High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing

High ticket vs low ticket affiliate marketing, which is best? While many more people will be able to afford low ticket products, a high ticket item is worth much more than a low value one. In terms of commissions for affiliates then, selling a high ticket affiliate products will generally earn an affiliate at least $500. While selling a low value item will generally earn an affiliate less than $10. In this scenario, you would need to sell 50 times as many of the low value item to make the same amount; given a $10 commission versus a $500 commission.

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing

So the question is, is it going to be 50 times more difficult to sell the high value product compared to the low value one? The answer is of course no! In fact, once you know how to target your particular market audience as an affiliate, it should take no more effort to sell a high value item than a low one.

In addition, low value products often pay affiliates very low levels of commission too! Amazon’s affiliate commissions vary from around 3% to 10%. A 3% commission on a $100 product will only earn you $3 as an affiliate! To make a $3 commission worthwhile, you’re going to need to sell in huge volume. But with a high ticket product, you only need a few sales a month to make a great profit, depending on your marketing methods of course.

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing – Promotion Methods

With low ticket affiliate marketing products, it can very very difficult to use paid marketing methods and still turn a profit. Your margin for profit is incredibly low with a low value physical item, for example. Try and run a paid marketing campaign with a $3 commission product and you’re going to struggle. But if you had a high ticket item worth just $2000, and you have a 10% commission, for example, you would earn $200 per sale.

This gives you much more margin for a profit with paid ads. If you also factor in digital products, and larger value products, you can increase your level of commission dramatically. Digital products tend to pay much more than physical ones too – typically 30-40% compared to 5-10% for physical.

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing

If you’re promoting low value physical products, this severely limits your ability to grow your business quickly. You may need to use content marketing for your marketing strategy, which can take much longer than using paid advertising methods. See PPC vs Organic marketing.

High Ticket Vs Low Ticket Affiliate Marketing

Here’s an example of a high ticket affiliate product, The Helicycle:

The Helicycle

This product is available on the site Hammacher Schlemmer and affiliates get paid 8% of the sale value. This means on selling one of these bad boys you would earn $31,600!

Let’s compare this with a standard product you might find on the Amazon website:

gaming headphones

This product (a gaming headset) will fall into the category of digital software which pays 6% commission. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

Or it may even fall into the home entertainment category which pays even less – only 3%. But even at 6% commission on a sale of the gaming headset you would only earn around $1 on the sale – a tiny amount. So you would need to sell around 32000 items to make the same amount as a single sale of The Helicycle mentioned above.

Your Marketing Strategy

Of course you may think that people won’t be able to afford the Helicycle and it would be pointless marketing such a ridiculously expensive item? But remember that affiliate marketing has a global reach and people can and do purchase such items.

Your marketing strategy of course plays a part in whether you should use high or low value items in your product range. If you already have a popular blog which attracts an audience in the subject of golfing, for example, it’s hardly worth putting a Helicycle for sale on your golf website! People who are looking to buy a Helicycle, aren’t necessarily looking for information on golfing! Golf enthusiasts are going to be more interested in purchasing golf related merchandise from your blog, so that’s a more obvious choice of affiliate product to use for such as site.

See also how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet pdf for more details on knowing your audience and customer avatar.

Your marketing strategy will have a bearing on your choice of product and vice versa. With a low value product, you will be more limited in your marketing strategy. But if you’re using a high ticket product range, for example, you can more easily use paid marketing as your strategy and turn a profit. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Access a free video series here to learn more about the different affiliate products you can promote.

Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing

Which is better; a blog vs website for affiliate marketing? In a blog, traffic can be attracted through creating a lot of content. Search engines index the content and the site is found through the SERPS (search engine results pages).

The same can be true for a simple website, however, it generally won’t rank as well or for as many searches. A website alone is less powerful than a blog with thousands of articles on it because it attracts less attention. So generally a new affiliate will need to advertise their website in order to get visitors to find it.

This can be done very quickly if you’re prepared to pay for it, or more slowly by building a blog on your website and creating a lot of content. Platforms such as Google Adwords allows website owners to drive targeted traffic to them quickly, which can result in sales.

Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing
Microsoft Advertising platform is similar to the Google Ads, advertising platform. Both use search marketing to drive traffic to your site.

However, it can be expensive to drive traffic to a website, and if you’re unsure of your profitability this comes with more financial risk. (Although you can set a daily budget). Blogging on the other hand is cheap! You can create content over a longer period of time and this eventually will draw more and more traffic to your site for free. But this takes time and a lot of effort. So according to your own personal preferences and circumstances, it’s wise to choose a strategy of marketing which suits you.

Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing

A Google/Facebook compliant website can be set up for the specific purpose of advertising an affiliate product. This can be done fairly quickly and you can then send targeted (paid) traffic towards your site, in order to sell affiliate products. If you’re short on time, this solution is probably better than blogging for you.

However, to maximise the potential earning power of your website, it’s useful to choose an affiliate business model which can be used in conjunction with paid advertising. High ticket affiliate products are a good idea here because you can recover your advertising spend much more easily. With a low value offering, it can more difficult to make a profit. Subscription affiliate programs also offer the ability to make recurring income from each sale you make. This again will help you build more stability into an affiliate business more quickly.

niche blogging

With blogging, it can take several months before you see a good amount of traffic. In that time you’ll need to be creating regular content and uploading it to your site. The disadvantage of this is that it takes a long time to generate the same traction you could with paid marketing very quickly.

The advantage of creating content through blogging is that it can work for you passively once you have put the work in. This means your sales are 100% profit because you’re not paying to advertise. But this can take several months or even years of hard work, before you see anything for your efforts!

Blog Vs Website For Affiliate Marketing – Niche Websites

A niche website is one built around a specific subject or niche. This site Affiliate Marketing Mentors, for example has been built around that specific topic. A niche site can give you an advantage in that it is very focused. If you build a niche site in an uncompetitive niche, you have a lot more chance of ranking your site at the top of the search engines for your specific keywords.

This can be a neat way of attracting free traffic without spending such a long time building hundreds of blog posts. If you do it right, you can get your site ranking at the top of Google. This means free traffic can come quite quickly. However there’s no guarantees and if you’re choosing keywords in a competitive market, your chances are severely limited. See niche affiliate marketing website for more on this topic.

You can also use this same strategy when creating content for a blog. Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. What this means is that your published content has lower competition on the search engine results pages (SERPS) than shorter tail keywords. As such, you are much more likely to get your content ranking near the top, or at least on the first page of the search results. This means free traffic to your website.

Combining Content & Paid Marketing

You can of course do a little bit of both of these strategies, or all three:

  • Build a niche website
  • Create lots of content
  • Use paid marketing to increase your traffic (alongside your free traffic)

Depending on your situation and available time, you can choose your marketing strategy accordingly. A useful way to promote a blog is through using paid search traffic. Both Google Ads and Bing (Microsoft Ads) offer the ability to run a “dynamic” advert. This is an advertising campaign which uses existing content on your site/blog and shows ads appropriate to your available content. See more about dynamic search ads here.

pop up sfm

Whichever method of marketing you use to promote your affiliate product/s from a website, it’s useful to also use email marketing. The power of email marketing is that it allows you to retain your audience’s attention for much longer than is possible from a website alone.

On a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes at the most. Once they leave they are gone forever! If you offer something on your site which encourages them to sign up to your email list, then you can send them marketing messages by email for days, weeks and even months and years into the future!

Summary

A blog is a good idea if you have the time and inclination to create a lot of content on your website. It can give you free traffic if you stick at it long enough. This means when you make an affiliate sale, it’s 100% profit, disregarding the time you’ve put in. Plus, blog traffic gives you a passive income.

However, it can take months or years creating the content for this to work. During which time nothing much seems to be happening! With a website and through using paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much more quickly; especially if you use subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

If you have the time, you can of course do a little of both blogging and paid marketing. You can also build a niche website around specific keywords to attract the attention of the search engines with minimal effort. See niche affiliate marketing website.

Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate

There’s several ways you can improve ecommerce conversion rate. The most common thought is to increase website traffic, which of course is a factor. But you can also do other things such as improve the rate at which your visitors subscribe to your email list, for example.

By testing different offers on your website, you can determine whether one form is more appealing to your audience than another. You can also test and measure your landing pages. Cross testing is one of the best ways to improve your conversion rate; whether it is for a website opt in offer, a landing page or a sales page.

What conversion are you measuring? Are you converting website visitors to subscribers, or email subscribers to customers? Or are you trying to convert your website visitors directly into customers straight from your website? If it’s the latter, it may be worth building an email list if you haven’t already. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing if you don’t already have an email marketing service provider.

aweber - email marketing

Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Email Marketing

Converting website visitors into customers is much more difficult than converting email subscribers into customers – depending on the service you provide of course. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. After they leave your website, they are potentially gone forever!

A good method to increase your conversion rate therefore is to offer something of high value for free to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Once you have their email address, you can continue to follow up with them for weeks, months and even years! This can have a huge effect of your bottom line because you are able to maintain contact with potential customers long after they leave your website.

improve ecommerce conversion rate

To get them on your email list, offer something hugely valuable to them. This can be discounts, offers, freebies and information. Test and measure different offers and try out a number of different benefits and options. Over time you should find your cross testing shows a particular offer will convert more visitors into subscribers.

If you get 100 visitors to your website a day, you can easily increase the rate at which they opt in to your email list through testing different campaigns. This is often far easier than simply increasing your website traffic.

Cross testing can also be done across the board depending on the marketing you’re using:

  • Landing pages
  • Email follow ups
  • Websites
  • Opt in offers
  • Pop ups
  • etc.

Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Retargeting

Retargeting is a method of advertising where you show targeted advertising directly to those people who have already interacted with your business online. You can (very cheaply) show an advert to people who have left your website, for instance, or interacted with your channel.

This is not only a cheap but also very effective form of advertising because the audience has already showed an interest in your business. Therefore it’s a very targeted approach to increasing your website traffic and conversions.

target audience

You can also send them to a page on your website which is most appropriate to their previous actions. For example, if someone has left the checkout page of your website (without making a purchase), you can send them to a reengagement page/campaign.

Creating specific retargeting campaigns for individuals is a great way to automate a more relevant experience for people who have already been to your website, or taken some action.

Improve Ecommerce Conversion Rate – Benefits Not Features

Many ecommerce websites get their opt in offers wrong and focus on what their offer is, rather than what it can do for the customer! For example, an offer can list all the features of their amazing products but neglect to focus on the benefits.

In the online business niche for example, a marketer might focus on all their amazing features:

  • Push and play business systems (feature)
  • Step by step training (feature)
  • Done for your systems and websites (feature)

But this kind of messaging often neglects to focus on the one thing the customer cares about: WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?!

improve ecommerce conversion rate

A more benefit driven message might be:

  • Earn an income from your laptop (outcome)
  • Create more time and freedom in your life (outcome)
  • Escape your 9 to 5 job! (outcome)

This kind of message is more focused on the benefit of purchasing an online business, rather than the features which they offer. Customers don’t care about the features so it pays to focus on the benefits in your marketing methods: opt in offers, email marketing messages and advertising.

This one simple shift can dramatically increase your conversion rates in terms of traffic, leads and sales; even without more traffic.

Increase Advertising Spend

Of course more traffic should equal more sales, all things being equal. But if you’re not already converting website traffic into sales, more of the same won’t make a difference. It will only cost you more! So make sure your website is converting visitors into leads, and leads into sales before you increase your marketing budget.

increase advertising spend to increase traffic

You can increase your daily budget, or turn up your campaign and bid more for clicks. If you’re not already marketing with PPC (pay per click), this is a very fast and simple way to increase your website traffic. Google Adwords is a good place to start. Bing also have a similar advertising platform where you can show adverts based on your defined search criteria.

If you’re a blogger, you can also set a campaign for a dynamic advert. Dynamic adverts allow you to show your content based on search criteria which matches it. The advertising platform crawls your website and shows adverts suitable for your content to those people who are looking for it.

Targeted Content – Blogging

Blogging is a great way to increase your organic reach and attract a targeted audience. The content you create on your website can attract traffic for years to come, so it’s well worth doing if you have the time. Your particular content should be well thought out before creating it. Create content which is well targeted towards the kinds of people who are looking for your services/products.

niche blogging

That way, you will attract the people who are actively looking for what you offer. How to know your target market? The better you get to know who your target audience is, the more you can create the right content which will attract them to your website. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.

A simple blogging strategy is to find long tail keywords which offer low competition. That way, your content is more likely to show in the search engines. You should also make an effort to back link to your posts and share them as much as possible. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress for some free tools.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

You might also be leaving money on the table if you’re not focusing on your search engine optimisation. SEO is a useful tactic to raise the interest in your online content through organic methods.

improve ecommerce conversion rate

When your site is easily found on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, you’ll attract visitors to your website for free. It does help to have a lot of content on your site and many backlinks too. But you should also be aware of the keywords on your content and target specific searches according to the customers you want to attract.

Depending on your content, niche and the relative competition, SEO might be worth working on for more free traffic.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Products

High ticket affiliate marketing products can make a massive difference for affiliates. With a high ticket sale, you can earn many times what you’d get from a standard product. A typical physical product pays between 3% and 11% commission, for example.

So something valued at $100 would earn you $3-$11 on a sale.

But a high ticket product can be valued from $1000 to $100,000 (and above) and so the commissions are much higher! Even with physical products paying only 8% commission, a high ticket item sale can earn you tens of thousands!

Take this Helicycle, for example, which is available on the site Hammacher Schlemmer. At $395,000 affiliates can earn 8% commission which is $31,600 for a single sale. Imagine how many $100 Amazon products you would have to sell to make a similar amount! Thousands!

high ticket affiliate marketing products

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Products

So high ticket affiliate marketing products are a good idea for affiliates. If you’re going to all the trouble of becoming an affiliate, and promoting your products, why not promote those which pay the most? What can amount to the same amount of work can pay you $10 or $1000! So it makes sense to promote the high value items.

You might think that most people won’t buy a higher valued item such as the Helicycle mentioned above! While this is true, and many more people can afford a $100 item, you would need to sell over 3000 items at $100 to make the same as one sale of the Helicycle. So while selling a high ticket item might be a little more difficult than selling a low value item, it’s not going to be 3000 times more difficult!

Here’s another high ticket product – the submersible craft!

high ticket affiliate marketing products

Here’s another super high priced item which you can find on the site Hammacher Schlemmer again. A single sale can make you $24,000 at 8% commission.

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Products – Digital Products

Another thing to consider is choosing high ticket digital products. Since digital products pay much larger commissions than physical products, you can make considerably more per sale with a high ticket digital item.

high ticket affiliate marketing products

Online business tools and mentorship programs are some of the highest value affiliate programs you can promote. See SFM Digital Business System for one of the highest valued programs.

Coaching a mentoring programs offer huge value to customers because they can be life changing – helping entrepreneurs to build lifestyle businesses. The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program has a number of high, medium and low value products which you can promote as an affiliate.

Because they are digital products, you can earn some of the highest levels of commission available using their products and services. Visit the Six Figure Mentors main site here.

high value digital products

High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Products – Regal Assets

Regal Assets offers long retirement and investment plans including gold bullion and Gold IRA investment plans. Because of the average investment plan, even at a 3% commission rate, you can earn $3000 on a $100,000 investment plan.

regal assets

You can join their program here and see their main website here. Investors mostly purchase gold and silver in bulk from this company. The average gold investment ranges from $20,000 – $80,000. On a $20,000 investment you would earn $600 at 3%.

WP Engine

WP engine is a premium wordpress hosting service. All of their staff members are experts and you will get the best possible hosting service with WP engine. You can earn up to $7,500 for a referral with this program plus additional bonus commissions on your referrals.

For example 5 monthly sales would earn you a bonus commission of $100 on top of your basic commission. A basic referral will generally mean you earn $200 or the first monthly payment of a customer – whichever is greater. So, for example, if you referred a ‘monster’ client (with a massive budget) you could earn a whopping commission (up to $7,500).

There’s lots of benefits to promoting WP Engine. It’s a top end service though so you’ll need to target your audience appropriately. Not everyone wants (or needs) such a dedicated hosting service.

You can sign up as a WP Engine affiliate here. See the main WP Engine website here.

Colmex

Colmex offer a stocks, CFD and Forex (foreign exchange) trading service. They pay out 3% of deposits made into accounts referred by the affiliate. This means on a deposit of $10,000 you would earn $300. On a deposit of $30,000 you would earn $900 in commissions.

Commission on Individual ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’ orders

In addition to this you can also receive up to 25% of the commissions (made by Colmex) on individual trades made by your referred customers.

See Colmex main website here.

A Rotating Climbing Wall

Here’s another great high ticket affiliate product – the rotating climbing wall!

The climbing wall treadmill is a perfect training tool for rock climbing enthusiasts! With a price tag of nearly $10,000, it offers a cool $800 commission on a sale.

Summary

High ticket affiliate products can be a good idea if you’re an affiliate. As you can see, a single sale of a high ticket item can earn you a lot more than even hundreds of sales of a low value product. Of course your choice of product will depend on how you approach affiliate marketing and your individual marketing strategy. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products – see 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

See also best products to sell as an affiliate and what is high ticket affiliate marketing.

high ticket
More about high ticket items in this video series.

How To Scale Affiliate Marketing

If you’re wondering how to scale affiliate marketing you’re not alone. Many people get into affiliate marketing not to make just an extra income, but to build a massively successful and profitable business. It can be done with the right mindset, intention and support. You also need the right business model in order to build a scalable online business. See affiliate marketing business models.

Still, you do need to set the groundwork first, before you can scale up an online business. Unless you’re profitable, you could find yourself throwing money into a black hole! Paid marketing platforms will gladly take your money whether you’re profitable or not! So you also need to act with caution. For example if your business is giving you a return on investment (ROI) of just 5%, it might not be the right time to scale. But if your business is returning 50% (ROI), you’re in a much better position to scale up. A small variation in your ROI might mean you’re actually losing money if you’re only just profitable and you start to scale.

However, profit is what you really care about when it comes to scaling. A 5% ROI might only make you a small profit when using a tiny marketing budget, but if this profit relationship holds and you’re spending much more, you will keep earning 5% of your marketing budget – all things being equal.

The easiest way to scale an online business is through paid marketing. Simply increase your marketing budget on a campaign which is already profitable. You might lose some profit margin while doing this, so it’s important that your business is generating a regular and consistent profit before you do! You should also be generating enough consistent profit to be able to take up some slack in the system once you start scaling. Should your profit drop by 5-10% in the scaling process, how would it affect you?

How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Do More

If you’re not yet profitable, you need to start by making more sales. If you’re a content marketer this can take some time. Scaling up your business through content generation is much more difficult than if you’re paying for advertising. Since creating content takes time, and no piece of content guarantees a massive upsurge in traffic, content marketing is a bad way to scale up a business. But if that’s your path, keep going and keep generating new content. Just expect it to take much longer than with paid marketing.

You can add some paid marketing to get more people to an existing blog. One way to do this is with Google Adwords. Use the dynamic feature which crawls your blog. You can then generate adverts based on your content and send specific web based searches to your appropriate content.

Another way to scale up if you’re a content marketer is to focus on increasing conversions. You can double your conversion rate without creating double the content simply by testing different opt in options (to your email list). Do a split test across many website visitors and see which opt in campaign works the best. A small difference can make dramatic changes if you already have traffic. See increase conversion rate on your ecommerce website.

how to scale affiliate marketing

A good book to read is Grant Cardone’s The 10X Rule which suggests multiplying your efforts by ten to achieve a greater level of success.

To make your online business more scalable though, you ultimately need to make it profitable first, and add the element of paid marketing, which you can turn up very easily.

How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Slippage

Scaling your affiliate business involves taking a small campaign and increasing its volume, while maintaining its profitability. So if you’re not yet profitable, it definitely isn’t the right time to scale. Before scaling you should be seeing a consistent profit month after month. Make sure you maximise your ability to make the most from your campaign before scaling. This might involve collecting data and looking at your tracking to see if there’s any leakage of your business systems. Make sure everything is working really well in your advertising, email follow up and business systems.

You’ll want to be very sure your business works before increasing your budget. Otherwise a bad month can ruin your profits and when you’re spending much more in advertising budget, this can be fatal!

Example

Let’s say you’re earning 10% ROI and you spend $1000 a month. Your return is $1100 – so you’ve made $100! By increasing your budget to $10,000 a month, you would expect to make a ten fold increase, which is $1000! However, when you come to scale a campaign you’ll likely experience some slippage. This means your 10% ROI could fall to 5% or even less. However, in larger numbers you can see you can still be profitable.

Ideally you want your profit to be as high as possible to account for this slippage; which means you can lose some profit as you increase your marketing budget.

high ticket

The larger your budget increases by, the greater you put yourself at risk. So it’s wise to gradually increase your marketing budget over time, checking to see if everything still works in your business.

How To Scale Affiliate Marketing – Raising Your Bids & Cross Testing

If you’re running a successful paid marketing campaign, one of the quickest ways to scale up is through raising your bids. So if you’re currently paying 50 cents per click, increase it by 10% and see what happens. This should increase the amount of traffic you’re buying. You can also raise your daily budget on a marketing campaign.

You should also be testing and measuring your landing pages and email follow up to get your numbers right. With a low opt in rate on a landing page, you’ll spend more per opt in. Getting these numbers down is a good place to start before scaling. This means cross testing different landing pages, audiences and email follow ups to find the lowest cost customers.

Knowing your numbers is the best thing you can do before scaling up your advertising campaign. When you understand how much your average cost per customer is, and know your average value of a customer, you’re in a much better position to start increasing budget, knowing how profitable you are and will be.

More Ads

Not all advertising campaigns will be profitable. So it’s important to run many until you find one which works for you and is profitable. Once you do, you can run many more like it and expand the geographical areas which you advertising. Expand to other countries which you’re not currently using, making sure language isn’t a barrier, of course. If your offer is available globally, take advantage of this by placing your advertising globally as well.

Retargeting

Retargeting is a great way to increase traffic to your business. With retargeting, you use a marketing platform to find customers who have already visited your website/YouTube channel. This is super targeted traffic because they’ve already found you online before, so this shows they have an interest in what you’re selling. It’s also super cheap to do retargeting too.

Retargeting can be done with banner ads or video. Test a retargeting campaign with a low budget first, before considering scaling. Make sure you are tracking all your sales too, so you know whether it’s profitable, before increasing the budget.

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF

Welcome to my affiliate marketing checklist pdf article. Having an affiliate marketing checklist can help you make sense of your affiliate journey. Affiliate marketing can be pretty daunting when you’re starting out and there’s many pitfalls too. So by being prepared you can hopefully avoid most of them. “Fail to plan and you plan to fail”, or so the saying goes!

By using an affiliate marketing checklist, you can see the journey you need to take beforehand. This can help you to get focused on the step you’re taking in the moment and help you avoid falling into overwhelm. Don’t try and do everything all at once. Just take one step at a time.

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF- #1 Product/s

Some affiliates will start with their products, and others with their marketing strategy. But when you know the product you will be selling, it will help you immensely. Having a product in your mind can give you ideas for your marketing strategy too.

If you don’t have a product in mind which you want to sell, you can join a training course which will help you decide. If you enjoy the course and get value form it, you can also promote it yourself as an affiliate. This is where I started out, knowing nothing about affiliate marketing. I simply joined a course and learned how to promote it.

You can access a step by step training resource here. This course will also walk you through affiliate marketing step by step, at a pace which suits you.

Access a step by step training resource and online business system you can use. Click here.

Choice Of Product

Your choice of product is pretty important and it’s wise to choose something with longevity. The ‘here today gone tomorrow” type of product isn’t what you want to promote because it can take some time to get your marketing going. If you choose a product which may be gone in a year, you can waste a lot of time for nothing, promoting something which doesn’t stand the test of time!

An example of a high ticket affiliate product – selling for $300,000!

It’s also worth looking at the different types of products you can promote as an affiliate. High ticket and digital products pay the most in terms of commission. Subscription affiliate products are also worth looking at because you can make ongoing recurring commissions from them, so you can earn more from the same amount of work as if you have promoted low value products. See best products to sell as an affiliate.

Ideally choose products you highly value yourself. When it comes to marketing your products, you will be spending a lot of time either creating content or describing the value of your products, depending on what you choose. So choosing a product or products which you align with can give you a major head start. It’s so much easier to promote something you genuinely value and appreciate yourself, than something you don’t believe in or care about! Plus your integrity, (or lack of it) will shine through in your marketing efforts – one way or another!

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF- #2 Marketing

Once you’ve chosen which affiliate products to promote, you’ll need to choose a method with which to promote them. Like I mentioned earlier, you can start out with your promotion method, and choose products later. This might suit someone with a passion blog for example. If you’re passionate about a certain topic, it makes sense to use that passion in your marketing.

niche blogging

Blogging can be a great form of marketing for someone who is passionate about their topic. It’s a long term strategy though so you should expect to maintain an output of content for several months or even years to make it pay.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is definitely something you should use to promote affiliate products, whatever other form of advertising you use. With email marketing, you build an email list of subscribers and communicate your marketing message to them over a long period of time. Sometimes I get sales coming in from my email list even years after someone has subscribed to it! See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing, or click on the image below to access a free email marketing software.

aweber

There’s many ways you can market your affiliate products and the method you choose will depend on your own particular situation and circumstance. If, for example you are working full time in a busy job, you may want to use paid marketing. But if you have plenty of time to create content, you may want to choose blogging or video blogging as your promotion method.

See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

With paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much more quickly than with content marketing (e.g. blogging). However, with paid marketing you put money at risk rather than your time. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content marketing too, so it can help you grow a bigger audience faster. See PPC vs organic marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Checklist PDF – #3 Mindset

Your mindset is one of the most important things you can work on as an affiliate. As you get better and start generating affiliate sales, it will be your own attitudes and mindsets which hold you back. You can’t grow a business beyond the thoughts you have about it. This means that unless you’re growing, and expanding your awareness of limiting ideas which you carry, your ideas, expectations and limits will naturally show in your business.

Successful affiliates therefore are often found to be fervent believers in self development and focus on improving their mindsets.

affiliate marketing checklist

You can do this by reading books on motivation and mindset (see motivational books free pdf downloads). You can also join webinars and seminars led by successful affiliates and access mentors and coaches to help you. (Do that through this online training resource).

Affiliate Marketing Checklist – #4 Tracking

You can’t change something you’re not aware of. If you want to lose weight, for example, you need to be aware of your dietary and exercise habits. Only then can you make the appropriate changes – through measuring what you do differently! The same holds true to affiliate marketing and it is tracking which is the measurement of your affiliate activities.

In the early days of being an affiliate, I rushed headlong into actions which didn’t amount to much. So I assumed affiliate marketing didn’t work! I was ruled by my attitudes and habits, but I didn’t record what I did, or measure the outcomes.

affiliate marketing checklist

Initially you should measure your activities and track your traffic, leads and sales. Over time, as you gather more data, you can use what you have learned to focus your time on the most productive activities. You simply won’t know what this is if you don’t use tracking to record meaningful events in your affiliate business. So it’s a good idea to make good habits of putting tracking in place in the early days of being an affiliate.

#5 – Failing

Before succeeding with affiliate marketing you much first fail! You’ve got to fail at getting traffic in order to know how to get traffic. You need to fail at building an email list before you can know how to build an email list. You need to fail at getting sales before you eventually make a sale! A common term for failing in affiliate marketing is failing forwards!

Just like a toddler who is learning how to walk must fall down many times, affiliates need to put themselves out there and learn how to stand up again and again. This is tough, especially at first. Affiliates who succeed have failed many times, so failure is the path to success. You probably won’t start out hitting a home run every time you start a marketing campaign. Or get a blog post going viral after only writing a single blog post. But by making mistakes, putting yourself out there and failing many times you’ll learn perseverance and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work for you.

affiliate marketing checklist

Tis can be tough because you’ll need to do a lot in order to achieve a little at first. But over time, you can learn which actions produced the best outcomes for you consistently. Without consistent effort and “feedback”, you will never gain the necessary experience to move your affiliate business forwards. See failure as feedback and keep learning from your feedback. Failing in affiliate marketing is only feedback. You only fail when you quit, so make a decision never to quit! If you haven’t failed at affiliate marketing, you haven’t tried!

Summary

So that’s my affiliate marketing checklist pdf. Depending on your route as an affiliate marketer, there can of course be many more steps. Here’s a quick recap of what’s been covered:

  • Products – find products you love and want to promote. If you find a product you really value, it will come across in your marketing and you’re more likely to sustain the necessary effort require in its promotion.
  • Marketing Method – There’s many ways to promote affiliate products. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Find a single strategy you can get behind, build on and stick to it until it’s working for you.
  • Mindset – Affiliate marketing is a business which can produce spectacular results. But it can also be very difficult. Your mindset is the driving force behind all of your actions and how you think about your online business is intricately tied up with your levels of effort, the things you do and the results you attain. Work on your mindset and keep working on it! Your affiliate business can’t grow beyond the level of thinking you bring to it! Your thinking is the glass ceiling of your business!
  • Tracking – Tracking is the eyes and ears of your affiliate business. Without awareness of something, you can’t improve on it. Tracking lets you see what works and what isn’t working in your affiliate business. So make sure you set up tracking so you know where traffic, leads and sales have come from.
  • Failing – “Failing forwards” means making those necessary steps in order to put yourself in a learning environment. Without “failures” you’ll never experience success. Failures lead to successes because you can learn from them. A toddler never stops learning how to walk even after a 1000 falls. The same should be true of your affiliate business.

Skills Required For Affiliate Marketing

What are the skills required for affiliate marketing? Affiliates have all kinds of skills and as you persevere with your affiliate business you can expect to add to your skill and knowledge base over time. In general, affiliates will need to be good learners. They should know what drives affiliate sales and how to target their audience. Good affiliates are good communicators and have learned how to drive website traffic in large numbers. This can be done is a variety of ways including paid marketing, blogging, content creation and social media marketing.

affiliate marketing skills

The main skill of an affiliate is marketing. Marketing can be said to be a little different from simply advertising. Advertising is putting up adverts. Marketing is communicating through advertising. A good affiliate is a good communicator who is able to reach a large audience through their marketing messages.

This can involve email marketing messages, blog posts, video marketing or any other form of advertising. You don’t have to be an expert in all these marketing strategies. It’s a good idea to focus on one area you can get really good at, at least initially.

Skills Required For Affiliate Marketing – Technical Knowledge?

Are you afraid of the technical skills you might need to set up websites, and run advertising campaigns? This fear is largely unfounded because software and technology has eliminated many of the technical aspects needed to build an online business. Twenty years ago this was a very different story; affiliates needed to be able to use code to build websites. Nowadays they can use drag and drop software and have a website built in a few clicks of their mouse!

skills required for affiliate marketing

There are some technical aspects to being an affiliate, of course. Affiliates need to run advertising campaigns, track their sales and use data to understand how to improve their marketing methods. But these things can be learned by joining a training program which walks you through the process step by step. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Skills Required For Affiliate Marketing – Self Reliance

As an affiliate you’re effectively a “solopreneur” – an entrepreneur who is working by themselves. As such, it’s useful if you have the skill of self reliance. Self reliant people can solve their own problems and find information off their own back. They are good at working by themselves and are self motivated. If you need a lot of constant support and reassurance, then affiliate marketing might not be right for you.

skills required for affiliate marketing

You can still find help and support, but your affiliate journey will be a lot slower if you need to ask someone for help every time you encounter a problem or have a setback. To move faster as an affiliate you should be good at doing your own research and solving your own problems.

Entrepreneurs are self motivated and since affiliate marketing is a performance based business, it will serve you to be highly motivated, self sufficient and self reliant.

Entrepreneurial

Affiliates are effectively entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial journey has many twists and turns and there are great risks and great rewards! Not everyone is right for entrepreneurial life though. As an affiliate you are effectively in business for yourself. If you don’t make any sales as an affiliate, you don’t earn any money! Affiliate marketing isn’t therefore for the faint of heart. If you’re used to a regular salary, going into business for yourself is quite different. There’s no guarantees in affiliate marketing.

This means you need to take 100% responsibility for your actions – both your successes and “failures” are learning experiences which can be used for growth or to justify quitting! A huge percentage of affiliate marketers drop out and the affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high at around 95%.

To become successful as an affiliate then, you need to be in the small percentage of those who don’t quit. This portion of affiliates experiences the same as those who quit – a fair amount of struggle and adversity. They just look at those experiences differently and learn from them instead of giving up!

Having a strong desire to succeed, a long term vision and ability to learn from adversity will serve you well.

If you’re serious about becoming an affiliate, access a free video series here.

Failing Forwards

Most affiliates will learn from the things they do, not from what they know theoretically. The fastest way to learn the skills of affiliate marketing is by failing a lot! By “failing” I mean doing the things which affiliates do:

  • Running adverts
  • Blogging
  • Uploading content
  • Learning video marketing
  • Using social media
  • etc.
high ticket

Only by doing can you get first hand knowledge of what actually works! There is of course a time period where you will be watching videos and learning some new things. Initially you’ll be spending 90% of your time learning: watching videos, attending webinars etc. Once you have learned some skills it’s vitally important not to get stuck in “learning mode”. You need to switch at this point to implementing those skills you have learned.

It’s easy to feel as though you’re progressing while watching videos and attending webinars. But most of your actual learning as an affiliate will come from your own trials and tribulations. Without getting your feet wet, you’ll likely fall into one of the many affiliate traps:

  • Getting stuck in learning mode – watching endless videos
  • Jumping from one course to another – looking for the easy option (aka shiny object syndrome)
  • Wasting time on fruitless activities – being a busy fool

Time Management

Time management is also a useful skill for affiliate marketers. You can’t really control time, only the actions you take in any given day. So making a priority of spending your time on the most important activities is pretty vital for your success. One way to help you do this is to create a daily to do list and prioritise your actions according to importance.

It’s easy to gravitate towards those activities which you find more pleasing and enjoyable. But the chances are strong that those actions are the least important ones! The difficult tasks are often the ones you will avoid or put off. Holding yourself accountable to those tasks you need to do, and not those you like to do is important if you are to move forwards.

Solution Oriented

A good affiliate is solution oriented. Unless you’re solution oriented, you will likely find problems will phase you. You might even let a technical issue stop you in your tracks. To succeed as an affiliate you will need to overcome problems. This means personal growth is pretty important to your success online.

Many affiliates will quit when they run into a small problem because they aren’t prepared to find answers for themselves. It’s easier to quit than to be resourceful and find your own answers. This is one reason so many affiliates quit – 95% in fact! They allow small problems to become big problems and they see them as insurmountable. When you’re solution oriented, no problem will stop you from achieving your longer terms goal of affiliate success.

An interest in personal development can help you to stay focused and grow into the person you need to be in order to succeed. If you don’t grow alongside your business, chances are good than a small technical issue will throw you into a bad mood, which can ultimately destroy your best intentions! It spirals out of control and before you know it you’ve completely given up on your business and your dreams!

Summary

Anyone can learn the skills required to become successful as an affiliate. It’s not easy though and you should expect to work at it for some time before you start making regular sales. Being consistent and finding a strategy you can work on over the longer term will help you immensely.

If you are thinking of just “giving it a go” affiliate marketing might not be for you. It takes a lot more than most people think to become successful as an affiliate marketer.

For more information access a free video training series here.

Bloggers Block

If you’re a blogger like me, you’ve probably experienced bloggers block at some point or another. It’s tough keeping up your blogging indefinitely. So occasionally you’ll need some time out to refresh your mind and give yourself some new experiences to regain your inspiration. Otherwise, blogging can become a drag. What’s the point in being a blogger, if it becomes like a 9 to 5 job which you hate?! The point is, blogging should be fun!

When it gets like this, you’ll lose momentum and start questioning yourself and whether it’s worth carrying on! Before you get into this downward cycle, it’s worth noticing it happening and taking some action. Regroup, step away, get some exercise or find some new inspiration.

bloggers block

If you keep pushing when the inspiration just isn’t there, you’ll get more and more frustrated. So it’s worth having some strategies to implement when you realise that your inspiration is waning. The first step is to notice your state of mind change. If you’re no longer in inspiration mode, you can shift into frustration and procrastination mode pretty quickly.

So it’s useful to become more aware of when you’re positive and inspired and when you’re demoralised and uninspired. Being aware of your cycles is half of the battle. Once you become aware of your state of mind, you can use your “up” times for writing, and your “down” times for “strategic planning”, reading or just doing whatever feels good and puts you in a better state of being.

Bloggers Block – Your “Perfect” State

I find my perfect state for writing is when I’m inspired to write. The more I write, the more easily I can find myself in the zone! But oftentimes, I find myself in a frustrated state, questioning whether I should even bother. I ask myself questions which undermine my confidence and I get “stuck”, feeling like I have nothing to offer through my blogging.

When I get in this place, blogging become almost impossible. I doubt every word I write and so nothing much happens. What helps the most is to acknowledge that I’m simply not in the right mindset to start writing when this happens. To shift your vibe, you can take some exercise, go outside, read a book or do whatever works for you. But it’s useful not to keep focusing on those negatives which only exacerbates the situation and keeps you stuck. Forgetting about it and coming back when you have shifted your state can really be beneficial.

A good book about altering your state of mind is Esther and Jerry Hick’s Ask And It Is Given. The book includes a number of exercises which can help you shift up the emotional scale through the various states of mind.

Bloggers Block – Use Downtime For Planning

Another strategy I find helpful is to use the frustrated moments to switch activities and do something else. This could be planning your blog posts, doing keyword research and strategising about the bigger picture and what you want from blogging in the first place.

Sometimes you have to trust your unconscious mind is helping you by placing a mental block in front of you. Why would it do this? Perhaps it is wiser than you are and is helping you look at things differently? Are you missing something? Are you inspired by your chosen topic?

high ticket

If not perhaps you can find another topic or subject to blog about. I find that some topics I write about become very difficult if I’m conflicted about the topic, or don’t believe I can do the subject justice. So I will leave these “difficult” posts for another time when I can be “unstuck” about them and blog freely and naturally.

Another strategy I use is to research my blog topic before hand. Especially if it feels like a difficult topic for me. I’ll spend a few hours looking at other blog posts which have written similar articles.

Before starting this article I was looking at a couple of keyword ideas to write about. But I was completely stuck and it just didn’t feel right! Low and behold I found a topic I was experiencing in the moment and it felt more congruent to write about something I intuitively knew about, rather than a tough topic which I was struggling with.

Bloggers Block – Stop Being So Needy!

Bloggers block comes to me when I feel I “must” write something, even when I’m not particularly inspired or interested. But my posts will definitely suffer when I force a blog post I’m just not feeling!

Also, the process of blogging is one I’ve chosen because I generally enjoy the process. So when it doesn’t feel right, I give myself some time off!

The neediness of my mental state will often determine whether I enjoy writing a post or detest it! No one’s forcing you to write a blog post, so stop being so hard on yourself and let yourself off the hook when it isn’t flowing!

Instead, prioritise the times when you feel inspired and have something to say which you’re genuinely inspired and interested by.

That way, blogging will become a joy and not a chore! I wish I could take my own advice here more!

Exercise & Gratitude

Blogging should be a great way to spend your time. But if you’re not enjoying writing, perhaps you’ve bitten off too much for the state (of mind) you’re currently in? I used to get so worked up when I started blogging. I would wind myself into a frenzy!

But when I’m calm and relaxed, and in a good state, ideas flow much more easily. A quick way of altering your state is to take some exercise. Hard cardiovascular exercise is the best so I’ve taken up running which helps me stay in the flow. Weight lifting is also a great way to change your mental state quickly.

You can also start writing a gratitude diary which helps you shift your mental state to a more positive one. When you’re very static physically, it’s easy to get static mentally too. Move around and change your state. The more you push against the state of procrastination, the more you compound the issue. Find a strategy which means you can unplug your mind from the task at hand.

Napping & Thomas Edison

Napping is great for ideas and if you’re a blogger, and have the time I highly recommend it. Thomas Edison was famous for his napping and he used to nap in a chair. He famously held steel balls in his hands when napping. As he fell asleep, he would release his grip.

The balls would fall to the metal saucers he had placed beneath them, and wake him up. The hypnagogic state which Edison was getting himself into is the stage before sleep, in a “twilight state” in between waking and sleeping. During hypnagogia, the brainwaves are typically alpha-theta, meaning that thinking patterns are usually different compared to full wakefulness.

A statue of Thomas Edison holding his steel ball

When you are in a frustrated state of mind, think of Edison who attributed many of his inventions with this practice. Upon waking, Edison would immediately grab a notebook and pen and start writing ideas he had while in this state.

Summary

There’s nothing worse than getting stuck with your blogging. You want progress but are stuck in a frustrated state, which keeps you stuck. The best thing you can do is acknowledge this state and step away. Changing your state is the priority. The more you push against it, the worse it gets. You can switch state by changing your habits, taking more exercise, starting a gratitude diary and taking regular naps!

Find new inspiration, talk to different people, step outside of your current circle. Read inspiring books and use other bloggers content for ideas. If all else fails, come back another day when you’re feeling it! Make sure you can write when you’re inspired and when you feel stuck, do something else!

See also content ideas for blogging.

Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s several drawbacks to affiliate marketing despite it having several advantages. Affiliate marketing can give you independent income, allow you to travel and work from anywhere. It can free you from a job, a boss and a commute. We’re all pretty familiar with the sales pitch of affiliate marketing – it’s great and can give you a huge amount of freedom! But what are the drawbacks of becoming an affiliate? What about the downsides?

beginners guide to affiliate marketing

From a business point of view and having an affiliate program of your own, there’s fewer downsides. Businesses use affiliates as a form of cheap advertising. When an affiliate makes a sale, the business pays them a commission. They only pay when a sale is made, so the only real downside from a business owner’s point of view is recruiting good affiliates who can help drive the business/product.

The affiliates themselves take all the risk, though. So the downside from their point of view is risk: risk of time spent or capital or both. Both without the assurance that you’ll even sell anything! Many affiliates will quit and there’s only a small percentage of affiliates who actually go on to make it their full time living. See affiliate marketing success rate.

Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Risk

So that’s a pretty big drawback. You can spend heaps of time and money on learning and studying affiliate marketing. And you can spend a heap of cash promoting affiliate products, too. Nothing is guaranteed after all this investment. You could just end up out of pocket. All this time and money could have been spent elsewhere and you will have saved yourself a whole heap of trouble!

drawbacks of affiliate marketing
See Affstat full 2016 affiliate marketing benchmark report here.

Affiliates are entrepreneurial and take on board this rick because they believe in themselves and want something more than the standard nine to five employment can give them. Affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to become self employed and earn an independent income from the internet. This is an attractive proposition for many, but most simply won’t make it work for them. In fact 95% of newbie affiliates will drop out and only 5% go on to make affiliate marketing their source of income.

The risk involved and the commitment needed to become successful as an affiliate are huge. Without capital to invest you put yourself at a much greater disadvantage too. If you go the cheap route to making money as an affiliate, it will take much more time and effort to make an impact because you’re relying on cheaper and free advertising methods such as blogging and social media.

Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Competition, Time, Money

There’s huge competition in the affiliate marketing space too. If you choose a competitive niche to build a blog in, for example, you could have set yourself up for failure. It can take years before you get traction from a blog in a competitive niche. Even in a less competitive niche, it will take a lot of commitment to make an affiliate marketing website profitable.

With paid marketing you can get traction much more quickly. But you’ll need a high ticket business model to compete with the “big boys” who are spending thousands every day on YouTube and Facebook. This isn’t cheap and then you’ll also need to spend money on your advertising.

Most of an advertising budget will disappear without trace before you get traction too. 80% of adverts simply won’t work so you’ll need to spend some time testing and measuring campaigns to see which ones are profitable and which ones don’t work! This is all time and money and if either is in short supply it can all be very frustrating!

Confusion

When you start out as an affiliate, you’re bound to make many mistakes. It’s an exciting prospect earning money from the internet and your first sale is a good milestone to base your enthusiasm around. But when this doesn’t happen right away, this can get frustrating. Disappointment doesn’t generally lead to more productive activity. In reality it can lead to disillusionment and frustration, which only fuels the fire for more procrastination.

drawbacks of affiliate marketing

This means you become less effective the more hurdles you bump up against. Affiliates need to be self motivated and self reliant. It’s tough getting 1 to 1 affiliate coaching, and help and support, especially if you’re on a budget. Initial passion and motivation can quickly turn into disappointment and frustration. You need to learn strategies to keep fuelling your desire to succeed with affiliate marketing.

Drawbacks Of Affiliate Marketing – Doubt & Fear

Affiliate marketing can provide a passive income, make no mistake. But this will be after having spent considerable time and effort in building your online business. If you’re juggling family and a full time job, you need to make time for your affiliate business. If you don’t commit, your chances of success are considerably lessened. You can of course use paid marketing rather than content marketing, which will considerably speed up the process. But again this is a commitment.

Without positive results in your affiliate endeavours though, you’re basing your affiliate assumptions on the advice of others – often those who are benefitting from your participation! When results aren’t forthcoming, it can be easy to become disillusioned. How can you promote and sell something you don’t believe in yourself? This is a catch 22 situation! If you’re sceptical this only hinders your progress. Your doubts and fears can eventually cause you to give up entirely on your affiliate business.

Summary

There’s many drawbacks of affiliate marketing, as you can see. But it pays to look to the positive if you’re looking for a genuine way to earn an independent income through the internet. Affiliate marketing can be a great source of income – either full time or part time. Depending on your particular situation and available time and budget, it may or may not be the answer. Like any self employed venture, not everyone will be successful. The success rate of affiliate marketing is around 5%. See also advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing.

henry ford

If you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing, checkout a free video series here to learn more.

Affiliate Marketing Can You Make Money?

Affiliate marketing – can you make money from it? The short answer is yes, anyone can make money from affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which affiliates refer customers to products and services online. Not every would-be affiliate is successful though and something like 95% of newbie affiliates drop out. See affiliate marketing success rate. That means that only 5% of affiliates actually make money and stay in the game. Yes, only 5%!

high ticket affiliate marketing can you make money
High ticket affiliate marketing gives you much larger commissions than the average product

But affiliate marketing is a very easy thing to get into, and not such an easy thing to become successful at. As businesses go, affiliate marketing is a very cheap business model. Unlike a bricks and mortar business, the barriers to entry are incredibly low. This might explain the high drop out rate. Pretty much anyone can “give it a go”. See also traditional vs e-commerce business.

Yes anyone can give it a go, but not everyone finds affiliate marketing to be as easy and straight forward as they had imagined, or hoped. It would be great if everyone could easily start an affiliate business and have huge success without a lot of hard work. But that isn’t the reality of it! In reality many affiliates will struggle and fail. The ones who use those “failures” as feedback, are the ones who eventually make it work for them.

Affiliate Marketing Can You Make Money?

Making money from affiliate marketing is done by successfully referring customers to products online through your unique affiliate links. The links are tracked back to you and you’re rewarded for the referral. But doing this successfully does take some getting used to. In the early stages of becoming an affiliate there’s a lot to learn. You need to understand how to attract an audience in order to promote products to them. This is where many would-be affiliates get into trouble.

The online space is pretty competitive and there’s millions of other affiliates who are also promoting products and services online. Despite their being many ways to reach your potential customers, this still means there’s huge competition. There’s various ways you can promote affiliate products but you’ll need to find an audience through the various promotion methods:

  • Blogging
  • Video blogging – v’logging
  • Paid marketing (Pay per click)
  • Social media
  • SEO – search engine optimisation
  • Email marketing – list building
  • Off line marketing methods
  • Niche websites
  • Etc.

Affiliate Marketing Can You Make Money – List Building

Most affiliates have an email list of subscribers who they promote their affiliate links to. An email list is a list of people who have signed up to a particular service in order to get some information about a certain topic. By giving value to subscribers and building trust through sending regular emails, affiliates earn money by referring affiliate products which are related to their topic of interest.

So for example if you’re selling a Yoga training course, you could offer free Yoga videos through your email list. People sign up to your list, and you promote a Yoga course while offering useful and free information about Yoga through your email messages.

In the beginning, your list will be very small. As such, it’s much more difficult to build a steady income from selling products to your subscribers. But as your list grows to more and more subscribers, you should see some sales coming in. Initially too, affiliates are less aware of the things they need to do in order to become successful. But, over time their marketing efforts are rewarded by better knowledge and more influence. Their list grows and they get better at communicating their value to their audience.

During this interim time of learning about affiliate marketing, many affiliates will get frustrated and quit. But if you can see this time as a learning and growing period, you’re much more likely to succeed. Success isn’t guaranteed in any business and affiliate marketing is no different. But you can make money in it if you commit to staying the course and choose never to quit!

Summary

Yes you can make money with affiliate marketing. But it’s not easy, especially not at first. Expect to work at affiliate marketing for several months/years before you can expect a regular income. Initially you’ll be spending time learning and implementing new skills. Your email list will be small so you won’t have the success of a long term affiliate who has built their list into the tens of thousands of subscribers, for example.

If you’re a content creator, it takes time to create and promote your content. The fastest way to do affiliate marketing is with using paid marketing, building an email list and promoting high value products through a high ticket business model.

Slower and cheaper methods include blogging and video blogging, for example. If you already have a website with traffic, you can quickly monetise by finding appropriate affiliate products and listing them on your website and promoting through your email list. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to get started building an email list.

For more on affiliate marketing access a free video series here.