AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Work For Myself Ideas

If you’re tired of working for the man, maybe you can use some of these work for myself ideas for inspiration. I was desperate to escape 9 to 5 and work for myself, doing work I loved. I tried all sorts of work including jobs such as delivery driver, taxi driver, lifeguard, trampolene coach, climbing instructor, waiter, fencing coach, martial arts instructor and stuntman. See my about me page.

But somehow there was always too much month left at the end of the money! I still felt trapped and uninspired in most of these roles, believe it or not! So I looked for a way to earn an income online so I would be able to work on my own terms. I also picked up several jobs working for myself in the interim, while learning how to earn online. Here’s a few of the jobs I found that you can do on a self employment basis.

Work For Myself Ideas: HGV Driver

While there is some training involved in HGV driving, you can pick up work sporadically and use your driving qualification to effectively work for yourself. Some agencies will require you to have some on the job training, so it’s worth getting some upfront experience first, before you start picking and choosing your jobs. HGV driving is a useful skill and there always seems to be a need for drivers, wherever you are.

In the UK, where I trained, I was able to get the qualification for a class 2 (rigid cab) for around £1000 all in. This was several years ago though so this will probably be a lot more today. Still, an HGV ticket gives you the opportunity to drive around the country and mostly be on your own. So if you’re a fan of driving and not a fan of people, it might be a solution!

Work For Myself Ideas: TV Extra

I worked as a TV extra for around 6 years. Initially it was a prerequisite to attain a certain number of days in order to qualify as a stunt performer. But over time I found the work to be fairly easy and even enjoyable, so I kept doing it. Extras works tends to be sporadic, and so it’s a good self employed income source to add to a portfolio. Some weeks you won’t work and then you’ll get a phone call from out of the blue, usually with little notice. It’s helpful to have a car to get to the locations and be able to drop everything when needed.

TV Extras or “background artists” fill the scenes in TV shows and films and are often used for crowd scenes. Most of TV Extra’s work involves waiting behind the scenes until you’re needed, so bring a book or something to do! You can find TV extras agencies near you with a search on the internet. You may need to attend a short course and provide a photograph or two to join the books of your nearest agency.

Work For Myself Ideas: Taxi Driver/Uber

Today it’s Uber but I found taxi driving was a good self employed option which gave lots of flexibility. You can choose your own hours, work day or night and it’s a sociable job which brings you into contact with lots of people. In order to drive on the Uber app, you’ll need a private hire licence from a council that Uber is licensed by.

You can also apply to your local taxi firm and ask them for details of becoming a driver. You may have to get a private hire licence and answer a short local knowledge test for a local firm. But Uber is different. London taxi drivers have to pass “the knowledge” test in order to work a black cab.

Handyman/Teacher

I worked as a handyman for some time while building an online business. To get work I use Google My Business which is a platform anyone can use to advertise their business from home for free! You simply sign up and list your skills from your home address. You can do this with any kind of skill you have to offer, so you don’t need to by a DIY fanatic! If you know something about something you can teach it or sell it! For example, you can do after school classes, teach the guitar/piano or offer painting and decorating!

Once I got my ad listed on Google, I got calls from around the city asking me about various jobs. I mostly did the small jobs I was able to do as I’m not a qualified tradesman! Still, it was a nice extra income source and I worked on my own terms. Jobs I did were things such as fixing a broken gate, curtain rails, painting and clearing etc. I once got a job where I used a screwdriver to tighten up a doors hinges!

eBay: Buying And Selling

Before starting an online business I bought and sold items from eBay and charity shops to then resold them for profit. There’s many ways of doing this but one strategy I found was through using a misspell tool you can find here. By finding badly listed items on eBay, and creating a better listing with more keywords and of course correct spelling, you can attract more bidders and sell an item at a higher price.

You can also find bargains because they are misspelled and therefore attract fewer bidders or even no bidders at all! You can read more about this strategy here.

Online Business

If you have a skill you can sell online, you can build an online business around your skill. You can also become an affiliate marketer and sell other people’s products online. You don’t need anything of your own to sell in order to do this.

I started looking for ways to earn online back in the early 2000’s . Initially I tried a couple of methods before finally finding affiliate marketing. Before that I tried eBay (buying and selling) and Forex marketing; both of which offer a means of earning on a self employed basis.

You can also create content online as a blogger, or video blogger and monetise your content with Google Adsense, or similar program. Learn more about strategies for earning online with this free video series.

Plug And Play Affiliate

You’ve probably seen those “plug and play affiliate systems”? They promise you that affiliate marketing is easy! All you need to do is “plug” them in, send traffic and make money! Mmmm, but it’s strange that the small caveat is actually the largest part of affiliate marketing: sending traffic. Any affiliate product can be sold, but that doesn’t mean anyone can sell it.

The hardest part of affiliate marketing is the “marketing” bit. Getting traffic to your affiliate offer is the biggest challenge for affiliate marketers and the part with which they need the most help. So purchasing a “plug and play affiliate business” is all well and good if you are already an experienced marketer. Otherwise, you’re better off with a program which gives you more help and support.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of value in a “plug and play” system. You can get a lot of the hard work of affiliate marketing done for you. You get sales pages, marketing materials, landing pages email templates and of course the product itself. But if you think you have bought a profitable business, think again! You have only bought the “guts” of a business, like with a franchise. You still need to work at your marketing in order to make money from it and that costs you either time or money, or both.

Marketing A Plug And Play Affiliate Business

Marketing a plug and play business system will involve some kind of marketing strategy. This is arguably the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Just sending traffic to a landing page doesn’t guarantee you sales. Your traffic also needs to be targeted. What is targeted traffic? Targeting for affiliates is super important and not all traffic is equal. If you’re selling a “money making” program for instance, you’ll need targeted visitors who are looking for what you are selling. If you want to run paid advertising to a money making program, expect to pay a lot for your advertising. Why is target market important for affiliates?

With the right audience and product, you can sell products quite easily as an affiliate. But if you attract the wrong audience, it’s much more difficult to sell. If you don’t want to pay a premium for your traffic, you’ll need to attract it another way.

Organic traffic is super competitive, especially in a niche like money making and unfortunately most of the “plug and play” affiliate products are in this niche. This means you’ll either be paying a premium for your traffic or working really hard for it. Blogging and video blogging are another ways to attract traffic online. But in a competitive niche it’s going to be a long, difficult journey attracting traffic to your products.

What Does A Plug and Play Affiliate Business Give You?

A plug and play affiliate system is a good idea for affiliates when it gives you help and support as well as the products, landing pages, sales pages, email templates and all the rest. Most plug and play business systems will offer:

A product to sell – or a range of products (ideally subscription and high ticket products)
An email marketing setup – which you can setup in a few steps
Pre-formatted email follow ups – follow up messages to send out automatically to your subscribers
Landing pages – where you can collect subscribers emails
Sales pages – to send your subscribers where they can purchase your products
Ready made webinars – useful for affiliates to help promote the products you’re promoting

A good “all in one” affiliate business will also offer training and support in the way of:

Pre-recorded video trainings, seminars and webinars
Live webinars and trainings which you can access regularly
Training step by step modules
Multiple training courses in a variety of marketing methods
Access to mentors and coaches who can help you 1 on 1

Access an all in one business system here which offers all of these options according to your requirements and budget.

What Most Plug and Play’s Are Missing

One of the most important ingredients in building a profitable online business is marketing. Without studying marketing, your chances of success are vastly reduced as an affiliate. In fact, most affiliates will fail and the success rate for affiliates is a shocking 5%! That means 95% of affiliates will fail! Perhaps the “plug and play” mentality is partly responsible for this statistic because so many affiliates can sign up to a program and just “give it a go”!

With a traditional business there’s much more cost involved in getting started which stops many from attempting it. But with affiliate marketing the costs are very low. This low barrier to entry means there’s a huge amount of people getting involved in affiliate marketing, many of whom will fail.

To be an effective marketer is becoming more difficult as more and more people enter the online space and attempt to make sales. Most plug and play businesses downplay the importance of learning how to become a successful communicator and marketer. But this is the crux of affiliate marketing success. A “plug and play” business has nothing to lose by selling their setup to partners who will absorb their marketing costs.

If you’re serious about building an online business, you need to factor in your marketing costs as well as the time and attention it will take to learn the strategies of online advertising. If you’re serious about doing this, you can get started here.

Does Clickbank Work?

Does Clickbank work? Yes, you can earn money using Clinkbank; however it’s no magic pill. Clickbank is an exchange network where vendors (products owners) place their products so affiliates can promote them. If you successfully refer someone to a product from Clickbank through your affiliate ID, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Because Clickbank uses digital products you’ll usually earn somewhere between 20-40% commission based on the sale. However, the main hurdle for most affiliates is actually making the sale. Since there’s a lot of people promoting the most popular products from Clickbank, you’ll find a lot of competition in the various promotion methods.

A product will have a specific “gravity” which is a number Clickbank uses to rate a product based on sales being generated. A very high gravity suggests that the product is selling well, but also that there’s likely to be a lot of competition. A low gravity score means the products is not selling in as much volume, or at all! This can mean the product doesn’t have a good sales page, or that it’s new to the market. It may also mean than not many affiliates have picked up the product for promotion.

Does Clickbank Work?

“Does Clickbank work” is perhaps the wrong question to ask if you’re considering promoting a product from the site. The question almost suggests that Clickbank will do the work and guarantee sales, which of course it doesn’t. As an affiliate marketer you are the third party referrer of a product or service. If you generate sales, yes of course Clickbank (and the product owner) will honour the agreement and you’ll get paid. There is a payment threshold which you’ll need to meet to actually have the money paid to you of course. You can select an amount between $10 and $1,000,000 as your payment threshold amount. The default amount is $100.

The real question for affiliates though isn’t whether some affiliate product is genuine or not, it’s whether you actually have the ability to generate sales using the knowledge you have of whatever affiliate promotion methods you intend to use.

Some products you might find on Clickbank are promoting the idea that you can make “easy money” online. While you can earn online I would suggest that for the larger percentage of customers this just isn’t true! So take those grandiose claims with a large pinch of salt. In fact there’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing and most give up before even making a single sale. See affiliate marketing success rate.

Products

There’s a huge variety of products on Clickbank and this means it’s a good platform for anyone with a pre-existing website which they want to monetise. Simply sign up for an account and place a banner on your site: instant monetisation. However, before you do this you should check into the product and ideally buy it yourself. How does the sales page look? Is it a good fit for your audience? Unless you know how to sell affiliate products already, or have already acquired a source of traffic, affiliate marketing can be tough. It’s even tougher if you choose a product which doesn’t sell.

Clickbank has thousands of products on its site, but that also means there’s a lot of bad products too! Look closely at the gravity of a product before you decide to promote it. Gravity is a good signal to a product’s worthiness. If you’re going to build a lot of content around your product, you want to genuinely stand behind that product and be 100% authentic about promoting it.

Before deciding on a product read a few reviews on it too. Often the review will be other affiliates promoting the product so keep this in mind when reading. The number of reviews can also give you an idea of the relative competitiveness of a product. If you were to write your own review of it, would you gain any traffic for instance? If there’s a lot of other affiliates promoting that product, you may struggle to make sales due to the competition.

It’s also worth considering promoting products which offer recurring income. Subscriptions can be a good idea, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. They pay out recurring affiliate commissions which means you can earn an ongoing income from only a few sales.

Best Blog Niche For Affiliate Marketing

What’s the best blog niche for affiliate marketing? Well since there’s over 600 million blogs on the internet today, this means there’s some serious competition, whatever your niche is!

Still, some niches are far more competitive than others. The goal of many bloggers is to rank their content and get free traffic. But this has become more and more difficult as the number of bloggers continues to rise. You can of course still earn from a blog, even without a ranking on Google. With plugins, social media shares and an email list, you can collect a following even without your content appearing on Google!

Initially this will take some time of course and ultimately you will want to get some traffic from multiple sources:

Social media accounts – where you share your content
Email marketing – build an email list
Push engage – send old visitors alerts of new content
Plugins such as social media share plugins and SEO plugins to help you gain traction (See also best free blog plugins for WordPress)

When you rely on Google, you’re building your blogging career on very unstable ground, but ideally you will get some free traffic from Google too and other search engines as you persevere. The longer you’re in the game, the better your chances are of collecting more followers and getting your content found. So, what ultimately is the best blog niche for affiliate marketing?

Best Blog Niche For Affiliate Marketing?

Some people will tell you to go after a topic you love. That way, you’ll enjoy blogging and therefore you’re much more likely to sustain the necessary effort to make your blogging profitable. While this is true, if you want to monetise your blog, you also need to find a topic which is profitable too, assuming you want to profit from blogging.

Ideally, find a niche which lets you work at a topic you at least enjoy writing about. There’s nothing worse than failing with a blog in a topic you don’t give a damn about! I tried this and it was utterly demoralising! My topic was Mushroom harvesting – which I knew nothing of nor cared about. Needless to say, it didn’t work and I gave up on the site after several months of hard work (in the wrong direction).

The “right” direction is one in which you can sustain forever! How much more difficult is it for your competition (in your niche) if you’re absolutely devoted to churning out content on a daily basis forever!? In the mushroom harvesting niche, there were so many more people who were passionate about mushroom harvesting than me – all of them in fact! They’re still blogging and creating videos today, when I gave up several years ago (in that topic).

Best Blog Niche For Affiliate Marketing

Some of the best topics available for affiliates are often the ones cited by the “experts”:

Money making online
Wealth generation and investments
Technology and electronics
Pets and Hobbies
Home and Garden
Dating and relationships.

But while these topics are generally thought of at the “top” money generating niches for affiliates, they are also the most competitive niches for blogging in. So if you’re considering building a blog, expect to be working hard for several months at least, if not years before your blogging becomes profitable. Take a look at the picture below which shows blog post activity compared to organic (free) traffic:

As you can see, you need to be thinking of generating several hundred blog posts to start seeing an uptick in traffic. With 600 million blogs on the internet (and climbing), you can expect this to become even more tricky as time goes on.

Think Long Term & Choose A Topic You Can Sustain

Blogging should be a passion and not a chore! While it seems like a nice idea earning passively from a blog, for most this doesn’t happen. Most bloggers will abandon their blogging when they see how much work is involved. If their sole interest is in generation money from their blog, they are more likely to quit when things don’t work out. But if there’s a bigger reason for blogging, such as sharing your passion, genuinely helping others or connecting to people for some higher purpose, you’re more likely to stay the course.

Simon Sinek explains this idea in depth in his book Start With Why. He shows how the better prepared and often least well financed can surpass those with more money but a smaller “why”. Your reason for building a blog in the first place therefore becomes the bedrock of your potential. With a strong enough reason a “why” can overcome any “how”.

If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going. – Stuart Ross

Affiliate Marketing Niches

Despite the competition in affiliate marketing, because there’s so many affiliate marketing niches there’s always room for new affiliates. What is an affiliate marketing niche? An affiliate “niche” is a specific topic or group of topics in which the affiliate builds their business.

For example, this website is based around the “make money online” niche. More specifically it’s the “affiliate marketing” niche, which could be said to be a niche within a niche! There’s many affiliate marketing niches and here’s a few of the most popular niches which many affiliates will gravitate towards:

Making money online
Health and fitness
Wealth generation, investing and finance
Pets and hobbies
Dating and relationships
Gadgets and technology
Home and garden

Within each niche are also several sub-niches. So for example in the niche of dating and relationships you might find niches such as:

Confidence with men/women
Dating advice for seniors
Communication tips in your marriage
etc

Affiliate Marketing Niches: Benefits Of A Sub-Niche

There’s several benefits of building a business around a sub-niche in affiliate marketing. For starters some niche topics are super competitive. So if you’re running advertising in them, you’ll be paying a lot for ad clicks. If you are trying to build a niche website for them, there will be a tonne of competition on Google, so it’s harder to get any traction.

In a sub niche though, advertising will be less costly because there’s fewer people competing for advertising space. Likewise, there’s fewer websites competing on Google for organic space in a sub niche. So whether you are thinking of building an affiliate business with paid marketing, or through content creation, your niche is an important factor to consider.

A sub-niche too is more specific and attracts a very specific type of visitor. This can be beneficial if you’re selling a particular type of affiliate product. For example if you have a Yoga course for seniors, the broader “Yoga” niche may attract the wrong kinds of visitors. Whereas “Yoga for seniors” as a niche will attract more people who are a likely fit for your target audience, assuming you’re promoting a “Yoga for seniors” course.

Affiliate Marketing Niches: Choosing A Niche

It’s a good idea to choose a niche which you have an interest in because it can take some time before you gain traction, depending on your marketing strategy of course. If you’re going to build content in your niche, expect to work at it for some time, uploading content on a regular basis. Depending on the relative competition of your niche, it can take several months before you start seeing the outcome you are looking for, with content generation.

With paid marketing of course it’s much faster. But you still need to maintain the work long enough to start generating regular sales. In a niche you are fanatical about, this is so much easier! At the very least, choose a topic you want to learn about so you can maintain this interest for the longer term.

I made a big mistake choosing a niche I wasn’t interested in several years ago. I chose to build a website around the topic of harvesting mushrooms! It was a low competition niche I thought I could rank a niche website for. It did rank at the top of Google for its main keywords: When To Harvest Mushrooms! However, each piece I wrote on the blog needed thorough research, so it took a long time. After six month of writing, I had had enough! I didn’t even have an interest in this topic, and only pursued it for the money. It turned out that it was also a difficult niche to monetise, with little to offer in terms of affiliate products.

It’s very difficult to sustain the necessary work required to profit from affiliate marketing niche if you have no interest in it! Choose something you love and it’s a pleasure doing the work!

Evergreen Niches

An “evergreen” niche is a niche which is profitable all year round. My mushroom harvesting niche wasn’t evergreen and only got the bulk of its traffic in mushroom harvesting season. even then, I couldn’t monetise it well because there weren’t a lot of affiliate products in the niche which would sell. An evergreen niche is one which gets traffic all year round. So it’s a good idea to avoid niches which are seasonal.

The niches mentioned at the start of this article are all evergreen, and building a niche can mean you get paid all year round as an affiliate, if you’re successful:

Making money online
Health and fitness
Wealth generation, investing and finance
Pets and hobbies
Dating and relationships
Gadgets and technology
Home and garden

If you have a unique interest of some kind, it can give you the edge in building a niche website, or offering something of value to your followers. So it’s worth investigating whether your niche is easily monetised with products you value and which sell.

Online Business PDF

In this online business pdf article, I’m going to share some of the insights I’ve learned over the last few years building an online business. Anyone can build an online business without any experience or even any products to sell. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing allows you to sell other people’s products and earn commissions from their sale.

To do this you only need to join an affiliate program and promote your affiliate link. The link is tracked back to you and you earn a commission for sales you have generated. Affiliates are therefore third party referrers of other people’s products. They get paid on a performance basis when they successfully refer customers to products online.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models, but it’s not without its problems. Many affiliates will struggle because they don’t get the training and support they need to become successful. I was the same and spent years finding out the hard way! Don’t make the same mistake, invest in your education and put yourself years ahead of the competition!

Online Business PDF – Why Affiliate Marketing?

Before finding affiliate marketing I tried various other online business models but affiliate marketing quickly proved itself to be a winner. With affiliate marketing you can sell pretty much anything online, so long as it has an affiliate program. So when you understand how to sell online, you can use that skill to continue to sell more and more products, all on virtual autopilot.

The skill is of course marketing and marketing using online advertising tactics is the skill you need. With an affiliate marketing businesses, you can focus solely on marketing because you can use pre-existing businesses which already exist.

That makes building a profitable online business a much simpler task than if you were to build your own products, infrastructure and customer service operation. As an affiliate you don’t need to deal with customers or product manufacture or delivery. You simply learn marketing and send targeted visitors to other people’s products.

Online Business PDF – Types Of Products

There’s many products and services you can promote online as an affiliate marketer. Many affiliates start out with Amazon, since it’s one of the most popular places to make purchases online. However, Amazon’s commission rates aren’t the best and despite some other incentives, there are better products to promote than those on Amazon. Amazon pays its affiliates between 1% and 20% commission, although most products will fall into the category of paying between 3% and 10% commission.

article about online business pdf — Access this free video series to learn more.

Amazon mostly sells physical products which pay less because there’s more cost involved in their manufacture and delivery. But with digital products there’s no delivery costs involved and as such product owners can pay affiliates larger levels of commission. Delivery of digital products can be directly over the internet as a digital download or access to a website or training course, for example. Digital products will tend to pay from 30%-40% commissions on sales you can generate as an affiliate.

High Ticket Products

High ticket products are also a way for affiliates to earn larger commissions than though selling low value physical products. A low value physical products you sell on Amazon, for example, might only pay you 3%. If the product sells for $100, you only earn $3 on each sales you generate. This means you need to make a lot of sales in order to build a profitable online business from selling those kinds of products. But with high ticket products, whether physical or digital, you can generate much larger commissions from each sale. Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product you can sell as an affiliate:

A Submarine!

This five person Exploration Submarine sells for $2,700,000! As an affiliate for the product you can earn 8% commission if you refer a sale. While most people aren’t shopping for such an expensive item, some people are. So if you’re going to learn the skills to become an affiliate, it’s worth considering which products will be more lucrative. To put this in context, in order to earn the same amount from a $100 item on Amazon which pays the same percentage (8%), you would need to sell 27,000 of the smaller item to make the same commission ($216,000) as just one sale of the submarine!

Granted though, it is more difficult to sell a submarine than a $100 item on Amazon, but it’s not 27,000 times as difficult! Once you learn how to sell online, often it is the same work you do for a sale in either case.

Recurring Income Products

Subscription affiliate products are also worth considering if you’re going to build an online business using affiliate marketing. These types of products are things like memberships and software products which require an ongoing fee. They also pay recurring commissions to affiliates which means you can create a sustainable income with fewer sales, much like with high ticket products.

Business tools and education products are good products you can sell which pay recurring commissions for subscriptions; particularly if they are hugely valuable. For example Aweber is an email autoresponder which is used by affiliate marketers.

Should an affiliate purchase the tool from you and subsequently build a profitable online business, they will maintain their subscription for years, or even a lifetime! This means as the referring affiliate you can benefit from a lifetime of recurring payments for having made the recommendation.

Online Business PDF – Ways To Sell Affiliate Products

Most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers to which they can recommend their products (using Aweber, or a similar email marketing tool). With an email list, you can recommend products and services to a growing list of people who are interested in reading about what you have to sell. There are many ways in which you can build an email list but the main two strategies are using either content marketing or paid advertising, (or a combination of the two).

This article about online business pdf for example is a piece of content which is used to attract a specific audience (target audience). If someone purchases a product which I recommend on my site, or through my email list, I earn a commission based on the sale.

Content marketing involves building content such as this blog post, or uploading videos to a site such as YouTube or TikTok, for example. Over time, as your content grows, you gain more traffic from your content. Some of these visitors will sign up to your email list if you use an opt in form on your website.

Paid marketing is however a much faster way to generate traction with an online business. With paid marketing, you run ads and send people directly to a landing page, or a sales page. Paid advertising can be run almost immediately whereas it can take much longer for content to get the same amount of traction.

Make Money Online PDF

In this make money online PDF I’m going to discuss one of the most popular online earning methods: affiliate marketing! With affiliate marketing you don’t need any products of your own to sell because you can use other people’s products and services.

Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model where third party “affiliates” refer customers to products online via their affiliate link. When someone makes a purchase through a unique affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission based on the sale. There’s no product fulfilment needed because the product owner handles product delivery and deals with the customer.

That makes affiliate marketing one of the easiest online business models you can learn. However, to make money online with affiliate marketing, you’ll need to learn a method of product promotion to promote your affiliate link. This is often the sticking point for new affiliates and so it deserves some attention because it’s often the main reason why 95% of affiliates quit!

However, before we get to promotion methods of affiliate marketing, it’s also worth discussing the different products affiliate marketers can choose from.

Make Money Online PDF: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available to choose from but one of the most popular programs is Amazon’s partner program which anyone can join to promote any of the thousands of products on the site.

You can also find both physical and digital products on various affiliate platforms such as Clickbank.com, JVZoo, CJ Affiliate Network (Commission Junction) and eBay’s partner program. A quick search online for “affiliate program” and almost any keyword will bring up programs in almost any category you can think of!

So if you have an existing website, it’s easy to join a program which offers a suitable product based on your individual topic/niche. However, different products will pay different levels of commission so it’s useful to know this before starting out with affiliate marketing. Physical products tend to pay the least in terms of commission percentages. Amazon, for example will generally pay between 3-10% commission on products you sell.

Digital products can pay a lot more in terms of percentages. Typically a digital product will pay between 30-40% commission. You can also promote high ticket products which are a good idea because they carry a larger price tag and therefore pay a much larger commission per sale. The sale of a single high ticket product can give you the same amount as hundreds or even thousands of lower value product sales.

Here’s an example of a high ticket product you can sell as an affiliate to earn 8% commission.

The sale of just one of these would earn you a commission of $31,600. To earn this much with a low valued product from Amazon at $100 for example, you would need to sell tens of thousands of products. You can also sell subscription products as an affiliate which can pay you a recurring income.

Make Money Online PDF: Methods Of Selling

There’s many methods of promoting affiliate products which you can use. Here’s some of the most common strategies used by affiliate marketers:

Blogging & other content creation: pdfs, ebooks, video blogging etc.
Email marketing – collecting email subscribers from a website/landing page
PPC – pay per click advertising, platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, Facebook etc offer paid marketing platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation – free traffic from the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

As mentioned, your marketing strategy is pretty important and has a huge impact on your affiliate business. Unless you get it right, you can easily struggle making sales with this business model so it’s worth investing in this skill if you want to be successful as an affiliate.

Some strategies are faster and more scalable than others too. Blogging, for example is generally thought of as a slower method of traffic generation, although you can ultimately earn a passive income once you have built a lot of content. Paid marketing strategies are much faster and more scalable. Once you have success with a paid marketing strategy, you can simply leave it running, generating traffic and sales and quickly scale it up to a larger audience.

Mindsets Of Successful Affiliates

Not all affiliate marketers are successful it has to be said and around 95% of new affiliates will quit. So it’s important to realise that if you’re starting off down the affiliate marketing journey, you’ll need to be prepared. Knowing some of the things in this article will help you but it’s also wise to get help from the outset from people who have already succeeded with affiliate marketing. Access the free video workshops and an online coaching and mentorship program here.

There’s one thing which successful affiliates all have in common: they don’t quit! Quitting is the only way to guarantee failure in affiliate marketing. So if you decide not to quit, whatever happens, you’re ultimately guaranteed to have more success than the average person – unless you die first!

If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going, no matter what happens. Successful affiliates have a strong reason to keep going when other quit. They use setbacks as learning experiences rather than reasons to stop!

Benefits Of Affiliate Marketing

Although this make money online pdf has focused on affiliate marketing, there’s other ways you can earn online. However, there’s a few benefits which affiliate marketing has over other online earning methods:

It’s a simple business model which anyone can do regardless of experience
You don’t need your own products
It’s relatively cheap to get started
You only need a laptop and internet connection
You can work from anywhere
Choose your own hours and working pattern
Work alongside a job while you build your income up
Selling products can be automated and scaled up globally
It can give you passive income, financial independence & freedom
It can give you geographical freedom – work from anywhere

Because affiliate marketing lets you earn by selling products online, instead of selling your time (as in a job), you can detach your working hours from your income and make money in your sleep on complete autopilot!

Access the workshops here to learn more and get started.

Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing

So there’s many benefits of affiliate marketing as you can see. Here’s some of the not so good elements of this business model:

You need to invest a lot of time initially for what seems like little return
It can be tough sustaining the necessary effort when things don’t immediately materialise
There’s a lot of competition from other affiliates who are selling the same products as you
There’s many “shiny objects” to distract you on the journey (courses promising the “easy” route), which never deliver!
You need to be disciplined and focused, setting goals for yourself and working on your business regularly.

Not everyone’s cut out to be an affiliate marketing but if you are successful it can do wonders for your lifestyle!

Access the workshops here to learn more and get started.

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing

Wondering how to be successful in affiliate marketing? Not every affiliate is successful and there’s a huge drop out rate in the industry. Around 5% of affiliates continue and make a success out of the business. So why the large failure rate? Why do so many affiliates drop out and how can you become one of the 5% who sticks it out?

Well for starters sticking it out is a major key to success in affiliate marketing. All affiliates will have problems and some use these problems as an excuse to quit! Successful affiliates use problems to better understand the business, and they eventually overcome them.

Depending on your approach to affiliate marketing and the methods of promotion you choose, it can take several months or even years before you’re profitable. Like with any business, success often depends on going the extra mile and continuing on when everyone else gives up!

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing? Have a Big “Why?”

Having a big enough “WHY?” will help you overcome almost any HOW?!

“If you don’t have a seriously strong “why”…. You will get stuck in the “how hole”. Your “why” is why you’ll keep going.” – Stuart Ross

Your “why?” is your reason to learn affiliate marketing in the first place. So whether it’s so you can leave a job, build a side income or work from home, it needs to be strong enough to overcome the difficulties you’ll definitely experience on your affiliate journey.

Most new affiliates experience some kind of difficulty and so in order to be successful as an affiliate, you need to persevere for much longer than the average person will.

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing: Baby Steps

To build a large and profitable affiliate business from scratch is a serious undertaking. It’s a long journey and one which doesn’t happen overnight. Taking small daily “baby” steps towards your goal is a much easier way to approach such an undertaking.

If you look at the top of the mountain, it’s easy to become demoralised and lose your enthusiasm. When you lose your faith, you give up! So fuelling your belief and enthusiasm is key to the longevity of your levels of endurance.

A small step every day is better than sporadic leaps forwards.

Even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing: Get Help From Others

Affiliate marketing is difficult and much more difficult if you try and go it alone. You can get led down all kinds of rabbit holes and completely lose your way. There’s many mental and practical traps which will leave you lost and directionless:

Shiny object syndrome – always looking for the “easier” methods and shortcuts and jumping from one “shiny object” to another.
Being a busy fool – a “busy fool” is someone who wastes their time online on unproductive activities. At first, an online business is quite exciting until you realise you only get paid relative to your performance.
Not understanding your target audience – trying to sell everyone online is a surefire way to not sell anything. Get to know who your target audience is first before looking for ways to sell
Selling the wrong products – low value products will only pay tiny commissions. Using higher paying products allows you to earn more from fewer sales
Choosing the wrong marketing method – some strategies will take months or years to gain traction, while others are more instant
Expectations – if your expectations of what an affiliate business can deliver are too high, you’ll likely become disappointed at a small hurdle and quit too soon

How To Be Successful In Affiliate Marketing

Get help from an online coaching and mentoring program here.

Love The Journey

The affiliate marketing journey is a long one which is paved with many problems and adversities! Unless you have a growth mindset which is focused on empowering yourself from this journey, you’ll likely decide that it’s way too hard! Although money is generally the main goal from an affiliate marketing business, the self improvement aspect of it is arguably the more important part!

Once you find your path, you’ll stick to it much longer if you actually enjoy what you’re doing. For this reason it’s worth spending some time considering your values and deciding on the route which you’re best suited to. Depending on your financial situation and how much time you can give to your business, you might choose from several marketing methods to promote any product which you feel aligned with.

When you love the journey, you’re much more likely to stick it out. If you hate it, on the other hand, you’re more likely to quit.

Selling Other People’s Products Online

Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products online. Anyone can learn how to become an affiliate and get paid for product referrals. Affiliates use all kinds of tactics and strategies to get their products in front of buying customers through their affiliate links. When someone buys something through an affiliate link, the referrer is credited for the sale. They will usually get paid a percentage of the sale value, according to the terms of the affiliate program.

Many affiliates will start out using Amazon’s affiliate program. Once you join, you get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can get your unique identifying link, or affiliate link. You can promote any of the thousands of products from the site once you have joined.

Selling Other People’s Products Online – Products

Despite Amazon being so popular with new affiliates, it’s not the best paying affiliate program you can use for product referrals. Amazon’s commission structure runs from 1% to 20% with most products falling into the 3-10% commission range.

So, if you promote (and sell) an affiliate product worth around $100, you can earn as little as $3 per sale. This means you need to make many sales in order to make a good income from your affiliate marketing business.

On the other hand, a product sale can be worth much more if you choose to promote high ticket affiliate products or subscription affiliate products. Even digital products will pay more per sale than most physical products (typically 30-40%). So you should choose your products wisely before rushing into affiliate marketing.

Subscription products are good for affiliates because they can earn ongoing commissions from each sale they make. So with what is often the same amount of work, you can earn substantially more just by choosing the right products to promote.

Selling Other People’s Products Online – Promotion Methods

There’s many ways in which affiliates promote other people’s products online to earn commissions. Here’s a few of the most common methods:

Blogging and content – this article is an example of a blog post
Video content – Many affiliates upload videos to YouTube or TikTok to generate website traffic either through paid marketing or organically
Social media – there’s many social media sites you can use to generate traction for an affiliate business by finding suitable people for your products
Email marketing – most successful affiliates will have an email list where they can contact their subscribers “en-mass” on a regular basis
Paid marketing – Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest and most scalable methods used by affiliates
Landing pages – many affiliates build landing pages to collect subscribers by offering a giveaway offer
SEO – search engine optimisation is used to generate traffic from the search engines and is used with content generation (e.g. blogging/video blogging)

Not all affiliates use the same methods (or products) to build their online businesses. Some will build a shop and direct website traffic to Amazon products. Others will build an email list and sell digital products. However, whatever your method you won’t get far with affiliate marketing without traffic (website visitors). So every affiliate needs to learn a strategy whereby they can attract their target audience in order to sell products to the most appropriate visitors they can find!

Selling Other People’s Products Online: Target Audience

The target audience is a particularly important thing to understand for affiliates because they can place their marketing message in front of a global online audience -i.e. everyone! Most people don’t want whatever it is you have to sell. But a small sub-section of global online traffic will be interested in buying your product/s. That is the target audience for your particular product. By getting to know your “perfect” customer, or customer avatar, you’re much better prepared for success as an affiliate.

You can define your target audience by their online browsing characteristics, their age, location, interests etc. Basically, the more you understand your customer avatar, they more focused you can be on targeting them specifically with your marketing messages. You are also better able to communicate in an effective way with people you know and understand.

Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Google Ads can all be used with very specific targeting, so as to place your ads in front of the right kind of visitors according to keywords, location, age, interests and a number of other demographics according to the product you are selling.

Competition & Training

Selling other people’s products online should be fairly straight forward. However there’s many other affiliates who are building websites and running advertising and this means there’s a lot of competition for advertising space online. Therefore many affiliates will struggle finding customers for their products and give up too early! The best thing you can do if you want to be successful as an affiliate is invest in learning the skills you will need to actually sell your products: marketing!

The route you take with your marketing will often depend on your marketing budget, choice of products and the available time you have every day to work on your business. Affiliate marketing gives you a lot of flexibility and you can build an affiliate business around an existing job.

To learn more about other online business models and affiliate marketing access the free workshop videos here.

Lead Gen Affiliate Marketing

Lead gen affiliate marketing is an abbreviation of lead generation affiliate marketing. What is lead generation in affiliate marketing? Lead generation for affiliate marketing typically refers to the collection of email details of online visitors. To attract an audience towards a lead generation page, (or landing page), the affiliate uses some form of marketing. So in order to generate leads for affiliate marketing you will need to have already attracted an audience. This might be from using any number of marketing methods:

Blogging or video blogging (organic content creation)
SEO – search engine optimisation
Paid marketing – PPC or pay per click direct response advertising
Social media marketing – using either paid or unpaid social media marketing

Lead gen in affiliate marketing is often done from either a website, like this one, or a specific landing page. The advantage of using a purpose built landing page is that there are fewer options for visitors on a landing page than there are on a website. On a website, there’s many options for visitors to consider. Visitors can browse around and click through many pages on a website. On a landing page there are only two options: subscribe or leave. This means the affiliate can more easily optimise the marketing and landing page for lead generation.

Lead Gen Affiliate Marketing: The Landing Page & Driving Traffic

A landing page is a simple form with a go-to message, encouraging visitors to opt in to an email list for more information. Here’s an example of a landing page I recently created on one of my websites:

As you can see, there’s very little information on the landing page itself, so a marketing message is placed before visitors land on this page.

Marketing through video is useful because you can convey a lot of information in a short video. Whereas with written word, it can be more difficult to explain the same message. Some research suggests that over 80% of what we communicate is non-verbal, so you can understand why video marketing is so important for affiliates.

Customer Avatar & Targeting

Before a marketing strategy and message can be built upon, affiliates should get to know who it is that they are aiming their advertising at. When you understand this very well, your marketing is going to be much more effective. By getting to know your target audience for affiliate marketing, you can more easily place your messages in front of the right kinds of people and speak to them more personally about their particular problem. There’s millions of people on the internet. Targeting everyone with your marketing will likely lead to not selling anything! Sell to everyone and you sell to no one. Why? Because not everyone wants the remedy for corns on their feet, or to build an online business.

Marketers understand this and so instead of sending their advertising out to everyone on the internet, they target specific people who meet certain requirements. They first get to understand their customer avatar and know who they can serve the most with their products or services. The “customer avatar” is the “perfect customer”.

Certain people will gravitate towards certain products more than others. A DIY store might cater to mostly people who are over 30, for example. So trying to sell to people in their 20’s will likely waste a lot of advertising budget for a DIY store.

Why Use Lead Generation For Affiliate Marketing?

Why use lead generation for affiliate marketing then? Why not sell directly from a website? On a website, a visitor can browse around and look at whatever they want. But they usually only stick around for a few minutes, before they leave forever! Since most website visitors won’t take any action, and research shows that most online customers will need 6-8 touch points before making a purchase, it’s a good idea to collect their details. This is often done on a website with some free giveaway offer, if it’s not done on a landing page. Once the affiliate has collected the email address of their visitor, they can follow up with email messages over a much longer period of time.

Affiliates can keep in touch with potential customers once they have their details. On a website, they only have a few minutes to “close the sale”. But with email marketing, affiliates can send out emails weeks, months and even years after the visitor has signed up to the affiliate’s email list. Traffic is also hard to come by and you need to either earn traffic through content creation or pay for it. But with email marketing, you can compile a list of interested subscribers who you can then send directly to your offers and products. The ability to control your traffic is worth a lot. Plus, you can build trust with your subscribers over a longer time period. This is something you can’t do on a website.

Other Ways To Collect Leads

There’s multiple ways in which affiliates collect leads to build their email list and you can do this from a website or landing page. This website blog is a source of traffic and leads for me. As you can see, there’s a couple of options to sign up on the website. Pop ups and drop down banners are a good way to engage with your website visitors. Although annoying, they work and let people know what you are offering!

Many affiliates will use landing page software too which lets them more easily cross test their landing pages to help optimise their opt in rates. See also free leads for affiliate marketing for more on this topic.