AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s many upsides, but what are the disadvantages of affiliate marketing? If you’re looking at being an affiliate, you’ve probably heard all of the upsides already. Unlimited earning potential and time and geographical freedom are often the benefits touted by those selling a program! But don’t forget that they will benefit from your participation if they sell you the course!

So of course they are going to tell you the benefits of affiliate marketing. But what about the drawbacks?! Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t for everyone despite what you may have heard. It takes a lot of commitment to build a profitable affiliate business. Most people are used to employment, whereas affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means you’re effectively an “entrepreneur” when you decide to build an affiliate business. There’s no safety net, it’s high risk and if you sell nothing you make nothing!

So if you want to talk yourself out of affiliate marketing, this is the article to read! For a more balanced view see the article pros and cons of affiliate marketing.

Remember also you get what you look for online too! So be careful of the material you’re reading. I almost talked myself out of affiliate marketing too after reading some negative reviews. It’s not all bad, but here’s some of the disadvantages of affiliate marketing.

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing: Programs/Products

One of the disadvantages of affiliate marketing is that however good the program/product is that you choose to sell, it can always change. Programs can and do expire. This can be a bit of a disaster for an affiliate. Amazon recently changed their affiliate commission structure and often updates their API – (basically software which affiliates use to connect their websites with products).

An affiliate friend of mine had been spending huge amounts of time and energy building content which linked to Amazon affiliate products. The recent change meant his work became redundant overnight! All his backlinks were effectively worthless unless he changed all his content!

This is an extreme example of course and many affiliate programs will run for decades without any issues. Amazon is known for lowering their affiliate commissions though.

As an affiliate marketer the Achilles’ heel is that you’re relying heavily on the affiliate program you use to make money. Since you’re not in control of the product/program, you could get kicked out, or something could change which effects your income. So you need to stay tuned in to the program you choose to promote; otherwise something could change which effects you and your income could suddenly stop.

Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing: Competition

There’s a tonne of competition online from other affiliates who are promoting the same products as you. Although there’s many products you can promote as an affiliate, there’s also going to be a lot of other affiliates who are doing the same things as you. So if you’re building a blog, for example, chances are good that thousands of others are doing the same. If you’re running paid ads on YouTube, guess what, thousands of other affiliates will be doing the same too!

This competition can be a major problem if you’re going after a certain market. If you’re attempting to rank your website for a certain keyword, for example, there’s a lot of noise out there competing for the top place! If you’re using social media to advertise, others are doing the same.

When people are inundated with marketing messages they get more discerning about what they buy and who they buy from; so you need to be a better marketer in order to sell in this kind of climate.

More competition also means advertising becomes more expensive. So even if you’re using the faster method of paid marketing to build an affiliate business, you can expect it to become more costly if there’s a tonne of people competing for advertising space.

Cons Of Affiliate Marketing: Customer Base

With most businesses you can connect with customers and establish a customer base. But with affiliate marketing you’re simply a third party who connects customers directly with the products they want. The customer can’t be loyal to you, the third party referrer. Should there be other products and value offered by the company you have referred the customer to, you can’t benefit from these relationships you have effectively created.

The exception to this rule is with a product range from which you can earn commissions from. But with most affiliate programs, you refer a customer once, and they become a lifetime customer of the company which offers the products, not the affiliate.

Subscription affiliate programs do offer the potential of lifetime commissions from having made a referral. So these are better to use than off-off commission products which only pay you once.

No Guarantees

With affiliate marketing there’s no guarantees. If you sell nothing, you earn nothing! It’s a performance based business model and you’re effectively working for yourself. If your marketing efforts produce no sales you’re out of luck! Plus, you could spend thousands on marketing and still not make a sale if your marketing efforts don’t produce the desired outcome.

Marketers spend huge amounts on their marketing budget just learning how to sell affiliate products. So if you’re on a tight budget it’s difficult to compete in this environment.

If you’re a content creator you can spend months or even years building content (blogging or video blogging) to no avail! It takes more than most people realise to become consistently profitable with affiliate marketing and there’s a huge drop out rate at around 95% – see affiliate marketing success rate.

Discipline & Consistency

Whatever path you choose as an affiliate it will take a lot of discipline and consistency to break through the initial phase of learning and failing! As a beginner, you start with nothing; no email list, no traffic, no leads or sales. You build the blocks of knowledge first and then start to implement that knowledge in building your business. It can take months to even get off the starting blocks. After that you need to apply what you have learned consistently for a long enough time to make your first online sale.

When results aren’t forthcoming, this can be psychologically very difficult. To overcome this you need to be good at a number of entrepreneurial skills which most people have never learned:

Mindset – see also psychology of affiliate marketing.
Time management
Self discipline
Self motivation
Controlling your mental state
Vision, purpose and goal setting etc.

Most people don’t have these skills or the long term vision needed to overcome the most common barriers to success. So they see it not working and give up.

Bad Press

Affiliate marketers get a bad press and are often associated with spammy tactics to make quick wins.

There can therefore be a stigma associated with the affiliate marketing business. Most people are employees and don’t know many, if any entrepreneurial or business owner types. They are mostly not familiar, not comfortable with risk.

So if you venture into the unknown world of affiliate marketing, you can expect some friends and relatives to try and talk you out of it! This can be tough and without help and support as an affiliate, particularly if you’re already struggling, you may have the added pressure of your family or friends not being very supportive.

If you’re not supported, and are having a difficult time anyway with affiliate marketing, it’s very difficult maintaining a positive attitude when those who you lean on want you to quit!

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money?

How many website visitors to make money does it take? This will of course depend on many factors. However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that you are selling products from a website which make you $100 per sale. Let’s imagine you want your website to make $100,000 a year income, which is 100 sales in a year, given this example.

The average conversion rate on a website is just 2%, but this will of course vary from site to site. So to make 1000 sales in a year you can find the traffic you need by dividing 1000 by 2% (or 0.02). This gives you a figure of 50,000. So in this example you’ll need 50,000 website visitors in a year in order to make this much in revenue.

That sounds like a lot, but divided by 365 (days) means you’ll need 137 visitors a day in order to earn this much money over the course of a year. This example remember stipulates a 2% conversion rate and a $100 income from each sale.

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money: Monetisation Methods

There’s a variety of monetisation methods you can employ from a website. The most common ones (if you don’t have a business/product or service yourself) are affiliate marketing and advertising. With affiliate marketing you sell products from your website, either directly or through email marketing. With advertising, you place adverts on your site and earn a percentage of advertising revenue from each click you get on an advert. If you’re using advertising on your site, you’ll need a lot more traffic to become profitable because ad clicks are worth only tiny amounts.

So affiliate marketing is often thought of as a better way to monetise a website. There’s a huge variety of affiliate marketing products too, so depending on the one/s you choose for your website, it can be more or less profitable. For example, many affiliate products only pay tiny amounts too. By using subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can earn a lot more per sale. In the above example, you earn $100 per sale. However, most affiliate programs pay much less than this, so you should choose carefully which products to promote.

How Many Website Visitors To Make Money? More Sales, Same Traffic

You can of course increase your sales from the same amount of traffic which will result in your conversion rate percentage going up! With a higher conversion rate you need less traffic to be profitable. This can be done through your targeting, advertising and content marketing. By getting to know your target audience better, and bringing more buying customers to your site, you can effectively turn more visitors into customers from the same or a similar amount of website traffic.

In terms of content this can be done through creating content which is very targeted towards your perfect customer avatar. For example, a review of a particular product will convert more visitors into customers because it’s a very targeted piece of content. Reviews attract buyers looking for a specific product. They are in their last stage of the “buying cycle”. With a “how to” guide, you may attract less buyer traffic with your content. That’s because that kind of content is absorbed by a different type of visitor; one who is looking for a DIY guide, for example.

Another way to convert more traffic into sales is to build an email marketing list. With a list of subscribers you can turn visitors into customers over a long time span. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. But on an email list this timespan is dramatically increased.

Summary

You can of course get lucky and make some money with very little traffic. However, in order to make the most from your site you should look carefully at different monetisation strategies and at your marketing strategy. The factors at play are your conversion rate and how much you can make from the sale of products from your site or from advertising clicks. Traffic isn’t the only consideration.

For a site to make money consistently, you need a good consistent flow of traffic because only a small percentage will convert into sales/clicks (2% is standard). You can increase this number by learning how to target your perfect customer and through building an email list from your website. See target audience for affiliate marketing and the power of email marketing.

Affiliate marketing is generally a better way to monetise a website than through using only advertising. With Google Adsense, you place code on your site which is converted into adverts. When visitors click on them, you earn advertising revenue. But this is usually only tiny amounts so you need a lot more traffic. See also Google Adsense vs affiliate marketing for two main monetisation methods.

Ideally, increase your sale value, conversion rate and traffic all at the same time. That way you guarantee that your website will become more lucrative over time.

Pros And Cons Of Blogging

What are the pros and cons of blogging? Blogging is a very cheap way to do marketing which can, over time produce some fantastic results. There’s also millions of bloggers out there too, which means there’s a lot of competition. If you’re choosing a topic which is very competitive, it can be more difficult to get traffic to your blog for free from the search engines.

Still, blogging is a very good way to attract visitors to a website or business. Should you do blogging as a means to making an income? It can take some time to build enough traffic to make an income from blogging, but it can be done. Whether you achieve it or not will depend on how long you keep going for and the topic you choose to blog about.

If you enjoy blogging, there’s no reason it can’t be turned into an income if you wish it to be. Lots of people do make money from their blogging, but not all!

Pros And Cons Of Blogging: It’s Cheap

Yes blogging is a very cheap way to generate traffic to your website. By creating and uploading regularly to a blog, you can encourage the search engines to index your website and you can get found for your blog post topics on the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages.

It’s also very easy to build a blog and you can even use a free website builder or blog platform such as Weebly or Hubpages. So you don’t even need to pay a thing in order to get started blogging.

You can even monetise a free blogging platform and make money from blogging through selling affiliate products or advertising. See how to make money with Google Adsense without a website.

It’s well worth building your own website however, if your’e serious about blogging. Having your own domain and hosting gives you more authority with your visitors and with the search engines too.

Pros And Cons Of Blogging: Time Consuming

Blogging is time consuming. So if you’re not into writing on a regular basis it can be too much. If you don’t know your topic too, you’ll need to research every blog post you write! So if you don’t have the time to do blogging, you’re better off using another strategy if you intend to earn from the internet.

It can take a huge amount of time and effort too; building up enough blog posts to draw a good amount of visitors for free. Because blogging is so easy, it also means that there’s a huge amount of competition in the SERPS. This means getting visitors to your site from blogging is going to take some time. Depending on your topic, it can take months or even years before you see enough regular visitors coming to your site to start generating an income from it.

AI writing tools are a boon to bloggers who want to save time. But their presence also means that more content can be created more quickly and easily. This means more competition for bloggers.

Blogging Should Be Fun!

Blogging should be fun and ideally choose a topic you have a passion or at least an interest in. If you’re blogging in a topic you have no interest in, it can be difficult to sustain the necessary effort over the longer term to make it work. If you want to make money from blogging, you’ll need to keep at it for some time in order to build enough traffic to make it profitable.

So don’t choose a topic you hate, just to make money in with blogging! You’ll likely find, as I did, that you can’t sustain the necessary work needed for long enough.

I built a blog website around the topic of mushroom harvesting because I found the keyword I thought I could rank on Google. It did rank but I lost interest in the topic and the site fell off the search results pages. It was a lesson to only focus on a topic I could sustain an interest in over the longer term.

If you find your passion, you’ll keep going for longer when the other people quit. There’s lots of bloggers out there who also want to rank their content on the search engines and this means it’s tough! It’s much easier to write about a topic you love for several months or years, than one you hate!

Blogging Might Not Pay

Another downside of blogging is that even after a lot of work, you may earn nothing from a blog. If earnings is your goal, find something which is enjoyable about the process. That way you’ll keep going.

It took me a long time before I was earning consistently from blogging. Only after I had built up months worth of content did the sales start coming in more regularly. Before that sales were sporadic.

This can be hard, especially at first. To sustain yourself during the drought period you need to keep your belief high in order to keep going. Once I started seeing the proof that blogging was in fact a viable way to earn online, it motivated me to become a more consistent blogger. But as a beginner, I worked sporadically always looking for evidence that it worked! This can hold you back if you don’t believe in what you’re doing.

To earn from blogging you need a lot of content and a way to monetise. This can be done through advertising or affiliate marketing. See what is affiliate marketing for more on this topic, and Adsense vs affiliate marketing.

Blogging Is Flexible

Blogging is a very flexible way to earn an income once you start making it pay. You can blog from anywhere and on any subject. So if you like writing, and can find a way to monetise blogging and write about a topic you love, it can be an awesome way to earn a living.

The downside of the flexibility to blogging is that you need to be very disciplined to maintain a blogging habit for long enough to make it pay. If you are only dabbling with your blogging, you shouldn’t expect much income from it. But if you get disciplined and turn blogging into a long term habit, it can give you a huge amount of freedom for doing something you love!

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s a few pros and cons of affiliate marketing. If you’re a business owner, affiliates can provide you a good cheap way to market your business/product. Plus you don’t pay them until they have successfully referred a customer. This means for a business, affiliates offer a very cost effective way of advertising.

The affiliate on the other hand takes all the risk! Affiliates are third party referrers who only get paid for referring online products and services. But affiliate marketing has it’s up sides too. If you an become successful as an affiliate, your online activities can replace an existing income. This can give you a huge amount of freedom, especially if your marketing is scalable.

If you’re a brand new affiliate, or thinking of becoming one, there’s a few things to consider before taking the decision to sell other people’s products and services online for an income.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing – Cons: Trust & Belief

There’s a few downsides to affiliate marketing if you’re thinking about being an affiliate. Affiliate marketing can be great, but it can also suck! In the beginning, you start out with a lot of enthusiasm, which can quickly turn to disappointment. This is because making sales online is a skill and as such it requires a lot of work initially to acquire that skill. A lot of newbie affiliates will quit when nothing seems to be happening. This is where you should keep going; when others quit! See also affiliate marketing success rate.

In the beginning phase of being an affiliate, you won’t know exactly what to do. You need to get some education and follow some training or a course. You can access one on this website by signing up to the free video series. Obviously courses cost money and this is how many affiliates earn their income; selling courses to other would-be affiliates!

If you’re sceptical this can act as a barrier to your building an affiliate business because of lack of trust in the process (or lack of money). When you don’t immediately start selling things, it can fuel this doubt, which leads only to procrastination and more scepticism!

If you are fuelled with passion and belief and you get the right help, it can get you beyond this beginners phase to your first sale! Once you have proved to yourself that you can make a sale online, you have achieved something really worthwhile and it can help you overcome the fear and doubt which can hold you back.

Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing: Pros

The pros of affiliate marketing are really worth paying attention to. Affiliate marketing is a business model which can give you a huge amount of freedom. Once you have made your first sale, you will have overcome two really significant mental hurdles of doubt and scepticism. These hurdles will often keep many would-be affiliates from taking the right actions which could completely change their lives.

Although affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, this really is a double edged sword. While on one hand this means if you don’t sell anything you don’t make any money, on the other hand there’s no limit to the number of products you can sell. You can also sell products in your sleep on complete autopilot!

In a job, you’re tied to trading time for money. But with affiliate marketing you can escape this trap. Once you have learned how to sell a single product online, you can sell many more, and in greater numbers. Affiliate marketing can give you time and geographical freedom, freedom from a job or a boss and freedom from a commute.

Competition & Slower Methods

The downside to all of these benefits is that there’s thousands of other people doing affiliate marketing. This means there’s plenty of competition. In the most lucrative niches this is all the more true. So if you decide to start blogging on a particular topic, for example, it can take years to gain traction and start making an income which is capable of replacing your salary.

The cheaper methods of doing affiliate marketing are often much more time consuming than the more costly paid advertising. So if you don’t have much money to invest, you’ll need to invest a lot of time to make affiliate marketing work. See also PPC vs organic marketing.

Content creation is one method of marketing affiliate products but there are many other ways. With content creation, you create video or written content and upload it to YouTube or a blog, for example. Because of the vastness of the internet, and the many other competing affiliates, you’ll face stiff competition and it can be difficult to get traffic to your content unless you have been at it a while. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

It Can Be Fast

But saying all that, there’s faster ways to do affiliate marketing. The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is through using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs. Using both these methods in unison can help you build a profitable affiliate business much more quickly.

This is all the more true if you can use paid marketing methods which are also much more scalable than blogging, for instance. One of the pros of affiliate marketing is that you can build an affiliate business very quickly if you can invest in your marketing and in a high ticket product range.

A product range can take the heavy lifting out of an affiliate business because it offers a means to sell larger value products to a scalable number of people. With most affiliate products you only earn once for each sale. With a product range you can sell an individual product and benefit from subscriptions and recurring income from up-sells which are bought later on. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Summary

There’s pros and cons of affiliate marketing and depending on how you approach it, your journey will be different. With paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel, you can get your business going very quickly. Cheaper routes to success involve building content and advertising for free, but this route is much more time consuming and much slower.

Many affiliate quit because they don’t get the traction they need to keep going. Getting over the initial hurdles of self belief and time management are key to success. Once you’ve made your first sale online, consider it a massive achievement, because it is! Many fall before they even reach this point.

Access a free video resource and learn more here.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale

Are you looking for an affiliate marketing business for sale? There’s a couple of options available if you want an affiliate business. You can buy a pre-made affiliate website from a site such as flippa.com. Or, you can invest in a six figure business funnel and start your own affiliate business from scratch.

With a pre-made already existing affiliate website, you will need to shell out for the site initially, according to what it’s worth. Make sure you do your due diligence before purchasing. Top sites can sell for upwards of $100,000 if they’re earning well already. You’ll obviously pay more for the affiliate sites which are already producing a monthly profit. The more profitable an affiliate site it, the more the owner will want to sell it for.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale

Here’s what a six figure business model looks like which is the other option for the purchase of an affiliate business:

high ticket funnel for sale — Access a high ticket funnel through this video series.

A six figure affiliate business funnel like the one pictured is a game changer for affiliate markers. With most affiliate marketing business models you promote a stand alone product which typically sells for around $100. Even with a digital type of product this will usually only give you a $40 commission. You need to perpetually sell more and more products in order to be consistently profitable. But with a six figure affiliate business model you use a product range which includes:

High ticket affiliate marketing products – larger than average value products which typically pay out $500 minimum in commission
A recurring income product – membership or subscription affiliate products
A multi-tier product range – not just a stand alone product
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.

A product range gives you much better opportunity for building a profitable business from affiliate marketing. It also allows you to more easily use and profit when using paid marketing methods which are faster and much more scalable than cheaper marketing strategies. See also SFM Digital Business System.

Affiliate Marketing Business For Sale – Pros & Cons

There’s pros and cons of purchasing a pre-made affiliate business. The price is often prohibitive for many but there’s a huge choice on Flippa.com if you decide to go that way. The more a site makes, the more it will cost you. Plus, you only have the details on the site to go on. Once you purchase the site, it’s yours! Websites can quickly change in terms of SEO and traffic generation, so you’re taking a risk whatever you do. Just make sure you check the website stats before you agree to make an offer.

Buying an affiliate website outright can give you a monthly income outright. But remember to ask why someone would sell a profitable asset like a affiliate site. If it’s making money, why sell? If you’re paying $100k for a site, when will you recoup your investment? It could be years after the purchase, depending on what it’s earning.

A six figure funnel will set you back too. If you invest in a six figure digital business system, and want the top commissions, expect to invest over $10k or so just to access top level commissions. This is of course much cheaper than a top website from flippa.com. However, you’ll need to also learn the skills to market your business too.

This can be a blessing or a curse depending whether you have an interest in adding to your skillset and building yourself into the business as an asset. Digital skills can be learned and they are lifetime skills. But if you’re not up for spending months learning how to market your sales funnel, a pre-build affiliate site might be a better choice for you.

Cheaper Options

Of course you can build an affiliate business from scratch and completely free! But it will take you much longer if you don’t have a product “suite”; a range of products including subscription and high ticket products offers a much more realistic option for building a profitable business online. Without such products you’re stuck promoting individual products and unless you use high ticket and subscription products you’ll need to sell in bulk in order to be profitable.

Lower value affiliate products are much more difficult to sell using paid marketing and still come out with a profit. This means you need to look for cheaper marketing strategies such as blogging which are much less scalable and very time consuming and slow.

Still, if you’re on a tight budget you can still go that route. There’s tonnes of affiliate programs which are completely free to join. You only need to find a promotion method which suits your budget. Ideally use high ticket and subscription products to give you more chance of success. See also best products to sell as an affiliate and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale

There’s a couple of main options if you’re looking for ready made affiliate websites for sale. One is to buy an existing website from a site such as Flippa.com.

Flippa.com is a marketplace for buying and selling affiliate websites. You can purchase an affiliate site on Flippa for a few hundred dollars or for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously the more you pay for an affiliate website, the more money you can expect it to produce! Cheaper sites, on the other hand aren’t going to be as profitable or well established as the more pricy options. Due your due diligence though before making a purchase and make sure you’re well aware of the potential earnings of a site and how long it will take to recoup your purchase price from it.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale -Shopify

Another option to buy an eCommerce store is to use Shopify. Shopify.com lets you easily build an eCommerce store, add products to it and then you’ll need to promote it. Keep in mind that building an affiliate website this way comes with some strings. You don’t get an instantly profitable website like you might do if you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a site from Flippa.com.

The “flip” side though is that you can have an eCommerce store for much less investment. You can build an eCommerce store with Shopify for as little as $19 a month! However, you don’t get an instantly profitable site, you’ll have to learn marketing in order to get people to it. This will take some time and investment outside of the $19 a month.

Problems With “Plug & Play” Website Builders

One potential problem with a Shopify store is the product you choose to put in it. If you choose low value physical products to sell in your store, it can be more difficult to monetise if you’re using paid marketing to get traffic. Paid marketing is expensive and so you’ll need some high value products in your store to recoup this cost and ideally make a profit!

If you use high ticket affiliate marketing products, it can be a way around this issue, since you can earn a lot more from each sale with these kinds of products. For example, a typical high ticket products gives you a much larger commission ($500 or more) compared to your average physical product which will only pay a few dollars if you make a sale.

If you monetise your Shopify store with Amazon products for example, you’ll only be able to earn between 1% and 10% commission on any of the products you sell. See Amazon affiliate commission rates. With digital products this commission percentage jumps up dramatically and you can often earn between 30% and 40% on digital affiliate sales.

Ready Made Affiliate Websites For Sale – The Six Figure Sales Funnel

Another option is to purchase an existing sales funnel which offers a range of high ticket products. This is similar to the Shopify option, but you’re in a much better position to profit from your affiliate sales.

A high ticket sales funnel offers a number of benefits to affiliates, including a ready made affiliate website which is up and running in just a few clicks. Here’s what’s good about a high ticket sales funnel:

Subscription products in your funnel – offer recurring commissions so the potential of profit is much larger than a typical Shopify store, for example
High ticket digital training products – offer some of the largest possible commissions available for affiliates.
A product “suite” – a product suite means you benefit from a built in sales team closing sales on your behalf and a product range: sell the entry level product and the sales team does the rest.
Multi-tier – some high ticket product ranges offer multi-tier commissions. This means you can earn from sales generated from your referrals.

All in all a high ticket sales funnel can give you more bang for your buck. As with Shopify though, you’ll need to market your sales funnel with this method. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Summary

If you want an instant income from a ready made affiliate website, your best bet is to purchase a profitable one from Flippa.com, or similar site. Just be careful and know what you’re buying before you dive in! Cheaper sites won’t be as profitable, or profitable at all, so you should expect to pay a lot for a site which is already earning a decent profit.

Shopify is another option if you’re prepared to roll your sleeves up and learn a few marketing tactics to bring people to your site. At only $19 a month, you can have a website up and running with a small amount of effort. However, this doesn’t mean it’s profitable. Just having a website which can earn money doesn’t mean it will earn money! You need to build a marketing “engine” to drive targeted traffic towards it for it to work.

This can take some time and effort and you’ll need to learn some new skills. So simply buying a site from Shopify doesn’t guarantee a profitable business. It only gives you the ability to make profit if you figure out how to get customers to your online shop.

The Online “Edge”

A six figure sales funnel can give you the edge here because it allows you to use more easily accessible marketing strategies like pay per click. If you don’t have subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products in your store, it’s much harder to use these marketing tactics and still come out on top. This means with cheaper items in your eCommerce store, you’ll need to focus on cheaper marketing strategies which may take longer and be less scalable.

Blogging and video blogging for example are free ways to generate traffic. But it can take a long time and a lot of effort to generate the kind of traffic you need to become profitable. With PPC – (pay per click marketing), you can turn on instant traffic to your site. But it comes at a cost. You should expect to spend money while learning these strategies if you want to be profitable long term.

Access a free video series here which explains the different types of affiliate products and business models which you can set up.

Earn Commission Selling Products Online

You can earn commission selling products online, even if you don’t have any products yourself. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are rewarded for passing customers on to other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate too. All you need to do is join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Once you have your link, you can advertise it to make sales. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission based on the referral.

As long as you have a laptop and internet connection, you can promote products and services online from anywhere. The key to making a success out of affiliate marketing is of course to get good at finding customers for products. When you can do this in large numbers, you can potentially replace your income from online referrals. This can give you a huge amount of freedom; both in terms of your time, geographical location and from a monetary perspective too.

But what does it take to become successful as an affiliate marketer? What are the average earnings from affiliate marketing? What are your chances of success?

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Affiliate Marketing

To earn commission selling products online there are many strategies you can use:

Blogging
Video blogging (v’logging)
Social media marketing
Email marketing – building an email list
PPC – pay per click advertising
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building – part of SEO
and so on..

To sell products en-mass, you need to learn how to reach an ever growing audience and this typically doesn’t happen over night! Most affiliates will have at least some struggles when they begin to learn the skill of selling online. Many will also quit! To become successful in selling products online you need to get good at marketing. Affiliate marketing means marketing other people’s products and services. The marketing part of the equation is your responsibility as an affiliate. Unless you get good at this skill, your chances of success in affiliate marketing are pretty low.

The Email List

One of the best and fastest methods of selling products online is through using an email marketing list. Autoresponders are automated email marketing systems which allow affiliates to collect emails from a website and send automated messages out on a regular basis. Through building a large list of subscribers, affiliates can sell products in large numbers through sending email marketing messages to their subscribers.

An email list can be built up to many thousands of subscribers which gives affiliates the means to reach an ever growing audience. By connecting to their subscribers on a regular basis, affiliates can built trust, give value and ultimately promote useful affiliate products which allow them to earn commissions based on the sales.

The email list is pretty important for affiliates as it gives them control of their traffic. Without traffic, an affiliate can’t sell products and services online. Traffic can be generated in many ways through either building content or paying for it. Paid traffic is far quicker than free traffic, which takes a lot longer and more effort to obtain.

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Types Of Product

Not all affiliate products are equal, and not all pay the same in affiliate commissions. Physical products, for example typically pay less than digital products in terms of commission percentages. A typical physical product you might find on Amazon, for example, pays between 3-10% commission, depending on the product. A typical digital product on the other hand will pay much more – usually from 20-40% commission.

Some products are much more expensive than others too, so you’ll earn a larger commission if you refer a sale. High ticket affiliate marketing products are typically those which pay out a minimum of $500 for referring a sale.

There are subscription affiliate programs too which pay affiliates recurring commissions. These are good for financial stability if you’re a beginner affiliate especially because regular recurring commissions can help to stabilise your affiliate income.

Marketing – The Key To Selling Products Online

Marketing is the key to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. Whether you decide to use paid marketing, build a blog or create a YouTube channel, you’ll need to attract an audience which resonates with your messaging and who are a good fit for the products and services you choose to promote. Blogging, for example can be used to attract an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation. Over time and with patience, a blog can ultimately attract website traffic completely for free!

If you’re less patient, you can use PPC – pay per click marketing to attract traffic directly from social media platforms or from search traffic. This is often used to send targeted traffic to a landing page where affiliates collect emails and follow up with automated messages via email marketing. Email marketing combined with PPC (pay per click advertising) is one of the fastest ways you can build an affiliate business. Combined with a high ticket product range this can give you the best chance of building a profitable income from scratch with affiliate marketing. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing.

Clickbank Trending Products

One way to find the most popular products on Clickbank is to look for Clickbank trending products. You can use a website called CBEngine.com to do this. Just look down the left hand side of the website and click on CB Top Gravity. “Gravity” on Clickbank denotes the popularity of certain products. A high gravity indicates that there’s a lot of affiliates already successfully promoting a particular product.

A high gravity would be above 80 whereas a low gravity will be typically less than 20. While a high gravity can mean a product is good, it also means there’s a lot of competition from other affiliates for that particular product. So depending on your promotion method, you could come up against more competition in your promotion methods with the most popular products. You can see in the image above, the products in the category CB Top Gravity are listed according to gravity with the highest gravity score at the top.

Clickbank Trending Products

Another way to find Clickbank trending products is to head to Clickbank.com and login. Then head over the the marketplace where you should see links to the best performing products.

You can also do a search in the marketplace and sort the results by a number of different criteria to find the best performing products:

Rank – the overall Clickbank rank of the vendor
Average conversion ($) – average conversion value of the sale
Initial conversion ($) – the first sale of a product, not counting rebilling etc.
Recurring (Rebill) – applies to recurring income products which pay recurring commissions
Gravity – The number of different affiliates who earn from the sale over 12 week period; newer sales also denote a higher value.

Clickbank & Gravity

Gravity is the best indication of whether a particular product is “hot” on Clickbank. This number represents a unique calculation by ClickBank. It takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the previous twelve weeks. Since more recent sales are given a higher value, this number can give you an idea of what products are “hot” at the moment, in terms of being promoted by many affiliates and making a good number of sales.

However, high gravity can also indicate that there will be a lot of competition in promoting this product; so it’s worth doing your homework before choosing a particular product just because of it’s gravity. Depending on how you’re going to approach your marketing, you should tread carefully. For example if you’re creating content for a high gravity product, look at other product reviews and content similar to what you will be doing before choosing to promote it. You may find the market is saturated or very competitive in a particular area.

Clickbank Trending Products & Recurring Income

It’s also worth checking out CBEngine and looking at the CB Recurring tab for those products which offer recurring commissions. You can also do this directly on Clickbank.com too. Just use the Recurring $/Rebill drop down menu in the marketplace while using the search function.

Subscription affiliate programs are great for affiliates because they give you recurring income from previous sales. With a good product and the right customer, you can maintain your income for years from each individual sale.

Fastest Way To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

What’s the fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing? I’ve been in an affiliate community for a number of years now. During that time I’ve seen people overtake me and achieve success very quickly. What’s their secret, I used to think? The answer? Cash and guts! To have success very quickly with affiliate marketing takes investment. First, you should invest in a high ticket sales funnel. Without a high ticket sales funnel, you’re stuck promoting products which are of low value. When products are cheap, you need to sell in bulk to make the big bucks! But doing so is much more difficult using scalable methods.

Paid advertising is very fast and much more scalable the other marketing tactics such as blogging. But it’s also costly. But if you can spend a small advertising budget and get a profit, you can scale. This just isn’t possible if you’re using slower marketing methods which are free or very cheap. Or, if you’re using low value products, it’s so much harder to run paid marketing and come out on top.

So the answer is to use a product “suite” which offers multiple high ticket products and subscription products. With a product suite you can come out on top much more easily and quickly. Plus, it’s easier to be profitable while running a scalable tactic such as PPC – paid marketing.

Fastest Way To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – The List

When I first started affiliate marketing I tried to make all my sales directly from a website. It was a big mistake because most people won’t buy at first glance. They need several touch points in order to make a buying decision. How many touch points before a sale is made? It’s more than you think – around 6-7 in fact, but it will also depend on your business. You can’t achieve this on an affiliate website very easily but it can be achieved much more easily from an email list. With an email list you control your traffic. You can build longer term relationships and get more for your advertising dollars.

aweber - fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing

On a website the typically visitor only hangs around for a few minutes. Then they are gone, often forever. But once you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can build a relationship over the longer term by delivering messages every day. The fastest way to build an affiliate business isn’t through blogging, or building endless content. It’s from building an email list of subscribers and promoting a high value sales funnel to your subscribers.

The fastest affiliates don’t even bother that much with a blog website. They use landing pages to build an email list. Landing pages are much more focused than a website. On a website, a visitor can browse around and look through your content. On a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave. This is why it’s more cost effective to build a landing page and learn how to optimise it. Then send paid traffic to the page and collect subscribers – in large numbers.

Paid Marketing

Free marketing is free, but it costs your time and effort. In reality using free traffic is more costly if you value your time over your money. Paid marketing is much better for an affiliate with a large value product range. In the early phase, you’ll be spending money in order to learn. This can be difficult and many affiliates will be put off here.

I was too! But if you stick with it, what you’re looking for is a money making machine which spits out cash when you put cash in! Ultimately, what you’re doing with a paid marketing campaign and a high ticket sales funnel is creating an autopilot money making machine! You put in $100 and out comes $200. Once you achieve this, you can simply put in $1000 and out comes $2000, (if this relationship holds of course).

The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is to uncover the power of this “machine”. Learn to use paid marketing and promote a high value product range. Once you can do this, you have a winning ticket! You simply spend money to make money. Once you have a profitable “machine”, you turn up the volume! If you have the cash to learn this strategy, it’s well worth putting the effort in. If you don’t, it’s probably better to look for a cheaper marketing strategy, or a cheaper product to sell.

You can still use high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate products which will give you more bang for your buck, whatever you choose to do.

Summary

Of course it takes a large financial commitment to purchase a high ticket funnel and then market it with paid ads. It takes some guts too, especially if you’re new. You can of course start out with a small daily marketing budget, and test and measure your marketing campaigns. Only scale up your affiliate business when you are seeing a consistent profit from a low budget campaign.

This can take some time and effort, and of course cash. Like the old saying goes, it takes money to make money. There are other ways to market products online of course. See my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products. However this article is about the fastest way to promote affiliate products:

Use a high ticket sales funnel which offers a product “suite”: multiple high value products and subscription products
Use an email list: build an email list from a landing page or website, or both. A landing page is better though and you should also cross test different landing pages to attain the best performing one in terms of conversions (sign ups/subscribers).
Use paid marketing: Paid marketing is not only the fastest way to promote affiliate products, but it also gives you the ability to scale, and quickly. Slower marketing methods (such as blogging) aren’t as easily scaled.

How Many Leads Do You Need To Generate?

How many leads to you need to generate in order to start earning from affiliate sales? As a beginner affiliate, you learn to generate leads from either your website or landing pages, or both. If you’re using paid marketing, you can see leads coming in quite quickly.

Whereas if your marketing efforts are only organic, you will see leads coming in more slowly and sporadically. For example, if your’e a blogger, you can collect leads from your blog posts. Initially this will be slow because you start with no content at all. As you build up your content, you should see leads coming in more regularly as your content grows over time.

Initially then you should aim to start generating leads regularly every day. Even if your target is only 1 lead per day at first, this is a good target if it motivates you. 10 leads a day is something to aspire towards as a beginner. At 10 leads a day you should start seeing things happen more quickly. As you improve, you can increase it to the hundreds.

But it’s worth getting your targeting right before you increase your ad spend, because it can get expensive. If you are targeting the wrong audience with your ads, and therefore attracting the wrong kind of leads, no amount of money will matter! You’ll simply end up out of pocket!

How Many Leads Do You Need To Generate: Targeting & Touchpoints

You can start making sales with only 10 leads a day as an affiliate marketer; although it may take a month or two for your marketing campaign to take effect. Often people will be on your email list for some time before they make a buying decision. 10 leads a day for two months is around 60 subscribers, which is still a small number. However, the longer someone is on your email list, the more points of contact you will have with them (through regular email messages). This can mean they are more likely to buy from you, if your messages are connecting with them. See also how many touchpoints before a sale.

The more subscribers you can get on a daily basis the better. But the number of subscribers is not the only factor determining how many sales you make. You also need to pay close attention to how you are attracting leads. Knowing your target market is key to attracting the right kinds of subscribers. For example, if you’re attracting freebie seekers with your marketing strategy, more leads only means more freebie seekers. To qualify leads better you need to understand your target audience and know your customer avatar. The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer; the person/s who will love what you offer and want to buy all your products. See customer avatar worksheet pdf.

How Many Leads Do You Need To Generate For Sales?

Of course different business models have different statistics in terms of leads and sales. With affiliate marketing it’s going to be different for every affiliate too; not just because each subscriber is different but also because every affiliate will offer a slightly different marketing message; even with the same business model.

In business, stats show that 10-15% of leads turn into deals. But with affiliate marketing this can be less because you’re not actually speaking to leads on the phone. In most cases affiliates will use email marketing to communicate, which can be automated. While this is convenient and more scalable, it also means that you’ll likely get less leads turning into sales than with businesses who follow up with a sales call. Many subscribers won’t even get your emails either because your emails will slip into their junk folders or promotions tab and they are never opened. Email open rates will therefore effect your email lead effectiveness.

Email open rates for affiliates are good at around 40%! That means a massive 60% of subscribers won’t even get your emails! Of course you can improve on this through communicating the value of your messages and reminding subscribers to check spam filters and promotions tabs etc.

Targeting; Making More From Less

You can make more out of leads by being very targeted with your marketing. For example, if you’re a content creator, create only content which attracts buying customers. Avoid creating content which will attract freebie seekers, but will attract buyer traffic. Before writing content, think about the keywords in your blog title. Ask yourself “what’s the intention of someone looking for this phrase?”. Are they going to be a buyer, or only a browser?

With paid marketing too, you can be super targeted with the kinds of people you attract to a website or landing page, and therefore get on your email list. Advertising platforms allow you to focus your advertising targeted towards people by their age, location, interests, hobbies, connections and a number of other demographics and criteria. If you get to know your customer avatar well, you can get laser focused on the kinds of people who would make the best customers. This will save you money and time, and get the right people on your email list who are more likely to buy.

Summary

Affiliates generate leads from a website or landing page to send people into their sales funnel. The more leads, the more sales you get, in general. But it’s not just quantity of leads which matters, it’s quality too. Cheaper leads are often from countries where people can’t afford what you’re selling, for example. So getting more of them just means more people who don’t buy from you.

To attract quality leads it’s worth getting very clear on who you are serving and who your best performing customers will be. When you find your customer avatar, you can focus your marketing on the right people, and save a lot of money in the process.

The number of contact points is also a factor. Generally speaking, a customer will need between 6-7 contact points with your marketing messages before they become a buying customer. Of course some will need more and others less. But as people pass through your marketing funnel, you should keep this in mind. The longer they remain on your email list, the more possibilities you have of selling them your product/service. See also the power of email marketing.