. This is a course for anyone wanting to learn online marketing or build their own online business from scratch.

The Modern Wealthy training can be accessed for $37. Click here to access it.

Stuart is going to explain and walk you through….

Profitable businesses modules
Six-figure niches
Email marketing
Multiple income streams
Authority marketing secrets
Autopilot traffic, sales & Income.

You will also get the Modern wealthy E-book along with access to the FB group, plus the affiliate marketing 101 and e-commerce 101 bonus courses.

So If you watch the 7 videos. Read the book, and work through the bonuses. You have ALL the information required to go away, take action and become successful with marketing online. There really is no information left out at all. It’s all there.

How you choose to use that information will of course determine your success with any online venture. Don’t get confused with a course providing information and a “done for you system” which this definitely isn’t; although you can use products and services within the course to earn commissions based on what you sell (more on affiliate marketing later in this article).

Modern Wealthy Review; Earnings Disclaimer

Having taken several online courses myself including spending some time on Stuart and Jay’s previous courses and trainings, I can say that Modern Wealthy is an absolute bargain for a beginner (or a novice) wanting to learn how to set up and market a business online. You’ll get far more value than you pay at your $37 price tag, assuming it remains at that price which I highly doubt!

Still, there’s a caveat to all online training and education courses. It remains a factor that needs to be mentioned. While many can see that their online success is based on their own efforts, there are still some who have an entitlement attitude when it comes to online courses. So if you think this is some “get rich quick” scheme which requires no work for success, you’re definitely mistaken.

Personally Stuart has always been clear on this which is what attracted me to his trainings several years ago. Before I met Stuart, I tried many online courses which promised the moon in terms of earnings. They all let me down!

Stuart definitely doesn’t do this and is careful to always state that earnings are never guaranteed.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Earnings from affiliate marketing are based on your own efforts and the strategies and tactics you employ to sell other people’s products online. The affiliate model is a great one especially if you have nothing of your own to sell or promote. But you still need to actually sell an affiliate product in order to make any money from it! This can be difficult, especially when you’re starting out. There’s all kinds of things which stand in your way. Mostly the lack of knowledge is the largest hurdle.

Having already done quite a bit of training on affiliate marketing, I went through the training in Modern Wealthy to refresh my memory and perhaps learn something I was missing.

I found many pearls of wisdom in Stuarts videos and course materials. They helped me personally with building my own affiliate business and identify areas which I needed further work and development. Things which I had forgotten or neglected. Having a firm grounding in the fundamental principles of online marketing is the bedrock to building a solid online business. Stuart is the best person to share these insights because he knows them so well and is great at articulating them.

Should You Invest In Modern Wealthy?

The Modern Wealthy is for serious people who want to learn how to build an online business, or further grow their own business using online marketing strategies. Before I found Stuart, I was attempting to build a martial arts school and massively struggling. The training helped me build my school alongside building a affiliate business.

training an education for online marketers

I was able to learn various strategies. These included things like Facebook advertising, blogging and YouTube strategies. I continue to learn an invest in my education because I’m committed to the journey of becoming a more effective marketer. If you’re looking for another way to build an income, and are prepared to put the work in, this course might be suitable for you. Whatever your reasoning, I would recommend investing in your knowledge of online marketing. The future is uncertain for many industries and sectors. Online marketing is here to stay!

Access The Modern Wealthy here and please sign up to my email list for further information on affiliate marketing and the various marketing strategies available.

I’ve been through the Modern Wealthy program and this is my genuine Modern Wealthy review. Still, it’s not for everyone I suppose but if you’re genuine about building an income online this is a great starting place to build your knowledge and get further help if required.

Disclaimer: *I am an affiliate for this program and if you do purchase through my links I will receive a commission based on the sales I make.

Modern Wealthy Review – Update 2026

It’s been a while since I wrote this review initially and I thought I’d add an update. Stuart has massively updated and revamped the program over the last few years and I still haven’t caught up with all the training in there. The latest revamp includes an AI program which helps you get very clear on your intention for building an online business.

This is a very user friendly step by step which helps you walk through the process of building your perfect business, whatever that means for you. Since everyone is different, Stuart emphasises that finding your core values is one of the most important things to make things work with any business.

I would say this is something I massively misunderstood and underestimated when I originally came to start out as an affiliate. I went back through the training again, even though I had done it already and learned a bunch of new things from it.

One of the main things was customer avatar. This is the precise definition of your “perfect” customer.

Using The Training For My Kung Fu School

I used the step by step training to better understand how my advertising was misaligned when it came to building my kung fu school. To bring in the right people to any business it requires identifying the people (or segment of people) who can benefit most from your business or product, who most want it and who can afford to pay for it.

I struggled for a long time trying to build my school. Revisiting the training, and in particular learning more about leading your customers through the right steps, has been massive for my school over the last couple of years.

Using Facebook I managed to attract the right students with a purpose led advert and using a landing page and email follow up – the exact way Stuart teaches in his program to build an online business.

So, even though I haven’t become a massively successful affiliate with modern wealthy, I have made sales. The upsells and membership products mean you can earn quite quickly once you get a winning advert, although this takes time, understanding and testing.

Aligning Values

One theme which reoccurs throughout Stuarts training is that of authenticity. When you are authentic, you attract the right people naturally, and it’s fun. When you are misaligned, or aren’t enjoying the process, it is much harder. If you attempt to build a business which isn’t aligned with purpose, values and your mission, it is much more likely to fail. With a well aligned business, you are much more likely to stay the course and keep working on it, even when things aren’t going smoothly.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory

Selling products online without inventory can be done in a number of ways:

Drop shipping – sell another company’s products and ship them directly to the customer
Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products and services through a unique tracking link online
Shopify store – can be set up with a simple plugin to directly link to existing drop shipping/affiliate products
POD – Print On Demand – printing T-shits and clothing on demand with specific logos and designs.
Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) – Products are handled and shipped by Amazon fulfilment centres.
Sell Digital Products – With a digital product, you can automate the sale online. No need to handle or ship products yourself. You can also find other people’s digital products which you can sell (affiliate marketing).
MLM – Multi-level marketing is a business model in which people recruit other sellers and earn a percentage of their profit.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory

While there are certain business models which can help you sell online without products of your own, many of these services will charge a premium for their assistance. Some will only charge a percentage of what you earn and some can be done without a charge, (other than your marketing efforts). Of all these different business models my favourite is affiliate marketing for a number of reasons:

You don’t need your own products with affiliate marketing
Choose from a number of products available online
There’s multiple affiliate programs you can join and thousands of products you can choose from

Like all other methods of selling online, there’s always a catch! Affiliate marketing like drop shipping, or Print On Demand or a Shopify store will all require you to market your website/product. Marketing is therefore the key skill you will need to learn in order to be profitable with most of these methods.

While many business models will work and become profitable with the right amount of customers, it’s still your job to find those customers and websites don’t serve themselves. You must learn how to send the right customers to your products to generate sales. Even if you’re not having to fulfil those product deliveries yourself.

Selling Products Online Without Inventory: Traffic To A Website

Setting up a website to sell something is the easy part, whether you use a Shopify Store, the drop shipping or affiliate marketing business models. Once your store is set up, it has the potential to sell products to its visitors. However, that is only the potential store and you’ll need to find a strategy for sending targeted website traffic to your store if you want to make any sales.

To do this there are a few different strategies:

Paid traffic – is the fastest method to get people to your online store. Pay per click according to your marketing budget.
Organic traffic – is another way you can attain an audience for your online store. This requires you to create content and work on your SEO – search engine optimisation so you can attain free traffic from the search engines.
Social media is another option for finding potential customers to send to your website and there are paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.

Whatever methods you choose for your marketing strategy has a huge impact on your success. With paid marketing you can get traffic quickly. But with organic marketing it can take much longer and is much less scalable.

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of building an income online through selling someone else’s products/services. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once joined you can choose any products from Amazon to promote from a website. Or, use your affiliate link to promote products anywhere online.

Amazon though is not the best payer in terms of affiliate products. There are far more lucrative products to choose from. High ticket affiliate products and subscription products for example are the best payers. A high ticket affiliate product will typically pay $500 and above per sale. Subscription products are good for affiliates because they pay out recurring commissions. So a single sale can bring in monthly commissions for potentially years to come; especially if you choose valuable products which are necessary for business, for example.

An example of a good digital product to sell is Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder and it’s useful for online business owners.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing

Want a landing page for affiliate marketing? Landing pages are pages specifically designed to capture email addresses. They only have two options for visitors. They can sign up to your email list, or leave the page. Websites on the other hand have many options for visitors.

On this website, you can browse around, look through my blog posts and access a bunch of free resources. But on a landing page visitors either leave or sign up – that’s it! There’s good reason for this and it means you can more effectively drive your traffic into your email list.

Why build an email list? Simple. If you send traffic to an ordinary website there’s a lot greater chance your visitors will leave without making a purchase of anything, never to return. If you’re paying for those visitors, (which you are one way or another; either with time creating content or with paid ads), you’re losing potential customers.

Once you get a website visitor to subscribe to your email list, you can follow up and build a relationship by giving them value through your messages. But on a website, they only have a few minutes and most of them leave. That’s why a landing page for affiliate marketing is so important.

You shouldn’t send traffic to a normal website with paid traffic because you’re throwing money away. Instead, send them to a landing page and collect their details. If you test and measure your landing pages, changing elements to make them more effective, you’ll be able to get your cost per lead down, and make greater profits when you start scaling up your affiliate business.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: Software

Convertri is a landing page software like no other. It lets you cross test landing pages against each other, capture other websites and copy them and gives you data which will help you optimise conversions on your landing pages.

It’s also super fast, which is massively relevant with landing pages. Many visitors will click away if a website is running too slow. So optimal speed on a landing page is vital to increase conversions and get your costs down.

Access Convertri here and start building your landing pages.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: Cross Testing

One of the best things about landing page software is that you can easily cross test your landing pages against each other to see which one performs the best. You can start with two wildly different landing pages, and run paid traffic to them collecting emails and building an email list. Pretty soon, you should see one out performing the other in terms of opt in rate. Once you have identified a winning landing page, you can split test it with a different heading, picture, or copy to see which one performs the best again.

By doing this many times, you will eventually come up with a landing page which is the best performer. Some affiliates can even get their landing page performance up to 40% or even 50%. At 50% opt in rate this would mean a half of all traffic being sent to your landing page opts in.

You should of course expect some visitors to leave your landing page without having taken any action at all. But once you have a good opt in rate, and your numbers are good in terms of cost versus sales, you can scale up your affiliate marketing business simply by turning up your marketing budget.

Landing Page For Affiliate Marketing: The Advert

A landing page is not the beginning of the sales funnel of course because you need to send qualified traffic to a landing page in order to collect emails. To do this you will need an advert. You can use many platforms to run advertising including Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube and so on. Video advertising is a good idea because you can convey more on a video advert than you can on a text only advert.

Here’s a video advert I recently ran on YouTube which sends targeted traffic to my landing page:

With a good advert, landing page and follow up email marketing series of messages, you can send the right people to products and services which will help them. Once you are profitable consistently with your advertising you can slowly increase your marketing budget.

Other Traffic Methods

Of course you can also use other methods for generating traffic to a landing page too. This blog is another strategy for generating leads for me. So if you don’t have a marketing budget to run paid advertising, you can create content or post on social media to obtain traffic. However these methods of traffic generation are typically much slower than by using paid traffic and also much less scalable.

Blogging, video blogging, posting on social media, SEO (search engine optimisation) are all methods you can use as an affiliate to attract traffic which you can then send to a landing page.

Email Marketing

Once you have captured your visitor’s email addresses you’ll need to follow up with email marketing messages and offer some kind of affiliate product (or your own product/service) which is relevant for the kind of person you have sent to your landing page.

To automate this process you can get an email autoresponder. I use Aweber which offers free access for beginners. You can open a free account with Aweber here or click on the banner below.

Email messages should be used to deliver value driven content to your subscribers. With so many marketers running email campaigns, you want your emails to get opened consistently. The best way to do this is to offer genuine and honest help and advice to your subscribers with information that is valuable and useful.

If you only send them links to affiliate products it soon become clear that you’re only interested in the sale! So they will likely unsubscribe from your list! But if you aim to genuinely help them with a problem, they are much more likely to trust you and continue opening your messages over the longer term. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they’re much more likely to buy from you.

Ways To Escape The Rat Race

What are the ways to escape the rat race?

Rat race (noun, an Americanism dating back to 1935-1940):

“any exhausting, unremitting, and usually competitive activity or routine, especially a pressured urban working life spent trying to get ahead with little time left for leisure, contemplation, etc.” (Dictionary.com)

If you’re fed up working your job, commuting for hours or dealing with your nightmare boss, it might be time to escape the rat race! But how? If you need your employment income to live, you’ll need to somehow replace it, or reduce your outgoings, or both. There’s various ways you can earn an income which can, over time replace your employment salary completely. Here’s a few ideas:

Build a property portfolio and rent – you’ll typically need a few properties to replicate a full time employment income
Start an online business – anyone can build an income online through selling other people’s products and services (drop shipping/affiliate marketing)
Invest in income producing assets – dividend shares
Rent out a spare room ( if you have one)
Get a buy to let property, bed and breakfast or run an AirBNB business

Of course all of these ideas require investment of some kind, especially if you want to purchase a property. An online business is probably the cheapest option.

Ways To Escape The Rat Race: Other Ideas

There are of course other ways to escape the rat race. You can switch careers, change jobs or start a business of your own. Consider what you would be doing with your time without the need for a job. Another option is to build a portfolio income from a number of part time jobs or small businesses.

The best way to escape the rat race is to completely replace your income. But this will take some investment and time. Here’s a few strategies which will help you relieve the pressure, free up cash and unburden you from the rat race.

Stop Spending

One of the quickest ways to unburden yourself from financial pressure is to downsize. Can you change your home or car? Stop spending on needless items, quit drinking and/smoking and free up cash which can be saved and used for investments. What direct debits are you currently paying which you could do without? Can you sell things you don’t use?

Pay Yourself First

Paying yourself first is a strategy used by the financially well off. Most people pay all their bills first and spend what’s left. The wealthy know to escape the trap of needing to constantly trade time for money, they need to create savings and invest in income producing assets. You can’t do this without money! Paying yourself first means to set up an automatic payment from your wages as soon as they come in. Let this become a normal event and the money will build up in a savings account. This has a two fold effect:

You learn to live on less – building a good habit for the future
You build a savings account which can be used for business/investments and which earns interest.

Your Latte Factor

David Bach talks about your “latte factor” in his book The Automatic Millionaire. The Latte Factor refers to those things you purchase on a daily or weekly basis, which although seem like small purchases add up over the year; such as a daily latte (coffee). If you spend $5 on a latte and $2 on a biscuit every day for a year you will have spent $2555 over the year.

Knowing how your little spendings effects your overall outgoings can allow you to save money where you didn’t know you were spending.

Stop Acting Rich

In Thomas Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he points out that those who live in rich neighbourhoods typically spend more. That’s because there’s an influence from the people around you. If the “Jones’s” have a new car, you buy a new car to keep up! When you stop acting rich you free up a lot of money.

So if you have an expensive watch and/or a performance car and so on, you’re wasting money which could be giving you more investments and more freedom. There’s a saying in Texas “big hat no cattle” and a similar one in the UK which says “all mouth no trousers”. It simply means to show a persona of yourself which is different to the reality. The fancy car and expensive watch are props for your self image. Are you holding up your projected image to show off?

Ways To Escape The Rat Race – Do What You Love

While a large income might be something you have achieved, it doesn’t necessarily go along with a happy and fulfilled life. Perhaps a simpler life is one which is more gratifying? Doing a job you love is one of the best ways to escape the rat race. So even if you don’t have the resources to buy property, invest in stocks and completely replace your current income, you can find other work which is more satisfying, downsize, sell assets and free up more time for the things you enjoy.

If you have an interest of some kind you could turn it into a business you love.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups

An online mentoring platform for startups can give you the start you need with an online business. Whether you have products/services of your own or not, you can start an online business from scratch. Many people are looking for a way to earn online and don’t have any products or services of their own to sell.

In this situation, you can simply sell other people’s products and services with a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets you sell existing products and earn based on what you sell. Whatever business you decide on, you’ll definitely need to learn how to market your business. A business without customers is no business at all, and this is one of the most important elements of building a successful operation.

You can learn more about this business system and online mentoring platform here.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups: What You’ll Learn

With so many people online one of the most important elements of building an online presence is marketing. Without marketing you can’t grow a business and you certainly can’t scale it. Marketing is to your business as the heart is to the body. Your marketing “pumps” your business with customers! Marketing is more than simply advertising. Marketing is every touchpoint between you and a potential customer. Therefore it’s important to get your marketing right if you want to attract the right customers.

Your branding is a big part of this. Branding is used to send a congruent message throughout your marketing message. Have you noticed how big companies such as CocaCola, Ford, Pepsi, McDonalds have a clear marketing brand which is congruent throughout their marketing? Their marketing message “becomes” their brand and people recognise this through their branding imagery and logos.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups: Avatar

The online marketplace is absolutely saturated with other brands, messages, marketers and advertising. To find your customers online is much easier when you know who they are: this is known as the customer “avatar“. Your ideal customer is someone who will love what you have to offer and become a lifetime fan! But in order to filter out all of the other people who don’t want your services/product, you need to understand who to aim your marketing messages at. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time and of course marketing budget.

Getting to know your avatar is key to this concept. Where do they hang out? What do they read? What are they interested in? Once you have built up a clear picture of who you are trying to find, your life will get much easier. You’ll be able to place a clear marketing message in front of the right people who can benefit from your service/product.

Mindset Of An Entrepreneur

Building an online business requires a different mindset than working a steady job. If you bring an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial endeavour, there’s a good chance you’ll create more difficulties for yourself. That’s because an enterprise needs a different mindset for it to succeed. The technical “groundwork” of an employee is a different skillset to the purpose driven vision needed by an entrepreneur to get their ideas to take off and actually make a profit.

This is a difficult thing to learn unless you’re surrounded by other entrepreneurs, which unfortunately most people are not. The mindset required to stand out online as a digital entrepreneur will be taught as part of the curriculum of the program you can access here.

Scaling

Scaling a business can be tricky and you need to have everything in place before you take this step. Your marketing strategy should be profitable already before you start to increase your marketing budget and scale, as you can easily blow through a large budget with online marketing methods.

You also need to ensure that your business is running smoothly; that you can still have a life and won’t be inundated with too many tasks. Ideally get everything in place so that you can still have a life when you take this step. Automation and infrastructure should be in place to deal with more customers.

Ready to start? Access an online mentorship program to help you build your business here, even without any products/services of your own to sell.

Make Money Selling Digital Products

In today’s digital age, it’s easier than ever to make money by selling digital products. From e-books and online courses to stock photos and graphics, there are countless opportunities for entrepreneurs and creators to turn their passions and expertise into a profitable business.

One of the biggest benefits of selling digital products is that there are no overhead costs associated with manufacturing, storing, or shipping physical goods. This means that you can start your business with minimal investment and grow it at your own pace.

Make Money Selling Digital Products

Another advantage of selling digital products is that they can be easily scaled. Once you’ve created a product, you can sell it to an unlimited number of customers, which means that your potential revenue is practically limitless.

There are many ways to sell digital products, including:

Online marketplaces: Platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Udemy, and Shutterstock allow you to list and sell your digital products to a wide audience.
E-commerce platforms: You can also sell your digital products on your own website using an e-commerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce.
Social media: Platforms like Instagram and YouTube are great places to market and sell your digital products.
Affiliate marketing: You can also make money by promoting other people’s digital products and earning a commission on each sale.

To be successful in selling digital products, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your target market and to create products that meet their needs. Additionally, it’s essential to have a strong marketing and promotion strategy in place to drive traffic to your products and increase sales.

Overall, selling digital products can be a great way to turn your passion and expertise into a profitable business. With the right approach and the right tools, you can easily create and sell digital products that will help you achieve your financial goals.

Make Money Selling Digital Products – No Products, No Problem

A key ingredient for success with digital products is to create/choose a product which people actually want. The downside to digital product creation is that creating your own products takes time and effort. After having creating a product you still need to sell it. It’s therefore much easier to choose products which are already selling, and promote them as an affiliate.

Affiliate products are everywhere online; anyone can join an affiliate program and sell almost anything online. Physical products are available too to sell. You’ve probably used Amazon, for example. Amazon has an affiliate program which anyone can join to sell thousands of products. Digital products can be found on sites such as Clickbank.com. Clickbank is a digital product “marketplace” where affiliates can find digital products which already exist in a number of categories.

You can find products in almost any area you could think of on Clickbank. From online piano courses to online business tools, from Yoga courses to building skills, Clickbank has a huge array of digital products you can choose from.

The Main Thing Is Selling

Even with an amazing product of your own to sell, the key is to actually sell! Without traffic to your website, even the best product in the world won’t make a single sale. Product owners learn many ways to generate traffic to their online sales pages and can choose from a number of promotion methods such as:

PPC – pay per click advertising using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Organic traffic generation methods such as content creation, blogging etc.
Place your products on a site where affiliates can promote them for you, for a commission (Clickbank for example).
Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid methods
SEO – search engine optimisation can be used for free traffic.

To make money selling digital products you need to get a number of things right. Firstly you need a product which will sell. Since there’s thousands of products online already selling, it’s wise to choose something which is already marketable. Building digital products of your own is time consuming and you may not even sell once you’re finished. So the fastest way to make money from selling digital products is to learn affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online and earn commissions based on what they sell.

But if product creation is more your thing, you can partner with affiliates so that they make the sales on your behalf. You pay them a portion of the sale price, in exchange for doing the selling.

Learn more about selling digital products online with this short video course.

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff

Can you really make your own website to sell stuff from? Well, there are many free website building platforms which allow you to do this completely free. Weebly.com, Wix.com and WordPress.com (to name just three platforms) all offer this service completely free.

But once your website is up and running are you actually going to sell anything? That’s the big question. It’s easy building a website, but much harder to get people to come and visit it, and more difficult still selling something from your site. Why would anyone come and buy from you anyway and what do you have to sell?

Selling stuff from a website is tough, even if you have something great to sell. You still need to advertise your site, otherwise no one will know it is there!

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff – No Products To Sell? No Problem

If you already have a business to sell (or a product), or a service, you’re already way ahead of many. Your issue is then getting people to your website, you might want to skip to the next section if that’s you). A website is definitely a good idea if you have something to sell already, but what if you don’t?

No business or product to sell? That’s no problem because you can sell other people’s products. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you list items from websites which you don’t even own. When you make a sale through your unique affiliate I.D. you earn a commission based on the sale.

Alternatively you could build a product specific website and sell something unique; sourcing your products as you sell them. But many people will simply go to eBay, or similar auction site to find such items. Why would they visit you?

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff – Marketing Your Site

As a newbie to affiliate marketing I thought I could throw up a website and suddenly people would flock to buy whatever I was selling. The truth was rather disappointing. Think of opening a garage in the middle of the desert, trying to sell petrol/gas and you’re somewhere near understanding how little people will care about your new shiny website.

And, even if they did find you, you then have the task of trying to sell them your product/service without actually having met them. With the competition online this is an unenviable task. Anyway, most people won’t buy from a website on their first visit, particularly from one which they are unfamiliar with. It takes several touch points before someone will buy from a website.

To get people to your site in the first place takes either paid marketing or effort in terms of content creation. Paid marketing is almost instant, but costly. You will likely lose money while testing it and trying to get the right people to your site. Blogging is a cheaper route. By creating content which attracts the right audience you can build massive traffic to your site over time. But this takes time and there’s a lot of competition online in almost every topic. See also paid marketing vs organic marketing.

Some Good News

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s some good news in this too. Having a website which sells is awesome and it’s worth keeping this in mind while you’re building your online empire! Imagine having a website which attracts thousands of visitors each day and many of them buying from you. Not only that, but imagine the products fulfilling themselves – not having to deal with any customers or deliveries, or even handle any products!

The business model of affiliate marketing is exactly that. Affiliates “partner” with companies who already sell products and services online. Amazon, for example is a popular website which also has an affiliate/partner program. Many people sell for Amazon and receive a “cut” when they make a sale. Amazon has a lot of products to choose from, but it doesn’t pay very well.

However, you can also promote other affiliate products which pay much better and which even pay recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate products are some of the best you can promote as an affiliate. They pay you recurring commissions for your referrals. So once you have sold a few, you get a nice, recurring payment every month – for the lifetime of the customer. So even with only a few sales you can build a good income up with these kinds of products.

Selling High Ticket Items

High ticket affiliate products are those which carry much larger price tags than the average product you might find on Amazon, for example. A high ticket sale can earn you at least $500 in commissions, just for a single sale. A few of those goes a long way, especially when you consider Amazon’s commission structure for affiliates. Selling an Amazon product worth $100 can earn affiliates as little as $1 if the commission is 1%.

High ticket affiliate products are a good idea therefore for a couple of reasons:

You earn more for what can easily be the same amount of work
It is easier to use paid marketing to get traffic to your website with high ticket items and still turn a profit.

If you’re selling low valued products from a website, it’s much more difficult to become profitable using paid marketing. The growing competition online means people are pushing up the cost of online marketing. So if you’re running adverts which cost $1 per click, and only 1% of people buy from you, you’ll need to cover $100 in ad spend just to break even; assuming you make $100 on a sale.

With high ticket items and recurring income products this pushes up your profit potential and you’re more easily able to spend on an advertising budget while still earning a profit.

Start From Scratch And Use An All In One Business System

Building your own website for profit has many problems attached with it as you can see. Even with products to sell, you need a marketing strategy to get people to your site. This can be costly or time consuming. With physical products you need to keep sourcing products if you’re selling something you own. But with affiliate products you can keep selling the same products over and over from your site. You don’t have to personally handle products with affiliate marketing, or deal with customers.

A similar business model is drop shipping where you outsource product delivery/manufacture to another company and your website is the go-between to find customers. See also drop shipping vs affiliate marketing.

To learn more about the different types of online business models, and to access an all in one business system and step by step training, access these free videos. You’ll also be able to build your own website which is pre-populated with affiliate products which you can sell.

DUMB Goals

What are DUMB goals? According to Brendon Burchard, they are:

Dream-Driven/Destiny Driven
Uplifting/Inspiring
Method-Friendly – (Enjoyable/easy process of attainment)
Behaviour-Driven – (Habits triggered by normal daily behaviours)

Here’s a video of Brendon explaining how SMART goals may be too cerebral (and realistic) for you to get excited about them! If you’re not excited about a particular goal, you’re probably not setting the right one, or you’re aiming too small.

In my article on SMART goals you can see the difference in goal setting approach. SMART is an acronym for:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time Bound

While I like the SMART goals idea, I definitely agree with Brendon; particularly regarding the “Realistic” part of the Goal setting process. While a realistic goal is attainable, it’s often not terribly exciting.

As a child I used to dream about stuff with a totally open mind. What Brendon is saying is that this natural ability to dream big is easily lost by pinning goals down into small boxes and dutifully working for their attainment; ticking off activities like a robot! In this scenario you can easily get too caught up in the minutiae of the detail, while losing the bigger picture of your larger destiny/dream!

DUMB Goals Vs SMART Goals

A DUMB goal therefore maybe more useful in that it can fire you up and motivate you into action. But there’s still a place for SMART goals within perhaps a shorter time frame. DUMB goals could be used for the 10-20 year timeframe and SMART goals could be used to track that your activity is aligned with your longer term goals.

Ultimately if you’re not motivated by your goal, you’re very unlikely to achieve it. So which are better between DUMB goals and SMART goals? Well of course this depends on you. Some people are more motivated by getting analytical about their “baby steps” and making progress, however slow. Others are more motivated by the grand vision, of the 5-10 year plan.

I suggest finding a goal setting plan which you are comfortable with and which means you can maintain enthusiasm for your longer term goals by aligning smaller steps you can take every day. If you lose your enthusiasm, you can always realign with your goals and refocus on your longer term vision.

Aligning Yourself With Your Goals

Choose a goal for the next 3-5 years and write it down. Does it excite you? By how much does it excite you out of 10? If it’s less than a 10, start again. Your 3-5 year goal should be super exciting to you; otherwise you’re more than likely not going to stick on the path to achieve it.

Once you have found your 10/10, 3-5 year goal, ask yourself how attainable it is? Do you believe you can attain this goal? On a scale out of 10, how achievable do you think it is? If you have scored less than 10/10 for believability, you need to change your goal.

A good goal should give you a 10 out of 10 for desirability and a 10 out of 10 for believability. If you don’t really, really want your goal, you’re not going to go after it, particularly if it’s difficult. If you don’t believe your goal is possible, you’re not going to chase it either.

This simple exercise is a good way to find goals which are meaningful to you. While a DUMB goal sounds like a good idea, how long will you actually chase a DUMB goal if you don’t really believe in it?

In Stuart Lichtman’s book on achievement he goes into further details on how you can attain a seemingly impossible goal. See also Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money

Overcoming limiting beliefs about money can take some time. After all, you’ve probably been thinking about your limits for years! Most people have at least some limiting beliefs about money that have been picked up unconsciously, often from their childhood. It’s not until you struggle, that you will begin to look for the hidden spectre to your success – yourself, or rather your own limiting beliefs about money, and/or yourself.

But your beliefs are invisible. So how can you route them out and change them to allow you to become more success conscious? A good first step is to become more conscious of how you think, feel and talk about money, wealth and other aspects which relate to money in your life. Here’s a few common beliefs which are easily picked up unconsciously before you are even 10 years old:

Money doesn’t grow on trees
Rich people are greedy
You’re selfish if you earn a lot of money
Money is the route of all evil
It’s virtuous to be poor
I don’t care about money
Money is hard to earn
Life is hard

Of course how you feel about yourself and your ability to earn money is another common thread to lack, struggle and poverty. Limiting beliefs about yourself will most likely bring about problems with earning money too:

I’m not good enough
I’ll always be poor
I don’t have the right background to earn money
I don’t have the education
I’m a failure

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money – Your Circle Of Influence

The 5 people you spend the most time with will often reflect your own ideas and attitudes towards money and aspiration. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”. — Jim Rohn. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

So another thing you can do is to just pay attention to what your circle of influence (friends and family) has to say about money, income, wealth and aspiration. Are they negatively inclined towards money? If they are, you’ll likely pick up on these same attitudes if you hang around them for long enough.

How do your friends talk about money, and about people who have it? If it’s in a very negative way, you can be sure they have some limiting beliefs about money.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money – Your Story

Everyone has a story which they tell people when they meet. What’s your story? Is it a story of woe and strife, or one of joy and abundance? Most people have some back story of woe and struggle, even if they don’t talk about it. If your story is about lack, struggle and poverty, you are feeding the very ideas you want to change. Stop giving energy to the negatives and begin to write a new story for your life, one which you want to happen instead of the one you wished hadn’t.

Your subconscious mind is wise and listens to everything you are saying. To begin to change some of your negative programming around money, you need to first become conscious of what you’re saying and thinking on a regular basis.

Once you become conscious that you are giving more energy to the things you don’t want (thoughts/words of poverty consciousness), you can begin to break the habit and stop feeding those negative beliefs. Start paying attention to what you say about yourself. You’ll begin to see/hear your self image which is related very strongly to your ability to earn money.

Maxwell Maltz – Psycho-Cybernetics

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who realised that many patients still had problems after successful surgery. If a patient had a poor self image, no amount of plastic surgery solved their issues. So Maltz started doing therapy with patients before surgery, helping them with developing the self image.

He discovered that after the therapy, many patients no longer even wanted the plastic surgery. Their problem was mental in nature and not physical. Once the self image was changed, their problems went away!

Holding limiting beliefs about money is similar. If you can change the negative programming towards how you see money, you can potentially change things much more powerfully than chasing money in the ways you always have.

Write A New Story

Once you have uncovered some of your limiting ideas around money by listening to your self talk, your circle of influence and your “story” which you tell yourself (and others) most frequently, you are in a good position to make some changes. If you continue to see yourself as the person in your (negative) story (and as a victim), you’ll keep repeating the same and getting the same!

The negative stories and self talk are a key indicator as to your deep subconscious beliefs about money. You can also think back to your childhood where many of these beliefs took hold.

Before you reach 10 years old, you have no conscious reasoning ability and you will have accepted your parents ideas about money unconsciously. So a good way to uncover your subconscious beliefs is to think about their attitudes towards money/wealth and income. What did they used to say about money? Can you think of any scenarios or situations where your self worth was an issue, or the issue of money came up?

Installing New Ideas

Installing new ideas about money can be a long process. Remember that you have most likely been repeating old stories and beliefs to yourself over many years. By listening to your self talk, story and that of your friends and family, you should be able to see more clearly the negative comments and ideas coming up about money.

By noticing them, without comment, you can become clearer about the kinds of ideas you would rather have! Here’s a few ideas which you can use:

Money comes easily and frequently
I get paid for being “me”
I am enough
I choose to be wealthy
I love and approve of myself
I’m happy and grateful
I choose happiness

These statements may of course not be truly authentic for you at the moment. But remember the old beliefs are not either – they are just faulty “programs” which are keeping you from a fuller and more enjoyable life. When you see the old beliefs and ideas as a faulty program, you’re going to be more willing to embrace some new ideas which you can use as mantras.
Whenever the older ideas come up in your mind, I’m not good enough, I’ll always be broke” etc., choose a new one to replace them with. Repeat it many times. Let the new mantra take over the old belief and make a habit out of repeating the new idea.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound

Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time bound. What do those words have in common? SMART is an acronym for goal setting and specifically means Specific, Measurable, Attainable Realistic and Time bound. SMART goals are better than whimsical goals because you can gain greater control, meaning and motivation from them. A goal without measure is not really a clever goal, it’s more like a wish or fantasy.

So one of the biggest reasons people don’t accomplish goals is because they’re not SMART goals.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound

Without a specific target for a goal, your goal is more of a whim or fantasy. How will you know you have reached your target if you don’t specify one? An example might be “I want more money”. But how much more – exactly? Or, “I want to lose weight”. By specifying your target you are making a dream/fantasy into a very specific purpose. It gives your goal weight and specificity.

A more specific target is to say “I want to earn an extra $500 a month”, for example. Or “I want to lose half a stone in weight”. These are specific goals which can be measured. You’ll know when you attain them by checking your income or your weight – based on your current income or weight! But this is still pretty vague as a goal. Just by wanting something doesn’t mean you will attain it. To get even more specific you could say I want to earn an extra $500 a month from the internet, for example. Or, I want to drop my weight down to 12 stone, for example.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound: Measurable

The second letter of the SMART acronym means measurable. This is pretty important because many goals are simply wishes without a connection to the real world. To make a wish real you need to pin it down with real world measures. With the examples above you could measure your income before and after you have accomplished your goal.

If you’re currently earning $100 a month from the internet and you want to earn $500, that’s something you can measure. But saying “I want to earn more money” isn’t measurable because you will keep shifting your goals because there’s always “more”! How can you know when you have achieved it?!

You may never even notice when you achieve a shift in income or a loss of weight with a vague goal such as “I want to lose weight” or “I’d like more money”.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound: Attainable

The third letter in the SMART goal acronym is attainable. This is pretty important too because without an attainable goal it’s likely to fall into the same category as wishes and fantasies! If you don’t really believe you goal is attainable, you’re going to falter somewhere on the path to achieving it. As

Henry Ford once said: “whether a man believes he can achieve something or not, he is right”! If you set a goal, but don’t believe it’s possible, how motivated do you think you’ll be to get started?! Pretty unmotivated I’d say. Without an attainable goal, you’re likely to give up pretty quickly and carry on as before.

While a lofty goal can be motivational, it’s also likely you’ll give up if you don’t really believe in it. Your goal needs to motivate you and be lofty enough to get your excitement levels up, but not too big that you won’t actually make a move towards it! This brings us to the next letter of the SMART goals acronym: realistic.

Realistic

The balance between an achievable goal and a realistic goal is a fine one. How will you know what is achievable unless you set a really big goal and pursue it? But is your really big goal realistic? If a super big goal intimidates you and motivates you, it’s probably a good one. But if it puts you off and demoralises you, you should probably pick something else.

Striking the balance between realistic and achievable is personal to you. Still, a goal should be big enough to inspire you into action, but realistic enough that you believe it is possible, that way you can pursue it with a positive mental attitude. A big goal you don’t believe in is simply a wish, dream or fantasy.

Time Bound

Without a date on your goal, it’s still a dream. A date on a goal gives it an expediency without which you will lose momentum and drive. Using the previous example of losing half a stone in weight, you could set a target to get to your ideal weight in 3 months, for example. Set the date and your ideal weight for your goal and you have a time frame with which to bring a goal into reality.

If there’s no time frame on a goal, it becomes something you “would like to happen one day”! When you take this approach to goal setting, you let yourself completely off the hook and there’s no accountability because you will settle for “whenever” as your time of arrival.

I highly recommend Stuart Lichtman’s book which discusses goal setting in great detail using cybernetic transposition and Stuarts “three step” process. You can access his book by clicking on the image below.