AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What To Do When Your Affiliate Business Isn’t Working

When your affiliate business isn’t working, it’s easy to throw in the towel. In fact around 95% of affiliate marketers do this. But there’s two ways to look at things when your affiliate business isn’t working. You can either throw up your hands and say “affiliate marketing just doesn’t work“. Or you can ask yourself whether you’re the problem!

“Am I the problem?” is the best way to look at it because it is empowering. If you’re the problem, you can do something to fix it! But if ‘affiliate marketing’ is the problem, you can’t fix that – because that’s the business model you’re using!

Taking 100% responsibility for your online business is the best way to make change possible. There’s a number of subtle ways in which your own mind can deceive you here. You can blame your lack of funds, your lack of training and understanding and so on. But ultimately, blame is of no use. It’s only disempowering, and it only serves to defer responsibility away from yourself. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which you only get paid when you sell something online through your affiliate link.

If you don’t do that, you don’t get paid. So your job as an affiliate is to figure out how to make those sales, whatever that means, and however you do it.

What To Do When Your Affiliate Business Isn’t Working – Fixing “You”

So the first thing you should do if you’re struggling to make money with affiliate marketing is look at “you”. Sometimes this means going back to the drawing board and getting more help and support. But sometimes it means re-evaluating your priorities and goals. If you’re carrying disempowering beliefs and ideas around, such as a victim mindset, entitlement attitude or you’re looking for excuses, that’s a good place to start. Those ideas need to change to more empowering mindsets, or you’ll keep running into the same problems again and again.

In yesterday’s post I talked about intention setting and goals and I think this is a crucial part of success with affiliate marketing. Without a target to aim for, how are you going to “hit” it? You might have some vague idea about what success means to you in your affiliate business, but if it’s vague you won’t know when you’ve arrived. You need a tangible goal and to communicate this idea to your subconscious mind on a regular basis.

This is done through using mantras, visualising and communicating the ideas of your intention to your subconscious mind. You are in effect training your mind to focus on the outcome you want. When you do this well, you’ll come up with ideas and insights you never before thought of.

Your intention must be strong to survive the battlefield of difficulties within the affiliate marketing space. There’s no room for uncertainty and doubt. The smallest problem is enough to kill your dreams if you’re full of scepticism and doubt. But if you fill your mind with positivity and create a strong, powerful intention, those same problems will only seem like molehills, not mountains.

See my post on focus and inspiration and watch the video in it, too.

When Your Affiliate Business Isn’t Working – Something Different

If you’ve been doing the same things over and over, and expecting a different result, perhaps it’s time to do something different.

Einstein is often cited as having said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

With affiliate marketing there may be an element of repetition which is necessary, especially if you’re a content creator, for example. But if you’ve been doing the same things for months, or even years, perhaps it’s worth trying something new. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and sometimes it’s worth shaking things up a bit if you feel like you’re getting nowhere!

I switched to using paid marketing a few years back and had some amazing results with YouTube, for example. Up till then, I was expecting too much from my blogging which only brought in sporadic affiliate sales.

Where’s Your Focus

For a long time, I was focusing on those who were far ahead of me in terms of earnings. While this can be inspirational and helpful (if they’re a mentor, for example), it can also lead you to doubt yourself and your particular “place” on the affiliate journey.

I would look at (and follow) affiliates who were earning tens of thousands a month, and then by comparison, feel doubtful at my modest successes. Focusing on the mountain peak ahead of you, and fuelling your mind with doubt and scepticism is not going to help you.

It’s useful to zoom in and zoom out of timeframes – looking at both your long term goals and the short term productive steps you can take. Use your long term goals as inspiration (spiritual fuel) and the short term steps as your daily routine. Unless you get both these on track, it’s easy to fail before you start because you have fuelled your mind with doubt and feelings of not being good enough. Hence, you fall back into scepticism and inaction, where nothing happens.

Summary

So, what to do when your affiliate business isn’t working? First, take stock of where you are at. How high is your belief in your ability to earn with affiliate marketing? Mark yourself between 1 and 10, where 1 is you have no belief and 10 means you’re absolutely buzzing with excitement at the thought!

If you don’t score a 10, you should spend some time fixing “you”. Your beliefs, intentions and goals are the “spiritual fuel” of your affiliate journey. Without fuel “it” won’t go anywhere because you’re the driver!

You also need a plan and some physical action steps. All motivation and inspiration won’t take you anywhere without action. If you’ve been trying something for some time and still aren’t getting anywhere, try something else. Reinvest in yourself and get some more training. Start again at the beginning if you need to. Take 100% responsibility for your results and accept that you are in charge.

Look at your counter intentions, the negative ideas and the mental roadblocks you are carrying. What stops you moving forwards, and who are you looking to blame? Are you carrying a victim mindset, or are your expectations simply too high? Do the work on yourself first, and then “in” your business.

Be brutally honest with yourself. The results are never promised with affiliate marketing, you only get paid when you sell something. Focus on that objective as your primary goal in the first place. Once you have made your first sale, you can make many more!

You can get help, support and training here.

Intention And Goal Setting

Intention and goal setting are super important if you want to achieve anything meaningful. Whether that’s at the gym, a business or in your personal life. But why do so many people fail when it comes to their fitness goals, business goals and personal life goals? The answer lies within their intentions and counter intentions.

Let’s say you set the goal of getting a six pack at the gym, for example. So you start out with the best of intentions and join the gym. You even start cutting out carbs perhaps in your diet, an important part of shredding your belly fat. But a couple of months in, you go out for some drinks and have a pizza. The next day you’re not feeling like training so you skip the gym.

Your intention or goal has met with a counter-intention which has superseded your primary goal. Your counter intention is that of having fun with your friends, having a beer (or a few) and a pizza. You didn’t plan on it, but your counter-intention has now killed off your new gym habit. You have a beer the next evening too, to take the edge off your hangover. Your enthusiasm for the gym is gone, and you take a few days off.

Intention And Goal Setting – Let Yourself Off The Hook

You let yourself off the hook saying “well it’s just a one-off”, “I’m not a monk” and decide that your initial goal wasn’t that important anyway. Now you have changed your intention from “get a six pack”, to “enjoy your life”. The goal becomes a distant memory until you fall into your lowest acceptable standards. You see the beer belly growing, due to too many pizzas and beers, and so you set another goal to “get fitter”. Only “getting fitter” isn’t a tangible goal, it’s whimsical, and you’ll never know when you actually arrive because it’s not measurable. See SMART goals and DUMB goals.

A SMART goal is – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound, so you will know when you hit it. Some people don’t like SMART goals because they are too cerebral and don’t sound like much fun! A goal should motivate you and pull you towards it with a strong internal connection to it.

If you set a goal which you don’t really care about, you’re going to eventually come up against a counter-intention which stops you from attaining it and which you desire more than the goal you initially set. Like with the beer/pizza example of going to the gym and getting fitter/a six pack.

Intention And Goal Setting – Counter Intentions & Standards

“We are not the best version of our self, we are the lowest version of our self that we can stand.” – Sam Ovens

As we hit “rock bottom” in any aspect of our lives, whether it is fitness, finance, relationships or career, we aspire to lift our game by setting goals. However, once we are flying high again, we lose our desire and fall back towards our lowest standards again.

This is a universal phenomenon and the graph of the pattern looks like this:

We work hard to attain the life, habits and circumstances we desire at the top of the above curve. This is our goal or achievement which we aspire towards when we set our goals/intentions.

However, as we get near the top of the curve something happens and we slacken off. We have, after all achieved what we set out to do. Perhaps we attained the income we desired online, or we got the physique we wanted from the gym.

At this point we start to celebrate and pat ourselves on the back. Our counter-intentions kick in and we find ourselves falling down the curve back towards our lowest acceptable standards, (shown as the bottom of the curve).

What’s The Answer?

The answer isn’t to keep setting lofty goals which you strive for then, and then fall short. Instead, lift the lower levels troughs of the chart (the lowest acceptable standards). If you’re struggling to keep up with your goals, perhaps you have set a goal or intention which doesn’t motivate you enough?

If your counter intentions are stronger, they will kill your motivation for your goals, and you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle of the chart above.

By removing the lower level, the chart trends upwards and your peaks become higher as well as the troughs (see below)

To lift the lower levels of your standards, as well as setting powerful goals which motivate you towards your best outcomes, you are putting yourself in a much more powerful position.

Summary

The reason you haven’t achieved your “dream lifestyle” “dream body/fitness” etc. you is because of having accepted the lowest standards on your chart of peaks and troughs. This trend can be found in many facets of life: how tidy/untidy you allow your house to get, your car, your finances and so on. When you become unhappy, you work, set goals and strive for better. When you reach the “pinnacle” which you have set for yourself, you fall back towards the trough again (your lowest acceptable standards).

Here’s a video from Charlie Morgan which explains this in greater detail which I found super helpful. This was a major eye opener for me and hope it helps you too. See also how to “flag” your goal to your unconscious mind.

Focus And Inspiration – What You Need For Affiliate Success

Why do you need focus and inspiration for affiliate success? As an affiliate marketer you need focus and inspiration to succeed. You must focus on the task in hand, while simultaneously inspiring yourself towards more long term vision. One of my mentors described this as a “zooming in” and “zooming out” of your long term and short term timelines.

If you focus only on your long term goals, (your vision for the future), it can be difficult to actually get going with the nuts and bolts of your business. If you focus on only the small tasks it can be easy to get stuck in meaningless action which doesn’t drive your business forwards.

So, the “key” is to “zoom in” and “zoom out” between the two! Let’s start with your long term vision of what you want for your affiliate business.

Focus And Inspiration – What You Need For Affiliate Success

Your long term vision is your goal or intention for the next 5-10 years. What do you want from your affiliate/online business? Imagine how you life looks in 5-10 years having achieved everything you want from your business. Spend some time, fantasising about it. Imagine your income, lifestyle and daily routine.

How different will your life be to what it is today? It’s important to spend some time doing this regularly. In many goal setting exercises, this is a fundamental part. You are laying the foundations of what you want to achieve in your life and programming the feelings, thoughts and emotions you want to have when you’ve achieved it.

A common goal is to be earning $10,000 a month, for example. Imagine how this feels for you. It’s definitely worth doing this exercise using an aspiration which is meaningful to you.

Focus And Inspiration – What You Need For Affiliate Success – Visualisation

In this video with Jack Canfield, he explains how by using a regular visualisation techniques he started having inspiring ideas while in the shower after 30 days.

He would imagine his life in the future earning $100,000 a year, something which was way beyond his perceived reality at the time. A good inspiring goal or intention is going to push your limits. Watch the above video and set yourself an inspiring goal/intention which is beyond your comfort zone, just like Jack did!

Spend some time doing your visualisation each day. This is the “zooming out” of your long term timeline. You’re zooming out and looking at the longer term view – perhaps 5 -10 years into the future.

As mentioned in the video above, Jim Carey used this same technique. In 1985 he wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars and dated it 10 years into the future. 10 years later in 1995 he got the movie role in Dumb and Dumber and was paid $10 million for the film.

“Zoom In”

Zooming in means looking at the day in front of you and focusing on the things you can do today to move yourself closer to your longer term vision. The visualisation practice gives you the long term goal and inspiration. Your daily habit patterns keep you moving forwards by taking actions, however small they may be.

By practicing the visualisation regularly you will discover the most powerful steps you need to take action.

If you’re just getting started out with affiliate marketing, your first step might be to purchase a course, for example. Access my recommended course here.

Your “zoom in” actions will depend on your longer term objectives. But if the outcome is a profitable online business, your daily steps will be to do some work on that business. That might be building your website, sales funnel or email marketing campaign. You might be going through some training videos, or creating online content or running paid advertising.

The “on the ground” daily routine is building the foundations of your online business, driven by your longer term vision. See also breaking goals into smaller steps.

Away Motivation Versus Towards Motivation

A long term vision of your desired future is a “towards” motivation. When you inspire yourself towards a desirable future, it’s a lot more attractive than an “away from” motivation – away from fear, lack and disappointment, for example.

An “away from” motivation only keeps you inspired temporarily before you again attract the fear based reality you are trying to escape – poverty, lack, conflict etc. Often, we can attract the things we don’t desire if they are a strong part of our subconscious habit patterns.

So, instead of practicing visualisation in a positive way (as in the Jack Canfield video above), we unconsciously focus on lack, limitation, fear and conflict, programming our subconscious minds to attract those very things we actually dislike!

The subconscious mind is a powerful attracting factor in our lives, way more important than our conscious mind. To succeed in any endeavour we need to align our conscious plans and our subconscious minds to achieve the outcome we desire to reach. If we are subconsciously attracting the opposite of what we desire, the subconscious will always win out against our best conscious efforts.

Summary

The zooming in and zooming out of our “timelines” into long term visualisation and shorter term action is a necessary part of building a profitable affiliate business.

If we get too caught up in the “nuts and bolts” of our business, we can spend too much time on unproductive and unnecessary actions, achieving nothing; but if we spend too much time in a future fantasy, we get nothing done.

The answer is to set and practice a clear vision of the future you want to achieve. Think about it and visualise it often. You are communicating the idea to your subconscious mind. Listen out for actions you can take. which will come from your subconscious mind, and focus on actions you can take every day to move your business (and life) forwards towards your long term vision.

What’s The Best Way To Make A Living Online?

What’s the best way to make a living online? One of the best ways to make a living online is through product promotion. As someone who has tried numerous methods of earning online, including Forex marketing, buying and selling on eBay and affiliate marketing, I can definitely say that I have found affiliate marketing to be the most reliable.

Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models available online and you earn commissions through referral product sales. However, there’s definitely some things you need to understand in order to do affiliate marketing well.

There’s pitfalls with affiliate marketing as with any online earning method. But if you get the right direction, and spend some time upfront building a system for selling a specific product, you can use that infrastructure to sell again and again, on virtual autopilot.

What’s The Best Way To Make A Living Online – Build A Selling System First

A selling system is the infrastructure you need to start earning a living online through product referrals. This might comprise of a website, a landing page, an email marketing system and some automated email messages. Selling systems are used all the time on the internet and their biggest asset is that they can sell an unlimited number of products through a single portal.

Once you have a selling system in place, you can drive traffic to it using paid advertising, (or some other traffic generation method). Once you start earning revenue from it, you’re in a position to scale up to larger amounts.

But before you rush off and build a system to sell online, you need to understand a couple of concepts to optimise it’s efficiency.

What’s The Best Way To Make A Living Online – Knowing Your Audience

The first step to optimising your online sales system is knowing who you are going to be serving with your products. If you’re selling a business tool, for example, your audience is business owners, or those wanting to start a business. If you’re selling a training course, you need to target the small section of the online marketplace who are most interested in your course.

So for example, if you’re selling an online tutorial for piano learners, you’ll need to target those people specifically. Your advert, website, landing page and email series will all need to be aligned with a single congruent message. This is aimed at a specific target audience, also known as customer avatar.

If you try and sell to everyone, and your message is scattered. You attract the wrong crowd and your messaging becomes too diverse. But if you provide a single and congruent message which solves a problem for your audience through a single product, sales will come much easier.

Here’s an example from one of my mentors. He sold a dating related product which helped men with online dating. He targeted men who were interested in online dating, and provided a single message which spoke to their main concern. Because he had a focused campaign, he was able to create a stream of sales through a single ad. He made his first million dollars in sales. It was through a single campaign selling one product, over and over.

Creating Online Assets Which Can Generate Repeat Sales On Autopilot

The “tools” of affiliate marketing are powerful when used with the right knowledge. These are:

A website/landing page – can sell globally 24/7
An email marketing autoresponder – allows for automated messages to be sent out to subscribers
Affiliate products – lets you make unlimited sales (without having to fulfil on product delivery)

The knowledge is understanding your target audience and being able to target that slice of the online marketplace (with marketing) and convey a specific message which speaks to their problem succinctly, and leads them to a valuable affiliate product.

When you can do this well, you will know how to make a living online.

Summary

So that’s what I consider the best way to make a living online. Find an affiliate product which is hugely valuable and learn how to promote it. This requires some upfront work in building a “digital asset”. But once you have learned how to sell an item online once, you can simply rinse and repeat. If you’ve built a digital asset which can use a repeatable system which is also automated, you can sell globally to an unlimited number of people.

The first step is to build a digital asset and choose an affiliate product to sell. Once you’ve done this, you need to choose a marketing strategy in order to drive traffic towards your offer.

Learn more and get started here.

Set It And Forget It Systems Vs Passion Project

Set it and forget it systems vs passion project, what are they? It was an ebook purchase which first clued me up to “set it and forget it” sales systems. I had bought an ebook from eBay and realised what an effective sales system an ebook was. You can make the sale and deliver the product completely on autopilot. It’s the perfect “set it and forget it system” for selling online. There was no dealing with customers or delivering of the product. The product is digital, so it can be downloaded over the internet.

It was nice and neat, so simple in fact that I decided I wanted to learn how to make money through selling my own ebook.

So I set about writing an ebook of my own and tried to sell it from a website. Little did I know how difficult this would be. The set up of the ebook, Paypal button and delivery was within my remit of technical ability, although I had to learn how to do it. Once set up though, there was another problem – getting people to my ebook. More specifically it was getting people to my ebook who wanted it!

Set It And Forget It Systems Vs Passion Project

I had virtually zero website traffic to my ebook web page. So, I bought a course which taught online marketing with the intention of learning how to get more traffic to my ebook. However, I discovered a business model known as affiliate marketing which led me in a different direction.

I soon realised that I could sell other people’s products online using the affiliate model. I also could choose products which were far better that my ebook. With digital products especially, the same automation could be applied to that of an ebook. The product could be accessed online and there was no need for postage.

Set it and forget it systems vs passion project, which one is the best?

This factor of a digital affiliate product had another benefit for affiliates – you could earn larger commissions on a digital product than you could on a physical product. With a physical product, like you’d find on Amazon, for example, you can only earn up to 10% commission. Whereas with digital products typically you get paid 30-40% commission for a referral. So I realised that by selling someone else’s product, I could earn much more than through a sale of my own ebook where I’d make 100% of the fee!

My ebook sold for $10, but one of my first online sales was a $100 product which paid 40% commission.

Set It And Forget It Systems Vs Passion Project

I got pretty good at setting up systems to sell other people’s products. That was the easy part. Many online courses even provide you with a “set it and forget it” system, all set up with products ready to sell. What they (sometimes) don’t tell you is that like with my ebook discovery, you must drive traffic to the digital storefront or you won’t make any sales!

Set it and forget it systems are what I used to focus on. I wanted the website to do all the selling for me. I even built hundreds of websites after following a course online which told me I could do it. They were all set up to make money through the sale of digital products – many of which I found on Clickbank, and had zero interest in personally.

Today they are all gone but a few and most of them didn’t sell a single thing! So what is the answer when someone tells you about “set it and forget it” systems that sell online? While they can and do work, they only do so when you drive traffic to them. There’s two main ways to drive traffic to a “set it and forget it” sales system/website. One is through using paid advertising platforms. The other is through creating content.

The Passion Project Strategy

A passion project is something you’re passionate about which you can align with your “sales system” in order to drive qualified traffic towards your online offer. In my first few years of being an affiliate marketer, I tried all kinds of things which only really addressed the “set it and forget it” part of an online business; the sales system, in effect.

I gave little attention to the passion project side of it, thinking that the passion was in the building of these online sales systems. I floated them out there in the vain hope that Google, or someone, would rank them and that I would get free traffic and make sales automatically, just because of my websites.

But sadly it doesn’t work like that. My websites mostly failed with only a single sale to show for all my websites and hard work. I threw in the towel, but came back to affiliate marketing several times with a new mindset and fresh perspective.

Paid Ads Versus Passion Project

Paid advertising is the fastest way to grow and scale an online business. But you need help and support because it’s pretty difficult if you’re starting from scratch. Then you need a marketing budget in order to test out your advertising methods.

You need to do that for long enough to break through and see some tangible results – sales! When you have some data, you can analyse it, and learn from it. As you get better and better at running paid advertising campaigns, you can figure out which ads to run and which to cut.

But if you consistently run out of budget, and you don’t have the resources to keep going for long, your choices dwindle back to content marketing. I’ve always used content to sell affiliate products. My first online sale was from a piece of content – a review of a product. But it was short lived, and I couldn’t repeat it.

But over time I started realising that my real passion was in the journey. I learned from my failures and eventually came to enjoy them – knowing they were the stepping stones to success.

A Passion Project

A passion project is something you have intrinsic motivation for. Your motivation comes from within. Before I realised this, I was focused only on what I could get from affiliate marketing, not what I could give. If you can find your ideal topic for creating content in, you will enjoy the journey while attracting a specific audience to your affiliate products.

It is at this juncture where the set it and forget it systems meet your passion project. Once you have a well monetised website, with an affiliate product to sell, you only need targeted traffic. If you can’t (or aren’t prepared to) pay for traffic, you must generate it by providing some kind of value through content creation.

To generate enough content, and at a high enough quality to attract your audience, you must align your niche with your interest/passion. Creating content in a topic which you love, is enjoyable. But creating content for the purposes of only making sales, isn’t. Therefore, it’s much more difficult to sustain the effort required if your intention isn’t heart aligned.

When you find your niche, love what you do, and make sales from it, you’ll know you’ve found your path! Good luck!

How To Shift A Poverty Consciousness

If you think you may have a poverty consciousness there’s a few ways to shift it. A poverty consciousness, or a scarcity mindset can severely hold you back in life. No matter what you do physically, if you’re always bringing scarcity to the table, you’ll always bring about the effects of those inner beliefs.

A scarcity mindset might have come from your childhood. Most inner and unconscious beliefs are embedded into our psyches before we are even 10 years old. Before that age, we don’t have the cognitive ability to reject ideas and suggestions. So they are absorbed by the subconscious mind and play out later in our lives, sabotaging our happiness.

Here’s a few of the beliefs you might be carrying around if you have a scarcity mindset:

Life’s a struggle
Money doesn’t grow on trees
Money is always tight
I’m always broke
Why is life so hard?
I’m not/never good enough

How To Shift A Poverty Consciousness – What You Think About You Bring About

If you are constantly thinking how little you have, and focusing on what’s missing, you will bring about more lack and scarcity. If you’ve been focusing on lack and limitation since your childhood, chances are good that they are pretty powerful by now. Shifting them can take a bit of work. But first it’s a good idea to notice the thoughts, words and actions you are giving energy to.

Start by noticing what beliefs you are reinforcing which are negative and which limit your ability to create more abundance and financial certainty. A useful practice to help you observe your inner thinking mind is meditation. Spending just 5-10 minutes a day, sitting quietly and observing your thoughts can bring some clarity to things.

At first, this will seem difficult. Your mind will be difficult to control and you’ll start thinking. Paying attention to your breathing can help calm the mind and create some inner space for you to observe from.

If you have a poverty consciousness, the first step is to observe your thoughts and the ideas and beliefs which you perpetually give your attention to.

How To Shift A Poverty Consciousness – Use Mantras

Mantras are useful and can help you shift a poverty consciousness. Start by observing one of your negative beliefs though paying attention to your thinking patterns for several days and observing the things you say which are red flags to the issue. It might be something a parent said a lot, and that you picked up. Here’s a couple of examples “Life’s a struggle”, or “you must work hard for money”.

If one of your negative views on money is “life’s a struggle”, you can find a mantra which gives you a better outcome such as “I choose to life in easy world“, or “life is easy for me“, “I’m always lucky” or “everything works out perfectly for me”.

Whenever you catch yourself saying or thinking one of your negative beliefs, say your new mantra 10 times. If you’ve been talking to yourself in this negative way for a long time, this will take some time to shift. Start with a mantra you can say often, and which sits right for you, but which is more positive than your old, negative belief.

How To Shift A Poverty Consciousness – Autosuggestion

When you’re stuck with a poverty consciousness, you repeat the negative ideas inside your mind over and over: life is hard, I never get ahead, I’m never good enough, I never seem to get ahead in life, etc. When you have this leaning, you are making suggestions to your subconscious mind which delivers negative results through a process Napoleon Hill named autosuggestion in chapter 4 of his book Think and Grow Rich:

“AUTO-SUGGESTION is a term which applies to all suggestions and all self-administered stimuli which reach one’s mind through the five senses. Stated in another way, auto-suggestion is self-suggestion. It is the agency of communication between that part of the mind where conscious thought takes place, and that which serves as the seat of action for the subconscious mind.

Through the dominating thoughts which one permits to remain in the conscious mind, (whether these thoughts be negative or positive, is immaterial), the principle of auto-suggestion voluntarily reaches the subconscious mind and influences it with these thoughts.“

To shift this negative bias, you must become aware of and control the thoughts you are giving energy to and change them to more positive messages which bring about the outcome which is more desirable.

Gratitude

In the many books written on the mind and making money (find some of them here), pretty much all them them mention gratitude. Gratitude is an important tool to shift a poverty mindset. When you are feeling like you have nothing, you mind is filled with what is missing. You focus on the scarcity.

But with gratitude, you are focusing on the things you are already grateful for and shifting your vibration energetically. Take a look at the emotional guidance scale image below.

You’ll see near the top the feelings associated with gratitude are love, passion, happiness, belief etc. Those you might associate with scarcity are at the bottom of the chart: powerlessness, unworthiness, blame etc.

Take the time each day to write in a gratitude journal for the things you are grateful for already. Write out 10 things which are different every day. Pretty soon, your mind will be looking for the good, the abundance you already have, rather than what you don’t have, or what you may have lost.

Shift Your Money Mindset eBook

Powerful techniques to permanently uncover and remove your success blockers and unleash your potential.

– Questions and answers
– Uncovering your hidden beliefs
– Making the shift
– Installing New programs
– Changing the way you earn
– Gratitude
– Money Principles Of The Wealthy

Access here.

Making Money On Autopilot

Making money on autopilot can be done with a business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online and make money as third party referrers. Because someone else fulfils the product delivery, an affiliate can simply refer sales through their links.

When someone buys a product online through an affiliate link, the affiliate receives a commission based on the sale.

Therefore the crux of making money on autopilot for affiliates is to learn how to refer products through their affiliate links at scale.

Making Money On Autopilot – Marketing

Initially when learning affiliate marketing you will learn how to promote your affiliate link through any given marketing method:

Blogging
Video marketing
Pay per click advertising
Email marketing
Social media marketing
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

Your first goal might be to make a single sale online using any one of the methods above. But the key is to be able to automate a marketing strategy which works, and then scale up to an ever growing audience.

To do this at scale quickly, you need to run paid advertising and send qualified visitors to a landing page where you can collect their email details. This is done through offering some kind of value giveaway, such as an ebook, or a video course. As people pass through your email message series, which might run over several days or weeks, they are offered your affiliate products through your affiliate links.

With a well targeted visitor/subscriber sales happen quickly as they see the value in your products.

Making Money On Autopilot – Choosing Products Which Sell

Finding an affiliate product which sells is priority number one for an affiliate. unless you product choice is a good one, no amount of marketing will help it! Your choice of affiliate product is therefore pretty important because it can make or break you as an affiliate marketer.

Ideally find a product in a niche you have some kind of alignment with; in a good topic in which you know something about, or have a passion. This makes things a lot easier if you’re going to create content in your niche. In an unfamiliar niche, this can be more difficult, but not impossible.

A good product will sell easily to the right audience. So if you find the right target audience to send to your website/landing page, they will sign up to your list and purchase your products quite quickly.

Making Money On Autopilot – Why Use An Email List?

There’s also going to be potential customers who have some questions, and might buy your product down the road rather than straight away. This is the reason you should use an email list. On an email list you have the ability to “nurture” your subscribers for a much longer timeframe than is possible from a website alone.

On a website, it can be more difficult to automate sales because most visitors only stick around for a few minutes. But once on your email list, subscribers can choose to buy an affiliate product weeks, months and even years after they have signed up!

An email list allows you to build trust through delivering value driven messages (on autopilot).

Using Subscription Products & Product Ranges

It’s a good idea to use subscription products too if you want to make money on autopilot. With most online referral sales, you only get paid once. But with a subscription product you can earn commissions month in month out for each customer you refer through your affiliate link.

That soon adds up to a nice passive income once you have learn a marketing strategy which works for you. Subscription products are digital products such as software and membership products. With a software product, such as email autoresponders, their purchase is vital for an online business to operate. So they can be a great choice of product to sell for an affiliate.

If you can find products which have multiple items within a product range, that’s also another key to online success as an affiliate. With a product range, you can earn more per customer than with standard affiliate products. This is because your existing customers can purchase more products later on from which you can earn commissions. This, nor recurring commissions are possible with most affiliate products.

Content Marketing Versus Paid Advertising

The two main types of marketing used by affiliates to make money on autopilot are content marketing and paid advertising. Some affiliates focus solely on paid ads, whereas others use organic methods such as blogging or video.

Of course you can also use a combination of the two. Paid marketing is the fastest method of building an email list to sell affiliate products. With paid marketing, you should start out with a small budget, testing various adverts to send people to a landing page. As you get a positive result, you can scale up by increasing your budget once you are profitable.

Content marketing takes a but longer and you need to do a lot of work upfront. It’s more difficult to scale up because you can’t simply turn up your budget. However, the benefit of content marketing is that your work compounds over time and you will start to see sales dropping in from content you’ve created previously. As you create more and more content, you should see your sales increasing as a result of the volume of content you’ve created over time.

Summary

If you’re ready to get started building your own autopilot money making system, you’ll need to learn some of the basics of affiliate marketing and set up a sales system – with products to sell. Get started here with this course.

Once you have set up your website and sales system, you can choose a marketing strategy to drive traffic towards your affiliate links. Ideally use an email list and a marketing strategy you can stick with for a few weeks or months at a minimum. Test out a few adverts if paying or create content if you’re going down the content marketing route.

Stick with it long enough and you will see your first online sale. This is a key moment and once you arrive here, you’ll know exactly how to make sales on complete autopilot! Good luck!

Get started here.

How To Get 1000 Website Hits In One Day Without Paying

If you’re new to blogging, it’s a good idea to set a goal. I’ve recently set myself the goal of getting 1000 website hits to my website, in a completely organic manner. In this post I’m going to share my strategy.

Now admittedly, I haven’t hit this number yet, at least not organically. When using paid advertising, it’s much easier because you can simply pay for traffic and bam – you’ve got your traffic. But you’ve also got a large advertising bill too. If those paid ads don’t amount to an equal or greater amount in affiliate sales, you’re at a loss!

Organic traffic is different because you’re using your time instead of advertising budget. If you’re time rich rather than money rich, that’s obviously a good option to use. If you’ve no time to spare, use a marketing budget instead to generate traffic. But if you have the time, blogging is always another option..

How To Get 1000 Website Hits In One Day Without Paying For Ads

Here’s a quick glimpse of my traffic stats over the last few years.

As you can see, I’m nowhere near this number at the moment. If you divide 70k hits from 2023 by 365 (days of a year) you’ll see I only have around 200 daily hits coming to my website on average. I took a bit of a hit in 2024 too, when I stopped blogging for a few months.

But lately, I’ve been encouraged with my goal of 1000 (organic) website hits and that has motivated me to blog more regularly. It’s well worth setting yourself a goal, wherever you are in your affiliate marketing journey. A goal should motivate you and drive you forwards. I like an arbitrary goal such as traffic because I can control what I do to create it. Whereas with sales, one month is different to another and I can’t always control how many sales I make.

But with posting blogs, and sharing them to my email list, I’m in control!

How To Get 1000 Website Hits In One Day Without Paying For Ads – Set A Goal

So, step 1 is to set a goal for your blog. Blogging is one the cheapest way to attract website traffic. Once you’ve set a goal, write a blog post. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect, the main aim is to set the wheels in motion and build a habit which you can sustain.

So if you can only sustain 3 blog posts a week, then aim for that. You don’t have to set 1000 hits as your goal either, especially if it’s totally unrealistic for you. If you’re just starting out, set a more achievable goal which drives you forwards and encourages you, not one which seems out of reach and unrealistic.

Once you’ve set a goal, break it down into easily achievable steps. For me, that’s writing a blog post a day, posting it to my email list and sharing it on social media. Sometimes I will write more, but that’s the minimum bar for my daily routine.

How To Get 1000 Website Hits In One Day Without Paying For Ads – My Strategy

My strategy is to start with a single website hit. When you get a single (free) website “hit” you can simply rinse and repeat the method for many more website visitors.

Over time, I’ve made a habit out of blogging. But if you’re not in the habit, the main first step is to build that habit. Blogging takes time and effort, so if you’re not ready to write regular blog posts, this strategy probably isn’t for you.

Step 1 : Write a blog post

Step 2: Share it, promote it and make it easy for your readers to promote it.

Step 3: Build an email list (if you don’t have an email list, you can get a free autoresponder here)

How To Get 1000 Website Hits In One Day Without Paying For Ads – SEO

Before I write a blog post, I do some research first on 2 main things:

Keyword research – I use Google’s keyword research planner to choose long tail keywords which fit my main topic (affiliate marketing in my case)
I select a keyword which I have more chance of ranking for (See how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty)
The keyword must meet 2 main criteria – it’s a good fit for my affiliate products and my customer avatar, and it has ranking potential. (There’s no point in me attracting the wrong audience to my website, since I won’t likely sell anything that way!)

In some of my later posts I have done less keyword research than I used to do. However this is a good practice because it helps your SEO score and your authority in your niche with Google. In my early years as a blogger, I used to simply spend all my time writing my posts and then I expected Google to rank them! Big mistake – most of them didn’t rank and I missed many opportunities to share content online through social media accounts.

Promotion

Next step is to promote your post throughout your social media accounts. Share on Facebook, Linkedin, X.com and whatever other social media platforms you use. You should also post your newly published content to your email list.

Now at first this activity won’t make a huge difference to your traffic. Maybe one or two people will see it on social media and have a look. So don’t expect too much at first. Remember you’re building the habit here and it’s the habit which matters more than your results.

If you’ve just started building an email list, you won’t have many subscribers, if any. So this too will be a little slow. Don’t worry, remember this is a long term strategy. Just stick to the plan and keep the momentum going!

You can also get some plugins which will help you syndicate your content automatically throughout your social media platforms. See best free blog plugins for WordPress. Make sure you make it easy for your visitors to share your posts too, and you can even suggest they share in your text (go on, give this post a share!).

Blog promotion is vital so don’t skip it! Your traffic will thank you for it later!

Rinse & Repeat

In order to make this pattern a consistent habit, you’ll need to choose a topic you are going to enjoy writing about. Otherwise, this task is going to be monumental! So before you set off make sure you’ve chosen a good niche which you’re happy with. It’s miserable coming up with ideas for blog posts in a subject which you have no interest.

Since the bulk of your work is coming up with new ideas for blog posts, on an endless cycle, you’re going to want to choose a topic which motivates you!

The “best” niche for blogging is one in which you have a passion for, and can continue writing in indefinitely.

Escape The Rat Race With Affiliate Marketing

Is it really possible to escape the rat race with affiliate marketing? Many affiliates have achieved this already and are earning a full time living through the sale of other people’s products and services online. The switch to online spending from traditional high street stores, with an estimated $730 billion a year (and growing), is a huge opportunity.

With affiliate marketing, you become the “middle man” and promote products and services online. The benefit of doing so means you never have to hold, purchase or store these products yourself. Nor do you have to deal with any customers. Once you have learned the skill of selling online, you can apply it to any product and any country. Get started here.

Escaping The Rat Race With Affiliate Marketing – Why Affiliate Marketing?

So why choose affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is just one online business model which can be used as a vehicle to escape the rat race by building an income online. Others include drop shipping, direct selling, print on demand or even selling your own products online. Affiliate marketing is a good answer because most people don’t have their own products to sell, and it’s the simplest business model. Simply join an affiliate program and get an affiliate link which identifies you as the third party seller.

You then promote this link online. When you make a sale through your link, you receive a commission based on your referral.

escape the rat race with affiliate marketing

Other similar business models can work well too, although there may be more involved. Drop shipping, for example is a similar business model. You send products directly to the customer from the wholesalers with drop shipping, having found them online using marketing skills. With most online business models the key skill is marketing – attracting an audience who is interested in your particular product. The fastest way to learn this skill is by choosing an affiliate product to sell and setting about selling it.

Once you’ve learned the skill of selling online, you can apply it to any business. It’s a skill well worth learning, whether you intend to earn from affiliate marketing, or any other business.

How Fast Can I Escape The Rat Race With Affiliate Marketing?

If your goal is to escape the rat race with affiliate marketing, you might want to know how long it will take. This is different for everyone and depends on a number of things such as the product you promote and the marketing method you choose to promote it with. In general though you can expect it to take several months before you’re up and running with affiliate marketing, making sales. For some, it will be less and for others it will be more.

The fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing is to use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing. This requires an investment upfront in terms of your business model and marketing method. Cheaper ways to sell online require less upfront cost by will likely take much longer to come to fruition.

High ticket products pay more because they offer more value. Training courses, for example, which offer software and personal coaching, will cost more than a small, low value physical product. There’s also high value physical products you can promote too.

How Much Can I Make With Affiliate Marketing?

With a regular job, your earnings are always capped because there’s only so many hours in the day. So even in a high paying job, you can only trade so many hours. But with affiliate marketing you can sell products online to earn money. This has huge benefits once you have learned how to do it. The Digital Payments market worldwide is projected to grow by 9.52% (2024-2028) resulting in a market volume of US $16.62 trillion in 2028.

Once you can sell online, you have learned a different way to make money which isn’t tied to trading your time for it. You can therefore make multiple transactions per day without having to be physically present through the use of automation. Websites, email marketing services and advertising campaigns can run automatically around the clock and you can sell products worldwide online.

The first step for an affiliate is to learn how to sell your first product online. Once you have done it once, you can do it over and over using the knowledge you have learned.

How Do I Get Started With Affiliate Marketing?

You can get started by joining a step by step program which gives you all the tools you need. Once you have set up your website, and sales funnel, by following the steps, you can learn a marketing method around your existing commitments.

Access a step by step course here to get started.

You will learn the basics of selling online; the number one skill you’ll need to become a successful affiliate. Then, follow the step by step course to set up your online presence – website, sales funnel and email follow up. This is pre-populated so there’s very little technical experience needed in order to do this. Website setup can be done through following a simple setup procedure.

Access here and begin your online journey.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales

Most website traffic doesn’t equate to sales so if you’re wondering how to turn website traffic into sales, this post is for you. Remember that the internet is an information gathering tool, and not a shopping mall. So when someone visits a website their intent is usually to find out some information.

Problem solving content will often help people out with specific problems, such as how to unblock a sink, for example. But that content won’t lead to many sales because that information can be used without having to make a purchase.

So the large proportion of content online leads to nothing other than website hits, not sales. But certain content will lead to more sales than others. That’s the kind of content you want to be creating if you’re an affiliate selling products.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales – Creating Content Which Attracts Buyers

So what content attracts buyers? Well reviews are a good place to start. With a review, someone is actively seeking information regarding a specific product. If you answer their questions satisfactorily, and lead them to the product (via your affiliate link), they are highly likely to buy that or some similar product which you have recommended.

Price comparison sites are a good option for affiliates too. With a price comparison website, consumers are looking for the best deals. When they find the cheapest deal, they buy something – ideally through your affiliate link.

Martin Lewis’s website moneysavingexpert.com is a price comparison site which attracts people looking to save money on their bills. It is also an affiliate website which makes money through its referrals.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales -Giving Away Information

“How to” guides work well too if you lead website visitors to products which add extra value. For example, I have an affiliate guide for beginners here which you can grab a free copy of.

To turn website traffic into sales with a free guide, you can use a downloadable ebook in conjunction with an email list. Many website owners also use free courses, video tutorials and other methods to encourage website visitors to sign up to their email list.

If you don’t have an email list, (get one here), and you’re trying to make money from a website with content alone, it’s highly recommended you get one. An email list can make a huge difference to your bottom line as an affiliate marketer.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales – Build An Email List From Your Website

Using a free giveaway product of some kind (a legitimate bribe) encourages website visitors to opt in to your email list. From the email list, you can send subscribers information and keep in touch with them over a longer period of time.

Studies have shown that most online consumers will need 6-8 touch points with a certain product or website before they make a decision to buy. On a website, you only have a few minutes for someone to make a purchase. But once you get them on your email list, this period of time is vastly extended.

aweber - using email marketing to build trust and sell products

I’ve recently sold an affiliate product to someone who joined my email list 5 years previously! This just wouldn’t be possible from a website because once someone leaves your website most will never return.

You can also build trust with your email subscribers by offering value driven email messages. Over time, your subscribers should come to know like and trust you, if you’re offering genuine value. If this happens they are much more likely to buy from you if your products match their needs.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales – Understand Your Audience

Your perfect customer (aka the customer avatar) is the type of person who will buy all your products and become a life long fan! Once you get clear on who it is your want to attract to your affiliate offers, you can craft content which matches their needs much better.

Whereas if you’re randomly throwing out content without thought, you’ll attract a lot of people who don’t match the customer avatar criteria. If you want your content to convert, you must get to know your customer avatar and write content with them in mind. Ask yourself “what information do they seek?”, and provide it through your content marketing strategy.

By understanding your target audience (customer avatar) and writing with their needs in mind, your content will become more targeted towards those people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Sales – Use Pop Ups

We all know just how annoying popups are. But website owners continue to use them because they work at getting their visitors onto their email lists. Once you have built a large list of subscribers through your blog, you are in a much better position to sell an affiliate product because you’re in control of your traffic with a list.

If you’re just attracting visitors to your website, who leave and never return, you are expending huge effort for that traffic (creating more and more content).Likewise if you don’t get them to opt in to your email list, you have potentially lost a future customer who might buy something down the line. Popups, drop downs, ebook giveaways and video courses are all simple ways to give your website visitors more value in exchange for their email address.

If you use multiple options for them to opt in to your email list, you’re more likely to convert more visitors into subscribers. See also my post on how to increase sales conversion rate.

Re-engage Visitors Who Have Left Your Website

Most website visitors to your website will leave without having taken any action and only a small percentage will usually buy from your links or opt in to your email list.

This will of course depend on your content. On a review website, where you review specific products, there will likely be a larger number of sales per visitor due to the intent of your visitors. But if you have an information website, only a small percentage will likely opt in to your list.

However, there’s other ways of bringing back old visitors to your website who have previously seen your content. You can offer a web push notifications using Push Engage. This is a plugin which offers your visitors the ability to opt in to notifications for any newly published content you have to offer.

Whenever you publish a new post on your website, they will automatically receive a notification about it. This encourages a lot of your old visitors to come back to your website for newly published content. A returning visitor is also more likely to join your list and be more engaged.

Use Retargeting – Bring Back Your “Old” Traffic

Retargeting is a similar method as the web push notifications plugin. With retargeting, you use an advertising platform such as Google Adwords to “re-target” visitors who have left your website. By placing some code on your website, Google knows who has visited it already and you can “follow” them around the internet, advertising directly to them whenever they find a website which allows it.

Retargeting is a great and very cheap way to bring back old visitors to your website. You can send them to a specific page on your website too, such as an email capture page/landing page to encourage them to join your email list.

Meet The Needs Of Your Audience

If you’re spending a lot of time creating content on a website, to drive traffic to your affiliate offers, you need to make sure they are a good match. Use a high value offer which meets the needs of your website visitors/customer avatar.

Having a bad match between your content and your offer is going to result in your not selling many products. So no matter how hard you work at generating website traffic, if your audience doesn’t want or need what you’re offering, you’ll struggle to sell anything.

So before you create any content, ask yourself whether that content is something your customer avatar would want to read/watch. If not, create something more aligned with their interests and needs. You also want to find a product which offers huge value and that your audience can afford!

Communicate The Value Of Your Products

With certain products, especially digital training products, the value to the customer is often less tangible than a physical product. With a physical product, what you see is what you get.

But with certain digital products, such as training courses and software products, the value is more arbitrary. Unless you communicate the value of your products in your content, and lead your visitors to them, they won’t buy from you!

Communicating value and leading your visitors to your products can be done through various ways: