AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Benefits Of Blogging

What are the benefits of blogging? For a business, a blog can be a good way to increase your sales. Blogging helps to gain website traffic and draw in potential customers. But there’s more to blogging than simply making more money. Many bloggers enjoy blogging as it helps them focus and it’s an outlet for their creativity, thoughts and emotions.

As an affiliate marketer, blogging is one of my main strategies for getting traffic to my affiliate offers. But traffic doesn’t come easy with blogging. It can take some time before you build up enough content to attract a steady flow of free visitors. Many affiliates will quit long before they reach enough traffic to build some real income. (See affiliate marketing success rate.) But for those who stick with it, blogging can ultimately give you a passive income from online sales.

Benefits Of Blogging: Sharing A Passion

Because of the high drop out rate among bloggers, it’s wise to choose a topic you’re passionate about; or at least have an interest in. Sharing a passion is a worthwhile endeavour whether or not you make a living from it. It’s a great way to connect with other people around the world who share your interest. Knowing you have helped someone solve a problem you have personally overcome is incredibly rewarding in its own right.

So whatever your passion is, building a blog around it can help you to express your creativity. It’s also an outlet for thoughts and ideas. Blogging can be incredibly rewarding and fulfilling, whether or not money is involved.

Benefits Of Blogging: Educating Others & Yourself

If you have a knowledge about something, or intend to learn about a particular topic, blogging is a great way to share your knowledge and/or consolidate knowledge at the same time. Blogging about something you’re interested in helps you pick up new knowledge and find new ideas related to your topic.

When I began blogging about affiliate marketing, I didn’t know as much on the topic as I do now. I had to learn about the topic as I blogged about different areas of the niche. There’s always more to learn too. By sharing knowledge as you go, you are learning twice because you learn once from others and share the information on your blog!

You don’t have to be an expert on a topic to blog about it and you can learn as you go. You do really need an interest in your topic though because you’ll need to stick at it for a long period of time!

Benefits Of Blogging: Gaining Exposure

Blogging naturally attracts people to your content over time as Google indexes your content and starts to rank it on the search engine result pages (SERPS). It can take some time before this happens, but you can also learn about the various ways to boost traffic to your website as you go.

This might mean sharing content on social media, linking back to it from other websites and even posting guest blogs on other authoritative websites. All of this of course adds to your exposure and posting guest blogs on other people’s websites will naturally showcase your work to a growing audience over time and give you more backlinks; helping you gain more authority with Google.

Benefits Of Blogging: Authority

As you continue to build content through sharing your knowledge and insight at a particular topic, you will naturally grow your authority online; both with your visitors and with Google (and other search engines). Having a strong perceived authority with your website visitors will mean they are more likely to trust you and believe in your expertise. This means they’re more likely to sign up to your newsletter (email list) and purchase whatever you’re selling too.

Your authority with Google and the other search engines also has a tremendous power. Once your authority grows with Google, your content will start to grow in the rankings. As your rankings improve, more people will be able to find your content and this has a knock on effect of exponentially increasing your website traffic over time. As more people visit your content, more people will like and share it. More will sign up to your email list, buy from you and also naturally linking to your content from other websites.

More backlinks equals more authority and so the cycle continues: better rankings, more traffic etc.

Benefits Of Blogging: Ranking & Free Traffic

One of the main goals of bloggers is to get free traffic from the search engines. This can be tough at first but as you can see from the above point, the more content you create and the higher your rankings go, the more traffic you attract and the greater your authority can build.

This situation although difficult to see at first can lead to a huge amount of free traffic to your blog. If you’re using blogging as an income generating tool, and selling something from your website, this can be incredibly lucrative if you stick with it for long enough.

Blogging can be used to find unique visitors who are looking for a specific answer to a specific question. By answering questions which are typically posed by your target audience, you can attract buyer traffic: people who are most likely to buy from you.

Viral Traffic

Another way blogs can encounter a lot of natural (organic) traffic is through sharing on social media. The more content you can create, the more likely you are to get something taking off through social media sharing.

As you create content on your blog and share it on your social media platforms, people will see it and visit your blog. If it’s popular, it can be shared a number of times and even go viral. A viral post is one which continues to be shared over and over again; leading more and more visitors to it. Traffic can spike dramatically if a post goes viral.

You can see examples of viral content sharing using the platform Buzzsumo.com. Buzzsumo is a site for marketers where you can find the most popular trending content which is performing the best on social media platforms.

Building Trust

People buy online from people, not from websites. Most people aren’t going to trust you if you immediately try and sell something to them online. After all they don’t know you. The same would be true in person. Blogging is a good way to build trust with your audience while also building credibility and authority. When people buy online it’s because they have got to trust you.

This is also a good reason to build an email list. With an email list you can continue to build trust by sending out useful information through email messages. On a blog, visitors are only around for a short time typically. Which means you only have a few minutes to build trust and demonstrate your trust-worthiness! On an email list this time is extended dramatically. You can send email messages for months, years and even decades after someone lands on your blog, if you get their email address.

Building A Brand

A brand is useful online because it conveys who you are and what you stand for. A blog can be part of this brand. If you aim to help people solve particular problems with your blogging, you can demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about while also building your brand.

A brand conveys your values, vision and mission and people are much more likely to see your value if it is aligned with their own values. Think about the major brands online and what they (say) they stand for:

Improve Your Writing Skills

I still have to check my spelling often when writing blogs but I’ve definitely improved my writing speed since becoming a regular blogger. As a beginner it took much longer to come up with ideas and to write a blog post than it does today. So as you make a habit of blogging, it will become like second nature to you, you’ll improve your grammar and the speed of your writing will also improve.

I’ve also found blogging to be a very cathartic activity which helps me clarify my thoughts.

Build A Passive Income/More Custom

Blogging can ultimately help you build a passive income through promoting affiliate products. If you have a business already, blogging is a good way to increase organic traffic and attract customers for free.

Most businesses see the benefits of blogging over the longer term as one of attracting free traffic. While this can take months or even years to accomplish, free sales is definitely something worth working for!

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work?

What is blogging and how does it work? The term “blog” is short for “weblog“(website log) which refers to an online journal. Blogs began as personal mini-websites that people used to record their views, stories, hobbies, and other writings as well as photos and videos. A blog can be used to share insight into a particular topic or niche.

Blogs are also useful for business owners who can attract customers through creating written content online.

In 1996 Amazon launched its affiliate program which was the first program that was available to the general public. Since then more people started using blogging as a means to make an income online. (See when did affiliate marketing start). Many thousands of bloggers have written content on websites in order to attract visitors through the search engines; Google being the most popular one.

Affiliate marketing has allowed anyone to generate an income from blogging by referring blog visitors to products and services online.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work?

Blogging works by creating written content and uploading it to the internet by means of a digital platform such as WordPress. The current platform I’m using to write this blog post is a WordPress website. You can also use free blogging platforms to write blog posts such as:

Blogger.com
WordPress.com
Hubpages.com

Free blogging platforms like these allow anyone to create and upload content to the internet. Once up there, people can find the content if they are looking for it, and manage to find it. Because there’s so much content on the internet, getting eyes on your content is the main issue for new blog post writers. Since most people will use a search engine to find the content they are looking for (e.g. Google), the main goal of bloggers is to get free traffic by creating a lot of content which can be easily found.

This can be difficult though given the huge amount of other bloggers out there. It’s estimated that there are over 600 million blogs on the internet today! Yes 600,000,000! That’s a huge amount of blogs. So depending on your blogging topic, it can be extremely difficult to attract an audience to your content.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work: Tactics Of Bloggers

The main search engine people use to find information on the internet is Google. While there are others such as Bing.com, Yahoo.com and duckduckgo.com etc. most people still use Google as their main “go to” for online research.

Any simple Google search will bring up millions of pages of results but the top few will receive the lion share of visitors. Bloggers aim to be in this select group of the search engine results pages (SERPS). Unless they are, their visitors will need to come from other sources or nobody will even see their content!

Other sources of traffic can be found through social media, back linking or sharing content elsewhere on the internet. However, it can take a lot of effort to achieve just a small number of visitors. If you intend on making money from blogging, you’ll need a huge amount of website visitors (traffic) to be successful.

One strategy bloggers use is to find the search phrases people are looking for by using Google’s keyword planner. The keyword planner shows searches which have been made already on Google for terms which you choose. For example, if you type “CD player” into the planner, you’ll find all the searches which have been done for terms relating to the “seed” keyword “CD player”.

By creating written content on a blog which targets specific keywords which you want to be found for, you can target those which you have more chance of obtaining a top Google ranking for. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

What Is Blogging And How Does It Work? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

SEO or search engine optimisation refers to the “tweeking” of content on a blog in order to improve the likelihood of it obtaining a higher position on the SERPS (search engines results pages). By optimising your blog posts, you can potentially increase your positioning and get more visitors from Google and other search engines. However, there’s no guarantees of getting a page one listing on Google (or any other search engine for that matter). Whether you do will depend on how Google perceives your content. Google uses a number of factors to determine how to rank content in the SERPS. These are some of the most well known of them:

Content – quality of your content (and quantity) is a huge factor in determining the authority of your site
Backlinks – often top ranking blogs have tens of thousands of backlinks from other high authority websites
Domain age – the domain age is a factor and older sites tend to be given greater authority
Time on page – how your visitors interact with your content (do they click away or stay on the site and for how long?)
Social media presence – how much is your content shared on social media
Interaction – do visitors interact and engage with your content (leave comments, share and post etc.)
Plus many more

Making Money From A Blog

To make money from a blog you need to monetise your website somehow. This can be done in a number of ways even without a business or product of your own. Many bloggers will monetise their blogs by promoting other people’s products from it (affiliate marketing) or using advertising (e.g. Google Adsense).

With affiliate marketing, you can attract an audience which is aligned with a certain product. When visitors come to your site, you can offer the product directly, or give away a “gift” in order to get visitors to sign up to your email list. From your list you can then promote affiliate products. See the power of email marketing.

With advertising platforms such as Google Adsense, bloggers can place adverts on their blog and get paid for clicks made by their visitors.

Summary

So, what is blogging and how does it work? By uploading written content to the internet, bloggers can attract visitors who might be interested in what they have to say. Blogging can be a hobby where bloggers write a diary, journal or “log” but it can also be used for business. Business owners write content which will attract customers to their business. Or they use content to help answer common customer questions.

Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic

As a beginner to blogging I often wondered “why my blog is not getting traffic?”. This can be for a number of reasons. If you’re just starting out with a blog the most likely reason is that you aren’t yet trusted by the search engines. Maybe also you haven’t been promoting your content?

As a beginner it’s easy to believe that just throwing up content will have people coming in droves! Sadly this just isn’t the case. In fact, no one will see your content unless you become adept at two main skills: targeting specific keywords (which have less competition) and promoting your content like crazy!

Why my blog is not getting traffic? You’re not established enough. There’s millions of other bloggers doing the same as you and no one can see you in the crowd.

In the United States alone, there are over 31 million active bloggers posting at least once per month. You need to continue working on your blogging for longer than most people will. Most will work for a few weeks, or even months, see nothing happening and then quit! Don’t do this! Become a blogging expert instead and see how magical having a blog can really be!

Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic? Google’s Sandbox

In order to sort through all these bloggers Google create a search algorithm which deciphers which ones to rank. Since Google is the main search engine, that’s the one you need to understand to get more traffic to your site.

The Google Sandbox refers to an alleged filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results. Although Google officially denies the sandbox, the Google sandbox is real.

If content immediately ranked, it would be incredibly easy to spam the search engine. This would mean a much worse user experience. Since Google’s priority is the perfect user experience, it makes complete sense that this is a thing!

So, one of the reasons your blog isn’t getting any traffic is the Google Sandbox. A good way to know if this is the case is to search for something very specific to your content on Bing, Yahoo or Duckduckgo. Those search engines tend to be more lenient on newer websites and your content should rank sooner on them than they would on Google.

Try typing in the name of your website in a normal search. Use Google and then use the other search engines. If your site appears on the other search engines and not Google, you know it could potentially be the sandbox. After a few months, your site might start appearing on Google too, depending on your search terms and the relative competition.

Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic? Keyword Research

Another reason your blog might not be getting traffic is that you’re not researching keywords in your niche properly. Most bloggers will target longer tail keywords with their content because the shorter (two or three word keywords) are incredibly competitive.

So if you are just writing without research, you have a very low chance of getting found in the SERPS – search engine results pages. This means all your traffic needs to come from other sources, more on this later.

To find long tail keywords with low SEO competition, you need to type your main keyword into Google’s keyword planner. Look for the longer tail (3 or more words) keywords which come up. Longer tail keywords have fewer competing websites which rank on Google. Therefore you have more chance of ranking for them.

Still, you’re not guaranteed a top ranking even if you produce the best quality content on a specific keyword with low competition.

Why My Blog Is Not Getting Traffic: Competition & Authority

Despite choosing a long tail keyword and writing a high quality article for it, you still may not rank for it! But why is this: the simple answer is competition!

Competing websites might have thousands of backlinks and huge domain authority with Google. This means your brand new website doesn’t have much chance of competing with them. You still might not have the relevant authority with Google when you’re starting out. So, you’ll need to build up your authority over time by creating a lot of content.

As you do so, you should attract more people to your site by promoting your content as much as possible (more on this later). A brand new site doesn’t carry much domain authority. You won’t have built up trust with Google or any backlinks from other websites.

Google is much more likely to rank a website which has poorer content for a particular keyword but thousands of backlinks and high authority, than a brand new website with none of that; even if it has better content.

Why Is My Blog Not Getting Traffic: Not Enough Content

A newly built website which is thin on content will rarely attract a lot of visitors for free through the search engines. Only by building content and proving your authority in that particular niche will you start ranking and attracting more visitors, shares and backlinks. When this happens your traffic can grow very quickly. But until it does, you’re likely to doubt that blogging can be effective.

The difficult part of getting started in blogging is when you build a piece of content and start looking for traffic. There’s nothing, just crickets! So you doubt it works and stop blogging! Only when your blog proves itself to you do you consider making blogging a habit.

But this is a catch 22! You don’t believe your blog will work until you see traffic. But you won’t put in the required effort until you see results! This little zen riddle kept me struggling for a very long time, wondering whether blogging could actually work or not. It can work, but you have to put in the work beforehand, to reap the benefits later.

Keep building content and targeting those long tail keywords.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

SEO or search engine optimisation is necessary if you want Google to eventually find your content and rank it in their listings.

A good SEO plugin can work wonders at helping you to write search engine friendly content – Yoast SEO is one of the best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Without optimising your content for SEO, you’re running the risk of losing valuable search engines points which will put you ahead of your competitors in the results pages.

SEO means placing your keywords in the required fields to tell the search bots what keywords your content is most relevant for. As you grow your blog, you should also link within newer posts to older articles using your target keywords. This is known as deep linking and is a useful SEO tactic to build your SEO authority. As other people find your content, they should naturally link to it over time too, particularly if you have written good quality content which stands the test of time!

You can build backlinks yourself too, which can help you SEO if you do it right. However, spammy tactics can also hurt your SEO score if you do it wrong.

Blog Promotion

Blog promotion is pretty important if you want more traffic; particularly if you are new to blogging. SEO and free search traffic is the long term strategy. But in order to get that traffic, there’s a lot of work to be done first. When I started blogging I threw up my blog posts expecting them to rank quickly and thousands of people to find me without much work. I was utterly disappointed when this didn’t happen. The truth is that there’s millions of other bloggers doing exactly what you’re doing and they are all competing with each other for traffic.

In the beginning, your blog won’t rank because of the competition, your lack of authority and of back links. So you’ll need to get good at promoting your blog posts yourself. Publishing a blog post is only half the job. You need to spend at least the same amount of time on blog promotion as you do on blog creation, if not more.

Free Promo Strategies

There’s a few free strategies you can use to promote your blog posts as you publish them:

Use social media share buttons on your site. This makes it easy for visitors to share.
Use a social media share plugin which automates the process of sharing your content to social media sites as you publish. See auto post to social media from wordpress.
You can also use a plugin called Revive Old posts which automates the sharing of older content.

Plus you can also use some paid marketing to get more people to your content too. More people to your content means shares, likes and links to your content.

Helping Vs. Getting

I have to admit in the early days of my blogging I was very focused on getting! I wanted to make affiliate sales and so most of my posts were written so I could get traffic and make sales. This of course becomes apparent to your visitors! More and more people are writing blogs and people are more discerning about what they want to read.

After getting help from a mentor, I was reliably informed that switching to helping others was the key to getting traction as a blogger. Remember what you’re doing if you’re a blogger – serving others!

If you keep this in mind when writing your blog posts, you’ll be giving more value to your readers. If your content is well received, visitors will be much more likely to like, share and link to your content! Over time, this will generate traction which will grow exponentially if you do it for long enough.

Patience & Time

When you first start blogging it can be quite exciting. You’re looking forward to being able to get traffic and start earning from your blog. You might even start looking for traffic after you’ve only done a few blog posts. But there’s not traffic! As you look for more evidence of whether blogging actually works, you lose focus on actually doing the work! You get demoralised and stop blogging.

Your blog stalls and nothing much happens. Months later, someone finds your blog posts and signs up to your email list. They might even make a purchase. You get all fired up again, having seen some evidence that your blog has actually worked! So you get back to it, finding blog post titles and creating some new content.

Belief

Your interest dwindles after a week of writing with not much to show for it and the process starts all over again! If only you could see that the small win (of the lead and sale) is all it took to keep up the momentum. If only you had spent that last few months blogging instead of doubting and procrastinating. You’ve have a whole load of traffic, leads and sales! Plus a load of content to build from.

Blogging is infuriatingly slow and often it seems like you’re wasting your time. But if you stick with it when everyone else quits, you’ll find that you are rewarded with more traffic over time. Depending on your topic, it could take months or even years before things start gaining traction. So learn to celebrate the small wins and keep up the momentum.

Focus on the small things you can do today, rather than the things you can’t change. Blogging is a long term strategy which can produce magnificent results if you’re patient enough and work hard at it. But you need to keep fuelling your belief that it will pay off eventually and enjoy the process in the meantime.

Why Blogging Is Important For Business

There’s a few reasons why blogging is important for business. Blogging is a good, cheap way of generating traffic to a website. Without it, you rely solely on paid marketing or word of mouth advertising which is out of your control.

When you have built a lot of content through blogging, it can attract traffic to your business absolutely free from the search engines, backlinks, and social shares. While this can take a long time to transpire, and a lot of content, it puts you ahead of your competitors in a number of ways:

Your website will attract free searches from Google, and other search engines.
Quality content positions you as an authority in your niche. This is both good for customer acquisition and your authority with the search engines.
Website content can be used to answer customer questions regarding your products/service and lead them to make a purchase.
Good quality content in your niche attracts shares, likes and backlinks, all of which can increase your domain authority and therefore traffic over time.

Why Blogging Is Important For Business

Making a habit out of blogging is well worth the effort because over time you are building a digital asset which will attract more business via the SERPS – search engine results pages. While this can take months or even years to accomplish, it’s well worth the effort. Your competitors are surely doing this anyway and so unless you do it as well, you’re going to fall behind.

A good publishing profile of continuous content will show Google you’re serious about what you do. Ideally, publish content as much as possible or at least three times a week, more if you can. Over time this will demonstrate that you know your topic; particularly if your content is of high quality because other websites will link to it over time.

Older websites which have thousands of backlinks rank highly in the search engines. This means they attract customers for the search terms which they intend to rank for and which are relevant to their business.

Why Blogging Is Important For Business: Long Tail Keywords Benefits

One strategy you can use for blogging is to find long tail keywords which offer lower SEO difficulty than the rest. One of the main problems with blogging is that there’s a lot of competition in most topics. To get your content found can therefore be difficult.

A way around this problem is to target content with long tail keywords. A long tail keyword of 4 or more words is typically much less competitive than a shorter phrase of two or three words. You can find long tail keywords using Google’s free keyword planner. Just type in your main keyword which relates to your business. Look for longer tail derivatives which you can create content for.

Long tail keywords have another benefit for business blogs too. They are much more targeted than shorter terms. A long tail keyword generally is more specific so you can also attract a much more targeted search query to your site by using them in your copy.

A more targeted search query is more likely to turn into a customer than a shorter and more general search query; if you choose the right ones to put on your website.

Blogging Vs. Paid Ads

Of course paid advertising is a far faster and more scalable method of attracting new customers to your business, see PPC vs. organic marketing. While blogging requires a lot of upfront effort to get any traction at all, the long term benefit of blogging is free traffic. So once you’ve put the work in beforehand, you can attract customers passively from the search traffic if/when your content manages to rank in the search engines.

To make this happen will usually require a minimum of several months of regularly blogging. It might be more in a very competitive topic. Initially the work you do won’t seem to generate any traction at all, and it can be easy to think this is a pointless and futile strategy.

But stick with it and over time your hard work will pay off. Blogging is slow initially but as your body of content grows, you should find a sudden upsurge in traffic after a certain period of time.

Summary

Why is blogging so important for business? A business can survive without a blog if it uses other forms of advertising. Many businesses don’t have a blog and prefer instead to concentrate on other marketing strategies which are faster and more scalable.

However, building a blog can, over time, give you a digital asset which attracts organic traffic from the search engines. While this may take months or years, it’s well worth doing as a longer term strategy. Blogging ultimately can give you free traffic and sales if you stick with it over the longer term. It can be a great focus if you have a limited advertising budget but have the time to do it.

Affiliate Mindset

Your affiliate mindset is your best asset or biggest liability when it comes to building an affiliate business. Affiliate marketing is tough and over 90% of new affiliates will quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a reason: it’s difficult. But why is this?

For one thing affiliate marketing is accessible for the masses. Pretty much anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing. If you bring a “have a go” mentality to an affiliate marketing business, it’s going to be so much easier to quit when things don’t work out. You’re already starting with the wrong mindset if you think you’ll “have a go”!

A better mentality to bring is an “all or nothing”, “do or die” or “whatever it takes” mentality. This kind of mindset is needed to overcome the many hurdles and challenges you’ll find on route to a successful affiliate business.

Affiliate Mindset: The Beginners Mind

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few –Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’ll need to spend a good proportion of your time in learning mode. Once you have understood some concepts you’ll need to apply what you have learned and develop some skills through trial and error. Depending on your choice of marketing strategy, this could lead you to create content, or run paid ads. You could find a social media strategy, or decide to focus on blogging or SEO, (search engine optimisation).

Whatever you choose, remember you’re still a beginner. Even after you’ve spent months on a strategy, and things aren’t going so well, remember the quote:

“In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”.

Beginners Mind

When you hit a roadblock in affiliate marketing you’ll be tempted to think : “affiliate marketing does not work!” When this happens, and it will, you should remember the quote about the beginner’s mind. In Buddhism, the beginners mind refers to a state of acceptance of not knowing. Therefore, in this state, there is the allowance of something new to be learned.

Originating from Japanese Zen Buddhism, the term ‘Beginner’s Mind‘ (or ‘shoshin’) refers to a paradox: the more you know about a topic, the more likely you are to close your mind to further learning.

This is what is meant by the quote “In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”. For a beginner affiliate, there’s the possibility of success. But once you have hit a few roadblocks and struggled, you become an “expert”, at least in your own mind. You cast out the possibility of further growth and quit, rather than investigating the cause of the “failure”.

There’s no real failure in affiliate marketing unless you quit. Failure is only feedback on the road to success! Hence “failing forward” is a term used by affiliate coaches, who encourage you to fail many times in order to learn.

Affiliate Mindset: Patience

You need to be very patient to be a good affiliate. The path to success is littered with all the other affiliates who quit! Depending on your situation and marketing method, getting traction with an affiliate business can take months or even years. Blogging, for example is a much longer journey for an affiliate than paid marketing strategies. However, if you’re using paid marketing strategies you’ll need to let go of the fear of losing money while you’re testing your ad campaigns.

For some, working really hard creating content (risking their time), is much more appropriate to their situation as those who would rather spend the money learning paid marketing. Either way, you’re going to need to be really patient when results don’t come immediately.

With blogging, you’ll need to create a lot of content and get good at promoting it. With paid marketing, you’ll need to test and measure different adverts and learn from the feedback you get – whether positive or negative. If you bring a expectation of an immediate return to affiliate marketing, you’re likely to be disappointed!

Having an “entitlement” attitude will give you more problems. There’s only cause and effect. Your job as an affiliate is to learn how to cause the outcome you want. This is done through experimentation after having studied a particular marketing strategy.

Affiliate Mindset: Desire Vs. Comfort

Another reason affiliate’s quit is because their desire to succeed isn’t large enough to overcome the status quo. If your life is pretty good, your desire to succeed in affiliate marketing won’t be as strong as someone who is in desperate need of change.

When an affiliate business is the very bedrock from which you intend to build your life, you’ll be very motivated to succeed. But if your affiliate business is only another passing fad, that’s a different kind of motivation.

When you meet a challenge in your marketing, which person will be more likely to overcome the difficulties? Will it be the person who needs to make their business work or the one to whom it doesn’t really matter? Of course it’s the one who’s desire is strong enough to overcome the difficulties.

Why put yourself through the challenges and difficulties of building an online business if you don’t have to? Your answer is your reason for doing affiliate marketing in the first place. Are you currently happy in you life and comfort zones, or do you want more? The degree to which you are comfortable has a large say in how hard you’re prepared to work at your affiliate marketing business.

Employee Vs. Entrepreneur

As an employee transitioning into an online business, there’s plenty of hidden challenges. The mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur is not an easy one. The two are very different. As an employee you get used to being paid a monthly wage; regardless of your performance. With affiliate marketing you only get paid performance related pay.

As an employee you have a specific role to play in a larger organisation. With an affiliate business you’re on your own, with many roles to learn. If you don’t make any sales as an affiliate, you don’t earn any money, so your time spent in your affiliate business needs to be laser focused. It can be easy to get caught up in a number of mental traps:

Shiny object syndrome – looking for the “easier” path continually by jumping from one course to another; but never gaining traction in any one direction.
Being a busy fool – spending time on activities which are enjoyable but not profitable.
Trapped in learning mode – initially you’ll spend time learning. But you don’t want to stay here, thinking you’re being productive but trapped in continual learning without action.

It’s easy to bring a bunch of attitudes and mindsets from employment into your business which will hamper you:

Being paid just for turning up every day (entitlement).
Expectation of reward for old habits and “expertise” which don’t translate into an enterprise/online business.
Misunderstanding of the needs of your customers – see customer avatar worksheet.
Not understanding that your business needs to be driven by purpose and vision, and an aggressive marketing campaign.

Autopilot Sales: Selling On Autopilot

Autopilot sales is no pipe dream. It happens every day for online businesses. When those sales are created with automated systems, and products are available globally, you have a globally scalable business.

Cumulative data anticipates a 16.8% increase in worldwide e-commerce sales over the most recently tracked period. That’s not so hard to believe especially during recent times – post 2020.

But how are automated sales made? Can anyone take advantage of online sales to earn an income online?

Autopilot Sales: Selling On Autopilot

An autopilot sale can be any transaction which is automated. However, many products need to be manufactured, packed and shipped. This adds another level of complexity to the process. But with digital products the whole of the transaction can be automated. So from an online purchase, the customer pays through a payment platform. They automatically gain access to the product they bought which is a digital product of some kind.

Digital product sales can be referred by third party affiliates. They earn commissions based on sales they generate. Using this model of online sales, anyone can generate an income by promoting and selling other people’s products and services online.

From a website, a customer signs up to some kind of freebie offer. They then receive email marketing messages where they are offered a product. When they purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. All of this can happen completely automatically.

Autopilot Sales: Email Marketing & PPC

The process starts with an advert or website sending someone into a sales funnel. A sales funnel is what online business owners use to build trust with potential customers. It involves a landing page, where the first transaction takes place. The visitor’s email is exchanged for a free offer of some kind. Once this happens the visitor enters the sales funnel and receive automated messages.

When a purchase is made, a “tripwire” offer is automatically given to the new customer. This is another offer usually of higher worth than the first. It lets the customer choose whether to upgrade their purchase. If you’ve ever been to McDonald’s or Burger King you’ll know this offer works!

“Do you want fries with that” is what thousands of McDonald’s workers ask their customers – because many of them will say yes. Burger King asks whether you want to “go large”.

The up-sell technique works because for only a little extra, you get a lot more as a customer. Globally, the offer makes a huge difference for the company doing the selling.

Targeting Your Audience

With email marketing, online businesses can reach thousands of people at once with automated messages which sell products through email marketing. It can also be scaled up globally to reach an ever growing number of potential customers.

This is done first by testing and measuring a marketing strategy which is scalable. Paid marketing platforms like Facebook, Adwords or YouTube let you define your target audience very specifically. When you get it right, you can run ads, send people to landing pages and collect their email. Follow up with email marketing messages which sell products.

The whole process is automated and scalable but does require some testing and measuring initially. To get better at targeting you first need to understand the needs and pains of your customer avatar.

Once you better understand your customer, you can target them more specifically in your advertising and create a congruent message which meets their needs. See also affiliate marketing journey.

From Blogging

Autopilot sales can be achieve by blogging too. Although with blogging, it’s much less scalable and much slower. With a blog, traffic is generated through the search engines via SEO – search engine optimisation. Because there’s so many blogs online, it can be difficult to compete for the top placement on Google for any given subject.

To get around this problem, bloggers often target long tail keywords which have lower competition. With a longer tail keyword, there’s often fewer competing websites being ranked on the search engines. As such you have more chance of getting a top listing.

Bloggers also spend a huge amount of time building content and promoting their blogs. The long term goal is free traffic. If that goal is accomplished, that traffic can be turned into email subscribers through a giveaway on the website. So blogging is simple a longer term strategy to generate leads for an automated business.

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing

What are the alternatives to affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business models online. But it’s not for everyone. There’s many other ways of earning an income online. So here’s a breakdown of a few other methods and strategies you can use to generate an income online.

Some of these will require more investment in time and or money than others. But most of them do require at least an initial investment of your time.

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: Content Marketing

Content marketing is a large part of affiliate marketing but it’s not only affiliates who make money from their content. Content uploaded to video or on a blog can generate a passive income over time from advertising. Google Adsense is one of the most popular advertising platforms for content creators.

Anyone can join Google Adsense or one of the many other advertising platforms you can use to monetise content:

Media.net
AdThrive.com
Mediavine.com
PropellerAds.com
BuySellAds.com
Skimlinks.com – technically affiliate marketing but works in the same way as ads.
InfoLinks.com

Most ad platforms allow you to place advertising banners on your content which are automatically populated with relevant content according to what you have on your site. The hard part is building enough content to maintain a steady flow of free traffic, which can take a long time and a lot of work initially. But once you’ve done this, you can earn passively from advertising revenue. You need to devote a lot of time to creating and uploading written content on a blog or video content to YouTube.

Pros: easy to place banners

Cons: you need a lot of free traffic for this to work and hence a lot of content.

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: Freelancing

Freelancing is a good alternative to affiliate marketing and although you don’t have the long term outcome of a passive income from freelancing, income can be more immediate. You’ll still need to set yourself up as a freelancer and find suitable jobs. This can be the biggest challenge when you’re up against very cheap competition who are more established already. Two freelancing sites are Upwork.com and Fiverr.com.

To get started you’ll need to register a profile on a site and promote yourself in a particular area of expertise.

It can take some time to build up your presence and secure a job. Plus you might need to work very cheaply at the start to build up your reputation and rating. But if you have some kind of online skill you can sell, this might be an answer.

Pros: Little investment except your time

Cons: Competition and finding work in your skillset

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: eBay

There’s many ways you can buy and sell online to make money on the difference. You can buy from a wholesalers such as Alibaba.com and resell on eBay through a single listing. This will require upfront investment and the more stock you can purchase at once, the cheaper it generally is per item. Once you have chosen an item to resell on eBay, you can create a listing and sell an item at a time.

There’s a lot of competition for this tactic though so it’s worth doing your homework before choosing something to sell. Some sellers are importing directly from China to keep their costs down as this means it can be difficult to do the same thing with a smaller investment of a wholesale purchase.

Pros: Simple strategy & convenient when set up

Cons: Risk and capital needed, competitive

There’s other angles you can take with eBay. Some sellers buy up stock which is damaged or broken and repair the item, adding their costs and a profit to the sale price. Another strategy is to find miss spelled items on eBay.

Miss spelled items often sell for less than they are worth because they don’t get enough people bidding on them (since they’re not visible). You can take advantage of this with a miss spell search tool and through using an auction sniper software to “snipe” auctions to get them for the lowest price!

The re-sell the item with a better listing, more pictures and of course correct spelling! Read more about this tactic here.

Pros: low cost

Cons: time consuming and not scalable

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: Forex Marketing

With Forex marketing you take positions on the Foreign Exchange markets with the aim of making money from small market shifts. This can take some time to learn and it’s worth investing in a trading course to give yourself the best chance of success.

A huge amount of novice traders completely blow their trading account within the first few months of trading. So it’s worth getting help and support and starting out with a demo account for at least a few months before risking real cash.

You’ll need a trading “bank” which you can ultimately use to make trades with and you’ll need to follow strict rules in order to be successful. Most traders never trade more than 1-3% of their trading capital on any one trade and not even the best traders win every trade. Patience is key for trading as is a good understanding of the numbers. You’ll need to understand risk:reward ratios and stick to a strict trading plan.

Pros: Leverage and large earning potential

Cons: Takes time to learn (2 years) and investment needed

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is similar to affiliate marketing in that you are using someone else’s business model and selling someone else’s products. Unlike affiliate marketing though you are taking orders from customers directly and arranging shipment of goods to them. In some ways drop shipping is a little more complicated than affiliate marketing in that you’re the “shop front” where customers buy from. Whereas with affiliate marketing you only refer customers directly to the sales page of the product owner.

Other that that they are both pretty similar business models. You’ll need to learn some form of marketing in order to attract people to your website and make sales. Here’s a few drop shipping suppliers you can use:

AliExpress
Alibaba
SaleHoo
Worldwide Brands
Doba
Sunrise Wholesale
Wholesale2b
Megagoods
Modalyst
Wholesale Central
Spocket
CJDropshipping
CROV

Pros: Scalable business model with large profit potential

Cons: Requires investment and time to learn

Alternatives To Affiliate Marketing: Self Publishing

If you’ve ever thought about writing something, why not try Amazon’s self publishing service? This is a low cost option which lets anyone publish a book to Amazon for free and earn money through your own sales or the Kindle Direct Publishing Select global fund.

Once you have written your book you can upload it directly to the Kindle Self Publishing site here: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/

Pros: Easy and free, potential passive income

Cons: No guarantees of income, sporadic income

Redbubble: Sell Your Art

Another alternative to affiliate marketing is RedBubble.com. On Redbubble, you can earn income from the sale of clothing and other items on which your imagery has been used.

So if you’re artistic or like creating images, just upload them to the site and earn royalties from sales that are made. Items are created on demand and you get paid when an item with your logo on it sells.

Pros: Easy and free to do

Cons: You’ll need to upload a lot of images to earn consistently, sporadic income

Sell Images & Videos

You can do the same thing with sites such as Shutterstock.com which pay you for downloads of your images and videos. So if you’re a budding photographer, or video creator you can upload your work and make money from it through royalties. Again, like with Redbubble, you’ll need to upload a lot of work to make this pay consistently. But the good thing is this income can become passive if you have enough images which are selling.

Other image sharing sites are:

Alamy.com
IstockPhoto.com
Photoshelter
Adobe Stock
SmugMug
Can Stock Photo
123RF
Dreamstime
FineArtAmerica

Pros: Cheap and easy to do

Cons: Sporadic income unless you have a lot of uploaded content

Print On Demand

This is similar to the Redbubble concept above only you’ll be generating the traffic you need to your own website and selling customer made printed products with your design on.

One of the most important benefits of a print on demand business is that you can sell products without the need to invest in a large inventory. This kind of business can be a small side hustle or a large earner making tens of thousands of dollars a month. It has huge potential for growth and is easy and cheap to get into, similar to affiliate marketing.

You can create an online store using a platform such as Shopify. Learn how to market your website and generate sales. Since the hardest part of such a business is marketing, it is very similar to affiliate marketing and drop shipping; only with the added hassle of being the middle man for customers and taking orders yourself. You’ll also need to find customers yourself through advertising your website.

Here’s some print on demand companies: Printful, Printify, and Gooten.

Pros: Cheap and easy to start

Cons: Self promotion is key to success, slower delivery of products

Start An Amazon Buisness

Amazon is well known for its affiliate program where you can link to products on the site and earn commissions. But you can also become a seller on Amazon by opening an Amazon seller partner account. With the fulfilment by Amazon option you can ship your inventory to Amazon. Amazon’s fulfils product listing and sale, and you get paid every 2 weeks. Amazon’s customer service team answers questions and deals with customers.

If you choose you can store and ship products yourself, using Amazon as the sales mechanism for doing the selling.

An Amazon selling partner account is £25 / $30 per month + selling fees.

Third party sales account for around 60% of physical product sales on Amazon and those sales are growing faster than Amazon’s own retail sales. So if you’re interested in becoming one of them you can learn more here.

Pros: Amazon is a trusted online brand and people are happy purchasing from them

Cons: Competition for product sales

Sell On Etsy

Etsy is a growing online marketplace where you can open your own store and start selling your own handcrafted goods. If you’re a small business or craftsperson who wants to sell their products online, Etsy might be an ideal way to gain visibility and reach markets that might otherwise be difficult to access.

The Etsy transaction fee is 5% of a total sale’s value, and each listing costs a flat fee of $0.20.

Pros: Cheaper than some other online marketplaces

Cons: Competition and costs, you need to promote your products/shop to find customers

Clickbank Alternatives

Not happy with Clickbank and looking for Clickbank alternatives? There’s many other places where affiliates can find good digital products. Clickbank isn’t the only place for them. Even though Clickbank has a huge array of digital information products and courses, there’s other places you can find those kinds of products too.

Digital products are great for affiliates because of the levels of commissions they can earn from them. Physical products tend to pay far lower rates of commission. Look at Amazon for example. Amazon pays between 1% and 20% commissions on its product range which is far less than what most Clickbank products pay.

Still, it can be easier to sell physical products than digital products so Amazon is definitely worth a look. You can join their partner program here.

Clickbank Alternatives: JVZoo

But if you’re dead set on finding another place for digital and information products JVZoo might be worth a look. JVZoo focuses on digital information products, similar to what you might find on Clickbank.

JVZoo offers make money online and online business products whereas Clickbank has a larger library of info products in multiple areas and topics. If you’ve already build content around a Clickbank product, you might be able to find a similar product on JVZoo.

You can also activate an instant payout feature on JVZoo; although this depends on the product vendor and whether they have activated this feature or not. Payout methods of JVZoo are Paypal, BlueSnap, Authorize.net, Zift, Stripe, Check, and Direct Deposit.

Clickbank Alternatives: Commission Junction (CJ)

CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction) has been around since 1998 and offers affiliate programs for software, retail and other products. The company was founded in Santa Barbara, California. Although it doesn’t have as many products as Clickbank, it offers more exclusive brands.

A lot of major brands have programs on CJ, including technology brands like Apple or Verizon, and retailers like Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, and Lowes. With CJ you will need to apply to each offer you choose to promote which can be a little frustrating if you’re not used to it. Whereas on Clickbank you only need setup an account once.

CJ affiliate pays out via Check and Direct Deposit and is international.

Clickbank Alternatives: ShareASale

ShareASale is a large affiliate site focusing on physical products. It covers a lot of niches, including home & garden products, fashion wear, green appliances, and business equipment. Represented brands include the NBA Store, WP Engine, and Viator.

ShareASale has been listed in some places as the largest network the world for affiliates. Though some non-network competitors (including Amazon) do more affiliate business. Despite its size, it can still be more selective than ClickBank with its affiliates.

Payout methods include Check, Wire and ACH Direct Deposit.

Clickbank Alternatives: eBay Partner Network

The eBay Partner Network is another potential alternative to using Clickbank products. You’ll need a website which has a lot of traffic already to join their affiliate program. eBay pays for clicks and offers CPC commissions so this may or may not be suitable for you.

eBay is a trusted brand and many people already have accounts on the site, so if you have traffic it’s easy to simply send it over. Unlike Clickbank eBay offers physical products, rather than digital.

Payment methods are Check or ACH Direct Deposit.

Rakuten Marketing

Rakuten Marketing is an affiliate network focused on physical product offers, including high fashion, jewellery, and accessories.

This network is more difficult to join as an affiliate than others and you’ll need a website and traffic to be considered. The signup process for the network is longer and more involved than most. Even after joining the site, you’ll need to apply to each separate offer individually. So if you’re a beginner affiliate, this isn’t a good place to start.

Rakuten has worked with many huge organisations and brands including the American Heart Association, Papa Johns, Ray-Ban, and Vans.

Payment methods include Check, Direct Deposit and PayPal.

Amazon

Amazon is a huge marketplace which has a lot of trust with customers. This makes it a good place to use as an affiliate who wants to promote physical products.

However, the platform can indiscriminately ban your account for no reason, and change terms and conditions without warning. Commissions are famously low and range from as little as 1% depending on the category you promote in. See Amazon affiliate commission rate.

Payout methods are Check or ACH Direct Deposit.

PeerFly

Peerfly is an affiliate network offering products including fashion, health, and eCommerce.

Most offers on Peerfly are CPA (cost per action), but you can also work out CPS (cost per sale) deals and revenue shares with some advertisers. You can also find CPL (cost per lead) offers on the site. Clickbank definitely has more products to offer than Peerfly and the application process is more thorough on Peerfly too. This means for new affiliates it might not be the best option.

Payment methods are Check, PayPal, Wire, Payoneer and ACH.

Earn Commissions Online

You can earn commissions online even without a product of your own to sell. It’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, third party referrers send customers to the product/service and get paid a slice of the profit. When a sale is made it is tracked back to the affiliate who referred the customer.

Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to make sales online:

PPC advertising – pay per click
Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Email marketing – sending automated email messages using an autoresponder.
Social media platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building for website authority
Niche website building
Other content creation -e.g. ebooks and infographics

Earn Commissions Online Selling Other People’s Products

To make your first sale online can be a bit of a challenge. Initially you’ll need to get some training and set up a website and/or sales funnel. A sales funnel is a system whereby the affiliate can send qualified subscribers into an email marketing campaign. The subscriber is then sent a series of automated messages which lead to affiliate products.

This whole system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. This means affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and ultimately give you a passive income.

There’s other ways of doing affiliate marketing too though. You don’t necessarily need a sales funnel. Some affiliates build blog websites and refer traffic directly to the affiliate products from there. But an email list is recommended because it gives you more control over the traffic you generate. Some affiliate marketing tactics are much faster than others.

For example, PPC – pay per click marketing is very fast, but more expensive than blogging, which is a very slow method of marketing. However, in the long run and with enough content, blogging can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Your Lifestyle

Your lifestyle may determine the route you take as an affiliate marketer. If you’re time rich, but don’t have much budget for marketing, you might choose a longer term route which meets your needs better. Blogging might fit in this scenario, or video blogging (v’logging).

If you’re busy in a full time job and don’t have much time, you would be better off using paid marketing to get traction more quickly and automate the process. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content creation. Plus it is much faster too. However, be prepared to spend money initially while you’re learning the skills.

On the whole a good rule of thumb is that if you’re busy, use paid ads. If you’re broke, hustle; meaning create content and build up a “digital asset” over the longer term. Once you have built a large blog presence online (or a bunch of videos), you can send the traffic you generate to a relevant product/service which is suitable for your audience.

Target Audience & Affiliate Marketing

Your target audience is an important part of marketing as an affiliate. Knowing who is going to be most interested in the product/service you’re promoting is vital if you want to attract the right audience and sell your product/s. If you attract an audience which isn’t a good fit for your chosen product, you’ll struggle to sell anything.

So whether you are promoting affiliate products through blogging or paid ads, it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you want to attract with your marketing. If you’re selling a Yoga course, for example, you don’t want your content to be about flower arranging! The content you create should be aligned with the product/s you are selling.

See how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet.

Earn Commissions Online: The Right Products

Your choice of product to sell is pretty important to if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Some products are better than others and some pay much more than others too. For example, Amazon has an affiliate program and you can sell pretty much anything from the site for a commission.

However, the commission rates are pretty low and range typically between 5% and 11%. Digital products pay much more: usually around 30%-40% commissions. Then there’s subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Subscription products are good because they pay recurring commissions and a high ticket product usually pays over $500 in commission for a single sale. So you don’t need to sell as many of them in order to become profitable.

Earn Commissions Online: Why Most Fail

Not everyone who attempts to earn commissions online is successful. In fact there’s a huge number of affiliates who quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a number of reasons:

There’s a very low barrier to entry: nearly anyone can “give it a go”
People quit too easily
People think affiliate marketing is easy
It requires a different mindset than most people have (see growth mindset and affiliate marketing)

Serious about building an income online? Access a free video series to learn more and get started.

Developing Entrepreneurial Mindset

It’s not easy developing entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs take risks and do things most people aren’t prepared to do. They see failures only as stepping stones to success. An entrepreneurial mindset is one which looks for opportunity for making money in the service of others.

Where most would quit, entrepreneurs tend to have a strong desire to accomplish something meaningful. A good example of the entrepreneurial spirit is James Dyson, best known as the inventor of the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, or “Dyson”.

After five years and over 5000 prototypes, Dyson launched the “G-Force” cleaner in 1983. But no manufacturer or distributor would handle his product in the UK, due to the valuable market in replacement dust bags. At this point many would have quit. But Dyson launched it in Japan through catalogue sales. It won the 1991 International Design Fair Prize in Japan.

After his invention was rejected by the major manufacturers, Dyson set up his own manufacturing company, Dyson Ltd.

Dyson’s breakthrough in the UK market came more than ten years after the initial idea.

Developing Entrepreneurial Mindset

There are five dimensions in a mindset: self-efficacy, locus of control, beliefs about our capabilities, motivation, and level of resilience. Here’s some of the main aspects of those which fall into the entrepreneurial bracket:

Self Efficacy – Self efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation. As Henry Ford once said “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right”.
An internal locus of control – high achievers put themselves in the driving seat of life. They take responsibility for their lives. By contrast, those with an external locus of control look to blame others. They tend to believe in fate, luck and that others are in control, not themselves.
Growth Mindset – Entrepreneurs have a growth mindset. They believe they can grow and change as necessary to create the outcomes they want. A fixed mindset is the belief that things are “set”; that your capabilities are inherent and can’t be changed. Neuroscience research attests to the growth mindset concept, that we can change, i.e. thinking and intelligence are not set in stone.
Intrinsic motivation – Intrinsic motivation is doing something for it’s own sake, rather than for the sake of reward. Those with intrinsic motivation have higher levels of engagement and psychological well being. Introducing an extrinsic reward undermines intrinsic motivation.
Resilience – entrepreneurs tend to have high levels of resilience and can therefore overcome difficulties more easily. Where others would likely quit, the entrepreneur persists. This can be due to a positive outlook and optimistic view, rather than a pessimistic one.

Mindset Habits Of Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs tend to have goals. They also continue to update and expand on their goals to maintain their focus over the longer term. Without a meaningful goal, it can be much more difficult to sustain a particular path over the longer term.

Learning to control your state of mind is a useful entrepreneurial skill too. This can be especially useful when facing adversity.

Time management is a skill which is useful to entrepreneurs too. You can’t really control time; only the activities you choose to do within a certain time period.

Entrepreneurs are good at seeing the bigger picture of what they want to create. This might mean creating long term plans for a decade and then focusing on the monthly, weekly and daily habits which support that outcome.

For more on goal setting see this article.

Entrepreneurs are aware of their speech. What you say is often the best indicator of how you think. So be careful of your thinking when alone, and your speaking when with others.

Successful entrepreneurs spend time with other entrepreneurial types. They know that they become the average of the people they surround themselves with.