AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey

The affiliate marketing customer journey is the journey for a customer from their first “touch point” of marketing to the end product; from an affiliate’s perspective. Before making a purchase, a customer will often look for a particular piece of information. A review, for example, is something someone might look for if they intend to make a purchase. The “customer journey” leads the prospective buyer from the review directly to the sales page of the product they want. This, as an example would be a pretty short customer journey: A Google search (for a product review), they find the review article, this leads them to the product, they make the purchase.

However, it often will take multiple points of interaction before someone actually buys something (from an affiliate). See also how many touch points before a sale. Research shows that it will often take between 6 and 8 touch points before a purchase is made. These points of interaction are what affiliate marketers use to help customers make a buying decision. If a customer journey isn’t smooth and congruent, there’s much more chance of a potential customer going elsewhere. But if your marketing structure leads customers on a congruent path, they are more likely to remain on that path. This is particularly true if your marketing messages are aligned with the customer’s needs, and leads them to a product/service which is useful to them.

Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey: The Customer’s Needs

To help affiliates align their marketing messages with the needs of their potential customers, they need to understand their customers! In particular, they need to understand that sub-section of the online marketplace who will value and invest in their products. The “perfect customer” is one who will buy from you again and again and become a life-long supporter of your products. Getting clear on who your products serve is a good way to define your perfect customer avatar, and ultimately define your target audience for affiliate marketing.

These are just a few things you should get to know about your customer avatar:

How old they are
Where they live
Where they hand out online
What kind of information they look for

The more you know about your customer avatar, the better you can find them online and communicate your message to them in a language they can relate to and understand. See customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on learning about your perfect customer. Once you have carefully defined your customer avatar, you can create content or run ads which will speak directly to them, based on their needs, pains and/or desires. This will ultimately be the first contact point where your marketing efforts find prospective customers.

Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey: Flow

The “flow” from one piece of marketing to another is pretty important on the customer journey. For example, if you saw a YouTube advert and decided to click through to learn more about the offer, you would expect similar messaging on the landing page you were sent to. Even a small deviation from the theme of the original advert might put a customer off taking further action. Here’s an example on one of my YouTube videos which leads visitors to a similar looking landing page.

The landing page below confirms the message of the video the visitor has just been watching. If the landing page wasn’t congruent with the earlier video/marketing message there’s a large chance that someone might think there was an error and click away. Or they might click away because the next step involves them handing over some information – their email and name!

To create flow in your marketing messages from one platform to another, it’s important to understand the needs of the customer and the most important details in the previous message. If the next webpage, or landing page, or video doesn’t connect the customer with the previous message, they are likely to click away, and be gone forever! A good customer journey is congruent all the way through.

Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey: Email Marketing

Keeping in mind that many customers will require between 6 and 8 touch points before they make a purchase, each interaction in your marketing strategy should carry on the theme from the last, to keep engaging with your audience and meet their needs. Many affiliates will use email marketing and retargeting to maintain this connection through their marketing strategies.

An email marketing follow up series is particularly useful to build trust and deliver value to your potential customers. It gives the affiliate the potential of connecting with their audience multiple times over a longer period of time. You simply could not you could achieve this just from a website.

Likewise with retargeting. With retargeting you are putting advertising messages in front of people who have already interacted with your marketing somewhere before. You can also choose to show advertising according to the actions they have taken previously on a website, for example. So for example, if someone nearly bought something from your website, and left the cart before paying, you can choose a congruent advert to relay that message to them and remind them of their purchase!

Retargeting is very effective for affiliates because you are placing advertising messages in front of people who are warm or hot buyers. They have already taken some action on your website or your marketing materials. So they are more likely than most general website traffic to want your products/service.

Summary

The affiliate marketing customer journey is an important thing for affiliates to understand. If you attract the wrong audience, you will struggle to sell anything as an affiliate. You can also break rapport with potential customers by sending out disconnected messages, which disrupts the smooth journey you ideally want to create for them.

Ultimately the affiliate marketing customer journey should be one which leads people to products they actually want and value, and that you actually want and value too! So if you don’t believe in the products yourself, there’s already a disconnect in your authenticity. This will likely show up in your marketing messages too!

With the right products and once you have learned about your perfect customer avatar, you are definitely a lot further along than many other affiliates. To access a free video series and learn more about affiliate marketing click here.

Components Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the components of affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which affiliates refer people to products/services online.

The affiliate doesn’t need to personally own these products and product owners are known as “vendors” or “merchants“. The “network” is the company or body providing the connection between the vendor and the affiliate. It provides a platform in which affiliates can connect to products.

When they refer a product through their affiliate link, the network credits them with the sale so they can be paid. The “publisher” is another term used for the affiliate who is the referrer of the products. Finally we have the customer. So the basic components of affiliate marketing consist of:

The “vendor” or product owner or “merchant”
The “network” connecting the vendor to the affiliate
The “publisher” or “affiliate” who refers the products online via marketing strategies
The customer who purchases the product.

Components Of Affiliate Marketing

So, the vendor, the network, the affiliate and the customer make up the main components of affiliate marketing. But there are many other components which the affiliate must understand in order to promote the products themselves. Affiliates only get paid if they successfully refer a product to a customer online. This takes some time and effort to learn and around 95% of affiliate quit. There’s several components within affiliate marketing which an affiliate needs to understand in order to give themselves the best chance of success:

The target audience – the sub-section of the online community who are the most interested (and most likely to buy) their particular products or services.
Marketing strategy – not all affiliates use the same methods of selling online. To be successful as an affiliate you need to learn at least one marketing strategy well enough to make consistent sales.
The customer avatar – is also part of the target audience. The “customer avatar” is the type of person who is likely to be your “perfect customer”.
Data and analytics – affiliates collect data when they run advertisements or create content so they know which content performs the best.
Email marketing – is a large component of affiliate marketing strategy for many affiliates. By collecting email subscribers they can build an ever growing list of people who fit the description of their customer avatar.

Components Of Affiliate Marketing: Marketing/Advertising Methods

The marketing side of affiliate marketing is a huge topic and can be broken down into further components for simplification. Some affiliates will use paid marketing methods such as Google Adwords. Others might build content (such as this article), using SEO (search engine optimisation) to drive their traffic source. SEO can also be broken down into many components too such as link building, content creation, social media sharing etc. Here’s a few of the main marketing methods used by affiliates:

Blogging – writing content on a website to attract the customer avatar/target audience
Video blogging – uploading videos to YouTube or TikTok and attracting an audience (with the purpose of selling affiliate products through the affiliate link)
PPC – pay per click (direct response) advertising allows affiliates to test adverts and collect data to improve performance.
Social media advertising – both paid and unpaid social media marketing can be used by affiliates to attract an audience for their products.
SEO – search engine optimisation is used to optimise content created on a blog or with video and may involve link building, content sharing and other methods to increase domain authority or reach.

Components Of Affiliate Marketing: Blogging

Blogging is a popular way to promote affiliate products and involves building content on a website like this one. Again, blogging can be broken down into many components to achieve the best results for an affiliate:

Creating content – writing specific content which will attract the right target audience
Content promotion – sharing that content: posting to social media, linking from other websites (guest posting), blog commenting, etc.
Blogging automation tools – bloggers will often use automated tools which help them syndicate their content more easily. See auto post to social media from WordPress.
SEO – search engine optimisation can be done both on-site and off site; using link building strategies and SEO plugins. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Content creation is also a major factor for SEO.

Summary

As you can see there are many components to affiliate marketing.

The “vendor” or product owner or “merchant”
The “network” connecting the vendor to the affiliate
The “publisher” or “affiliate” who refers the products online via marketing strategies
The customer who purchases the product.

Components For Affiliates

For affiliates there are other components which they must understand to successfully sell their products:

Targeted audience – who is your “perfect” customer
Marketing Strategy – How will you attract them?
Customer Avatar – Specifics of your perfect customer
Data & Analytics – help with your optimisation
Email marketing – collecting subscribers

Marketing Strategies

Marketing strategies can be broken down into different methods:

Blogging
Video blogging
PPC – pay per click
Social media
SEO – search engine optimisation

Blogging Components

And even each marketing strategy can be further broken down into smaller components. For example with blogging:

Content creation – Creating content on a website whether written on video
Content promotion – promoting the content in whatever way appropriate
Tools – plugins and data collection tools to help optimise your efforts
SEO – search engine optimisation to help gain organic traffic
Link building – to increase domain authority and Google rankings etc.
etc

Access some training videos here.

What Is The Work Of Affiliate Marketing?

What is the work of affiliate marketing? Many people are hearing about affiliate marketing but don’t know what’s involved. What do affiliate marketers do exactly?

Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which third parties promote and sell other people’s products online. There’s thousands of affiliate products which you can sell, and many ways to sell them. Different affiliates have different approaches to selling too. Some of the most common ways to sell affiliate products online are:

Content marketing and SEO – search engine optimisation. This might be strategies such as blogging or video blogging also know as “v’logging”
PPC – pay per click advertising. There’s a variety of advertising platforms which affiliates use such as YouTube, Adwords, Bing etc. They run ads and send traffic to affiliate products
Email marketing – most top affiliates will have an email list of subscribers. They send regular messages to their subscribers helping them with a specific problem and selling their products to their list at the same time.
Social media – many affiliates use their social media accounts in one way or another, either with paid marketing or organic methods of finding customers for their products.

What Is The Work Of Affiliate Marketing? Join A Program

The first step for affiliates is to join an affiliate program. One of the most popular affiliate programs is Amazon’s and anyone can join providing they meet Amazon’s partner program criteria.

Joining a program is usually just a matter to filling out a form. Although some programs will require you to already have a website and a number of email subscribers. Once you have joined a program you can choose a product to promote and get your unique affiliate link. An affiliate link is a unique identifying code which allows programs to credit referrers when they make a sale.

To make sales, affiliates need to learn some kind of marketing strategy where they can attract paying customers through their links. This is the most difficult part of affiliate marketing and as such the part which requires the most amount of focus in order for an affiliate to become successful. To summarise the work of affiliate marketing, it is the “marketing” part of the business. Most affiliates will need to learn some kind of digital marketing strategy, in order to make sales.

What Is The Work Of Affiliate Marketing? Running Ads/Creating Content

How you sell your affiliate products will determine a number of things for affiliates:

How successful they are
The time period it takes
The amount of work they need to do
The scalability in their business and the ability to automate it

Many affiliates, for example will start by blogging and although blogging is a method of affiliate marketing which can work well, it’s a long term strategy. A faster strategy to use is paid marketing. With paid marketing platforms, you can experience almost instant traffic, for example. But with blogging and SEO (search engine optimisation), results can be much, much slower.

Bloggers create content on their website and optimise it for the search engines. If successful, their content will get traction and they will make sales organically. Over time, if they stick with it for long enough, they can generate passive income from blogging. Depending on the topic of their blog and the relative competitiveness, this can take weeks, months or even years!

With paid marketing, affiliates use targeted advertising to place their marketing message in front of prospective customers. For example, Google Adwords lets marketers target adverts based on Google search traffic. By finding specific keywords which relate to their affiliate products, affiliates place ads in front of people who are likely to buy. The target audience for affiliate marketing is the specific section of online visitors who would be most likely to buy your particular product/service.

Data Analysis

Whatever method of marketing an affiliate uses, some of their work will involve analysing their data. With paid advertising, over time affiliates will gather data on their ads and their sales. By compiling data over various different ads, targeting and sales pages, they can determine very accurately which ads are performing the best. Once they know this they can cut off ads which aren’t performing and scale up ads which do!

Ultimately the aim is to be running advertising/marketing which is generating sales and profit for the affiliate. In the first instance this can be a tough journey, especially if ads aren’t performing. A lot of affiliates will quit during this time and assume that their business just doesn’t work! But this is a mistake, and although learning advertising techniques can be tough, in the long run, affiliates who stick the course can earn an automated income through running ads and selling affiliate products.

Email Marketing

Most long term affiliate marketers have an email marketing list. They build a large list of subscribers who opt in to receiving messages about a particular topic or interest. The affiliate then automates a number of email messages which are sent on a regular basis to follow up with each subscriber. Over time, as your email list grows you should find more and more of your subscribers are buying affiliate products from you.

Anyone can build an email list in a number of ways and first you should get access to an email autoresponder. Get one free here.

Once they have an autoresponder, affiliates build their lists in a few main ways:

They create an opt in offer on a website, and build traffic through blogging
They create specific landing pages and send traffic there with paid or organic marketing methods.
They offer a free giveaway such as an ebook, pdf download or some information giveaway

Keyword Research

Bloggers and video content creators often use keyword research in order to find the keywords which are likely to perform the best. With blogging, many keywords are too competitive to rank on the search results pages in Google, for example. So many bloggers will look for the long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. These are the keywords which are much more likely to show up in the search results if they create content for them.

Keyword research can be done with many free and paid for tools one of which is Google’s keyword planner. By using the planner to find keywords which relate to your particular topic, you can be much more targeted when it comes to creating content.

If you target content specifically, you can make your work as an affiliate go further than by simply writing/creating content about random topics in your niche.

Training & Education

The most important step to consider if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate marketing is training and education. It’s pretty easy to join an affiliate program but much more difficult to effectively sell affiliate products. Around 95% of affiliates will quit and most assume it’s far easier than it really is to become successful as an affiliate.

If you get the proper training and stick with it over the longer term, your chances of success are far higher than most.

Access a free video series and learn more about affiliate marketing products, strategies and methods.

How Does High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Work?

How does high ticket affiliate marketing work? High ticket affiliate marketing is the same as any affiliate product, only with more expensive products. Typically a high ticket product will pay much more than a standard affiliate product will. Most affiliate products and programs have items costing less than $100, for example.

Amazon, one of the most popular affiliate programs, has thousands of products you can promote on their site. But most of these products are valued at $100 or less. Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 20% commission on its products with most of its commissions falling into the 3-10% range.

If you decide to promote products valued at $50 and which pay only 10% commission, you’re going to need to sell a lot of products to become profitable as an affiliate; at only $5 commission per sale! But with high ticket affiliate programs, you can make fewer sales and make more money. This is because the products are valued higher or because the commission is a larger percentage of the sale value (or both).

How Does High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Work?

With high ticket products, you will typically make over $500 per sale, due to the higher sale value of the product. Here’s an example of a high ticket product. This submarine costs $300,000! By joining the affiliate program at Hammacher Schlemmer, the website which sells this item, anyone can then promote their unique affiliate link to the item. If you make a sale through your link, you earn 8% of the sale value. This would give you an affiliate commission of $24,000!

There are of course far fewer people looking to spend £300,000 on an Amphibious vehicle than there are looking to spend $100 or less on Amazon! However, as an affiliate it’s worth far more to sell one such item than the many items you would need to sell with a low value product. For example, let’s compare this to selling a $100 item from Amazon, with a 10% commission. To make the same as this one sale of the watercraft, you would need to sell 2400 items from Amazon!

Despite the fact that a high ticket item like this is more difficult to sell, it’s never 2400 times as difficult! In fact, often is the case that the work will be very similar in attracting customers for either item. Once you have learned how to attract the right audience for your products and services as an affiliate, you can promote anything you like. So it can be much more lucrative to go after customers for larger valued items, once you understand how to sell online.

How Does High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Work?

Of course the Submarine/watercraft is an extreme example, and there’s many other affiliate products you can promote which have a smaller price tag than $300,000! Here’s another example of a high ticket product you can sell as an affiliate:

The “Aquatic Gymnasium” is priced at $10,000 and would give an affiliate an $800 commission if they made a sale. Here’s another item. The Climbing Wall Treadmill is valued at $9950 and pays out $800 commissions to affiliates.

High ticket affiliate marketing is the same as with all affiliate marketing products, except they carry a much larger financial reward for sales you generate. Most high ticket affiliate products will pay out at least $500. Compared to lower valued products, it’s obviously a much better way to do affiliate marketing if you’re considering becoming an affiliate.

Basic Affiliate Marketing Setup

To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program. As mentioned, Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs online. To benefit from high ticket sales on Amazon, you just need to find their most expensive products. Here’s a few of the highest priced watches on the site.

At the time of writing Amazon pays 7% commission on it’s watches according to this chart:

A sale of one of these watches would give you an £875 commission! Once you’ve joined an affiliate program you will get access to the online dashboard where you should get your unique affiliate link. This link identifies you as the selling when you send a customer through it to the product. Once they make a purchase the sale is credited to you and you earn a commission. This is payable by the “vendor” – (product owner) or owner of the affiliate website where you have signed up.

Making Sales

To make sales as an affiliate, whether high ticket or low ticket, you need to get buying customers to click through your affiliate link and make a purchase. This can be accomplished in a number of ways but these are some of the most popular methods:

Blogging
Email marketing
PPC – pay per click advertising
Video marketing – paid and organic
Social media marketing

The main skill of a successful affiliate is finding a strategy they can use to sell their affiliate products. If a strategy can be automated and scaled up to a larger audience quickly, so much the better!

To learn more about high ticket affiliate marketing access a free webinar and video series through this link.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Pyramid Scheme

If you’re looking for affiliate marketing vs pyramid scheme, you’re probably wondering whether affiliate marketing is a pyramid scheme or not? Rest assured that affiliate marketing is definitely not the same as a pyramid scheme. With a pyramid scheme, you’re encouraged to involve other people with the reward of earnings for doing so. So, in some ways there are similarities. But this is where the similarity ends.

Wikipedia defines pyramid schemes as the following: “A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.”

With affiliate marketing, you refer customers to products and services of some kind. Affiliates are third party referrers who benefit from the sale of other people’s products, mostly online.

Affiliate Marketing Vs Pyramid Scheme

A pyramid scheme is notable by lacking a trade of value of any kind. Most pyramid schemes entice people to join into a system where introducing new members results in payment. You can also earn from the recruitment of members further down the pyramid, so the more people you recruit, and the more they recruit, the more you get paid! If there’s no value other than the idea of financial reward, this is often a clue whether it is a pyramid scheme.

Pyramid schemes and multi level marketing businesses often get confused. A multi level marketing business rewards its sales people for building a team of sales people who are all selling products. If there’s no products, it’s more likely to be a pyramid scheme and less likely to be a legitimate business.

With affiliate marketing some affiliates will promote courses with a two tier commission structure. This encourages them to recruit more members because those members can add to their earnings with their sales. However, with a legitimate product, this is still legal and above board.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which affiliates refer customers online to products and services. They don’t need to personally own those products themselves in order to benefit from their sale. Because affiliate marketing has such a low barrier to entry, there’s a lot of people who attempt it. This does make the affiliate marketing space very competitive. Many of those affiliates who attempt to make money from it fail. Around 95% of affiliates drop out which means only a small percentage actually make it work for the over the longer term.

Affiliates use all kinds of methods to get their products in front of buying customers:

PPC – pay per click advertising
Blogging
Video blogging
SEO – search engine optimisation
Email marketing
Social media
etc.

Although affiliates can use any advertising they want, most affiliates use online digital marketing strategies as apposed to traditional advertising methods.

To learn more about affiliate marketing access this free video series.

Niche Ideas For Affiliate Marketing

What are some good niche ideas for affiliate marketing? Whatever your niche in affiliate marketing, your main job is to drive traffic to your offer/s. How you do this is largely going to determine whether you’re successful or not. In any niche there’s going to be competition from other affiliates and businesses. So whether you decide to focus on paid advertising or search engine optimisation (SEO)/free traffic, you’re going to need to spend time and/or money building your business.

Sadly the top paying niches are also the most competitive. So if you build a website in the hopes of attracting traffic for a top niche, your chances of getting free traffic are pretty minimal, especially without a great amount of effort. With paid marketing too, the top niches are super competitive and this drives up the price for your advertising. Top paying niches for affiliate marketing are generally thought of as:

Wealth and money making
Health and fitness
Dating and relationship
Hobbies and interests
Pets
Electronics and technology
Home & Garden

These topics are evergreen and this means they sell all year round. More “fringe” topics are generally less competitive but may also be seasonal. Christmas, Easter or seasonal products are an example of products which aren’t evergreen. They will only sell at certain times of the year.

Niche Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Choosing Your Topic

If you’re going to build a niche website and attempt to attract free traffic from SEO, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you’re passionate about or at least interested in. Building content for SEO is a long term affair and many bloggers will quit even months into their plans when nothing happens! There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and this means there’s a huge amount of competition, whatever your topic is. The good news is you can “niche down” into sub-topics to enable you to have an easier time of it and attract a specific audience.

So what’s a sub-niche? A sub niche is a niche within a niche. So for example, if you’re planning on building a website around the topic of Yoga, you’ll find a huge amount of competition. So you might decide to find a sub-niche within this niche such as Yoga for seniors, for example, or chair Yoga!

To help you find a sub niche in your chosen category, you can use Google’s free keyword planner to look for the keywords being searched for already. Here’s just a few results that come up when using the keyword planner for the term Yoga online. “Prenatal Yoga online” is one term which jumps out because it’s a potential sub niche. You could also look at “Zoom Yoga” for a website theme too if appropriate to your blog/website.

Niche Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Ikigai

If your intention is to build a resource website, think about all the competition you’ll be facing online. In a more competitive niche, you’ll be facing much more competition. But if you use the keyword planner to niche down and find a less competitive sub-niche, as mentioned above, you’ll likely be facing less competition. Even in a less competitive niche, there will still be competition. The online world has grown rapidly and you should expect fierce competition even if you choose a lesser known topic.

To give yourself the best chance of success, it’s a good idea to focus on something you have a passion for. Ikigai is a Japanese term meaning reason for being. If you can tie in your niche with your ikigai, you will find it much easier to sustain the necessary effort over the longer term to succeed. With a topic you’re unfamiliar with, or not bothered about, it’s going to be much tougher to succeed. When you turn your passion for a subject into your vocation, you will have the edge over many other business owners who don’t care so much about their topic.

It’s therefore much better to choose a topic which you’re going to be passionate about delivering, than to aim at a topic simply because you believe it to be lucrative. Imagine yourself blogging, for example for several months and years. What topic strikes you as something you can sustain for this amount of time?

Keyword Planner

To use the keyword planner to find niche ideas for affiliate marketing start by typing a keyword or phrase into the planner. You’ll be shown many other phrases which are being searched for already. As with the example above you can find specific keywords which match your criteria and help you niche down. So for example, this website has been built on the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors”. Since “affiliate marketing” is such a competitive term, affiliate marketing mentors seemed like a good match for my site.

You can use this concept with any topic about which you have an interest. Here’s a few ideas you can use. Simply type them into Google’s keyword planner and look for longer tail keywords which would potentially make for a suitable website.

Martial arts – Tai Chi, Karate, TaeKwonDo, Kung Fu, Aikido etc.
Handy crafts/hobbies – Basket making, scrapbooking, crochet, knitting, scale models etc.
Gardening – garden furniture, vegetable plots, equipment
Money saving tips – credit cards, mortgages, loans, budgeting etc.
Jewellery – home made jewellery, custom jewellery, antique jewellery
Home decor – DIY, cheap painting and decorating tips, incense and scents, furnishings

Niche Ideas For Affiliate Marketing: Products

If you’re still struggling to come up with niche ideas for affiliate marketing, there’s a few other ways you can come to decide what your niche is going to be. Some of the best paying affiliate products are those which pay high ticket affiliate commissions and recurring affiliate commissions.

By choosing a niche which attracts your target audience in the high ticket space, the same amount of sales can earn you a lot more. This is one way to get around the huge competition online. Instead of competing to get a tonne of traffic in a very busy niche, choose a topic in which you only need one or two sales in order to become profitable.

See also high ticket affiliate products for more on this topic and subscription affiliate programs.

Your niche then can be chosen based on your products, rather than the other way round. To learn more about the different types of affiliate marketing products available, access this free video series.

Affiliate Marketing Objectives

What are your affiliate marketing objectives? Affiliate marketers are third party referral “sales” people who earn revenue from selling other people’s products online.

They are effectively self employed entrepreneurs who are mostly aiming to earn from the internet for several different reasons:

To escape having to work for an employer
For another income source
So they don’t have to commute any more and join the rush hour traffic every day
To become self employed and be their own boss.
To attain financial freedom and/or geographical freedom (work from anywhere)

In order to achieve any of these objectives, affiliates must sell affiliate products and earn enough from it to replace an existing income, or give them another source of income which can be built upon.

Affiliate Marketing Objectives: Why Affiliates Should Have Objectives & Goals

Affiliates work for themselves in an industry which is performance based. As such, unless they sell products, they don’t make any money! Since affiliate marketing is incredibly easy to get into, and not so easy to excel at, affiliates need goals and objectives to strive towards.

Without serious goals, it’s very easy to fail with affiliate marketing. Around 95% of new affiliate marketers fail and drop out. To avoid the trap of failing with affiliate marketing you need to be very serious about it and set goals. Otherwise, it’s easy to become demoralised when things don’t immediately work out!

A lot of affiliates will assume that affiliate marketing is their golden ticket to a charmed life. They set about it without really knowing what to do. When things don’t work out, instead of getting help and support, they simply quit. If you set goals and objectives for your affiliate marketing business, you are giving yourself a much better chance of success than those who simply wander into it expecting it to be easy! See also is affiliate marketing difficult?.

Affiliate Marketing Objectives: What Are They?

What are your affiliate marketing objectives? If you don’t know, it’s a good idea to get started with affiliate marketing with some training. Access a free video series to start here. Once you have begun your affiliate marketing journey, you can break down long term goals into smaller more achievable steps which you can do each day. With a large long term goal it can seem like you have a mountain to climb and this can be daunting. A good long term goal should excite you and it should also feel like a bit of a stretch.

Long Term Objectives

Long term affiliate objectives might be:

To earn the same amount as your employment so you have the option to quit working a job
To achieve financial independence from a boss or a job
To be able to work from anywhere globally from your laptop
Financial freedom

Medium Term Goals

These are long term goals which you can achieve through using affiliate marketing. However they won’t happen overnight and you’ll need a plan of action and to break down these longer term objectives into small achievable goals you can work on day to day. Here’s a shorter term list of potential objectives which affiliates might have:

Choose your marketing strategy
Choose the products you want to sell and join an affiliate program
Make your first sale online
Generate a regular income from affiliate marketing

Once you have chosen your path, there’s many other steps you might take. Choosing your marketing method is an important step for affiliates. Ideally find one which suits your working ethos, marketing budget and available time.

Short Term Affiliate Goals:

Short term affiliate goals are the ones you can do today:

Join an affiliate marketing course
Work through a step by step program
Watch a training video
Build your first website
Start learning a marketing strategy

Ideally affiliates should have a few objectives and goals which they can categorise into the following:

Long term – 5 to 10 years
Medium term goals – 6 months to 1 year
Short term goals – weekly goals
Shortest term goals – what can be accomplished right now, today

Tony Robbins “Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in two or three decades.”

Without breaking your goals down like this, it can be easy to “have a go” at affiliate marketing and struggle. When you see only problems, you quit! Think of the Chinese bamboo tree!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The Chinese bamboo tree makes a great analogy with affiliate marketing. With the Chinese bamboo tree, there’s a gestation period where nothing sprouts above the surface of the soil for several years. If you didn’t know the plant’s growth period, you could be mistaken that it was dead, and abandon it. But it still needs water and nourishment to form.

Unfortunately this is the same for affiliate marketing. Many affiliates will “give it a try” for a few weeks or months and give up when nothing “sprouts”. If only they stuck with it. The Chinese bamboo tree can sprout 90 feet in only a few weeks once it breaks the surface. The same is true of affiliate marketing because of the potential to scale up to a global audience with the sale of affiliate products.

If you’re ready to start with affiliate marketing you can start here with a free video series.

Affiliate Fundamentals

What are the affiliate fundamentals? The fundamentals are those affiliate marketing principles and techniques which every successful affiliate marketer should understand and abide by!

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third party referrers are rewarded for selling other people’s products online. If they successfully refer a customer to a product, they earn a commission based on the sale. However, despite the huge potential of earning from selling affiliate products, only around 5% of affiliates are successful. Most affiliates will struggle and quit!

Knowing a few affiliate fundamentals well might mean the difference between success and failure as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business model which means without sales you don’t make any money!

To make sales consistently as an affiliate takes more than most people expect. Knowing the rules of the game will put you ahead of the many other affiliates who will quit too early, not knowing that success may be only a few alterations of their knowledge and a change in their awareness.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Numbers & Targeting

Affiliate marketing is of course a numbers game. With only a small amount of traffic to your website, you’ll only make a small number of sales, at best! Often, new affiliates will struggle getting traffic to a website and then also struggle turning that traffic into buying customers. Not knowing who your customers are can therefore cost you dearly as an affiliate. First it can cost you several months of struggle in getting people to your website. Then it can cost you the psychological impact of realising that you’ve attracted the wrong kind of traffic to your site: browsers, not buyers! All of this is too hard to bear for many affiliates and they drop out; who could blame them after all?

So, one of the most important affiliate fundamentals is knowing your target audience. When you know who your customers are, where they live, how old they are and where they spend time online, you’re in a much better position to put your marketing messages in front of them, and to do so in a meaningful way.

When you understand your “perfect” customer, you’re in a much better position to target them and only them with your advertising. There’s a saying in sales, if you try and sell everyone, you sell {to} no-one”. By finding your customer “avatar”, you are able to focus your efforts on talking directly to them and marketing directly to them which will save you a heap of time and stacks of money.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Types Of Visitor & The Buyer Cycle

Affiliates need traffic to put their marketing message in front of buying customers. By far this is one of the biggest problems especially for new affiliate marketers. Not all traffic is the same of course and there’s a huge difference between an online visitor looking for free information and those looking to buy a particular product. Most website visitors are of course looking for information. Some of that information leads people to products and services (ideally through your affiliate link).

An example of a piece of online information which leads someone to a product might be a product review. Review websites are good for affiliate marketers because they attract the kind of person who is looking to buy something very specific. So if you’re going to become a content creator as an affiliate, this is an important thing to understand. Review sites work well also because you attract someone who is in the last stage of the buying cycle. They just want one more piece of information before making a purchase. A DIY website, on the other hand, will more likely attract people looking for DIY advice, rather than a specific product.

Depending on where someone is in the buying cycle, you may need longer to persuade them of your product’s value. This can be achieved if you build an email list.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Controlling Your Traffic

However you earn traffic, you will ultimately want to be in control of that traffic. This can be very difficult and you shouldn’t rely on traffic which is out of your control. Google, for example can only give a top ranking to one website at any given time. So competing against high authority websites can lead you to become very disappointed – especially if you’re choosing a competitive niche for your affiliate business.

You can of course gain free traffic by targeting specific keywords in your content, but ultimately it’s up to the search engines whether to reward you for the content you have created. It’s never a good idea to rely on traffic from an intangible outcome. Far better to choose your marketing strategy and work at getting very good at it. Whether this is paid marketing or organic marketing, you should definitely aim to make the most out of your website traffic by getting a list of subscribers. Most affiliate marketers use an email list, which they can build with either free or paid for traffic.

A list is a good idea because you can control your traffic, build trust over time and send your visitors to content you have created to help them. Access a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing here.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Touchpoints

Most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website. In fact it will usually take several touch points before someone is ready to make a buying decision. On a unfamiliar website, this is all the more so. Whereas on trusted websites, such as Amazon.com for example, people are more ready to buy because they know the site and have come to feel comfortable buying from it.

If you’re an affiliate marketer this can present a difficult proposition because you’re effectively recommending products which aren’t actually yours! Certain products can be sold quite directly, and you can send your traffic directly to Amazon if you have a suitable product to sell. But with certain products, such as digital products, their value can be somewhat arbitrary. This can mean a potential customer will need to know more about the product (and about you) before they decide to buy.

This “getting to know you” process can be achieved by delivering value before the sale in the form of information. This can be achieved through email marketing, blogging or creating videos etc. An email list is definitely a good idea; especially if you’re going to sell digital products.

Branding: Selling “You”

Depending on the product you’re selling, you may want to consider your “brand” as an affiliate marketer. Unless people buy into you, they won’t want what you have to sell either!

Your “brand” is how you present yourself in all your marketing materials: your blog, website, email marketing list, video advertisements etc.

Ideally how you present yourself and your brand should be congruent across all your marketing “tools” and platforms to present your brand consistently to your website visitors, email subscribers and blog readers.

Branding goes hand in hand with targeting your customer avatar and it’s useful to know who you want to target with your message and who you are right for in terms of serving your customers.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

There’s many different ways to sell affiliate products and depending on your business model and marketing budget, you may choose from one or even two of many:

Blogging
Video blogging
Paid advertising – search, video, retargeting, etc.
social media platforms (paid and unpaid)
SEO – search engine optimisation

Paid marketing is a much faster way to get traction with affiliate marketing although you’ll need to be careful initially with your marketing budget. But once you’re profitable with a paid marketing campaign, you can leave ads running indefinitely and scale them up quickly. With content marketing it’s a much slower process. It can take several weeks or even months to see the results from your hard work. Plus it can be much more difficult to scale up to larger numbers with content. However, if you persevere with content marketing, you can ultimately make passive sales if your content gets free traffic from the search engines.

Ideally choose a marketing strategy with a view of the longer term and based on your available time, products and marketing budget.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can promote as an affiliate online. You can choose from physical products, digital products, subscription and high ticket affiliate products. Your choice of products is pretty important and will in many ways determine how successful you will become in making sales. The right kinds of products will always sell and some products won’t sell well however good a marketer you become!

Unfortunately many of the most popular products are in very competitive niches too. A competitive niche has many other competing affiliates in it which makes your job more difficult whether you’re running paid ads or creating content.

Physical products do sell well but as an affiliate you generally earn much less from selling them. Physical products will tend to pay between 5% and 10% commission whereas digital products will pay much more: generally between 30% and 50%. So if you’re selling low value physical products, you’re going to need to sell in bulk in order to make your efforts worthwhile.

High ticket affiliate products pay much more than average and are worth considering along with subscription affiliate products which pay you recurring commissions from your sales.

Mindset

One of the most important factors in your success as an affiliate is your mindset. Since around 95% of affiliate fail, it’s important to stay the course when others are quitting. This means learning from your “failures” which ultimately aren’t failures at all but rather learnings which should help you to eventually become successful.

Most affiliates will become disillusioned when they meet with some adversity. In the beginning it can be a little demoralising when nothing seems to be happening. But remember that affiliate marketing is a long term thing, and it’s also a numbers game. Long term affiliates know this and stick at it. With a small amount of traffic on your website, you may not see any sales coming in. But over time you can build on the small daily steps you continue to take. With a small email list, you likely won’t see a dramatic amount of sales, but over time your efforts compound because you can get better at growing your list and communicating with your subscribers.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

In The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing pdf I’m going to share some of the most important things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing over the last 10 years. Affiliate marketing is a business model which anyone can benefit from. Simply refer products and services online to customers! Sounds easy doesn’t it? While the concept of affiliate marketing is a straight forward one, there are several roadblocks to success which many affiliates will discover!

The easy part of affiliate marketing is joining an affiliate program and getting access to your unique identifying code or affiliate link. Once you have your link, you have the ability to make money by placing it online in front of buying customers.

When someone buys something through your unique code (affiliate link), your sale is tracked and you earn a commission. Sounds like nothing could be simpler. But the truth is many new affiliates will struggle to make a single sale online. Knowing why this is will best prepare you for a successful career as an affiliate marketer. That’s why in this article “The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF”, I’m going to focus on this topic: why affiliates struggle.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

95% of affiliates fail! This statistic should wake you up to the fact that affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as some make out. But armed with this knowledge, and the knowledge in this article, you’ll be better prepared to become successful. If you also bring the right mindset to this fantastic business opportunity, your chances of success increase dramatically.

Why do so many affiliates fail? I believe this happens for a number of reasons:

Affiliate marketing has a very low bar to entry. This means anyone with a laptop and internet connection can “give it a try”.
Affiliate marketing is a very cheap business model which you can start for free. Again, anyone can do it without investment which is impossible in pretty much any other business model.
People have high expectations of what they can achieve without much effort. Yes high earnings are possible, but this takes more than most people are capable of.
People quit too easily because they expect an “easy ride” which affiliate marketing most definitely won’t give you!

Knowing all these things should prepare you better to become successful as an affiliate. With most affiliates, when they encounter a roadblock or problem, they see it as a reason to quit. Or at best they see it as a reason to doubt whether affiliate marketing really works. You should know that the 5% of affiliates who become successful don’t do this! They carry on through the problems and roadblocks, never allowing doubt to cloud their mind! They use roadblocks as learning opportunities, not as a sign of failure.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF : Shiny Object Syndrome

So, mindset is a hugely important part of affiliate marketing. Ignore it at your peril. But as well as mindset it’s important to get the right information and stay your course over the longer term. It’s very easy to get distracted when you’re new to affiliate marketing because there are so many people trying to persuade you one way or another with their “shiny objects”. Another training course seems much more enticing when you’re facing problems of some kind. Especially when the seller proclaims how easy their system is compared to the one you’re currently using!

The Busy Fool

Most paths of affiliate marketing will require a good deal of work before you can see the benefit. Unfortunately this means you need to stay focused on your marketing strategy for some time without seeing the benefits! Whether you run ads, create content or post on social media, it’s not typical that you will automatically start making sales on your first outing as a marketer.

Controlling your time and not getting distracted by shiny new courses or being a busy fool is paramount to your success. It’s easy to work at things which don’t produce a meaningful outcome too. This is known as being a busy fool and it’s another trap many affiliates fall into. A “busy fool” spends time on affiliate activities which although might be enjoyable, aren’t moving your business forward. As a business owner time is your most valuable resource and you mustn’t waste it. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business. If you don’t make sales, you don’t get paid!

Types Of Products

As a new affiliate I made many mistakes; one of which was promoting the wrong kinds of products. I chose Amazon and eBay simply because I knew they offered an affiliate program and I used the sites myself. The trouble was, I didn’t know how little they paid in terms of affiliate commission. You can make good money of course from any affiliate program. But with low commission based programs you need to shift a lot more product in order to become profitable. Amazon, for example pays as low as 1% commission on some of its products. So it’s well worth becoming aware of the different affiliate marketing business models and their relative levels of commission.

Physical products tend to pay the least to affiliates – typically from 5-10%. Digital products pay more and usually offer from 30-40% commissions. Then there are subscription products which pay recurring commissions to affiliates and of course high ticket affiliate products which pay much higher “one time” commissions.

Of course the best products to promote will depend on your marketing method, but the most profitable are those which pay you recurring commissions and higher rates of commission: subscription and high ticket products.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF: Methods Of Marketing

There’s various methods of marketing which affiliates use to get their products in front of a buying audience. Depending on your situation and marketing budget, or lack thereof, you might choose from a number of different strategies:

PPC – pay per click – paid marketing
Blogging
Video blogging
Social media methods (both paid and unpaid)

Marketing methods can be categorised into main groups: paid and unpaid. The paid marketing methods are the faster of the two and most scalable. Organic marketing methods such as blogging and SEO (search engine optimisation) are much, much slower methods. Plus they are less scalable. However, a free marketing method might suit you if you don’t have much free money for spending on marketing, but have a lot of time for content creation.

Creating Content

With content marketing, it can take weeks, months or even years to get traction and sell products on a regular basis. But with paid marketing, you can see results almost immediately. Most paid marketing campaigns don’t work however, so you’ll likely need to run several advertising campaigns to find just one which is profitable. This of course takes time (and money). But once you hit upon a successful campaign, you can leave it running (forever) and make money by running it. You can also turn up your marketing budget to make more sales. This is a bit like having a “tap” for money! Want more money? Turn the tap up – the “tap” being your marketing budget.

This can’t be done in the same way with content because you won’t see the same results as quickly nor is content as easily scalable. However, you can ultimately earn passively from content you have created previously if it does well.

An Analogy

I like the Chinese bamboo tree as an analogy to affiliate marketing. In my early days as an affiliate, I jumped around from one strategy to another without really getting any traction. I was frustrated and disillusioned over and over again. What I didn’t know then was that affiliate marketing is like a Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese bamboo tree takes a long gestation period of up to 5 years before you even see shoots above the surface of the soil. But if you water it and feed it, once it breaks the surface, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Affiliate marketing is like this and although it might not take 5 years to show promise (depending on your marketing method/products), it works in a similar fashion. Your first blog post for example won’t suddenly bring in thousands of sales. But after several months of blogging, you’ll start getting traffic to your website.

Your first advert might not make you any sales, but once you find one which does, you’ll have an income from it which can be grown and scaled up. The hard work with affiliate marketing is definitely the “unseen” work which goes on day after day when there’s nothing to show for your efforts. This is like the gestation period of the Chinese bamboo tree!

Stick at it and learn from your mistakes. “Fail forwards” and learn from your experiences. Little by little, you will grow and develop your business and eventually it will be like a freight train which doesn’t stop! One day you’ll be glad you never gave up! With affiliate marketing you can ultimately earn money without working, because of the work you’ve done previously. Your systems and automation will do the selling, once you’ve figured out how to be profitable.

Summary

While this handbook isn’t a definitive guide to affiliate marketing, there’s several points I’ve mentioned here which I believe will help you become successful if you decide to become an affiliate. Here’s the main points I’ve mentioned for a quick recap:

95% of affiliates fail and quit – to succeed you need to be better than them!
Lower value products pay less – learn about the different products you can promote – see affiliate marketing business models.
Choose a marketing strategy which suits you and your marketing budget – and stick to it
Get help – access these free videos to learn more about training and joining an online community.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF

In this affiliate marketing course free pdf downloadable document, we’re going to look at what affiliate marketing is and the different ways to do affiliate marketing.

access free workshop series — Access a free video course to learn more here.

What is affiliate marketing and why should you care? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are paid for referring products and services online. Anyone can be an affiliate and earn commissions if they learn how to sell online. They don’t need their own products and services because they can refer customers to existing products.

To do affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program and choose a product to sell. You can then get your unique affiliate link, which tracks any sales back to you. Once you’ve done that, you need to learn a marketing strategy in order to promote your link earn money.

To join an affiliate program is quite easy. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone who joins it can promote any product from the site for a percentage of the sale value.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available online and a huge choice in products you can promote. Amazon, as mentioned, is one of the most popular ones but mainly because it’s been around so long. (See the when did affiliate marketing start.).

There’s many other programs too and you can find affiliate programs in almost every area online. Not all affiliate products are the best to promote and there’s a wide range in affiliate commissions throughout the product range. For example, physical products like you would find on Amazon pay affiliates between 1% and 20% commission, with most products falling into the 5-10% commission range.

affiliate marketing course free pdf — Access a free video course and learn more here.

You can also promote digital products as an affiliate too. Many new affiliates will head over to Clickbank.com which is a site with many digital products to promote. Digital products are usually available for instant download and as such there’s fewer costs in their delivery.

Because you only need to create a digital product once, and you can sell it over and over again, there’s also fewer costs involved in manufacturing than with physical products. Because of this, most digital products will reward affiliates with higher levels of commission. Since the main cost in selling digital products is advertising, product creators can afford to pay much more, often from 30-40% of the sale value. This is obviously much better for affiliates than many physical products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Subscription and High Ticket Products

Affiliates can also promote subscription products and high ticket products. Subscription products are those which carry an ongoing regular charge. Memberships, trainings and software products often carry subscriptions and they are good for affiliates who can earn recurring income from each sale they generate. These are good, especially for beginner affiliates because they can help stabilise your income more quickly.

stuart chart free course — Access this free video course here.

With one time sales (which pay you only once) you need to keep making sales in order to keep making money. But with subscription products even a few “one off” sales can generate a regular income. Subscription products which are hugely valuable are good ones to choose, such as business tools which require a membership. These kinds of tools are necessary for online businesses, so members are more likely to maintain their memberships once they buy.

High ticket products are those products which carry a larger than average price tag and as such they offer the largest levels of commissions to affiliates. A good high ticket sale can earn affiliates the same as thousands of sales of a low value product. When you consider than most affiliate sales, even high ticket ones, will require the same or a similar amount of work to achieve, it makes sense to focus on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: How To Sell Affiliate Products

There’s various strategies and methods which affiliate marketers use to sell their products and services online and offline. Most affiliates will concentrate on online sales using a variety of tactics:

Blogging or video blogging – content marketing involves creating a lot of content and attracting a specific “target audience“.
SEO – search engine optimisation (optimising website content for the search engines)
Paid marketing – Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook and YouTube are just a few platforms which offer targeted advertising for affiliates.
Social media – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used.
Email marketing – many affiliates collect emails from a website and automate an email marketing campaign, sending out emails on a regular basis to their list.

Depending on the products you choose to promote, the return on investment available to you, your marketing budget and available time, you might choose any one of these kinds of marketing as an affiliate. If you’re working in a busy job and have little time, you might choose a paid strategy which is faster and more scaleable. Whereas if you don’t have a huge marketing budget, or have more available time, you might choose content creation as your strategy.

Ideally choose a strategy which suits your working style and circumstances and which you can maintain for long enough to get some traction. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Is Affiliate Marketing For You?

Affiliate marketing is a clever business model which allows anyone to earn an income from anywhere globally. All you need to start is a laptop and an internet connection. However, not everyone is successful at affiliate marketing and there’s a huge drop out rate. Only around 5% who try it stick with it long enough to make it work, so you can bet that affiliate marketing isn’t easy, despite the low bar to entry and low cost of starting.

Depending on your strategy, the time to start making sales will vary, and this is something which is different for everyone. Some people will have some early success and others will struggle because affiliate marketing isn’t an exact science. However if you stick with it longer than most, your chances of success dramatically rise!

It’s definitely worth getting help and support if you’re going to take the affiliate journey seriously. Access a free video series to learn more here.