AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Many TouchPoints Before A Sale?

If you’re wondering how many touchpoints before a sale is made, it’s more than you might think!

A touchpoint is any interaction that might influence how your customer feels about your product, brand, service or business. As an affiliate marketer, touchpoints are generally made through website content, video and email marketing messages.

On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. This is why it’s so important to get website visitors onto your email list. From an email list, you can have many more touchpoints with your potential customers than you possibly could on a website.

After 10 minutes on a website, most of your visitors are gone, potentially forever! But once on your email list, you can follow up over weeks, months and even years and decades! This gives you many more opportunities to influence your audience through touchpoints – interactions where you can influence someone and build trust.

How Many Touchpoints Before A Sale?

According to research it can take from 6-8 touchpoints before a sale is made. However, it will differ across different businesses offering different services. It’s also going to depend on the leads you attract and the targeting of your marketing.

If you’re very specific about who your best performing potential customers are, it can be a lot less. (See how to know your target market). It also will depend on your marketing strategy.

Much of this data comes from businesses who follow up with sales calls to their leads. But with affiliate marketing, this doesn’t happen. Touchpoints for most affiliates refer to those interactions visitors have made on your website, and through your email marketing campaigns.

Still it’s important to know that most leads won’t immediately turn into customers from the get-go! This is useful because you know the follow up emails are vital. Or, if you’re calling prospects, you’ll need 6-7 interactions with them in order to make a sale, on average.

How Many Touchpoints Before A Sale: The Landscape Has Changed

Consumers are more immune to traditional advertising and sales methodologies today. They are more likely to do their own independent research about a particular product or brand before believing the “salesperson” selling them something. This is why email marketing is so useful for marketers. With email marketing you can offer value and give insight over a much longer period of time.

Rather than trying to sell directly to leads, you can build trust over the longer time period by offering value and answering questions which your email subscribers are likely to have. You can also address issues which are likely holding them from making a buying decision. This all comes down to knowing your customers. See customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this.

Types Of Product

Of course your product has a huge bearing on how many touchpoints someone will need to buy something. If you’re selling a physical product from a website, a simple review might be enough to make a direct sale. That’s because a review website attracts an audience who is already looking for a specific item. A review catches someone at the last stage of their buying cycle. They just needed a little knowledge on the item before making the purchase. Then they buy it through the affiliate link.

If, on the other hand you’re selling a complicated item, such a digital business training course, it’s going to take a little longer to build up trust with your customer. Why should they trust you? If your emails provide useful information and try the help them, regardless of the sale, they are much more likely to trust you and buy from you. If you’re shoving a product down their neck from your first email, they will probably unsubscribe! At the very least they will take your emails with a pinch of salt, knowing you’re only after the sale!

Agressive Sales

Have you ever been in a shop browsing when a salesman comes over and tries to “help” you too much! How does it make you feel? Like a commodity, right! They just want their sales bonus. “Too pushy” sales people push people away instead of letting them choose on their own. You leave the shop and browse elsewhere where you’ll be left in peace!

In the internet age, people have changed their buying habits. They can go elsewhere and usually get it cheaper. As with email marketing, if you’re too pushy and “salesy” you can have the opposite effect to you want to achieve. It’s much better to offer huge value in your email marketing campaign, and help the customer – building trust. When you build trust with an email marketing campaign, you’re much more likely to have people open your emails.

When they know you only want to sell them something, they stop opening them because they know it’s of no value.

Summary

How many touchpoints before a sale can be made? Although the standard answer is between 6-7 touchpoints, this will vary across the board according to the marketing, customers, business and strategy of connection to customers. With an affiliate marketing business touchpoints are different to those which many physical businesses employ such as cold calling. With affiliate marketing those touchpoints are through email marketing and website or video content. So you may require more touchpoints in order to build trust when you aren’t physically speaking to a potential customer.

If your marketing is good though, and you are able to attract a very targeted audience, touchpoints should be less. The point is you should be able to improve your marketing methods as you go, and it’s important to remember that every customer is different. With email marketing, focus on providing value and building trust. See also the power of email marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation

Affiliate marketing lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers into your sales funnel. You can do this from a website or landing page by offering something for free in exchange for your visitor’s email. There’s many ways you can attract leads to an affiliate business. Here’s a few strategies:

Lead capture pages – landing pages designed to get email leads
Blog websites – See lead generation through content marketing
PPC advertising platforms – pay per click adverts sending targeted traffic to either a landing page or blog/website.
Pop ups – popups are a popular way to collect leads from a website or blog

Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation – Why Use It?

Lead generation is a good idea for affiliates because without building an email list of subscribers you must rely on passing traffic from your website/blog. This is expensive or time consuming to attain, or both. If you’re a blogger, it can take months or years to attract traffic to your site. With paid traffic, you can spend a lot of money only to have most visitors leave your website without having taken any action. Once they leave, they are likely to be gone forever!

But with an opt in offer, many of your visitors will sign up to your email list because you have an attractive offer or “freebie” to give them. Once they do, they enter your sales funnel. From this point you can continue sending them email messages for a much longer timeframe than would be possible simply from a website. Subscribers can unsubscribe from your messages of course, but many of them will stick around for months or even years; buying from you long after signing up to your email list.

On a website there is only a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. Most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes. Once on your email list, this timeframe increases dramatically.

Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation – Best Strategy

Although there are many strategies for lead generation, one of the best is to send paid traffic to a landing page. A landing page is a specific website built with one purpose in mind: get the email address. On a website, visitors can browse your content and have a look around. But on a landing page there are only two options: Sign up or leave. This means the affiliate can optimise the outcome of sending paid traffic to a landing page in a much more effective way than they could on a normal website.

By cross testing different landing pages against each other, affiliates can see clearly which ones outperforms the others. Over time this means your marketing dollars will go much further. Sending the same paid traffic to a website will seldom have the same effect because much of the traffic will look around and leave, never to return! That means a lot of your marketing budget is wasted.

Follow Up Emails

Once people have subscribed to your email list, you can send a series of automated messages to help build trust, offer value and of course sell your affiliate products. By leading with value, your subscribers are more likely to open future emails and you can build a rapport with your communications. Emails should be used to get your audience to know, like and trust you. If they do, they are much more likely to make a purchase form you, if your product/s meet their needs.

The opposite is also true; if you put the sale first, before the value, it’s hardly likely that your subscribers will be opening your emails. So its important to lead with value in your emails; don’t go for the sale too early! You can offer value in a number of ways through email messages:

Provide information and value on the subject matter they are interested in
Give subscribers more insight into your products and what they can do for them (benefits not features)
Let them know how you can help them
Use a call to action – direct subscribers to more information and/or useful products

Summary

Affiliate marketing lead generation is a pretty important topic for affiliates. Without leads in your marketing funnel, you must rely on passing website traffic so you will be leaving money on the table. Most of that traffic won’t convert into a sale. Traffic is also costly or time consuming to acquire, so it pays to make the most of it.

Evidence shows that most online customers need several point of contact before making a buying decision. On a website, they have only one. So getting website visitors to sign up to your email list can give you a much better chance of selling something to them. Plus you can build a long term relationship with them by offering value and giving them some valuable insights and information.

Highest Paying INFJ Careers

What are the highest paying INFJ careers? INFJ is the rarest of the sixteen personality types created by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®).

I – Introverted (energised by time alone)
N – iNtuitative – focus on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details
F – Feeling – Makes decisions based on feelings and values
J – Judgement – Structured and organised (rather than open and flexible)

INFJ is also called the “Counsellor” because of their tendency to be idealistic, compassionate, and sensitive.

The ideal work environment for an INFJ is harmonious, industrious, and oriented to a purposeful mission, with co-workers who are similarly committed to positive change.

A good career would allow them to use their creativity in an independent, organised environment to develop and implement a vision that is consistent with their personal values, dreams and mission.

Highest Paying INFJ Careers

Financial stability, freedom, creativity, authority, flexibility and enjoyment are some of the things INFJ’s value in a career. INFJ’s often become leaders in their fields:

CEO’s
Entrepreneurs
Forex Traders
Affiliate marketers (- what is affiliate marketing)
Psychologists
Writers
Scientists

There is no exact career path that is right for each personality type, however, understanding your personality type can give you insight into what might be most important to you. Here’s a few traits of INFJ’s which may lead them to certain careers:

They enjoy contemplating and creating new ideas or approaches to a variety of problems
INFJ’s often prefer working with people or on products and services making a difference in people’s lives
They like to find solutions to help people grow and develop
They need meaning or purpose in their work and desire to align with the company’s mission or values

Are You An INFJ?

Since INFJ’s are introverted, they prefer certain work environments. If you’re looking for a high paying career as an introvert it is often one which lets you work in an environment you can control. Work you can do alone can often suit INFJ’s too:

Forex traders – largely work on their own
Affiliate marketers work alone or in small groups

INFJ’s are creative and can do any kind of work but they will do better if their work is meaningful to them and aligns with their values, dreams and mission.

CEO’s
Doctors
Lawyers
Managers
Planners

INFJ’s are intelligent creative thinkers who can put their mind to almost anything. But work needs to be purposeful and have meaning for them to enjoy what they do.

Autopilot Affiliate

Is an autopilot affiliate business really a possibility? After all the affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high (at around 95%). If you could really “set it and forget it”, why don’t more people succeed with affiliate marketing?

The truth is there’s quite a lot of work to be done in order to generate an autopilot income from affiliate marketing. Most people just give up too early; before they have realised the potential of affiliate marketing.

The systems used in affiliate marketing can definitely be automated. This means it’s entirely possible to build an affiliate business which runs with little or no work involved. But what about setting up these systems and making the business profitable. That’s where the hard work comes in. But once you have achieved this, you can quite easily make a passive income from affiliate marketing, with little to no input.

Most affiliates struggle in the early days because of a few things:

They don’t know what to do
They make mistakes
Traffic – beginners have no email subscribers, website traffic or content

But once you’re earning from affiliate marketing regularly, it gets easier.

Autopilot Affiliate – Why It Gets Easier

Affiliate marketing gets easier the longer you do it for because over time you can build an email list of subscribers, create content on your website, gain knowledge about advertising and gain expertise.

All of this compounds over time to help you generate more website visits, email leads and of course sales. When you start generating traction with an affiliate business, it means you’ve done the work. But depending on your marketing strategy, this can take some time. With a large marketing budget, you can build an email list very quickly and gain traction within a few months even. But if you’re a blogger, or use some other slower and cheaper route to traffic generation, it can take much longer.

During this interim period is when most affiliates will quit. They don’t see the bigger picture of what they can achieve over time. Or they just don’t have the motivation to carry them through the tough times.

Autopilot Affiliate – Using Systems Instead of Time

In a normal job you trade your time for money. If you don’t turn up for work, you don’t get paid. Affiliate marketing lets you earn through the sales of products and services online. This can be automated completely too, which means the work you do is in building these systems so that they’re profitable. That’s the responsibility of an affiliate.

But once your systems are working, you can focus on generating more traction by scaling up your affiliate business. This can be as simple as increasing your daily marketing budget, if you’re using paid marketing. In theory, if you can turn $1 of marketing budget into $2 worth of commissions, you can just spend more money. Spend $100 and make $200, spend $1000 and make $2000 etc.

The main systems for affiliate marketing are:

Your advertising/marketing strategy (PPC advertising, Blogging, V’logging, social media, website, etc.)
Email marketing – where you sell your affiliate products through email messages

When you can find a profitable balance between advertising and profit, you’ve effectively build an autopilot money making machine!

Autopilot Affiliate – Is It Possible?

An autopilot income is possible with affiliate marketing, although it takes a lot of work to start with. There’s a few key elements which can help you generate more from an affiliate business with less work:

Use paid marketing – paid marketing is much faster and more scalable than content creation. So if you can afford it, using paid advertising platforms will make your life easier.
Use an email marketing autoresponder – email autoresponders allow affiliates to build email lists of subscribers and send automated messages to them. This means you can build relationships and sell products completely hands free!
Choose to promote subscription affiliate programs – subscription products pay you a recurring income which can run for years! Each sale gives you a monthly income. So even when you stop working, these keep coming in; giving you a passive income.
Use High ticket affiliate marketing products – these are products with a larger than average price point which pay out much larger commissions. This can help you to be able to reach the more expensive advertising platforms and give you a larger profit.

Summary

It’s entirely possible to generate a passive income from affiliate marketing through using automated systems to sell other people’s products. If you also use subscription products you’ll benefit from earning recurring commissions on each sale you generate.

However, it does take some time to learn affiliate marketing and it’s worth investing in your ongoing education if you want to take it seriously. Many affiliates will quit at the beginning phase before they even see a single online sale. But if you push past this point, get the right training and support, you can build a lucrative income from affiliate marketing.

Access an all in one business system and training program by clicking on the banner below:

Autopilot Income

It’s long been a dream of mine to generate an autopilot income. I first remember thinking of it after buying an ebook from eBay which was about building an eBay based business. (Details of the book can be found here).

The transaction struck me as a very brilliant business model; I was able to buy the book and download it directly to my laptop.

This automatic transaction seemed clever in that anyone could buy this ebook from anywhere in the world and get it instantly so long as they had internet connection and a laptop. I became determined to get on the other side of this transaction and make an automated income from selling my own digital downloadable books.

Autopilot Income – My First Ebook

At the time, I was a struggling stuntman, attempting to find work in the TV and film industry. This was something I knew something about and I had trained for a number of years to become an Equity approved stunt performer in the UK. So my first book was about how to be a stuntman! Unfortunately it didn’t go down too well with the stunt industry and it felt like I had shot myself in the foot! Adding insult to injury I didn’t sell a single copy – despite potentially ruining my stunt career!

However, I persevered despite the set backs. I had managed to create the digital book and build a website to sell it from. I set up Paypal buttons and automated the process of downloading the ebook once a visitor had completed checkout and paid. I had basically learned how to sell digital downloads on my website.

What I hadn’t learned though was how to get visitors to my website. Without visitors I couldn’t sell my ebook! So I put myself on a marketing course with the intention of learning how to get traffic to my website. At this point I discovered a clever business model known as affiliate marketing.

Autopilot Income – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which affiliates refer customers to other people’s products online. When a sale is made, the affiliate earns a commission based on that sale. My stuntman ebook was on the website for around $10; but the course I had joined was selling for around $100. As an affiliate, I learned how to make $40 per sale (40% commission).

Even with someone else’s product, I was able to earn more per sale than creating my very own product and attempting to sell it! All that time wasted – I thought!

Yes, you don’t need to create your own products and you’re often better off using someone else’s products too.

Not all affiliate products pay so much commission of course. Depending on the type of product you choose to promote, you can earn from 1% to 100% commission. Most physical products pay from 5-10% commission, and most digital products pay from 20-40% commission. See average commission for affiliate programs.

Autopilot Income – My First Online Sale

I took many courses which taught me how to generate traffic to my website (or landing page). But by this time I had abandoned my ebook and chosen to promote other people’s products instead. My intention was still to create an autopilot income from my laptop.

My first online sale was promoting a product I used to build my websites (called XSitePro). I don’t think it’s in operation any more, but this is going back a while. It was a great achievement but it was only one sale and I made about $40. The sale came from a review article I had written on a free blogging site called Hubpages.com.

From then on I was hooked and despite a number of difficulties and setbacks, I kept going, determined to build an autopilot income from the internet! During this time I took many different courses, built multiple websites, had my Adwords account banned, and had many other setbacks!

Autopilot Income – Getting Help

Getting help online back in the early 2000’s was pretty difficult. There was a few shady “guru’s” who over promised and under delivered! I found a number of people who offered courses in “how to earn online” including a few names I remember: Shaun Smith, Peter Lexis, The Keyword Academy, George Brown (Google Sniper) and several others which I don’t remember! You can read more about my journey in my digital profit course review article.

I eventually found a company which offered coaching and mentoring for online entrepreneurs (the company I now recommend on this site). You can access a free info video series here. Of course I was sceptical about handing over money to anyone else by this point; but I had had a few successes online but still hadn’t cracked it and made an autopilot income yet.

This was the first time I had met anyone in person from the affiliate marketing industry. Before I joined Mentors, I had only spoken online through emails to affiliate coaches. I was able to access coaches and mentors and learn affiliate marketing from scratch, using an entirely different business model.

Different Types Of Products

I had, up until this point, been struggling with making much at all from affiliate marketing. The odd sale here and there would drop in, but it was far from able to replace my income or have any sort of stability. What I learned was that through using a different business model, I was able to earn recurring commissions from selling subscription affiliate products. This made an immediate difference in my income because I could make monthly recurring commissions from each sale I made!

High ticket items also made a huge difference too. These are affiliate products which are valued much higher than most, therefore pay much larger commissions when you made a sale. Before, I was selling low value products from Amazon and making peanuts when I referred a sale. High ticket affiliate products make a huge difference because you can not only profit more but this also allows you to use paid marketing strategies which are faster and more scalable. Before discovering high ticket items I was struggling trying to get traffic to my websites for free, which is much more difficult.

The Six Figure Business Model

I realised the autopilot income “fantasy” I had was already being used much more effectively by those who knew what they were doing! Using a high ticket product “suite” you can earn a passive income from building an email list into the tens of thousands and promoting just the entry level product to your subscribers.

I wasn’t even using an email list for a large part of my affiliate career! I just didn’t understand how important it was to building a lucrative internet income. See also the power of email marketing.

You can also access an email autoresponder for free using the banner below. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

To get started and learn more you can access a free video series here. Or if you’re ready to dive in and build your own online business from scratch you can join Mentors here.

Manifesting Your Dream Job

Knowing what you want is the hardest step in manifesting your dream job. Once you have a clear intention, you can learn what you need to do in order to achieve it. You can then set about working towards gaining the necessary qualifications, experience and/or contacts to bring about your dream job.

If you’re stuck in a job you hate, this can seem a lot more difficult. Your mind is clouded with doing the things you don’t want to be doing. It takes up all your time and energy. However, this experience is useful because it can give you the necessary motivation to work towards something more enjoyable.

When you’re suffering in a job you hate, it can give you more clarity, both in terms of what you don’t want to do and what you would rather be doing. But you need to make sure you don’t give up on your dream, and get stuck in a job you hate.

Manifesting Your Dream Job – My Story

I was in exactly that situation – working several jobs I hated, directionless and unmotivated. Just removing the struggle was my motivation, rather than finding my dream job. Then in my 20’s I met a stuntman – I thought “wow that’s amazing – that’s my dream job”!. But until that day I didn’t realise such a job was possible. Suddenly everything changed. If he could become a stuntman, so could I! My life changed because I knew it was possible to do something I loved and everything became about making it a reality.

I went about finding out what I needed to do to join the British Stunt Register. You can read about it on my stunt website here.

It was a long list of qualifications which took a few years to achieve. But because I was super motivated to achieve my dream job of becoming a stuntman, I took the necessary steps.

Manifesting Your Dream Job – Knowing What You Want

This is why knowing what you want is so important. Unless you do, it’s easy to get caught up following other people’s advice to take a nice steady pay day for the ease of it. Before you know it, you’re stuck in a job you have a growing distain for!

Many dream jobs don’t offer a nice steady payday, or at least getting there may require some out of the box thinking. You might have to accept that getting there will require some long term motivation. But once you have made the decision to go for it, life becomes about that goal, and deliberation over it doesn’t happen any more.

At this point you may get some bad advice from well wishers who “just want the best for you”. These are people who accepted the status quo and want you to as well! Beware of them killing your dream! If you’re still deliberating your intention, it’s a good idea to be around other dreamers who support you and your dreams, not those naysayers who say it can’t be done!

Creating Your Plan

My dream was to be a stuntman and it required me to acquire a bunch of qualifications in various activities:

Fencing qualifications (the sport not the barbwire kind!)
Martial arts – level below black belt.
Climbing instructor – Single pitch award
Trampolining instructor – elementary gold level
SCUBA diving – Divemaster (PADI)
Swimming qualification

These did take some time and dedication to achieve, but I knew I had my dream job at the end, so that was my long term goal. To make these achievements more realistic, I broke them down into much smaller easily achievable goals which I could work towards every day.

Easily Achievable Steps

Once you have decided on what you want, and have learned what it will take to get there, you can break down the goals into easily achievable steps which you can do on a daily basis.

For me, it was to contact a fencing club and go and join a class. Or find out where I could learn SCUBA diving, for example. Depending on your dream job, it could be to call a company, or do some research on your dream job, and how to get into it.

The key is not to think you have to do everything at once and overload yourself with an insurmountable mountain of a goal. anything can be achieved with the right mindset and a plan broken down into easily achievable steps.

Readjusting Your Goals

You may also find your goals change as you go along. Perhaps you’re not that motivated to get your dream job after all, and something else is more suitable and realistic. It’s worth re-aligning your goals over time because you can find you become attached too much to your outcome, and miss out on another (possibly better) opportunity.

Once I had achieved my long term goal of becoming a stuntman, I was out of work a lot. So I was still working on building sites, delivering take aways and driving taxis and HGV’s etc. Life didn’t suddenly become the dream I had expected it to be! There were still challenges and over time my love for being a stuntman changed.

I found that an online business gave me much more freedom and flexibility than the stunt work did. Waiting by the phone constantly for stunt jobs over the years took its toll, and the insecurity of the film and TV business wasn’t ultimately the only thing I was looking for.

If you’re looking for more freedom and flexibility in your work, access a free video series here and learn more about starting your own online business.

You may also be interested in Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition which is a technique for manifesting impossible dreams.

Doubling for Stellan Skarsgard in “River”

Lifestyle Business Model

The lifestyle business model is one which allows you to automate your income through selling products and services online; or some other such system. Any lifestyle business model will have several things in common:

They are run and operated from anywhere globally – e.g. from a laptop
You can automate them and they are scalable
They use products and services to generate income, rather than trading time; as in a job.

Here’s some lifestyle business model examples:

Network marketing – using a team of people to promote products and earn from the efforts of your team
Advertising – using websites or advertising space to generate income remotely
Using affiliate marketing model – selling other people’s goods and services as a third party referrer
Drop shipping – selling other people’s goods from your own website

Lifestyle Business Model – Affiliate Marketing

One of the best and most accessible of these is the affiliate marketing business model, in which third parties refer goods and services online in exchange for a commission based on the sale price.

Not all affiliate marketing business models are alike however, and some are more capable of giving you the lifestyle they claim to than others. For example, Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate websites you can use to generate revenue. If you refer a sale on Amazon, you receive a commission based on the sale value. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

But Amazon’s rates are quite low, so you’ll need to sell in bulk in order to generate enough income to replace a job, for example. Once you’ve replaced your income or salary from affiliate marketing, you can work from your laptop, live anywhere and travel while you work also. Affiliate marketing is also so versatile that you can generate a passive income from it which gives you huge time and financial freedom. See also passive income and affiliate marketing.

Why A Lifestyle Business Model Is The Way To Greater Freedom

A lifestyle business model allows you to detach your time from the way you earn money. While most people trade their time for money in a job, affiliates use automated systems, technology and other people’s products to leverage their income through selling online.

Whenever you are trading your time for money, you are inevitably trapped by working continuously until you retire. As time passes your values can change and your time becomes more valuable to you. However, this can be difficult if you’re trapped by your income working in a job.

With affiliate marketing, you can build up a business which will ultimately work by itself, generating sales in your sleep. By using automated systems to do the selling, and recurring income products, you can generate an income which doesn’t stop just because you do.

The Best Lifestyle Business Model For Affiliates

Despite all its merits, it still takes some effort to build a passive income from the internet. But much of the hard work can be removed if you use a step by step selling system which is already set up and running. Access here.

One of the fastest ways to build an online income from scratch is to use the six figure (plus) sales funnel.

A sales funnel is basically an email marketing campaign which has a number of useful products attached. Through using online marketing techniques, anyone can promote such a funnel and generate revenue from sales they make. You can do this even without products and services of your own.

This is a good model to use for affiliates who want the lifestyle business and probably one of the easiest ways to earn online. Selling small valued products can be more tricky because it’s harder to profit while using paid marketing. See also high ticket affiliate marketing products. with high ticket products (and subscription affiliate products) in your funnel, you have a much better chance of profiting, especially if you want to use the faster marketing techniques (paid marketing).

Can It Work For You?

Can a lifestyle business model work for you? While affiliate marketing has a high drop out rate, many people are embracing the opportunity today to start building their own profitable businesses online. Cutting edge tools, software and resources have made this one of the best opportunities today to change the way you live and work. No longer is affiliate marketing only for the technically minded as many people are jumping on board the lifestyle business opportunity.

Access a free video series here to learn more.

grow your own online business from scratch

Time And Financial Freedom

It’s not easy to create both time and financial freedom. You’re either trading your time in a job, or spending time away from work enjoying life, but spending money. Seldom do you have both time and financial freedom.

Without a job you would have so much time you wouldn’t know what to do with it. But most people would struggle to live without a job because they wouldn’t have enough money coming in. So you work for a wage but that means you get caught up in work politics, often working for longer hours than you want to.

Life ticks away when you’re trading your time for money when all you really want is more time to do the things you want to do: spend time with family, relax, go on holiday etc.

How can you escape this trap?

Time And Financial Freedom – Sell Products Rather Than Your Time

The answer is that you need to find a way to earn money without trading your time for it. This can be done by selling products and services online. Affiliates are third party referrers who get paid even with no products or services of their own to sell.

They refer sales to other people’s products. What’s good about this business model is that you can automate it and grow it to reach a global customer base. This gives you both time and money. It works because your time isn’t tied in with the business of affiliate marketing once you have automated the process.

Unlike in a job your time is detached from the business processes which are set up to automate sales online. This means you can automate the selling process and once you’re earning enough to surpass your employment income, you can leave your job!

Time And Financial Freedom – How It Works

When you’re working in a job, whatever level of income you can earn will always still be limited. That’s because there’s only a certain number of hours in the day. This is the same for even highly paid professionals.

But with an online business model, you can earn sales in your sleep because you can automate the process of selling. If you also use products which pay out recurring commissions, you can continue to earn long after you have made the sale.

Register for the 10K online webinar here.

A typical recurring payment affiliate product might pay out only $20 a month, for example. But with 100 sales, that’s $2000 a month – and it’s passive. See recurring income affiliate programs for more on this topic.

With automated selling systems you’re also not working hard in order to make these sales come about. In fact they can work even when you’re not there. This article for example can attract an audience months or years after it is written. When someone buys from my website, I earn a commission based on the sale. This happens whether I’m physically at my computer, on my holidays or fast asleep!

Systems Versus Trading Time

Trading time for money is a traditional method of making money which is built on industrial age thinking. Factories needed workers to physically manufacture goods. But we’re now in the digital age where the technology has advanced far faster than this outdated thinking can keep up with!

Many have learned from their peers to get a job and work hard. But this old way of thinking can limit your potential and keep you stuck in the trading time for money cycle, which keeps you in poverty and/or mediocrity.

Online systems and automation can be used to generate income online through the selling of other people’s affiliate products and services. The digital revolution is already here with millions already spending consistently online. However, so many haven’t yet caught up and started learning how to tap into this way of generating an income.

Summary

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you keep getting what you’ve always got” – Jim Rohn

Time and financial freedom is almost impossible to obtain through doing what everyone else is doing – trading time for money. Instead you need to find a way to generate income which isn’t tied to selling your time. Affiliate marketing is such a strategy. If you can earn income through using systems and automated sales, you can have both time and money.

Access a free webinar here and learn the strategies of online selling.

Simple Affiliate System

A simple affiliate system can allow anyone to use paid marketing to send qualified leads into an email marketing campaign. Pre-made email follow ups are automatically sent out to your subscribers. You earn commissions based on products you sell through the system.

Of course using paid marketing means you’ll need to cover your costs when you do make a sale. This is much easier if you have a product range to sell, rather than a single product.

Single products like you might find on Amazon for example only pay you once. Plus they often pay peanuts too which means your potential for profit can limit your marketing strategy. It’s much more difficult to make a profit as an affiliate with low paid affiliate products using paid ads. But with a simple affiliate system which uses a product range you have multiple benefits:

Subscription affiliate products within the range pay out recurring commissions (on each sale) – making your business more viable immediately
High ticket items which offer huge value also pay out the most in commissions. One sale can bring in the equivalent amount of many thousands of small product sales.
A built in sales team help you with later sales in the product range. So you only need to refer the initial sale of an entry level product. The sales team helps close high value products to your existing customers – for which you receive commissions.

Simple Affiliate System – Why High Ticket?

High ticket items make an affiliate business much simpler for a beginner because it gives you more choice of marketing methods. With a low value product you might only make a few dollars in commission if you refer a sale. But with a high ticket product you can make a few thousand. This means you can more easily earn a profit when using paid marketing.

If you use low value products you might be forced into using marketing methods which are much slower and more time consuming. Blogging, video blogging and other organic marketing methods are cheap but not as fast or scalable as with paid marketing.

So many affiliates quit because they can’t get traction with their marketing strategy. Paid marketing is both fast, scalable and more reliable. But it can be expensive. To make an affiliate business easier, you need to overcome this barrier and one way of doing so is to use high ticket affiliate products which pay enough in commission to offset your advertising costs and still give you a profit. Subscription affiliate programs also offer this benefit of a recurring income from sales you generate. While standard affiliate products will only pay you once, so you need to continually make sales in order to be profitable.

Simple Affiliate System – Step By Step & “Done For You” Systems

A step by step modular process can also take out the hard graft for newbie affiliates who want systems to do the heavy lifting for them. Done for you affiliate systems offer benefits such as:

Step by step setup of email marketing system and product range
Ready made email follow ups
Push and click website setup – no need for technical knowhow
Affiliate link populated websites, complete with banners and links already coded to your unique affiliate code
Training and other resources

Access the step by step setup process through this link.

Step By Step Vs On Your Own

A step by step business system which offers benefits of setup and product range is far easier to use than if you go it alone as an affiliate.

Affiliates get all kinds of advice for building an affiliate business from scratch:

Build a niche website and rank on Google
Choose a topic you love and build an information website
Build an email list of subscribers and offer them value
Use paid marketing to build an email list
Use your YouTube channel and create regular videos
and so on…

While some of this advice can be helpful, as a beginner it can become very confusing going it alone and looking for free advice on the internet. There’s so much conflicting advice, you can spend years trying and still not get anywhere! By getting help and support, the journey towards building an income from affiliate marketing can be a lot smoother. Plus the technical side of things is largely taken care of if you use a done for your system. On your own there’s a lot more you’ll need to learn.

What’s Not Done For You?

In most simple affiliate systems there’s still much to do but a simple affiliate system should take out the harder elements of building an income online with affiliate marketing. These can be things such as the technical aspects of website building, for example, and the setup of email marketing messages. Once you have set up a simple affiliate system, you should have:

Landing pages to collect subscribers from
Email marketing autoresponder setup and pre-made marketing messages
A website which is pre-populated with your affiliate links
A product range you can profit from (links in your email and on your website etc)

What you then need to do is learn about how to market your business, which a good system will offer you training for. With a high ticket business setup, you should be looking to use paid marketing methods as these are much faster and more effective. Your ability to use theses will depend on the products in your marketing funnel and your “buy-in” level. If you invest more you will benefit from larger value sales with a bigger commission.

With a lower value product range, you may need to use other marketing methods to build your business such as blogging and other organic methods. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Summary

Affiliate marketing isn’t easy and it takes a lot more than most people realise to become successful with it. But if you’re committed to the journey and take the necessary steps anyone can do it. One of the main problems of affiliate marketing is that there’s so many different ways of doing it. This can be confusing if you’re new to it so it’s worth using a step by step system and blueprint which has already proven itself.

Paid marketing is much simpler, faster and more scalable than content marketing. If you want a simple affiliate business, use an affiliate business model which lets you more easily access the paid marketing platforms. A good model will include high ticket items and subscription products as this will give you a higher return on investment compared to other lower value affiliate products.

Access an all in one business system and training program here.

Biz Op

Are you looking for a “biz op” – business opportunity you can start from anywhere? There’s a few reasons why an online based business might be right for you. The positives are that you can work from anywhere; all you need is a laptop and internet connection. You can build your income around other work commitments and eventually replace an existing income from your online business.

However, on the downside, building an internet based business isn’t easy. You’ll need to commit to the journey for several months or even years before you can reap the rewards. Despite what some online “guru’s” suggest, the “easy money push button system” is a myth! You need to work to build an online business. However, more so now than ever, there are softwares and systems to make your life easier if you’re just venturing into entrepreneurialism for the first time.

You don’t need to be a coding expert to start with an online business. 20 years ago you needed a lot more know-how than you do today. So if you’re passionate about building an income from your laptop, it can be done by anyone; providing they are motivated enough to overcome the associated difficulties involved.

Biz Op – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing offers one of the simplest models of business opportunity around today. Anyone can become an affiliate just by joining an affiliate program and learning how to promote their affiliate links. Amazon, for example, is one of the best known and most popular affiliate programs.

By joining any affiliate program, you get access to your unique affiliate link which you can use to earn affiliate commissions. This is done through a number of different marketing strategies such as:

PPC – pay per click advertising
Email marketing
Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Social media marketing
etc.

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products but product promotion is key to making your own affiliate efforts viable as a long term and profitable business. As an affiliate this is your responsibility.

Biz Op – Different Affiliate Programs

There’s thousands of different business models available within the affiliate marketing business model itself, too! According to your choice in the various affiliate marketing business models, you can find it more or less difficult to make your business profitable.

For example, some products will only pay a very low level of commission. So when you refer a product you’ll find you only receive as little as 2% of the product’s value. Physical products tend to pay the least, while digital products pay much, much more; from 30-40% and even more in some cases.

Then there are subscription affiliate programs which pay recurring income on sales you have generated. These are a good idea for referral partners because each sale adds up to your overall monthly income. As you make more and more sales, you monthly income grows continually.

So, if you’re going to learn how to become an affiliate marketer, it’s worth investing in your education. Them more you understand about the business, the better able you are to use it to your benefit.

High ticket affiliate products offer much higher commissions too. With a high ticket product, you will typically earn $500+ on a single sale. Compared to a product valued at $100 on Amazon which only pays you 2% commission and you’ll see it pays to focus on promoting the higher valued affiliate products. See high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Biz Op – Affiliate Skills & Mindsets

As I said, anyone can become an affiliate just by joining an affiliate program. However, not all affiliates are successful and make their businesses profitable. In fact there’s a high drop out rate in this business. There’s several reasons for this:

Affiliate marketing is incredibly easy to start – ease of access means anyone can literally “give it a go”
Compared to brinks and mortar businesses affiliate marketing is super cheap – no products of your own needed, no staff or premises means you only need a laptop and internet connection to do it.
Most people have a laptop and internet connection
It looks like a good idea for most people – most people are dissatisfied with their lifestyle and/or job, so there’s a massive need for lifestyle change

However, most people aren’t entrepreneurial. Most are employees and this means they will bring their employee mindset with them to their affiliate businesses. Thinking entrepreneurially requires a different mindset to most people. The skills required for affiliate marketing success can be learned but it can take some time to break through and start seeing sales.

During the learning phase is where many affiliates quit. See affiliate marketing success rate.

Promotion Methods

There’s many ways to become successful at affiliate marketing but your two most important decisions are the products you promote and the marketing method/s you choose.

Blogging, email marketing, paid advertising, niche website building, social media marketing etc. are all methods of product promotion which affiliates use to get their message in front of prospective customers.

Some of these methods are faster than others. Paid marketing, for example is the faster method of marketing. If you’re busy, use paid marketing. Cheaper methods such as blogging and video blogging are much slower and more time consuming. So if you’re time rich, use content marketing. If you’re time poor use paid marketing. If you’re busy, use paid, if you’re poor: hustle!

However you choose to promote affiliate products, it’s important to keep learning and growing. You can access a video training series here which will explain some of the different types of products to sell and promotion methods you can use to start generating income online.