AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Clickbank Problems – Challenges For Affiliates

Facing Clickbank problems? Whether you’re using Clickbank or any of the other affiliate programs out there, you’ll no doubt face certain problems which every affiliate will need to overcome to become successful. Clickbank is no different and despite the higher levels of commission you can earn from selling digital products (compared to physical), you still need to actually sell them to make any money!

What Clickbank problems are you facing? One of the biggest problems for affiliates is traffic.

Clickbank Problems – Traffic

Traffic is undoubtably one of the biggest problems which affiliate marketers will face. Without it, your affiliate business is dead in the water. Even with traffic, if that traffic doesn’t convert into paying customers, you’re still going to struggle! So what’s the best way to attract hungry buyers for your affiliate products?

While some affiliates will create content, this can be a long and difficult road, especially if you choose a popular product and there’s a lot of competition. Blogging is a solid cheap strategy for attracting an audience but what if there’s thousands of bloggers in the same niche as you, even selling the exact same product as you? If so, it can take months or years to gain traction from a blog.

Without a blog, you can use video blogging. YouTube is a popular alternative to a blog and there’s far less competition on YouTube than there is on Google search. Alternatively use paid advertising and drive traffic to a landing page where you can convert traffic into leads. On an email list, you have a much longer time period to interact with potential customers, build trust and make the sale. See also know, like trust funnel.

Whether you use paid ads, content marketing or social media to find customers for your Clickbank products, you need to get something right to avoid problems. That is to understand who your perfect customer is – your customer avatar.

Clickbank Problems – Customer Avatar

Yes, your customer avatar is the small cross section of the online marketplace who are most likely to want, need and love what you have to offer. If you get to learn more about this person (or type of person), you’ll save yourself a heap of problems, headaches and despair!

Once you understand the people you can serve best with your products, you’ll waste less time sending the wrong kind of people to your website/landing page. As a beginner affiliate I made this mistake too – the mistake of trying to sell to everyone! An expression in marketing is: “Try and sell everyone and you sell (to) no one”.

It’s easy to forget that with affiliate marketing you can attract a global audience – most of which don’t give a hoot about what you’re selling! To find those people who do care, and want what you’re offering, you need to get to know your target audience.

What’s your ideal customer like? Where do they live? How old are they? Where do they hang out online and what kinds of questions do they ask? What kind of content do they consume? It’s worth spending some time learning the answers to these questions. It will shave a lot of frustration and struggle off your affiliate journey. You can’t hit a target you haven’t got – which is why many affiliate struggle to sell online.

Competition

The cost of advertising with many of the online platforms is steadily rising as more and more people become affiliates. If you choose a competitive niche to build an affiliate business in, there’s a lot of competition for content but also ad cost rises too! So what’s the solution? Well one solution is to find a niche which is less competitive.

Although a lot of “guru’s” advise to choose Clickbank products with a high gravity, this may also mean there’s a lot of competition too. So choosing Clickbank items with lower gravity, (but which are still selling), is a good idea in some cases.

If you’re creating content as an affiliate, it’s worth checking out the content you’ll find on Google for the products you’re promoting. Reviews, for example, are popular among Clickbank affiliates because they are a simple way to promote any product. But if there’s already thousands of reviews on Google for your chosen product, you can struggle to get your content found. What’s the answer? Choose a topic you love creating content around and a product which will be around for some time. It can take months to build a niche website which gets traffic and if your product vanishes overnight that’s a lot of hard work wasted!

Making Sales, Recurring & High Ticket Items

Even if you get traffic to your affiliate products you can still struggle making sales. Some products sell better than others so it’s worth being prudent when choosing products whether you’re using Clickbank or not.

Certain products will pay out recurring income if they carry subscription charges. This gives you an obvious head start as an affiliate because it gives you a more reliable income more quickly. However, there’s a downside in that subscriptions require a high quality product otherwise customers won’t maintain them. Some good subscription affiliate programs are software products and memberships which offer training and education for online businesses, for example. See also subscription affiliate programs.

A $100 product form Clickbank will give you a commission of $30-$40 depending on the rate. To replace an income you’ll need to sell a lot of these products on a regular basis. But if you use high ticket affiliate products, a single sale will pay you the same as several low value products.

Automated Money Making System

Anybody can build an automated money making system with only a few tools:

An affiliate product – someone else’s product/s which you can promote online
An email marketing tool – known as an autoresponder which collects email addresses and sends out email automatically
A marketing platform – which finds perfect customers for your product/s through paid ads.

There’s other ways to sell affiliate products online too, but this is the simplest way to build an automated money making system, which you can use to make money in your sleep! There’s other ways of product promotion, such as using banners on websites, for example, and there’s other ways of getting people in front of your products, for example blogging. However the fastest and most reliable way to build a money making system is with only three tools: an affiliate product, an email marketing tool (autoresponder) and a marketing platform which uses paid ads.

Automated Money Making System – Products

You can of course sell your own business or product/s if you have one to sell. But for most people the best way to monetise a system is with other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products and services online for a share of the profit. Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote products for a commission.

Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs online and attracts thousands of affiliates who promote the many products from the site. But there’s many other types of affiliate program too and you don’t have to just choose Amazon. In fact, Amazon’s affiliate commissions are pretty low in comparison to many other affiliate programs.

digital vs physical affiliate commissions

Digital products pay far more than physical products typically. So if you’re considering building an affiliate business it’s worth understanding the different levels of commissions you can earn from product promotion. Physical products typically pay the least: usually between 5% and 10% of the sale value. Digital products on the other hand pay much more – 30%-40% in most cases, sometimes even more. Then there’s high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products to consider. These are especially useful if you’re going to use paid marketing in your automated money making system. Since paid marketing can get expensive, you’ll want the highest possible return on your investment possible.

Automated Money Making System: Email Marketing

While you can sell affiliate products directly from a website, most people won’t buy from a website, especially on their first visit. Customers on average will need to interact with a business several times before they make a buying decision. This creates a problem for many website based businesses. How do you get more customers to your website and how do you build more trust? The answer is with email marketing. In fact, you can make many more sales if you skip the website altogether and simply send customers to your email marketing campaign.

What advantage does email marketing have over a simple website? On a website a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes. This means you have only that time to sell them something! But once you have someone on your email list, you can send them automated messages over a much longer timeframe. Often email subscribers will purchase something from you even months or years after joining your list.

The email messages you send out are an opportunity to build trust, offer value and help your subscribers get to know like and trust you.

A Marketing Platform

A marketing platform allows you to send qualified and interested potential customers into a lead nurture funnel – (your email marketing campaign). This can be done using any of the many paid marketing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Adwords, Bing etc. Most advertising platforms allow marketers to target a specific cross section of their audience so that they can place ads in front of people who match their customer avatar.

For example, if you’re selling a Yoga related affiliate product, you might want to target the search term “Yoga” in your adverts. Since the people looking for information on Yoga are likely to fall within the realms of your perfect target audience. Some marketing platforms will allow you to also narrow down your target marketing by other criteria such as age, location, interests and even by their income bracket.

Not knowing who you are targeting your ads towards is a major reason why many fail with an online business.

Target Audience

Once you have identified your target audience and set up an advert, you can send visitors to a landing page where you collect their email address. Why use landing pages?

A landing page is a simple one page website which gives visitors only two choices: sign up or leave. On a website, like this one, there’s much more choice. As such, it means your visitors are less likely to opt in to your email campaign if you use a standard website. So, it makes sense to encourage your visitors to opt in and you can do this by optimising your landing pages for the best performance. This is done through cross testing different pages against each other to see which performs the best.

Other Marketing & Monetisation Methods

While paid marketing can be expensive, it’s the fastest way to build an automated money making system using email marketing and affiliate products. A paid marketing platform gives you traffic immediately, whereas other methods of traffic generation are much slower and less scalable. Blogging, for example is a very slow way to generate interest in your affiliate products. With blogging you can build a similar system but without paying for advertising.

Over time if you persevere with blogging, (or another content marketing tactic), you can build a passive income through organic traffic. However, this will take some time and effort and depending on the topic of your content it can be competitive.

Video content is another way you can generate traffic online. Upload videos on a regular basis to YouTube or TikTok. Over time your channel will pull in visitors which you can send to your affiliate products. Or you can monetise in another way with Google Adsense for example. Adsense lets you monetise content on a website, or a video channel and you get paid for each click of an advert from your visitors. See also affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense.

Summary

To build an automated money making system is possible with only three things:

An affiliate product or products
An email autoresponder – get one for free here.
A marketing platform

Paid advertising can become expensive and you’ll benefit from using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products which pay larger and recurring income commissions.

If you’re serious about building a profitable online business using this strategy, you’ll need training, help and support and the right products in your sales funnel. Access a free video series here to learn more about the different types of affiliate products you can use.

Start Blogging To Earn Money Online

How easy is it to start blogging to earn money online? Blogging can be one of the simplest ways to earn online. But it can also be a huge challenge. With over 600 million bloggers in the world in 2022, there’s huge competition. If you’re choosing a very popular topic too, it can be very difficult to get heard through all the noise.

But if you can make blogging pay, it has some huge benefits. You can generate a passive income, you can escape the 9 to 5 and you can work from anywhere globally. So the question is do you want that badly enough?!

Many bloggers blog because they enjoy their topic too, not for an income. But if you can find a topic you love and you can generate an income from it too, it’s a win win! In fact this is the best way to approach a blog.

Without being in it for a good amount of time, it’s much more difficult to break through and get the necessary engagement and exposure to succeed financially. But if you choose a topic you aren’t passionate about, how long do you think you’ll keep it up for?!

So, one of the best decisions you can make when contemplating building a blog is what topic/niche it will be about.

Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Choosing Your Niche

Your niche is your topic and this choice will affect how much you enjoy blogging and how engaged your readers are. Choose a topic you’re less than thrilled. about and before long, blogging will become a drag, draining your enthusiasm and bringing you down! You can’t sustain a blog for long if you don’t choose your topic well.

I chose a topic I wasn’t at all interested in! Within a few months I was completely burned out. The site soon dropped off the search engine results pages (SERPS) and I let it go! Don’t make the same mistake. Choose a topic you are genuinely interested in and you’ll be able to out-perform other bloggers in the same niche because you’ll be more passionate about it!

It’s a little trite to just say “do something you love”! This needs to be balanced with a viable niche which can be easily monetised. I chose a niche in mushroom harvesting. This niche was both of little interest to me and difficult to monetise! In a popular niche, such as money making online, there’s a huge amount of competition. So you’ll need to blog over months or even years before you gain traction. So even though this niche is easily monetised with affiliate products and ads, you’ll have your work cut out making it work.
Conversely if you choose a niche which nobody cares about or which can’t be monetised with affiliate products, you’ll struggle to make it pay.

The answer is to find something you’re genuinely interested in, and find affiliate products you believe in, which align with your topic.

Start Blogging To Earn Money: Micro Niche

Sorry to say but blogging is a slow process. Even if you work really hard it will take a long time to make it pay! That’s because there’s so much competition. Ultimately bloggers want free traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.). Once they get free traffic, things can change quite dramatically. But getting this traffic is tough because there’s so many others doing exactly the same as you. The key to speed up this process is dig into your niche and find a niche within your niche which is more specific.

An example of a niche within a niche is “chair yoga for seniors”! Yoga is a hugely popular niche in which there’s many blogs. So if you started a blog on Yoga, it will likely take a huge amount of time and effort to get any traction. But if you dig deeper, and find a more specific topic, which has a smaller more niche audience, you’ll find far fewer competing websites.

Your site will stand out because you’re a specialist. This makes the journey a whole lot quicker. In a popular niche it can take years of blogging before you get the traffic you want. In a less competitive niche (a sub-niche) you might do it in a few months. See also best micro niche for blogging.

Start Blogging To Earn Money: Monetisation

Of course you can blog in any topic you choose but the longer you can sustain your blogging habit, the better your chances are to outperform the competition. That’s why choosing a topic you’re going to enjoy writing about is paramount. If you hate every minute of blogging, you’re not going to sustain it for years are you!?

To earn from blogging you can monetise in a couple of main ways. You can make your own products to sell, or sell your own service/business if you have one. But if not don’t worry because you can join an affiliate program and promote other people’s products from your blog.

There’s affiliate products in almost any area you can think of. Just have a look on Amazon, or Clickbank.com for ideas of products you can sell from a blog. You can also monetise a blog with advertising too. Adsense is the most popular platform where content creators can go to place ads on their content. You get paid when your visitors click on your ads and only in tiny amounts. So you’ll need a lot of free traffic if you’re going to monetise with adverts. That’s why affiliate marketing is a good choice because you can make more money from blogging with less traffic.

With high ticket affiliate products and subscription products on your blog you can dramatically increase your income from a smaller amount of traffic, once you start attracting visitors.

Start Blogging To Earn Money Online: Free Blog Platforms

There’s several free blogging platforms where you can get your start as a blogger and I started with Hubpages.com and Blogger.com. However, it’s far better to own the website you are blogging on for a few reasons:

Your site has more authority with your visitors – they perceive you as more of an authority that they would on a free blog platform.
Search engines see you as a greater authority and therefore ranks you better with your own website
There’s more control with your own site – you choose what to put up there and you’re less restricted by rules, terms and conditions – which can limit your choice of affiliate products and links etc.

Here’s a few other free blog platforms where you can get your start if you don’t have the cash to start your own site:

Joomla (www.joomla.org)
Tumblr (www.tumblr.com)
Blogger (www.blogger.com)
Ghost (www.ghost.org)
Medium (www.medium.com)
Weebly (www.weebly.com)

Buying A Domain Name & Website Setup

You can buy a domain name of your own from many places but I use namecheap.com. A domain name gives your own website character and credibility. You can also target specific keywords within your domain name which can give you a head start in terms of traffic generation. See my article on this topic “how to build a niche website“.

Once you’ve bought a domain name you’ll need to host it with a hosting provider. I use Hostgator which provides cheap hosting and lets you install your site through their user interface.

Once you’ve bought your domain name, I recommed to use WordPress which you can install through the Hostgator interface. WordPress is one of the easiest interfaces you can use and gives you complete control over your site. You can also install a number of plugins to WordPress very easily and for free. Checkout my blog post on best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Writing Your First Blog

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and blogging is exactly the same! I recommend a plugin called Yoast SEO which allows you to optimise your blog posts for the search engines. This means you’ll get more ranking status with Google and other search engines should your post come up against similar blog posts, which it surely will!

Most blog posts won’t rank however, particularly in the early stages of being a blogger. This makes it hard to get regular traffic to your site. To get around this problem, you can target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Finding the keywords which have the least competition on Google can give you a chance at free traffic with a new site. Over time, as you create more and more content, your site authority will grow and you should start getting more traffic.

But this can be a long and arduous task which is why if you don’t enjoy the journey it’s all the more difficult to sustain over the longer term. To get more traffic more quickly, share all your posts on social media frequently, write often and use social share plugins. See the best free blog plugin for WordPress for some other recommended plugins which will make your blogging journey smoother!

Summary

Can you really start blogging to earn money online? Starting blogging is very different to earning money from blogging. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet which means you’re competing with a huge number of others for attention. So if you’re going to become a blogger, it’s wise to do your homework before you start. The best thing you can do is to spend some time deciding on your blog topic. In a very competitive topic, you’ll struggle to get your content seen. But, choose a topic which people are uninterested in and you’ll struggle to get visitors for the opposite reasons.

It can take months or even years for bloggers to get enough traffic to their blogs to make any money. Here’s a few tips to get ahead of the rest:

Find a topic/niche you are passionate about and could continue writing about for months or years
Make sure you check how you’re going to monetise your topic before you start. Some niches are harder to monetise than others
Ideally use subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products to monetise your niche. This can give you greater traction with less traffic.
Build an email list from your blog – use an enticing call to action and promote your affiliate products to your list automatically. Access a free autoresponder software here.
Join an online business community for help and support: learn more here.

Know Like Trust Funnel

The know like trust funnel refers to a marketing funnel where you build trust with your potential customers. Most people don’t just buy the first time they come to a website or join an email list. In fact there’s often a number of touch points before a customer will buy from a website or email marketing list.

This shouldn’t be surprising because there’s so many websites (and marketers) out there that customers are spoiled for choice. Why should they buy from you, a faceless affiliate/marketer?

Many marketers/affiliates make the mistake of just trying to get more traffic and subscribers. They then fire countless emails to their list to get people to buy from them. Unfortunately this tactic is shortsighted, especially given the number of marketers out there. Emails are quickly seen as spam unless you are delivering value in your marketing messages.

Value driven messages will set you apart from other marketers and help you to build trust with your subscribers. When they get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy a product you recommend, because you’ve proved you are trust-worthy and are genuinely trying to help them, not just sell to them!

Know Like Trust Funnel

I made this mistake too as an newbie affiliate. I figured that I just had to send people to my offer, and keep reminding them of it for them to buy. But unless you are genuinely trying to help people, subscribers will see through it, click away and unsubscribe. I’ve been on many email lists too, and the ones which say only “Click here and buy this amazing product” are very short lived.

Unless those kinds of emails are proceeded by a lot of value driven content, I won’t even open them, and nor will your subscribers! To build trust can take some time, so you need to be patient. When I shifted from trying to “get” to giving more value to customers, my sales went up. Not because I was promoting anything different, but because I was changing my focus from getting to giving.

There’s a law of reciprocity in sales which is attested to in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. If you’re a marketer it’s well worth a read.

Once you start giving to your email subscribers instead of trying to get them to buy, the law kicks in. They will get to know, like and trust you if you have their best interests at heart and genuinely demonstrate this by helping them, with or without their custom!

Freebies, Help and Value

Some of the things you can offer to your email subscribers:

Free webinars
PDF downloads
Guides, ebooks and recommendations
and of course finally affiliate products

But if you lead with your sale, some subscribers will smell a rat! “This guy just wants my money”. “Every email he asks for the sale”! That’s not delivering value and sooner or later they will get the measure of you and stop opening your messages. But if you’ve spend several weeks delivering highly useful information, guess who’s going to open your email when you send it?

You stand out among the others when you start delivering value in your email marketing campaigns. Plus, it’s genuinely more satisfying feeling like you’re helping people rather than just spamming them!

The know, like trust principle is fundamental in marketing and sales. People buy (into) people, they don’t just buy products. If you can be someone of value, people will be much more likely to buy something recommended by you, especially if you’ve already helped them out massively through your emails.

Know, Like Trust Factor – Mike Massie

I joined an email list of a guy called Mike Massie, you probably haven’t heard of him unless you own a martial arts school. Well, some years ago I had a struggling Kung Fu School and looked online for help when I found Mike. I didn’t want to buy anything, I just wanted some free advice. Here’s Mike’s freebie which I found online:

So I signed up to Mike’s email list and he proceeded to email me a tonne of helpful advice. After several months of using Mike’s (free) advice, I bought his book! I would probably never have bought his book unless he had built that trust with me through giving me a tonne of value. I got to know, like and trust him! He had been so helpful, and given so much that I almost considered it rude not to buy from him! The law of reciprocity had truly kicked in! Mike’s was the perfect example of the know like trust funnel!

Know Like Trust

As an affiliate marketer or business owner it’s easy to think of just getting people on our list and then sending them to a product/service. But if we can also help our subscribers with information, advice and give them something which is of value to them, we are much more likely to build trust with them.

Once you have done this through your email marketing strategy, it means your subscribers are more likely to become your fans who seek out your information and look for your emails. When this happens, they are much more likely to trust your recommendations when it comes to the products you’re promoting.

But if you only send them to products, without also giving value, you’re going to appear less trustworthy! Your intent is clear, you are trying only to “get”, to sell! This can put people off when there’s a tonne of other similar marketers just like you. To shine out, begin by treating your subscribers as you would a friend or family member. Give them help and advice with the intention of helping first. When you build trust and get subscribers to know, like and trust you, they will be more likely to buy from you, knowing your intention is good!

Escape 9 To 5

Do you want to escape 9 to 5, create more financial and time freedom, and live anywhere? To really escape 9 to 5 you need to create multiple income sources which don’t take up all your time. With a job, you’re always trading time for money. So no matter how well paid a job is, you’re always going to need to keep turning up in order to keep getting paid.

An online business is different in than you can sell products instead of your time. You can use systems and automation to sell products globally, even while you’re not working. This is one way you can escape the 9 to 5. Anyone can use a clever business model called affiliate marketing to do this and you don’t need any products of your own to earn online. Access an online community here to get started.

Escape 9 To 5 – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model whereby third parties promote other people’s products online for a share of the profit. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once you have joined, you can promote products from Amazon and earn commissions from the sales you make. While Amazon doesn’t pay huge commissions, it’s program has thousands of products you can choose from and it’s one of the most popular affiliate programs online.

There’s other types of products too which you can sell as an affiliate. Digital products pay much more than physical products in terms of commission. So with a digital sale you can make much more than through selling a product from Amazon. You can also sell high ticket affiliate products which pay much larger amounts. By using high ticket and subscription affiliate products, affiliates can build a passive income much more quickly and easily than they would through selling only products from Amazon, for example.

How Long Will It Take?

To escape a 9 to 5 job, you need to replace your income. To do so with an affiliate business is possible, but it will take some time and investment. Depending on the business model you use, and your marketing methods it can take several months or several years to build up your income to match that of your job.

However, once you’re making consistently with affiliate marketing, you can maintain this income without trading your time. In addition to this affiliate marketing is scalable. This means once you’re profitable, you can easily scale up simply by spending more on advertising and reaching more people with your products.

There’s several ways in which affiliates sell products online and some are more scalable than others. Here’s a few methods commonly used by affiliates:

PPC – pay per click advertising – using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post
Video blogging – video bloggers upload content regularly to YouTube or TikTok channels to find people to put their products in front of
Social media – there’s both paid and unpaid marketing strategies you can use on social media platforms.
SEO – search engine optimisation is often used by bloggers to optimise their content and get found for free on the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. )

Other Ways To Escape 9 To 5

There’s other ways to escape 9 to 5 of course. You can move to a cheaper country, buy property to rent out, or find your dream job! But if you want to build an online business using the affiliate marketing (or another model), it’s one of the most accessible routes to entrepreneurship. Here’s a few other online business models you can use:

A shopify store – selling either affiliate products or using drop shipping
Google Adsense – an advertising platform which allows content builders to monetise with adverts
Import export businesses – create a website to sell and import in bulk
Direct selling – directly sell from a wholesalers and send products directly to the customer (drop shipping)
Print on demand – sell t-shirts and clothing with your own designs
Royalty income – use photographic stock websites to upload your photos or upload designs and images you own to sites such as Redbubble.com

For more ways to earn an income online, access this free video series.

See also escape rat race for strategies to escape the 9 to 5 life!

Clickbank Mentor

Looking for a Clickbank mentor? While affiliate marketing on Clickbank can seem like an easy option for income, most newbies in the industry will find the opposite. Many “gurus” will exaggerate the ease with which affiliates can earn an income from Clickbank.

You get started with a lot of enthusiasm, looking for someone to follow. But when things don’t work out straight away you can find yourself asking whether affiliate marketing actually works! It does work, of course, but it isn’t as easy as some will make out. In fact, affiliate marketing can be infuriating!

You can spend a lot of unfruitful hours with affiliate marketing and still get nowhere. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially if you’re on your own, or only with pre-recorded videos to direct you.

So what’s the answer? The answer is to find a community of other affiliates who can help and assist you. If you only want to dabble in affiliate marketing, you’ll only earn a tiny amount. But if you’re serious about affiliate marketing you need to treat it like a serious business. When you do this you can make some serious money from it.

Clickbank Mentor – My Story

I started affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. After struggling with various online earning strategies including Forex marketing, buying and selling and selling my own ebooks, I discovered affiliate marketing. I made my first online sale after jumping from course to course and trying a lot of different techniques. It was a monumental moment and I knew affiliate marketing was the key to a passive income.

However there were a lot of problems and for each sale I made, I worked for many weeks, sometimes even months! Sometimes I thought about giving up too. I tried multiple courses and strategies but eventually found an online community which helped me take affiliate marketing seriously and get traction. You can access the free video series which let me to the group.

There’s a couple of things I learned which weren’t helping me. Maybe you’re doing the same? One of them was I was struggling getting traffic to my offers because of the strategy I was using; organic (free) marketing. I figured I couldn’t afford paid marketing, but I was wrong. If you promote high ticket affiliate programs you can earn much more which covers an advertising budget.

With subscription affiliate products you can earn ongoing commissions for each sale you make. These two things hand in hand completely changed the game for me as an affiliate marketer.

Clickbank Mentor – Why Be An Affiliate?

I wanted success fast and because of this, (and doing everything on the cheap), I was cutting too many corners. I didn’t understand how to sell online. I didn’t understand who I was selling to nor did I understand why I was promoting certain products. Getting clear on these topics can give you more clarity and they will help you build an affiliate business which has greater longivity.

Knowing who you are selling to is one of the best things you can understand. Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will be super grateful to you for the referral.

Choosing products and services which you believe in gives you a certain authority which you wouldn’t have if you were only looking for the end goal of making money. Of course we all need money to live, but feeling good about being an affiliate will place you in a different category to most other affiliates who are only trying to get sales.

Aligning yourself with products and services which share your values means you’re going to be better at promoting those products because you genuinely believe in them, and they have helped you. Selling something you don’t care about is much less satisfying and has a much shorter shelf life! Plus your disinterest in the product will likely hold you back and make you less interested in your business. This will also come across in your marketing efforts and how you feel about your business; and of course how you feel about yourself.

Marketing Methods

With high ticket and subscription products to sell, it’s much easier to use paid marketing to make sales. With low value products it’s much more of a struggle making a profit if you’re using paid marketing. So many affiliates, like I did as a beginner, will focus solely on using free marketing methods, or very cheap ones.

When I started out as an affiliate I tried to do everything for free. I built websites and tried to get the free traffic. This is a very difficult way to sell affiliate products because there’s so much competition; particularly in a competitive niche. If you’re a beginner, you don’t have any content, you don’t have an email list, and you’re unsure how everything works. So you’re at a huge disadvantage to those longer term affiliates who have built huge email list, have lots of experience (and data) and have grasped how to make sales already.

Coupled with uncertainty and lack of experience, this can make the journey incredibly difficult and frustrating. You need a mentor to guide you in this stage. A mentor can hold you accountable and give you belief and trust in what you’re doing. Without a guide, it’s so much easier to drop out, particularly when well meaning friends and family are sceptical.

Access a community here and get the help and support you need to excel with an affiliate marketing business.

I hope you have found this Clickbank Mentor article helpful? Please let me know in the comments.

Freedom Lifestyle Business

A freedom lifestyle business gives you time, money and geographical freedom. But how realistic is it to build a profitable online business, ditch the day job, and start living your dream life?

After reading Timothy Ferris’s The 4-Hour Work Week, I became inspired to find a method of building a lifestyle business which would give me complete freedom – both financially and of time.

While working on an eBay business I realised that all my time was being sucked away and it wasn’t giving me the freedom I had hoped for. I was posting items, dealing with customers and spending all my time finding products to sell. I knew there had to be another business model, which would give me more freedom. So I ditched the eBay business and started trying to sell my own ebooks online.

An ebook had originally put me on to the idea of the eBay business. But I realised that if I could sell an ebook, it would be an automated sale. I could create the book once, and sell it over and over again online. This, I thought, would give me complete time and financial freedom.

Freedom Lifestyle Business..Failures

Sadly, my idea didn’t work according to plan. I built the website, the ebook and even created a payment page using Paypal. It was all set up to start taking money, delivering my ebook and it was all hands free! The only problem was nobody knew of my ebook! I couldn’t get any traffic to my website, so I put myself on a marketing course to learn how to get website traffic with the intention of selling my ebook.

Access videos here.

But I discovered a different (and better) business model instead. This business model is called affiliate marketing and it allows anyone to earn money from the internet through referring customers to other people’s products. While my ebook was up for sale at $10, I could sell a $100 affiliate product and earn $40 per sale. So I ditched my ebook idea and started learning affiliate marketing instead.

Freedom Lifestyle Business

I tried a few other ideas before finding affiliate marketing such as Google Adsense (advertising on content), Forex marketing, buying and selling on eBay and of course the ebook idea. But affiliate marketing seemed the best and after one or two sales the income outweighed the tiny amounts I was earning through Adsense. I knew affiliate marketing was the freedom lifestyle business I was looking for! So I got to work, learning how to build affiliate websites and advertise them through paid ads, blogging and anything I could do from my laptop!

After a lot of problems and sporadic results at best I almost quit several times. But my life was such that I was constantly struggling with low paid jobs, low self esteem and troubling debts. I tried a number of courses which promised me an easy ride, but none of them delivered on their promises!

But I had made a few sales online and I knew I just needed some bigger success and I could quit the day jobs.

Freedom Lifestyle Business – A Chance Meeting

In 2014 I found a mentor and joined his community. Here I found help and support and real world people. This was unheard of before and the coaches I had previously found were nowhere to be found when I needed help the most. I desperately wanted success with an online type of business, I just didn’t know what I was doing and I was really struggling.
I had paid for numerous courses at this stage and was sceptical and fearful I would be joining a scam, or that it wouldn’t help me. But I found I was able to join webinars and seminars and even live events in London and nearer where I lived in the UK.

Within my first few months I was able to make my first high ticket digital sale online. It was a real break though. With high ticket affiliate products you can make much larger commissions per sale.

Instead of trying to sell thousands of products to make a few dollars on each, sell one or two high ticket items and make the same amount. Because I didn’t know this previously, I felt I had wasted so much time trying to sell low value affiliate products. Still, the perseverance had paid off and I am glad I didn’t quit like so many do.

Lessons Learned

A freedom lifestyle business was what I wanted. But when I started out I had no idea what to sell or how to do it. Today, experience has taught me a few key things which you may not already know:

To use an existing business model and just learn how to market it.
To choose high ticket affiliate products to sell – more income for the same amount of work
Using subscription affiliate products gives you a recurring income from each sale you make
Choose a product “suite” rather than just selling stand alone products. A product suite is a range of products offering high ticket, subscription, low ticket and mid ticket items.

A lifestyle business is with the grasp of anyone with the drive and commitment to see it through. You don’t need your own products to sell or any previous experience. But you do need a string desire to succeed in this space. There’s plenty of competition online and it’s not cheap advertising. This means you can spend a lot of time and money and still get it wrong. This is why so many affiliates quit and give up on the dream of a freedom lifestyle business which can give them total autonomy, financial and geographical freedom.

Mindset

Most people who start businesses fail within their first three years and with affiliate marketing it’s no different. Around 95% of affiliates give up and drop out of the business which means to succeed with a lifestyle business model you need to put yourself in the 5% camp who never quits!

Having the right mindset about building an online business helps and most people simply aren’t equipped with the business building mindset required to get profitable. Even with the tools, mentors and coaches behind you, it’s a tough journey and you should expect some times to be tough, like with anything worthwhile.

But with the right direction, business model, coaches and mindset you have a much greater chance of succeeding with an online business and building a freedom lifestyle business.

Employee Vs Entrepreneurial Mindsets

As an employee for much of my life I brought some of the wrong kinds of mindsets to my online business. There’s a whole bunch of new mindsets, attitudes and behaviours I had to learn in order to build profitable online business.

Trading time for money in a job is very different to building an online business for many reasons. In a job, you only work the hours you work. The rest of the time is yours. But in a business, unless you get your business profitable, you don’t get paid. It’s absolutely your responsibility whether you get paid or not with an online business because you’re the one who benefits.

Since affiliate marketing is a performance based business, you don’t get paid unless you make sales. Although this can be daunting, it also means there’s no limit to what you can earn. Plus you can detach your time from your income, by selling products automatically as an affiliate. With a job, you always have to sell your time.

This is why I believe affiliate marketing is the best business model if you’re looking for more time and financial freedom.

If you’re ready to get started with your own online business you can do so here.

Digital Marketing Affiliate Programs

Digital marketing affiliate programs offer one of the best opportunities for new affiliates to earn while they learn! With most affiliate programs you simply get access to your affiliate i.d. (your affiliate link). You then need to go off and promote your affiliate link with often no idea how to do it!

With a digital marketing affiliate program you can learn how to promote anything online. So, whether you have your own business/product or are an existing affiliate, digital marketing affiliate marketing programs can give you the education you need.

A good digital marketing program offers multiple products within a range of products – also known as a product “suite”. A product suite gives you low ticket, mid ticket and high ticket items to sell. It also gives you subscription affiliate products you can use which pay recurring commissions. This gives you a much better chance of success as an affiliate to generate profit regularly. You can also more easily afford the large cost of online advertising with a high ticket offer.

Get access here to an all in one digital marketing affiliate program.

Digital Marketing Affiliate Programs – What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing covers a whole range of different marketing techniques and strategies using digital technology. From search engine optimisation (SEO) to PPC (pay per click advertising), from social media marketing to email marketing; digital marketing has become a mainstay of modern day advertising for businesses, individuals and companies. Whether you like it or not, digital marketing is here to stay and learning it will give you a huge advantage whether you’re in business or an employee.

The post-COVID world has shifted even more to an online digital workplace and more people are seeing the necessity of learning digital marketing for either themselves, their businesses or their employees.

So whether you intend to build an online business yourself to become financially independent of a job/boss or whether you are intending to learn digital marketing for employment, it’s well worth the investment given the times we are in!

Digital Marketing Affiliate Programs: What You’ll Learn

Digital marketing comprises of a number of online advertising strategies and tactics. Depending on how you market a business you might choose any of these marketing tactics:

Blogging – This article is an example of a blog post
Video – video can be used on many social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, Facebook and Instagram
PPC – pay per click is a fast marketing tactic which can be used to build huge international businesses
Email marketing – is used in conjunction with other marketing methods to build a list of email subscribers and promote products/services
Social media marketing – you can pay or use different unpaid social media marketing ideas.

A good marketing strategy is different to marketing tactics. Your strategy is your overall broad view. To build a good marketing strategy it’s important to outline your customer avatar, so you know who to target your marketing towards. Trying to sell to everyone online seldom works because more people simply aren’t interested in whatever it is you have to sell! You want to place your marketing message in front of those people who will value your product/s. To get this right can save you a lot of struggle!

Digital Marketing & Your Customer Avatar

Your customer avatar is the type of person who is most likely to buy from you online. Without a clear idea of who this is, where they live, what their interests are and so on, you’ll likely waste a lot of time/money placing your advertising in front of the wrong people! Once you are clearer on who you’re advertising to, you can also communicate better to those specific people, knowing what their circumstances, interests, pains and difficulties are.

With online digital marketing, each point of contact with your potential customer is a “touchpoint” with which you need a congruent marketing message. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, it’s likely that these messages will be disjointed, because you’re not clear on your customer avatar.

Summary

Knowing digital marketing is worth it’s weight in gold whether you’re in business or an employee. Whether you are considering being an affiliate or simply learning how to sell online, it’s well worth investing in learning this skill. As an affiliate having learned the skill of digital marketing, you can earn independently of a boss/job.

Building an online business using other people’s products is one of the easiest business models to get involved in.

Access an online digital marketing training and education program (which has partnered with):

Microsoft Lynda (Under the Linkedin umbrella of companies) offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the curriculum.

DigitalMarketer now offer their own training as part of the curriculum.

Get started here.

Selling Information Products Online

Selling information products online is one of the best ways to earn without your own products/service to sell. You don’t need your own products as you can use a business model known as affiliate marketing, which lets third parties refer customers to products and services online.

There’s thousands of digital affiliate products which you can choose from. A site called Clickbank.com is a good place to start if you are thinking of selling them. You can also find start an online business from scratch here.

Selling Information Products Online: Why Information Products?

So what’s so great about information products? As an affiliate you don’t need to sell information products to earn an income online. You can sell any kind of products. Physical products can also be sold for a commission. Amazon has an partner program which pays affiliates for referring sales on the site. The main problem with Amazon is that Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are tiny. You typically earn only a small percentage – between 3% and 10% in most cases.

So for a sale of a $100 product from Amazon, you may actually only earn as little as $3!

But information products can be sold digitally which means there’s no need to physically post them. You can buy information products directly from your laptop. This means they can easily be sold internationally to anyone online. Because there’s fewer costs involved in information products, this saving is passed on to the advertisers – the affiliate!

As such affiliates for digital products (information products) can earn larger commissions on sales. Digital products typically carry a commission rate from 30-40%. So for a similar sale of a $100 product, you would earn between $30-$40.

Selling Information Products Online: Downsides

However, there are potentially some downsides to selling information products online. Potential customers don’t know about your products or, more specifically, what they can do for them. A physical product is much more tangible than a digital one. So it may take a little more than a website to sell a digital product. The plus side is that this can be done through email marketing, which allows you to build more of a relationship with potential customers than you could possibly do from a website alone.

aweber - selling information products via email marketing

Email marketing is one method in which affiliates can sell their products online. By collecting subscribers onto an email list, marketers can automate delivery of multiple email messages, over a longer period of time. On a website a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. But once on an email list, this period can be dramatically extended. You can also showcase your products more effectively and demonstrate their usefulness through email messages.

Best Selling Information Products

The best selling information products are the ones which can help customers the most with their biggest problems. If you can solve a problem such as learning a new language with an information product, you can sell it for a few dollars. Here’s an example of a Spanish course you can find on Clickbank.com:

This particular course offers online live classes, so it looks like a good one. Here’s the price break down for the courses:

The best selling information products are those which offer the most amount of value to the people who want them. You can also choose to sell high ticket products and subscription affiliate products which pay larger than average commissions and recurring commissions respectively.

Here’s an example of a high ticket offering which helps people get started build online businesses from scratch:

With business consulting and mentoring programs you can earn much larger commissions because people are willing to pay much more for solving their income problems. Whereas with a language program like the one above, although there’s a huge value given, it’s not worth so much to the marketplace.

Methods Of Selling

There’s several methods of selling information products online. The most commonly used ones are:

Blogging – this website for example uses blogging to attract an audience
Video blogging – same as blogging but in video format using sites such as YouTube and TikTok
Email marketing – is a very effective form of marketing to a growing audience. Your email list can be built using content marketing or paid advertising
PPC – pay per click advertising is a popular method used by affiliates. Pay for each advertising click you get on an advert targeted towards a specific audience.
Social media marketing methods – social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc can be use with paid and unpaid methods. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Your marketing method is an important factor in your success in selling information products online. Most marketers will use a website of some sort to showcase their products and choose a given method of generating traffic to that website. As already mentioned, email marketing is a good way to communicate the value of your chosen information products. To encourage website visitors to join your email list, you can offer information for free which relates to the product of interest.

How Long Does It Take?

You can build an info selling business quite quickly online because of the speed at which you can build an email list with paid marketing. But if you chose a different, cheaper route such as blogging it will take much longer. You also need to find and sell your products to the people who would be most likely to buy them.

This requires understanding your target audience (or customer avatar). Your customer avatar is the ideal customer who would be most likely to make a purchase. Once you understand who they are, where they hang out online and other such demographics about them, it’s much easier to find them through your marketing. Without knowing who exactly you are trying to reach with your marketing strategy/tactic, it’s much more difficult to place your products in front of buying customers.

selling information products online — Get started with your online business here.

How long it takes to build a regular income from selling information products will vary according to your aptitudes, marketing strategy and available time for your business. You can access an online training and education resource to get started here.

Affiliate Marketing Average Income

What is the affiliate marketing average income? According to Glassdoor.com the average affiliate income in the Uk is £38,040 (around $45,625).

Glassdoor’s research shows that the average base pay is $56,916 a year, with lower and upper ranges of $42-$83k per year. Affiliate marketing manager salary in the US ranges from $16,778 to $442,605. The median salary is approximately $80,530 or so.

However, these statistics are for salaried affiliates who work as managers in the sector for big businesses who employ affiliates for their marketing.

For affiliates who manage their own affiliate marketing businesses it’s different. Here’s the stats for self employed affiliates according to emoneypeeps.com:

90% Of Affiliates Earn Between $0-$10,000 per year
7% Of Affiliates Earn Between $10,001-$100,000 per year
2% Of Affiliates Earn Between $100,001-$1,000,000 per year
1% Of Affiliates Earn Over $1,000,000 per year

This falls in line with another article I did on affiliate earnings which uses previous data from 2016. The 2016 Afstat report showed a similar breakdown of affiliate earnings:

As you can see, the top earners in affiliate marketing are in a minority. More affiliates earn between the $0-$10,000 a year. So the “average” affiliate will fall into this demographic.

Affiliate Marketing Average Income

That shouldn’t be a surprise though given the number of affiliates there are in the world. Although there’s no way to determine a precise number of affiliates that are signing up to the many affiliate programs available, the industry is generating over $12 billion annually and still growing.

The affiliate marketing success rate is pretty low, with around 5% of affiliates going on to make a living from it. That means a massive 95% of affiliates give it a go and drop out, or struggle! So why is the affiliate marketing average income so low?

Most physical businesses too have a poor success rate with around 90% of businesses failing in their first few years. So why should affiliate marketing be any different? The low barrier to entry and low cost make affiliate marketing a business which many flock to. So is it any wonder why the success rate is so low?

How Not To Be Average

So if you’re going to succeed with affiliate marketing you need to not be average! You need to excel! Top affiliates make millions of dollars from affiliate marketing. Can you be in the 3% of those who “make it”? As someone who struggled for years with affiliate marketing I can attest to the difficulties which many will encounter.

When I finally found a group of mentors in 2014, things began to improve. But before then I was selling low value items from content marketing – something which is incredibly time consuming and slow. It wasn’t until I changed a few things that things started improving. Here’s a few of the main things which allowed me to make affiliate marketing work for me:

Don’t quit! Keep going and learn from problems, rather than blame them!
Use subscription products – subscription products pay you over and over again. To make a consistent income from “one off” sales, you need to sell in bulk and continuously. Recurring payments mean even sporadic sales add up to a consistent income
High ticket products – high ticket items pay more than average affiliate products. A single sale (of a high ticket item) can earn you the same as hundreds or even thousands of low valued products.
Build a list – I didn’t even know about the power of list building. I was trying to sell directly from a website (for years). With a list you compound your efforts and you can build rapport and trust with potential customers. On a website, someone only has a few minutes to buy from you, then they are gone forever. But once you have a list that timeframe is dramatically extended to weeks, months and even years.
Get help – even the most hardened entrepreneur has a down day. When you’re on your own as an affiliate it’s tough. By joining others on the same mission you can ease the load, gain support and get valuable insights into your own psychology and motivation levels.