AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income

Trading time for money vs online income, what’s the difference? Most people are trading time for money in traditional employment. You work a certain number of hours for a certain amount of money. The problem is there’s only so many hours in a day, so you can only earn so much.

When you hit the later years in life that realise that you want your life back! You want more time and the money to do with it what you want! But there’s a problem. You must keep turning up to work over and over, no matter how many other things you’d rather do! If you quit your job, you can’t support your lifestyle.

There’s an answer which can get you out of your job before retirement and it’s the internet. With the internet, you can get paid for selling other people’s products and services. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you can choose almost any product and sell it. There’s no need to speak directly to customers or hold any products. You can sell products directly from links, affiliate links to be precise.

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income

Through the sale of products and services online, you can escape the time for money conundrum. In a job, there’s only so much you can earn because there’s only so many hours in the day. With an online business, you can sell products over and over again, and there’s no limit because you have a global audience at your fingertips. Plus, selling products online isn’t dependent on your time and the process can be completely automated. That means you can sell products while you sleep, while you’re on holiday or even while you’re doing you 9 to 5 job.

An online income can be built up around your existing job so that over time your online income can slowly replace your existing income. Once your online income overtakes your employment income, you’re in a great position if you want to quit your 9 to 5! Many people dream of living a life on their own terms, travelling and spending more time with their family. But most never are able to do it beyond the remit of their 2 weeks holiday a year from their employment income.

With an online income, you can get paid for selling products and services and automate the process so your income isn’t dependant on your time.

Trading Time For Money Vs Online Income – Getting Started

Before you can earn an income online, you’ll need to set up some infrastructure and learn the strategies of selling online. One of the main ways to do this is through email marketing. Build an email list of subscribers and offer them something valuable in return for joining your email list. As your email list grows you can earn income by promoting products which are of interest to your subscribers.

Many online business owners build their lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. By sending relevant and useful information to their list, marketers can generate income through product sales.

The best thing is that this can all be done on autopilot while you’re doing other things. Once you have the infrastructure in place, you can simply send targeted traffic (website visitors) to your email list. From their the automated email messages are sent out daily to your subscribers.

Affiliate Products – What To Sell

The best products to sell are those which offer the most value to your subscribers. Products which offer the most value are the ones which tend to sell. There’s millions of products you can choose from as a product referrer (affiliate marketer). Some affiliates will head to Amazon and promote any of the thousands of products on the site. But there’s also digital products you can promote too, which offer higher levels of commission than Amazon’s physical product range.

Certain products pay much more more than others too, such as high ticket affiliate products. Those are products which have a much larger price tag than most. You can also sell products which offer subscription payments. So you can get paid over and over for each sale you refer. These are good for affiliates because you can start earning a steady income quite quickly once you start making sales.

Summary

Trading time for money in a job can mean you feel trapped not only by the need to keep showing up but also your need for the income it provides. An internet based income can be generated around existing work through the use of affiliate products. Affiliate products are other people’s products and services which you can sell for a share of the profits.

By using automation in the sale and delivery of online products, third party referrers (affiliates) can generate an income around existing employment. Over time, this can be built up to completely replace and grow beyond what you currently earn.

Once the infrastructure is in place with an online business, it can largely run on autopilot. This means your income isn’t tied to your time, as with employment. Online business owners can travel and live anywhere providing they have access to the internet and a laptop.

Learn more and start your own internet based business here.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet

There’s a few ways to generate an income from the internet and over the years I’ve tried a few. In the first instance, I tried Forex marketing. Forex marketing, is trading on the Foreign Exchange markets. I used Forex pairs and jumped in an out of the markets speculating on the small market shifts. Despite spending a couple of years learning a strategy for this, I eventually gave up on it. Around 95% of new traders blow their trading bank in the first year of trading, never to trade again.

Trading Forex can work if you stick with it and are very disciplined. But for me it wasn’t to be. I then tried a bit of buying and selling on eBay. I started off buying from charity shops in the 90’s and then found a strategy where I found bargain items on eBay itself and sold them on. You can read about the strategy I used here.

After a while of buying and selling from eBay I decided it wasn’t working out. I seemed to be spending a huge amount of time finding items and re-listing them, not to mention the time I spend queueing in the post office. So I looked for something else, which might have more potential.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Selling Online

I had learned the eBay strategy I mentioned through the purchase of an ebook, which I bought off eBay. The transaction seemed pretty simple: it was a digital book which I could buy and download instantly. This seemed to me like the perfect business model – nothing to physically post, and no stock gathering dust in my spare room!

So I decided to write my own ebook and sell it from a website. The trouble I found was in attracting traffic to my website. I couldn’t find any buyers, despite having figured out how to automate the sale from my website. So I put myself on a marketing course with the idea to sell my own ebook. (More on selling your own ebook here).

The course I joined was about affiliate marketing and I realised that I could easily sell existing products (which were worth much more than my ebook) in the same way as selling my own product (my ebook). My ebook was up for $10 but I could earn more by selling the course I purchased – even though I only took around 40% of the sale price! So I set up a website through the course and started selling a course.

How To Generate An Income From The Internet – Advertising

After a few setbacks, including the course creator taking the course off the market (this was back in the early 2000’s) and having my advertising platform suspended, I changed tact. I couldn’t use Google Adwords (the paid advertising platform used to sell the product). So I switched to another strategy. I started trying to earn income from advertising on a website. This is another strategy you can use to earn online. By earning income through advertising clicks, you can effectively earn a passive income online. However, the clicks are only worth tiny amounts. So you need a lot of them in order to be profitable.

After a lot of blogging, I was still only earning a few pennies a day (cents in the US). So I decided that this strategy wasn’t the best! Looking back now I now realise how much time I was spending jumping from one idea to the next! This is known as “shiny object syndrome”! Do yourself a favour and learn from this mistake of mine! Don’t look for the “quick route to online riches”. Instead, study affiliate marketing – one of the fastest ways to make a real online income and replace your employment income.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The “Best”

Whatever works is what I believe is genuinely the best. However, in my personal experience, I’ve definitely found affiliate marketing to be the best. In the early years of my experimenting with online earning methods, I made trickles from advertising revenue (Google Adsense) and I made gains and losses from Forex marketing and ebay strategies. However, the best gains for the least amount of work and hassle definitely came from affiliate marketing.

This is of course why I pursued affiliate marketing with a passion. I did of course come up against a number of obstacles. Google algorithm changes, ad platforms disallowing and disapproving (and even suspending my account) and massive drops of my ranking content on the search engines are just a few of them.

But with affiliate marketing you can find and sell the best products online. You don’t need to create a product yourself. So if you can find high value products which already sell, half the battle is already won. You then need to focus on a marketing strategy you can stick with for at least 6 months to a year; whether this is paid marketing, or a cheaper alternative, such as blogging or v’logging.

Getting Started

You might be thinking this is all too much hard work? But if that’s the case, you’re probably not in the right space to start learning affiliate marketing. Those who succeed at affiliate marketing have a big reason to succeed. It’s not easy for sure, but once you understand how to use the leverage of selling online, you will have learned a skill for life which is life changing.

Get started here with a step by step system. It gives you all the products and software you need to set the infrastructure for a solid online business from scratch. Once set up, you only need to learn how to market your sales system and generate leads. It’s one of the simplest selling systems online.

Access here and get started!

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?

If you have a website, and are attempting to attract an audience, you might have wondered where your website traffic comes from. Website traffic comes from a few main areas: organic, direct and referral, paid, email and social media.

Organic traffic comes from the search engines. So people are finding you from a search enquiry from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo or one of the other search engines on the internet. If you have a lot of content on your website, this is more likely to happen. Or much of your traffic will be for specific keywords for which you are ranking highly on the search engine results pages (SERPS). For example, if you have a store which specialises in something, that keyword is likely going to bring up your website – especially if you have a locally based business and someone is searching locally.

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From?

Direct traffic comes from someone who knows your website url. So your website address is typed directly into the search bar at the top of the screen (on a laptop/computer). Or this kind of traffic can come through some unknown source too. If you use business cards and flyers to advertise your business, you might get people finding your website through this form of advertising. Direct traffic usually comes form someone who knows your website address, or has visited you before.

Referral traffic comes from other websites. If someone has linked to your website from theirs, visitors can find you through the referral link. Or, if someone recommends your website from an email, this can also be a form of referral.

Paid traffic is another possibility if you’re paying to drive traffic to your website. Paid platforms such as Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing, and social media platforms also offer paid advertising for website owners. Paid advertising is one of the fastest and most effective ways to drive customers to your business online. With Facebook, for example, you can even specify the type of person you want to attract. Demographics such as their interests and location can be used to attract the most likely type of people who will buy from you.

Where Does Your Website Traffic Come From? – Email Marketing

Email marketing is also a great way to get people to your website. By building an email list of subscribers, many website owners boost their number of visitors. An email list can be built by offering a giveaway of some kind on a website.

Ebooks, video courses, downloads and discounts are just a few of the things website owners offer to their subscribers. This encourages website visitors to opt in to their email list. Once on your list, you can send out updates and new content for your subscribers to visit.

Social media is another source of website traffic. By sharing content on social media, and building communities, groups and pages etc., website owners can begin to attract people from Facebook, Linkedin, X.com and many others.

Diversifying Your Traffic Sources

Having a diverse source of traffic can be a good thing if one particular source lets you down. For example, if you rely heavily on paid traffic, but have a problem with your advertising account, it can leave you vulnerable. In the same way, relying on SEO (search engine optimisation) too heavily can give you problems. When Google updates their algorithms and your website is penalised, for example. Your rankings can quickly fall off the search results overnight, leaving you without any traffic.

So it’s a good idea to do a little of each:

Paid advertising (e.g. Google Adwords)
Email marketing – build an email list that you own
Social media marketing – sharing content on social media
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – create lots of content which can rank on the SERPS
Offline advertising – directing people to your website directly (direct traffic)

Getting More Traffic To Your Website

As you can see there’s lots of ways to generate traffic to your website. If you set aside a marketing budget each month, paid traffic is the fastest method of getting people to find you online. However, you need to be careful because not all that traffic will convert into customers. So make sure you target the right people who are most likely to buy from you. See my post on target audience and learn about your customer avatar. Then start with a low budget you can afford to lose while you learn.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation is another way to attract (organic) traffic from the search engines such as Google and Bing etc. To attract a lot of organic traffic, you need to create valuable content on your website which is targeted towards your ideal customer (customer avatar). Write content which will be useful to those people you want to attract. Share your content on social media frequently to give yourself another “stream” of traffic. You can use social share buttons and software to help with this. See my post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Offline advertising is another option to attract direct traffic to your website. Use flyers, business cards, newspaper adverts and the like.

For referrals you can write blog posts for other website owners within your industry. Do this in exchange for referral links (also known as back links). Back links are a highly valued ranking algorithm factor which can boost your content in the search results pages and give you more free traffic from Google.

If you know people within your industry/niche, you can always reach out personally to ask for backlinks too.

An Interesting Thing About Blogging

There’s an interesting thing about blogging and that is that it casts a shadow. Let me explain. Back in July I set myself a goal of getting 1000 website visitors to my blog in a single day. Check out my post “how to get 1000 website hits in one day without paying“.

At the time, I was getting on average around 200 hits on my website. So 1000 hits was a bit of a stretch for me. That’s what a goal should do though. A goal should motivate and inspire you to take actions which you previously were not taking! My goal definitely inspired me into action. I blogged much more than I would otherwise have done last month.

I didn’t quite hit 1000 hits though, in a single day. I got pretty close to it though hitting over 800 hits on many days. Checkout my stats below and you’ll see my goal definitely pushed up my traffic: (see also the importance of goal setting).

An Interesting Thing About Blogging

The thing is though, before I set my goal my traffic stats showed a much lower amount of daily traffic. When I set my goal, I was inspired to write more blog posts and to promote them (on social media) and share them every day with my list. I did this for about a month without fail.

Then a funny thing happened. I burned out and gave up! I got busy with other things and my blogging took a nose dive. However, what was interesting is that my traffic didn’t take the same nose dive as my activity did. In fact the opposite happened. My traffic kept going up! I posted a blog once a week or so, but nothing like the frenzied activity I was used to doing.

It’s now been 2 weeks since my last blog post which was aptly titled dealing with overwhelm! However, my traffic has remained fairly consistent and stuck over the 500 daily hits mark. Checkout the stats below:

An Interesting Thing About Blogging – The Shadow Effect

The “shadow” effect of blogging is the lagging activity which happens from the actions you’ve done previously. So, for example, when I write and share this post on social media, it might not get seen for a few days by some. So I might get a visitor from that social media share, but it doesn’t happen straight away. Also, I post my freshly published blogs to my email list. Well, someone on my email list might only read my post the next day, or the next week, or even a month later.

I’ve heard some subscribers tell me that they put the emails in a folder to look at at a later date.

When I share via my email autoresponder, there’s also an option to share the content with my social media business pages; which I do. So my posts get syndicated out to my Facebook pages, and other social media platforms such as X.com.

I also use a software called Revive Old Posts, which syndicates older content out to social media automatically.

All this activity leaves a shadow – a trailing digital footprint which can lead to later actions and visitors to my website. So, even though I stopped blogging for a couple of weeks after burnout, my traffic continues on.

The Tipping Point Of Blogging

I’ve written before about the tipping point in blogging. That’s where your cumulative efforts eventually “tip” your blog into the big time! The effects of SEO, continued blogging, promotion of posts, email list and your creeping results on the search engine results pages all factor in to your overall traffic. Eventually your previous efforts results in organic traffic which grows and grows culminating in a curve which grows exponentially:

However, there’s also the tipping point of the “wave” which reaches its peak and starts to fall away! I believe I may have reached this point, benefitting from the work I did over the last month or so. Ultimately the traffic will start to drop again, as it reaches the point where the “shadow” of my previous work has reached its limit.

Today my stats show nearly 500 website hits. Not bad for free and considering that I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks! However, if I continued to do nothing, I’m sure this would slowly drop over time.

Summary

An interesting thing about blogging is the shadow it casts and how your previous efforts culminate towards a rising “peak” of the traffic “wave”. Blogging has definitely taken much longer than I anticipated to get to the point of consistent traffic. Google is constantly changing their algorithm and this effects the organic traffic you may have earned previously.

We also have artificial intelligence now which is becoming almost unrecognisable from human content. That means blogging is getting more difficult! So if you want to make blogging work for you, I suggest picking a topic you’re wildly enthusiastic about so you can enjoy the process and so that you won’t get too unhappy when things don’t go according to plan. They undoubtedly won’t!

Dealing With Overwhelm

If you’re an affiliate marketer you’ve probably experienced dealing with overwhelm at some point or another. Overwhelm is, well, overwhelming. It stops you from moving forward in any logical way. The result of overwhelm is non-action, confusion and getting stuck. I’ve recently been in overwhelm again and it’s definitely not for the first time. It often happens when you’re shifting gears from one strategy to another. Or, if you have got caught up in shiny object syndrome, it’s when you jump from course to course looking for the “easy way” to make money online.

But shifting gears is a gradual process. If you attempt to move too quickly while shifting gears, it’s like trying to push a freight train off course. It simply doesn’t happen easily. You need to give yourself some room.

I’ve recently been investigating a free Facebook marketing strategy and I’m not really into the habits with it yet. My previous habits are blogging, and I’ve just begun posting on Quora again. See my post how to use Quora for affiliate marketing for more on this strategy.

While juggling a part time job and blogging and posting on Quora and learning a new free marketing strategy, I find myself sitting doing nothing. It’s quite frustrating really! But I’ve realised that I need to go back to my daily routine which is well established, and gently add the new Facebook strategy over time!

Dealing With Overwhelm – Doing One Thing Well

Trying to do everything in your affiliate business leads to overwhelm and inaction. So if you find yourself here, a good thing to do is to focus on a single daily action step you can get into a habit with.

My single daily action step has always been to write a blog post. So here I am, taking some action again. No matter how small your daily action step feels, it’s always good to establish a routine where you are taking at least one daily action step with your affiliate business. So no matter what your marketing budget looks like, you can always take some positive action regardless.

There’s magic in taking action steps because it fires up your enthusiasm, and prevents you from procrastinating yourself into a corner.

One single action step is far better than a week of frantic procrastination and spreading yourself too thin among many different strategies. When you spread yourself too thin, nothing much happens because you never gain any traction in any area.

With blogging, my “go to” daily routine, I’ve managed to keep it going for several years now and have built a huge volume of blog posts on this website alone.

Dealing With Overwhelm – The Cycle Of Confusion

There’s a cycle of confusion within affiliate marketing and it explains the around 95% drop out rate in the industry. You join a course, get some training and then it comes time to choose a marketing method and get to work. But you don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t. If you have a marketing budget, you can start out running ads and testing different marketing campaigns. If you don’t have money for marketing, you’ll need another strategy, such as blogging, video content or using social media.

The problem with any kind of marketing method is that nothing is guaranteed to work, especially the first time you try it. But particularly with free social media tactics and content creation, it takes a long time before you see any results from it. So you need to be confident in your daily action steps and persevere, often for weeks before you see the result.

The worst thing is, before you take action, you procrastinate. You wonder whether the action steps will work. You want proof that it works! But there is no proof. The results are only waiting for the action takers who put themselves on the line – both with paid advertising and content generation.

Dealing With Overwhelm – My New Facebook Tactic

My new Facebook tactic is only just underway and I’ll share my results in a later post once I’ve given it some time to generate traction. But at the moment I’m running into problems with it. What invariably comes up is doubt and scepticism. I wonder whether it’s worth my time at all. My old habits of blogging, sharing content with my list, positing on social media and answering Quora questions are more established, and therefore easier.

By taking action on a new strategy, I’m taking time away from my old strategies. Should I stick with my old tactics or switch to Facebook? Will Facebook actually work? These are the questions which fill my mind and while they do, doubt arises and I’m not actually working on anything!

I also mentioned my new tactic to someone who queried it, which led to me querying it! Now I’m doubting my new tactic already before actually starting it properly. It also gave rise to this post on why you should’t tell anyone what you’re doing before it’s done!

Now there’s two sides to this coin because some say you need to be held accountable. Telling someone your goals for example makes them hold you to account. But, if you’re unsure of something, sometimes it’s worth keeping it to yourself before you tell anyone what you’re up to! Anyway, I’ve shared my new tactic here so I hope you can hold me accountable to it. Sign up to my list and you’ll get my future post on the tactic once I’ve proven to myself that it actually works!

Summary

So if you’ve found yourself dealing with overwhelm, unable to think or act, it’s probably worth choosing a single action you can do every day without thought. For me it’s posting a blog on my website, but it could be running an ad, uploading a video, posting on social media. That action becomes your daily staple and you can build on that over time.

When you switch to something else, especially after establishing a routine, your mind rebels. It wants to remain in your old patterns of behaviour. It’s easy to remain the same. So cut yourself some slack if you’re going through this. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Change takes time. Make a daily habit out of one simple action step you can get into a groove with, and build on.

That’s far easier and more effective than jumping from course to course, or strategy to strategy, looking for some magic pill. A single step towards your goals is much better, no matter how slowly you move, than staying in a state of overwhelm and confusion.

Don’t Tell Anyone What You’re Doing ‘Till It’s Done!

Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing ’till it’s done! There’s a reason you should keep quiet about your ambitions and dreams. People have the habit of stealing your thunder, undermining your ambitions and making you question yourself. When you share a dream, make sure that the person you’re sharing it with is on the same page. Otherwise it can have dire consequences. Better yet, don’t share them with anyone, just go out an achieve them first. Let your results do the talking!

A dream or ambition is like a seed, which needs consistent belief to grow. When you share your dream with someone who is full of doubt and scepticism, (like many people are), they throw that scepticism on your belief – your “seed”!

You start to wonder whether your dream is valid at all, whether you want it, or whether you should even bother. Your once alive and joyful desire to achieve or manifest something is dulled. Now you’re filled with scepticism and doubt instead.

If you’re particularly empathetic, you’ll easily pick up on any doubt/scepticism coming from others, especially regarding something that’s important to you.

Don’t Tell Anyone What You’re Doing ‘Till It’s Done!

So, why would someone sabotage your dream anyway? What’s in it for them? There’s lots of reasons why someone would do this, and it’s usually done without their awareness. Well meaning friends are often trying to help you, keep you “safe”, or have “concerns” about your direction. Like a well meaning parent, who warns you off the career you want, to encourage one which is “safe” and gives you a “secure” future.

In my 20’s I decided I was going to become a stuntman! That didn’t get a lot of encouragement from a lot of people, I can tell you. Well meaning strangers would tell me how that was only for certain types of people, but not for me. “Former racing car drivers, that’s the kind of people who become stuntmen – but not you”…whoever you are. Pretty soon, I learned not to talk to them about it.

If I did, I might have listened. Then I wouldn’t have become a stuntman and got to hang under a helicopter, a dream since I was a kid watching The Fall Guy on television with Lee Majors as Colt Seavers!

Don’t Tell Anyone What You’re Doing ‘Till It’s Done! – Cultivating Your Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is what drives your actions. If you don’t have any enthusiasm for something, you’re not going to take action for it. At least not any enthusiastic action. You can, of course, keep taking action in turning up to your steady job, even if only because you’re enthusiastic about being paid!

But over time a lack of enthusiasm for the job itself means you’re at odds with it. This eventually catches up with you when your resistance for a job is greater than your desire to keep doing it, or for the money you earn from it. This can take decades, but once you’re completely disheartened about your job/career, you’re forced to look elsewhere and make a change. Or, ruin your life in other ways if you fail to recognise the cause! Using drugs or ruining your relationships for example.

The problem here is that over a decade, you become surrounded by people who support your current reality. This is why change is so hard. To change, you need a new direction and new enthusiasm for something. When you suggest this to someone in your current circle, they deny it because it betrays their reality! If you could for example start an online business, and escape the corporate 9 to 5 nightmare, their situation would be worse, relative to you!

Why Naysayers Demoralise You

The “naysayer’s” might not even share your desire to escape (your current reality), and so only reflect their own beliefs back to you, instead of supporting your new venture!

Far easier to denigrate your desire to escape, and be re-assured that there’s no better reality out there than the current one. Should you escape, it would alter the dynamics of the relationship.

So they dissuade you from your new ideas, ambitions or goals, putting your ideas down and demoralising your dreams! Now they are safe in their reality, and the relationship dynamics remain the same. You think “ah well, maybe they are right”, and give up your dream!

If you are uncertain about your dream, and speak to one of these naysayer’s about it, they are sure to kill it for you! This is why you Don’t Tell Anyone What You’re Doing ‘Till It’s Done!

Protect Your Dreams

To cultivate your enthusiasm you need to protect it from these negative influences. Like a seed in the ground, they can easily be washed away. Treat your “spark” of inspiration (or dream) as a newborn, which needs love and protection. Guard it well and keep watering it and feeding it positive intentions, even if you don’t know the actions to take yet.

As Napoleon Hill wrote in his book Think and Grow Rich:

“The subconscious mind is like a garden in which weeds can grow in abundance if seeds of more desirable crops are not sewn therein”

Your inspiration, idea or dream is your “seed” which needs protecting. You must keep adding to it, in order for it to grow: water it and give it love. There’s nothing so damaging to it than asking a friend for encouragement, and none is given. Especially a friend you think well of and trust their judgement, as you do your own.

Summary

There’s another reason to keep your mouth shut about your future plans around people. Many will subtly sabotage your plans, hopes and dreams because they don’t really want to see you doing better than them. It changes the relationship “status quo” and puts them on their back foot with you.

Many may say they want “what’s best for you”, and are only “concerned” or “worried”. But in reality they are simply relaying their own personal fears and prejudices about a path they wouldn’t tread themselves. Most people simply aren’t coaches, who try and understand what you want and encourage your dreams out of you. Most people subtly convey their own limitations, fears and biases onto you instead of supporting you in your endeavours.

When you practice self control, you give more power to your dreams/goals too. Not only do you disarm anyone’s ability to denigrate your dreams (because you don’t tell them), but each time you keep quiet, you remind yourself of your goal.

When you share a goal you haven’t materialised with the wrong person, they can undermine your belief and desire in it to the extent that you lose all motivation for it, based on their opinion or indifference to it.

Your disappointment that they don’t share your enthusiasm can soon turn to discouragement, even if they mean well!

So keep quiet and show people with your results, don’t give away your intentions!

Who To Target With Your Affiliate Product?

If you’re wondering who to target with your affiliate product, you’re in the right place. It can be easy to get your affiliate link and start randomly “shoving” it out “there”, any way you can. But it’s a mistake. Most people aren’t interested in your product, even if you are! There’s only a tiny slice of the online marketplace who actually is likely to buy your product, and some of those people will require a little persuasion.

But what if you could attract only those people who were ready to buy? Those with their wallets out and credit card in hand? Wouldn’t that save a lot of wasted time and effort? While we can’t always find those exact people, we can certainly “zone” in on those people who are most likely to buy from us, when we show them our affiliate product.

When you know who to target with your affiliate product, you’ll shave a lot of wasted time and effort off your online journey.

Who To Target With Your Affiliate Product – Your Customer Avatar

The first thing you should do once you’ve selected an affiliate product to promote is to define who your customer is. Your “customer avatar” is the type of person who is most likely to buy your product. They are your target audience and focusing your marketing campaign/s towards people like that, is going to give you more sales than not doing so.

So, who is your customer avatar? When you’re a beginner affiliate, you probably haven’t given this much thought. If you haven’t run any advertising campaigns yet, you won’t have any data to know who they are. So where do you start? When I began in affiliate marketing, I was in a rush! I rushed through basics like this and wasted a lot of time and effort, throwing my affiliate links hither and thither in the hope one would land on a buyer! It’s a reciepe for disappointment let me tell you!

When you don’t know who to target with your content or your ads, start with your product. Ask yourself who it will serve the most, and why they will not hesitate in buying it.

Who To Target With Your Affiliate Product

If you’re selling a piano course, you want to target people looking for such a course. That’s pretty obvious right? But what if your product is more obscure, like a training course for entrepreneurs? In this case, you would look for people who need a solution to their problem.

If someone hates their work, and wants more time with their family, an online business course might offer a solution for them. Here’s a few tips on how to find your target audience through your affiliate product. Start by asking yourself:

What problem/s does your product solve, and who might have that problem?
What kind of people are most likely to buy your product and why?
Where do they live? Is your product location specific?
How old are they? Is there a specific age range of the people who will buy from you?
What interests might tie your customers together?
What do your customers have in common?

How To Target With Your Marketing

Once you know a little about your customer avatar, such as their likely age, interests, location and circumstances, you can begin to set up a campaign which will target them, and them specifically. You can also communicate a single congruent idea/message towards your customer avatar, knowing their circumstances and speaking to their pains/problems.

So, for example, if you’re creating a video advert, you can communicate to someone about how your product can solve their main problem. If they are struggling with a challenging work situation, and want more control over their life for example, you might suggest your business course as a solution.

If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s much harder to reach your customer avatar and communicate in a way which connects with them. But if you understand their main problem, you can speak to this in your marketing, and lead them to your solution.

Marketing platforms are very high tech these days and you can focus your marketing demographics at a very specific “slice” of the online marketplace. Target people by age, location, interests, income and all sorts of other criteria to get focused on your customer avatar.

As you start making sales, build a database around your customer avatar, getting more and more focused on who your “perfect” customer is, what drives them, and where they hang out online.

Facebook, Adwords, Microsoft, YouTube?

So, which advertising platform should you use to attract your target audience? Well that depends on where your customer avatar hangs out. Which platforms are they using to solve their problems? Google Adwords is a useful platform to find people who are actively seeking a solution to their problem.

They are solution aware perhaps. Solution aware people are actively looking for a product to help solve their problem. So a search on Google could be used to show your advert, for example. You could research keywords which are being used on Google (use Google’s keyword planner tool) for your particular product.

Reviews are a good example of this. When someone is looking for a review of a product, they are solution aware and may be ready to buy. They simply want to know whether that particular product will help them. So your could create a review for your product and run some advertising to it, targeting people looking for that particular review.

If someone knows they have a problem, but doesn’t know what the solution is, their are problem aware. They might be looking elsewhere for a solution online.

Summary

Knowing who is likely to buy from you is super important. If you don’t know, you’re likely to waste a lot of time and marketing budget scattering your marketing efforts about randomly.

When you know who is most likely to buy from you, you’re much better armed as an affiliate to succeed at making a sale. Not only will you know where your customer avatar is and what they want, but you should also get to know their pains and problems, so you can communicate a message which speaks to them directly.

Speaking to a specific person who you’ve identified through their pains and needs, is much more powerful that trying to communicate a message to “all and sundry”. A vague message doesn’t hit home like a specific one aimed at the right target demographic. Once you get to know your customer avatar, and how to communicate with them directly and in a meaningful way, you will get better at making online sales as an affiliate.

Goal Setting & Identity Shift

The last couple of my blog posts have been about the importance of goal setting but in this one I’m going to discuss goal setting and identity shift. One of the reasons you might find it so difficult to work on your affiliate business, or make change in any area of your life, is because of your identity. “Who” you see yourself as, has a great affect on what you can achieve, because it’s embedded in your very being.

For example, if you see yourself as someone who “struggles”, you might perpetuate that reality because it’s how you identify yourself: “I am one who struggles“. It is “me“. An identity gives us congruency and safety. When we make a conclusion about “who” we are in life, it’s a form of security which the ego can cling to. It is the self image. People get to know us as that person, and they continue to reenforce that false “self”.

When you try and change things you meet resistance, both from yourself and your circle of friends/family. But mostly it is from your “old” version of yourself trying to cling to its reality. You can’t be a “successful entrepreneur” and at the same time “one who struggles” , for example. You can’t be a “fit athlete”, if you see yourself as “fat and lazy”. One of those identities clashes with the other. So, in order to make progress in any area of life, an old part of yourself (an old identity) has to die!

Goal Setting & Identity Shift – Kill Your (Old) Self

But it won’t give up without a fight. Your old self has been around for a long time. You’ve had fun together! You have become comfortable as “that” person you created! That’s the reason that when you set about making change in your life, in any area, there’s a battle going on. Your old self is fighting for its survival! It’s a paradigm which you’ve entrenched in your mind for perhaps years of your life.

A new “self” will rock the boat. Friends will say things like “that’s not ‘you'”! When you come to “do the work”, you’ll kick and scream because that’s where the old self is fighting for its existence. It resists change because it wants to retain the status quo. It wants to stay alive!

But you want change and the best way to change things permanently is through self growth and an identity “shift”. That won’t happen without a fight, and without losing your old self in the process.

Goal Setting & Identity Shift – Why Goals Often Don’t Work

You might have had some problems with goal setting. You set a goal, and when you come to do the work, you get blocked. There’s resistance. Resistance is anything which comes up which you use to not do the work you need to do to accomplish your goal.

Your mind tells you a story about the action you should be taking and it might take a form such as this:

I’m not good enough
I just can’t find the motivation
What if I should be doing something else
I don’t really care about the goal anyway
I’m not cut out for this
I’d rather not do it
It won’t matter anyway

You avoid doing the work and the payoff is that you stay the same. Your identity remains in tact. But your situation doesn’t change either. A goal can help you do the work needed in order to change your identity. Once you have an identity shift, you become the person who does the work. But you must push through the pain otherwise you’ll only perpetuate what you already have. You’ll avoid the work, make excuses, and your reality won’t shift.

Summary

A goal sets the wheels in motion and gives you motivation to make change. However, once you have set a goal, you’ll come up against resistance. This will come in the form of your old self justifying why it doesn’t want to shift, why it doesn’t need to shift.

Observe this resistance for what it really is – your old self putting up a fight! In order to affect change you need an identity shift towards the person who does the work in order to get the outcome you really want – to achieve the goal.

the “old” you is the person who struggles, procrastinates and avoids the work you need to do to achieve your goal. The “new” you (version 2), is the person you must become in order to achieve your goal. The “battle” is between the old you and the new you who is trying to manifest itself through your goal.

Once you become aware of this battle, you can see the resistance for what it really is – the older version of you battling for its existence! This is explained much more succinctly in this video by Charlie Morgan and it’s well worth the hour and ten minutes of your day if you’re struggling with your goals.

Failing With Your Online Business?

If you’re failing with your online business, you’re still far ahead of those who aren’t even trying. A “failure” is never truly a failure until you quit, it’s actually feedback for those who stay in the race! So if you can keep going, and choose never to quit, you’ll eventually learn from your mistakes and hit a winner. Then you can use that winner to create more and more of the same. Ultimately, your mindset will determine whether you will continue or not, and whether you continue or not determines whether you win (or not)!

In the middle of July I set myself the goal of getting 1000 website hits on my blog through organic only means. Here’s the post I wrote explaining my method: how to get 1000 website hits without paying. Yesterday was the deadline and I was inspired to write this post: the importance of goal setting, to mark the occasion!

I actually had a shortfall and didn’t hit my target of 1000 website hits in a single day. Here’s my stats. They show I had 746 hits yesterday, a shortfall of 254 from my target! Today is Thursday, which is why it shows only 247 hits so far.

Failing With Your Online Business?

So, did I fail? Certainly I failed at hitting my target of 1000 hits by the end of July! However, the goal itself served its purpose and I worked much more diligently towards my blogging that I would have, had I not set a goal. Have a look at my stats for the rest of the year as a comparison:

I decided on this goal in mid July, to spur me on in my blogging! If traffic was my intention, which it was, (and content creation of course), the this is surely a success? Before this point, I was blogging fairly regularly, and you can see I was getting regular traffic to my blog. However, once I set the goal, my activity increased because I had a stronger intention – to reach 1000 hits by July 31st!

In my drive to hit the 1000 figure, I wrote more, and I promoted my blog posts more too! Previously, I was held back by thoughts like:

It won’t make any difference if I blog more
I don’t want to annoy people with too many emails
Will blogging even help my bottom line
Should I be doing something else, such as paid ads?
Am I taking the right course of action here?

But once I set my goal, these thoughts had no space because I needed to focus on every single effort I could make to reach my goal. The doubting thoughts in my mind had to take a back seat – my goal was what mattered! There was simply no time to entertain negative thoughts like these. If I did, I wouldn’t be taking consistent action towards my goal!

Failing With Your Online Business? – Set A Goal

“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes” – Andrew Carnegie

If you feel as though you’re failing with your online business, set a goal for yourself. A goal should inspire you and excite you. I’ve set many goals in the past which I quickly forgot about. Nothing came of them because I either didn’t care about my goal, deep down, or I didn’t believe I could achieve it!

But set a goal which motivates, inspires and drives your behaviour, and you know you have set a good goal for yourself.

When I set the goal of 1000 website hits in mid July, I was already blogging, knew I needed some motivation, and knew my goal was more traffic. So the goal was pretty logical.

If you’re unsure of a goal to set, think about an area of life which you’d like to change. With an online business, the goal is likely to relate to achieving more sales. You don’t have to know how you will achieve your goal when you set it, just that you want it, a lot and you believe it’s possible, even if it’s a stretch.

Failing With Your Online Business?

I recently found an old goal I had written (and laminated) in a recent house move. It was dated 2010 and said “I now earn £1000 a month online”. Earning an income online was a goal of mine for a long time, and once I achieved it, I rested on my laurels. I sat back, forgot about my goal, and slowly my online income dropped down again.

I had forgotten about all the actions I had taken to get me to that goal of £1000 a month online. As a result, I stopped doing the things which drove my business forwards!

Had I set another goal, of perhaps hitting £2000 a month online, I would have continued taking the right actions to move my business forward! See my post on contingency goals.

The same thing happened after I set a goal to become a stuntman in 1998! Once I got my first stunt job, I thought I’d “arrived”. I had achieved my goal! I rested on my laurels and stopped setting new goals. Sure enough, the work dropped away and I found myself back in my default settings – scraping by and doing jobs which made me unhappy.

If you’re failing with your online business, maybe you have let your intentions slide? Can you set a goal which will help you get back on track? One which motivates and inspires you?

“We are not the highest version of ourselves that we can imagine, we are the lowest version of ourselves that we can accept” – Sam Ovens

Summary

So if you’re failing with your online business, perhaps you have fallen into the same trap I did? Perhaps you have let your intentions slide. The negativity has crept in and drowned out your inspirations and aspirations?

You need to refuel your aspirations and intentions by writing out a meaningful goal which inspires and liberates your hopes and dreams!

Set a new goal. Decide where you want to be in 5 years time and choose the outcome you desire. Without a conscious choice of your direction, your arbitrary actions and habits will decide for you!

If you haven’t started an online business, you can begin the journey here! Good luck!

What Are Contingency Goals?

What are contingency goals and why use them? A contingency goal is a goal you use if you change direction, achieve a goal, or meet resistance with your primary goal. It’s a contingency plan for when things don’t go as expected.

In fact, it’s especially useful if they do go as expected! Once you have achieved a goal, it’s easy to drift off into a vague meandering mind space. This is because you’ve “arrived” at your “destination”. As such, you’re no longer driving yourself forwards anymore, so it can be easy to drift.

I only recently heard about contingency goals from one of my online mentors and it immediately struck a chord with me. I’ve set goals in the past, and achieved them only to drift off and meander for years afterwards! In my 20’s I set a goal of becoming a stuntman, which I achieved in 2002 (here’s my IMDB page).

What I failed to do, was set a contingency goal once I had achieved my primary goal of joining the British Stunt Register. My contingency plan was eventually to escape the film industry and build an online business. But it took me a few years to realise this is what I wanted.

Contingency goals are useful for when things aren’t going to plan. My stunt career wasn’t what I had imagined, and over time I became demoralised by it. I wanted an online business to give me more control over my income. With the stunt business, I was always at the whim of a phone call.

What Are Contingency Goals & Why Use Them?

It’s useful to have a contingency plan for an online business too because things might not go exactly as you expected them to. For example, you might run out of advertising budget, and need a fall back marketing tactic. I experienced this personally, and hence why I have used blogging extensively. My income from stunt work was always sporadic, which didn’t give me a consistent income for marketing my online business.

But I had plenty of time to create content – so blogging seemed like the natural contingency plan when my ad budget ran low.

A contingency goal gives you the power to create a new destination, rather than hoping that your current habits will take you there. After a few years as a stunt performer, I realised just waiting for jobs wasn’t a good strategy. But I didn’t have a contingency goal for when the phone stopped ringing!

Many people who start an online business have felt trapped by their jobs and income. A goal to build a profitable income online gave me an option out of the stunt business, which I ultimately felt trapped by.

My Latest Contingency Goal

I set myself a goal a few weeks back to attain 1000 website hits on this website through organic means. I even wrote a post sharing my strategy: “how to get 1000 hits on your website without paying“.

My goal was to get 1000 hits a day, by today (31st August 2024). While today isn’t over yet, yesterday I reached 860 hits organically, a slight shortfall to my main goal.

The 1000 hits was a contingency goal. After I ran out of advertising budget, I could no longer run paid advertising. But I had a lot of time. So the contingency goal was to generate traffic, leads and sales through blogging.

Why Use Goals

As my latest goal has shown me, there’s huge importance in goal setting. By setting a goal which is both important to you and meaningful, which meets the criteria of believable and desirable, it should drive you towards a meaningful future outcome which you have control of. Not doing so allows you to fall back into your old habits and behaviours and your life becomes the default setting of what has always been so.

Insanity, as Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Goal setting allows anyone to set a future destined event or circumstance and then work steadily towards it in a logical and consistent fashion.

When I’ve failed before with goals, it’s been because I didn’t believe in them, or I didn’t really care about the outcome. Setting a good goal inspires you towards its outcome, and allows you to focus on its achievement in a desirable and enjoyable way.

Once you have achieved a goal, it’s easy to fall back into old habits and downwards towards your lowest acceptable standards. A contingency goal can be used when this happens. It allows you to focus again, and keep moving forwards towards a life of your conscious choice, rather than living by default.