AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online

There’s likely more than 10 reasons why you’re failing to earn online. But these will probably highlight a cause for you. Once you discover the reasons why you’re failing to earn online, you can more easily succeed!

Failure gives you the ability to start again, only more intelligently – Henry Ford.

failure the opportunity to start again more intelligently

95% of affiliates will simply quit instead, but if you’re reading this, you’re one of the ones who will succeed – because you don’t give up! So here’s my list of 10 reasons why you’re failing to earn online with affiliate marketing.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #1 You’re Not Serving Enough People

The money you make online (or otherwise) is a direct reflection of the number of people you serve (with your affiliate products). So, unless you can find customers for your products in big enough numbers, you’ll fail to earn a real income online.

This might sound obvious but when I started out online I had a totally unrealistic idea of what was possible. I imagined myself posting blogs online and making tens of thousands relatively easily. But if you’re a blogger, you will know the amount of work involved in only attaining a single sale.

Why is that? With blogging, you can only get your blog in front of a certain amount of people organically. So even if you write with SEO in mind, target long tail keywords and get ranked on Google, your traffic will still be limited. It’s also a big “if” whether you rank or not for your keywords.

If you’re paying for advertising, but don’t have a large budget, that’s also a limiting factor. So what’s the answer? Well if you’re marketing organically, expect it to take longer. If you’re running ads, you must find a way to recoup your budget early on, such as with an entry level product within a product range. This offsets your costs and allows you to cheaply acquire customers.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #2 – You’re Attracting The Wrong Audience

Your audience must be aligned with your product and your marketing efforts need to lead them to it. For a long time I didn’t understand this concept and in my early days as an affiliate, I simply thought everyone would want my product because I knew how good it was! I was sadly mistaken. In fact, the large proportion of the internet doesn’t want your product, whatever it is!

You must keep this in mind whenever you’re crafting an advert, specifying who it will show to or creating some content. If your content isn’t a good match for your product (to attract the right kind of person), you’re better off creating something else. You can spend a huge amount of time creating content. But if it doesn’t attract the right audience, you’ll seldom make any sales.

A good example is that of a product review. Sales can come easily from a product review because it attracts a very specific person to your website. It attracts that person who is looking to buy a specific product (your affiliate product). But some generic “how to” guide won’t attract the same buying customer. So if you’re spending all your time on generic content which attracts visitors not buyers, you’re going to be spending a lot of time which is unrewarded by affiliate sales.

To attract the right audience you must know who they are first. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf here.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #3 – You’re “Tinkering” With It and Not Treating It Seriously

If you are really serious about building a serious income online, you would give it the seriousness that it deserves. After all, it can replace your existing income and you can be completely financially independent, and have financial freedom. There’s no limit to the number of affiliate products you can sell online with access to the global economy! An online business can give you complete geographical freedom too, and you can choose where to live anywhere globally once you’re running at a profit.

So ask yourself, are you taking it seriously? Do you really want it, or, are you just “playing at it” without really believing that it will work.

Perhaps you don’t really need the income, so you can justify not taking the actions which are uncomfortable to take?

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #4 – You Are Repeating The Same Actions Expecting A Different Result

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein

Are you continuing to do the same things over and over again, such as posting your blogs on social media? Do you expect your results to change?

While some content marketing strategies do take a bit of time, there’s also other actions you can perform which can magnify your results. Blogging and building a YouTube channel are examples of longer term strategies. You can’t expect to suddenly have a booming affiliate business overnight after a few blog posts, or having uploaded only a few videos.

These tactics can and do work, but they are longer term strategies which require a lot of work initially and often for very little return.

If you’ve been doing this for some time, it might be worth considering using some paid marketing, or using automated syndication tools to help you gain more traction, for example.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #5 – You’re Caught Up In The Minutia Of Your Business

Here’s other possible reason why you’re failing to earn online. You’re caught up doing the small, tiny things which don’t really matter to your business – the minutia, small things which don’t count! This could be things such as:

Watching endless training videos without taking any action
Designing your logo or website to make it perfect, but without driving any traffic
Creating lots of content, but not promoting it and therefore not getting any traffic
Constant re-evaluation of your marketing tactic, procrastination and non-action
Overthinking your business without acting in your business
Working in your business in small useless actions and avoiding the important meaningful actions

Working “in” your business has many potential actions many of which don’t count for much. The large meaningful actions which move the needle on your income are the actions you should be focusing on, not the small meaningless innocuous ones!

If you’ve been doing action after action for some time without any change in your outcome, it’s probably time to reinvest in your education. Here’s a program which helped me.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #5 – You’re Not Investing In Your Education/Growing Yourself

Here’s another reason why you’re not moving forwards with your affiliate business. You’re not investing in your education. When I found this course, I had already spent several years struggling as an affiliate marketer. I had some knowledge, but it was flawed. My understanding of marketing had many holes in it. But you don’t know what you don’t know. Reinvesting in your knowledge is a good place to begin, even if you’re an experienced affiliate.

Your business cannot grow beyond the thinking of its owner. So if you’re not investing in growing your knowledge and understanding, your business can only grow to where you currently are.

The thinking you bring to your affiliate business is the “glass ceiling” which stops it from growing. By expanding your thinking beyond where it is today, you can change the way you approach your business and approach it from a better vantage point. Access a training resource here.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #6 – Subconscious Blocks

Your business is a tool so that you can live more fully, and ideally help others on the journey. So if you’re not seeing your future as bright and abundant, you could be cutting off your potential with your lack of vision or false assumptions.

Be honest about how you feel about your affiliate business. Are you inspired to promote someone else’s products and services? Are you inspired for the financial abundance which is possible for an affiliate? What does inspire you about your affiliate business?

How do you see your life when everything is working how you want it to with your affiliate business? There may be a subconscious blockage holding you back from the success you desire. This is especially true if you can’t foresee your future success with affiliate marketing. Perhaps there’s something else you want to do instead?

Do you believe in what you’re doing as an affiliate? If you somehow doubt yourself or hold some negativity towards what you’re doing or where you are heading, you’ll sabotage yourself on the path. Checkout my ebook on money mindset for more on this topic.

10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #7 – You’re Not “Failing” Enough

There’s an expression in affiliate marketing known as “failing forwards”. Without these “failures” you can’t learn from your own experience.

Have you yet tried writing 100 blog posts, running 50 adverts, creating 100 YouTube videos or attending several training courses? If the answer is no, you probably haven’t “failed” enough!

Long term affiliates have tried a lot of strategies and failed at most of them! So if you’ve only just joined the affiliate marketing path, expect to fail some more before you find a strategy which works for you.

As the saying goes : “The expert has failed more times than the beginner has even tried”

Not only must you “fail forwards” to learn affiliate marketing, but you must also do it enough to find a winning strategy. Once you do, you’ll know which path to take.

#8 – You’ve Chosen A Product Which Doesn’t Sell

Bad products don’t sell unfortunately so it’s definitely worth doing your homework before choosing a product to sell. Even with all the marketing in the world, if you’ve chosen a product which doesn’t sell well, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Before I found good products to sell I joined Clickbank and promoted a lot of products that I didn’t know anything about (neither did I care to). But it’s a mistake to promote products you have no connection to and haven’t invested in yourself.

That’s exactly what I did when I started out as an affiliate. I just wanted to sell and make money. I thought I could rush through the process of doing that, and skipped over a lot of necessary detail – such as choosing a hugely valuable product which sells like hotcakes! Choose necessary and important products which are in demand and needed. For example, one of the products I promote is Aweber autoresponder – a product which is vital for running an online business. You can access it free here.

#9 – You Haven’t Spent Long Enough On Your Marketing Method Yet

All marketing methods have a different timeline. For example, some of my latest blog posts have been on the topic of blogging. See how to make blogging pay.

With blogging, you are going to need to create a lot of content and over a long period of time. It can take months or even years to break through with blogging and even then you must align your topic with the right products. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time if you want to get paid!

Paid marketing methods can work much, much faster than blogging. But there’s still a period of experimentation where you’re learning. Unless you’re prepared to fail many times with your marketing method, while learning, you’re probably not going to break through and start making those sales.

It’s at the beginning point here where most people will quit. But it’s past the “frustration” mark where success is to be found – after you’ve wanted to throw your laptop through the window many times!

Are you expecting too much from too little effort? I certainly was when I began as an affiliate. Remember there’s 600 million blogs out there and more than 114 million active YouTube channels competing for attention online. What you get paid as an affiliate is a direct result of the number of people you serve with your affiliate products.

#10 – You Haven’t Found A Product/Niche Which Is Heart Aligned

This one’s a bit touchy feely perhaps but none the less I believe this to be one of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing. If you’re dedicated to a particular topic or niche, and in helping people overcome a certain problem perhaps, you’re much more likely to succeed than if you’re merely seeking to earn a bit of extra cash.

A passion project will continue much longer than a “get rich quick scheme” simply because of the integrity behind the intent of the work involved. When you’re heart aligned, you do the work because you are passionate about it, not because you might earn some money. This is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is what keeps someone going long after everyone else has quit. If you only want the reward, you’ll quit much earlier.

The man who likes walking goes further than the man who likes the destination.

Find a project you can be intrinsically passionate about and you’ll go much further than anyone else. Find a product which aligns with your passion and you’ve found your passion affiliate direction!

How To Make Blogging Pay

If you’re frustrated with blogging here’s a post on how to make blogging pay. Blogging can be a slow burn and if you’re just getting started with a blog, don’t worry if the results aren’t forth coming just yet. It can take some time before your traffic starts growing. So don’t be put off if you don’t see much traction.

In the beginning it’s far better to make daily habits out of your blog posting and focus on that. When you look for results too quickly, the result is disappointment. This leads to inaction, and inaction leads to, well, nothing much happening. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy that a blog will fail when you don’t work on it continually.

So first, light up your enthusiasm with a passion project you want to work on. Choose your topic carefully and ask yourself whether you’re going to enjoy the process of coming up with new blog ideas for several months at a minimum.

A blog you love working on is going to last much longer than one where you’re only interested in the outcome. So choose a niche you love, and get blogging!

That all said, to make blogging pay you also need to do two things really well:

Find a great affiliate product you can offer to your visitors
Find visitors who will benefit/want that product

How To Make Blogging Pay – Choosing A Great Product

You might think that’s obvious! But attracting an audience with your content is going to be more lucrative if you find a product which is of high quality and of huge benefit to your audience. Consider what you’ll be writing about and the kinds of people that will attract. If you choose a product which is misaligned with your topic, you’re going to be wasting a lot of time!

The easiest way to align a good product with your topic is to choose one which you personally endorse and have benefitted from. For example, I promote Aweber’s email marketing software from my blog. I use it myself and haven’t used anything else for my email marketing. It’s a great product and absolutely essential for building a profitable online business. You can also use it for free through this link.

So why wouldn’t I promote such a beneficial product?:

It aligns with my content
I personally use it and recommend it
It’s helpful and necessary for online success (through building an online business)

It’s therefore a total no-brainer that I would promote this product from my blog. Bloggers can use the product to collect emails from their blogs, and promote their affiliate products through it to an ever-growing audience. My audience includes bloggers who are often trying to build an income online on a shoestring budget. Hence again, the free version of this software is a total no brainer to get – you get up to 500 subscribers without having to pay!

Still, if your blog is about something else, such as cabinet making, for example, you’ll want a different product which aligns with your topic and the interests of your audience.

How To Make Blogging Pay – Aligning Your Content With Your Product

If you’re writing content on one particular subject, but promoting a product in another niche, you’re going to get a mix-match. Your audience won’t be interested in what you have to sell.

So no matter how many blog posts you write, your audience is only interested in that particular topic. For example, if your blog attracts people who have no money, it’s going to be difficult encouraging them to buy a particular product, especially if it’s well out of their budget.

So it’s worth asking yourself a few questions so you can get clearer on who you are attracting:

Are my visitors likely to be able to afford my product?
Is my product a good match for my audience?
Does my product help my audience?
Do I relay the value of my product through my content?

Answering these questions (and more like them) will enlighten you as to whether your content is attracting the right audience for your products.

Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet too and go through it. You should learn something about the “who” you’re trying to attract, or are attracting by default by not thinking about it properly.

How To Make Blogging Pay – Lead Visitors To Your Email List/Product

Most people come to a blog post to read the content you have put up – if they have found it (more on this later). So, for this particular piece of content, “How To Make Blogging Pay”, I can expect people who read the content are already bloggers, or are considering becoming bloggers.

Bloggers are often trying to build an income online on a shoestring budget. Which means they aren’t likely to come to your content looking to buy something! However, people from all walks of life are also looking to learn how to make money blogging.

But unless you lead them to your products, they are mostly going to leave your blog post without having taken the action you want – (signing up to your email list or buying a product through one of your links).

You can lead visitors to your list/product through popups (annoying I know), embedded links and forms on your website. So make sure you test them out if you haven’t already done so. A popup on this website also showcases my ebook (Affiliate Marketing For Beginners) – Access it here.

How To Make Blogging Pay – Getting Eyes On Your Content

Without traffic to your content, you won’t make any affiliate sales and you won’t get any leads (email opt-ins). So content promotion is a large part of making blogging pay. There’s several ways you can get more traffic to your blog posts:

Write more content
Share your content more widely
Write for SEO – get ranked on Google/search engines
Build an email list and send subscribers to your newly posted content

Think about how you currently promote your content, if at all. When I started blogging, I would write a post and sit back, waiting for Google to rank it – and the traffic to come flooding in! Sadly that mostly didn’t happen and although some of posts did rank on the first page of Google, most of them didn’t get a look in. So, in fact, most of my hard work at blogging was completely wasted because nobody saw my posts!

When I started to understand that I needed to promote my posts too, I started seeing more hits on my website. But it’s an easy mistake to make. So just make sure you promote your content, otherwise you’re pretty much guaranteed to get zero visitors unless you’re already a high ranking/popular blogger.

Methods Of Blog Promotion

There’s many ways to promote your blog posts once you have created them. Or, you can write content in such a way as to garner the respect of the ranking algorithms too – (i.e. get ranked on Google). This can be a challenge, but if you’re in a relatively uncompetitive niche it’s much easier to do. Checkout my post on how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Here’s a few ways you can promote them too:

Post them on your social media accounts manually
Get an automated software to post them (such as Revive Old Posts)
Use share buttons on your website to give visitors the option of sharing on their social media
Send them to your email list
Link back from other websites to them (blog commenting or guest posting)
Use some paid advertising to drive traffic to them

You don’t have to do all of these, but I’d recommending as many automated methods as possible to reduce your workload.

Summary

So there’s a few aspects of blogging you need to get right in order to make it pay. Here’s a quick recap:

Choose your topic carefully – find a subject you personally align with and can write about for several months at a minimum, ideally forever!
Find a high value product (or products) you can align with your topic. Unless you attract an audience who want that product, even with a lot of content you won’t sell.
Make sure you are promoting your content – don’t rely on your content being ranked on Google or getting found through the search engines alone! Some will of course but most won’t.
Lead visitors to your product and/or your email list – ask for the sale. With a high value and good product which you audience needs, you should find selling through your content much easier.
If your topic is misaligned with your product, selling will be more difficult or even impossible. Can your audience afford your product? Is it vital for their success? Checkout the customer avatar worksheet for more on this.

Are You Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business?

Are you wasting time in your affiliate business? If you’ve been an affiliate marketer for any length of time, and are still not getting the results you want, there’s probably a good reason for it. Once you can identify that reason, and change your behaviour, things can and will change. There’s an estimated $730 billion being spent online each year online. That number is perpetually growing. too. All you need is a slice of that to earn an income online from your business.

But if you’re spending all your time on actions which aren’t moving the “needle” on your business, you’re likely wasting much of it. There’s one specific thing all affiliates need which without, they will never see a dime from affiliate sales. That thing is traffic. But more specifically it’s traffic which seeks that which you’re selling! This is also known as targeted traffic.

Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business?

There’s a tendency towards those activities which you feel good about. Those which you don’t like, you avoid. In the beginning you’re likely to take a course, build a blog and watch training videos. Perhaps you’ll set up your sales funnel and start writing some blog posts. All this takes time and it’s time which isn’t rewarded financially until you sell something.

Selling something online means finding a specific person and getting them to click your affiliate link, and buy. If they are very well targeted, they are actively seeking the answers which your product gives them! Targeting the wrong visitors, or having a bad product are going to cost you dearly, even if you get everything else right. But if you’re actively engaged in creating content, but haven’t thought about promoting it, you’re being a “busy fool”! It might feel productive, but unless people are finding your content and engaging with it, you’re not selling anything!

I’ve written several ebooks, built many websites and failed many times with affiliate marketing but the one thing which makes sales is getting someone on your email list and delivering a product which is of value to them.

Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business? Got A List?

The email list is definitely one of your best assets as an affiliate marketer. Get one here for free. Without it, you must drive traffic either by working (usually very hard) for it through content creation and endless posting on social media and SEO, or you must pay for it using paid advertising.

aweber -Are you wasting time on the wrong actions as an affiliate? If you've been an affiliate marketer for any length of time, and are still not gettin

But once you have an email list of subscribers you have much greater control over your traffic. Plus, you can build trust over a much longer time period than is possible otherwise.

The list is a major piece of the affiliate success jigsaw. It doesn’t solve every problem, but a lot of problems are solved by it.

Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business – Your Customer Avatar

Obviously you need to drive traffic to build your email list up. Most affiliates will quit before they have even got 1000 subscribers on their email list too, so make sure you stick with it. Top affiliates have huge email lists. So a single email will be opened by thousands, if not tens of thousands of subscribers! With only a small list, and only a percentage opening them consistently, you’ll see far better results with a large list.

target - wasting time affiliate marketing

Despite affiliate marketing being a numbers game it’s also important to understand who you are attracting to your list. Attract the wrong people are your sales will suffer. So who exactly are the “right people” to attract to your email list?

The right people are aligned with your product. They are the kind who will buy and become life-long fans. If you’re selling subscription products, they will maintain their subscriptions because they understand the value of your product/s. Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet to learn about who you should be attracting through your marketing efforts.

Using Paid Traffic

I’ve definitely had the best results with affiliate marketing when I’ve been using paid traffic. But you need to tread carefully too. If you haven’t tried using paid traffic before, start with a low budget you can easily afford to lose and build up gently.

Expect to learn a lot before you start seeing immediate results. Most ad campaigns aren’t going to work straight away and you’ll need to do some experimentation. But if you start to work on understanding your customer avatar, and carefully align your product with the type of search query which is a good match, you should see sales coming in, or at least people opting in to your email list.

To optimise your landing page, find a good giveaway product which is a good match for your product. Don’t send paid traffic to a blog, since you’ll waste a lot of marketing budget. Far better to send it to a landing page to collect emails for your list.

Take An Inventory

To help you gain traction in your affiliate business, take an inventory of the time you spend on your online business. What actions are you performing? Ask yourself whether this course of activity is going to take your business to the level you want it to over 6 months or 5 years.

If the answer is no, you should start investigating new ideas you can implement. If you’re studying and have just started, you’re likely to be watching videos and learning. Make sure you don’t get “stuck” here in “learning mode”. As soon as you have some information to act on, make sure you act.

It’s worth trying new things even though you’ll likely see many of them as “failures”. But without failing at something new you’ll never learn it. So, for example if you haven’t ever done any paid advertising, make sure you set up a campaign and run it with minimal budget, just to get the ball rolling.

Paid marketing is a much more scalable marketing strategy for affiliates and remember that affiliate marketing is a numbers game – the more sales you make the more income you make. Without targeted traffic, in large numbers, you can’t grow your affiliate business.

Summary

Paid marketing is the fastest way to drive traffic. But you also need to make sure that traffic is very well targeted, or you’ll waste your ad budget. You must also make sure you’re using a high value product which is of huge value to your customer avatar. Unless you have chosen a good product to promote, no amount of advertising will help!

While blogging, creating ebooks and video content is rewarding, it doesn’t necessarily drive traffic very well. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and more than 114 million YouTube channels. So the chance of your video finding a large audience is very small. Likewise with your blog posts.

Blogging can take months before you start to see large amounts of visitors and it’s the same with a YouTube channel. Paid advertising on the other hand delivers targeted traffic very quickly. You can rapidly see whether a campaign is working. But with organic (content) marketing, it can take months to discover that your strategy is flawed! After which you’ve already done a lot of work!

Get help and support with your affiliate business and go back through the basics, even if you’re a long term affiliate.

Building Success Online With Tiny Achievements

Building success online is done through tiny achievements. Sadly, the money doesn’t come in immediately with affiliate marketing. But it’s there for the taking if you commit to the journey and stay the course. There’s an estimated $730 billion (USD) being spent online each year and it’s a number that is perpetually growing.

You only need a small slice of the pie to make a living from affiliate marketing. But it starts with taking small daily steps.

Building Success Online With Tiny Achievements

While it might sound nice to be earning $10,000 a month with an online business, every affiliate starts making nothing! From the foundation, you can get some training and begin by building a website., for example.

Once you’ve set up a website and a sales funnel, you can progress to studying a marketing method, such as paid advertising or blogging, for example. Each of the first steps as an affiliate is the foundation to your ultimate online success.

Building Success Online With Tiny Achievements

But it’s often after the initial excitement has worn off, when a beginner will lose interest. Once you’ve done all the initial steps, and yet nothing much seems to have happened, is where many lose their mojo and quit! To keep yourself moving, no matter how slowly, you must focus on the next step on the journey!

Building success online is done with tiny achievements. Each step leads you closer to the long term goal of having a profitable online business. But unless you keep going, you’ll lose momentum and likely quit. So, how do you keep going when the mountain seems so high and so far away? The answer lies in small, easily achievable goals.

Building Success Online With Tiny Achievements – Touching The Void

If you haven’t seen the film Touching The Void I highly recommend it, especially if you’re an affiliate. In 1985 two friends, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, set out to climb Siula Grande in Peru via the West Face. This was a unaccomplished feat by any climber.

Joe breaks his leg on the descent and Simon is in the process of lowering him on a rope to get them both to the bottom. However, a problem arises and Yates realises he has lowered Simpson over a crevasse. With no strength to pull him up, and having to make a decision he cuts the rope in order to save his own life.

Assuming Joe has been killed, Simon proceeds down the mountain. However, Joe is still alive! His story is something to behold and it’s an inspiration if you’re a struggling affiliate.

In the film, Joe explains how the only way he was able to sum the strength to drag himself (broken limbs and all) down a mountain of obstacles, which would have been enough to discourage most able bodied people, was to focus on small wins. He sets himself time limits with which to get to certain points on the horizon.

Only with the small, achievable “wins” was he able to continue and survive against so many odds!

Building Success Online With Tiny Achievements

While building an online business isn’t quite so perilous as dragging a broken body down the Siula Grande, it certainly has its challenges!

But as with looking at the big picture with a mountain, if you look at the feat of building a profitable online business it’s easy to become discouraged. When you start an online business you’re bound to be discouraged at some point too. The answer is to use this same strategy – focus on what is in front of you. Make small goals which can be accomplished within a short timeframe.

In Touching The Void, Joe gave himself strict time limits to get to a specific point on the horizon. He knew, if he didn’t get to basecamp before Simon left that he was finished!

With an online business, these tiny “baby steps” can be easily achievable goals which can be done within the day – not long term goals which seem impossible!

Why Most Quit

There’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing which means only a tiny percentage actually keeps going and becomes successful. But like with the Joe Simpson analogy, if you look at the big picture, you’re bound to become overwhelmed and quit before you even begin!

So instead of doing so, look to the small steps you can easily accomplish:

Watch a training video
Write a blog post
Email your email list
Get a free autoresponder
Create a website
Shoot a video
etc.

By making a habit out of achieving the small wins, and celebrating them, you keep yourself moving forwards towards your longer term goals.

Summary

Success with affiliate marketing doesn’t come easily, although some early “easy wins” are possible. However, long term, sustainable success is something different entirely. It can be easy to become overwhelmed by the size of the task you have undertaken, and as a result, lose your belief and faith that it even can be done.

Don’t look at the top of the mountain! Look instead only at the step right in front of you that you can take!

Good luck!

If you’re ready to get started in building an online business from scratch, you can get started here.

6 Game Changers For Struggling Affiliates

Here’s 6 Game Changers For Struggling Affiliates. Affiliate marketing can be tough, especially if you’re a beginner. There’s a lot to learn and then you need to actually do something, once you know what to do.

But you don’t know what the outcome will be, and you’re a little uncertain whether it’s worth your time and the effort. In this state of “cautious trepidation” you’re not taking bold steps. More like you’re taking nervous and unsure actions and then looking for results to confirm whether it’s worth your while! You’re uncertain, so you tread carefully.

The problem here is that when you look for results, you confirm your scepticism, and this leads to inaction.

Perhaps you write a blog post, and share it on your social media platform. Nothing happens. So you create an ebook, and place it on your website. Still nothing. At this stage you’ve spent several days/weeks/months with no results to show. Perhaps affiliate marketing isn’t for you after all, you think to yourself! Hmmm!

Around 95% of affiliates will quit, so by not doing so you’re already ahead of the herd! But you also want to start generating sales, or your efforts are pointless. Or are they? Perhaps a better way of looking at your affiliate marketing efforts is from the point of view of a great analogy – the Chinese Bamboo Tree.

6 Game Changers For Struggling Affiliates – #1…The Chinese Bamboo Tree

So here’s game changer number 1! The Chinese Bamboo tree takes 5 years of gestation under the surface of the soil. Once it sprouts through the soil, it grows 90 feet in five weeks! During it’s gestation period, it needs to be watered and fertilised. Affiliate marketing is a little like this too.

First you spend time learning and studying, to understand how it works. Next you build some infrastructure around your affiliate business – a website and an email marketing system perhaps. This all takes time and it’s time where you don’t see any results because you’re in the early phase of building your foundations.

The next phase is marketing. You must learn some kind of marketing strategy to attract an audience in order to promote and sell your affiliate product. Some affiliates will post on social media, others will write blog posts or create videos. Some will run ads, sending traffic into their sales funnels.

Depending on your particular circumstances, marketing budget, choice of marketing method and the relative competition in your niche, this can take some time! It’s going to be different for everyone. Here’s the point. If you start looking for results before you’ve done the work, the result will be inaction. You’ll look for the shoots of the “Chinese Bamboo” before you’ve given it time to develop.

6 Game Changers If You’re A Struggling Affiliate Marketer -#2… Think Big & Acquire The Right Knowledge

The “roots” of your Chinese Bamboo tree are your knowledge and aspirations. Everything grows from that. If you’re thinking you’ll just make a little “on the side” extra cash each month, your actions and results will grow from that kind of thinking.

If you think a little bigger, and decide to replace your income from affiliate marketing, you can absolutely do that too – but only if you believe you can first!

Henry Ford : “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”

So, be honest. What is your vision for your affiliate business? What does success look like for you?

In a similar vein, the knowledge you acquire in the beginning will set you on a path. In a straight line, even a 1% deviation off target will take a rocket far off its target on a trip to the moon.

Thinking big and acquiring the right knowledge is therefore a pretty important factor. If you’ve got a bad strategy, for example, even if you work really hard at it for months, it still won’t pay off! See my post on how to earn more money online with less effort.

6 Game Changers For Struggling Affiliates – The BattleFront Soldier

A while ago I started learning Forex marketing, before I decided to become an affiliate. I studied for a couple of years but eventually gave up because it didn’t work for me. I just lost money! But I learned quite a lot in the process and one of the things I learned was to be a “sniper” not a battlefront soldier.

“A trader is a sniper, not a battlefront soldier” – one of my mentors told me.

The same is true of affiliate marketing.

When I started affiliate marketing I posted my affiliate link everywhere that would allow it. I posted it on eBay, I posted it on my social media profiles, just everywhere! But nobody bought any affiliate products from it.

Why?

Simply because I was out blasting my affiliate link like a battlefront soldier. Whereas I should have been a “sniper”. A sniper might take longer to find their target. They lay in wait, perhaps for months. Then they take a single shot, and get their target.

In the case of affiliate marketing, their “target” is a sale.

6 Game Changers If You’re A Struggling Affiliate Marketer – #3 Be A “Sniper”

So how can you be the sniper as an affiliate marketer? One of the best ways to become the “sniper” as an affiliate is to understand your customer avatar. See the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this. The customer avatar, is the type of person you can best serve with your particular affiliate product. By understanding “who” this is, you can more effectively target them online very specifically and ignore the rest.

Posting your affiliate links anywhere and everywhere is being the “battle front soldier”. But you’re wasting a lot of effort with this tactic. Most people online aren’t interested in what you’re offering. But when you bring this understanding to your affiliate business, and get very specific about “who” your target audience is, you can become more intentional about every action you perform online to attract them.

Each blog post is crafted with your customer avatar in mind. Each video/ advert speaks intentionally to their needs, and in their language – speaking to their pains and problems. Adverts are targeted towards the demographics of your target audience – those exact people who are most likely to want, and even need your product/service.

6 Game Changers If You’re A Struggling Affiliate Marketer – #4 …Take Responsibility

You are the weakest link if your affiliate business isn’t working! It’s not the fault of the “business” or of your marketing tactic, it’s you! Unless you take full responsibility for this, you can always sidestep your responsibility for success with your affiliate business. If you do this, you will look for excuses rather than solutions.

Your business cannot grow beyond the thinking you bring to it. So if somewhere inside your mind, you don’t believe in yourself, or think you’re incapable of the success you really want, or that it’s simply unachievable, that is what you need to fix! This is often related to your “identity” or self image – how you see yourself in the world. See also how to change your self image.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate. – C. G. Jung

There’s power in accountability. When you accept that you’re fully responsible, regardless of your circumstances, it can be very empowering for you and your business. Are you honestly taking full responsibility for the results in your affiliate business?

#5 Your Circle Of Influence

Jim Rohn – “You are the average of the 5 people you spend most time with”.

If you’re a struggling affiliate, it’s definitely worth having a look at your circle of influence – close friends/family who you might go to for support and advice. Are they supporting you and cheering you on with your affiliate endeavours? Or are they undermining your efforts and/or secretly hoping you’ll fail?

Although this sounds a little harsh, the dynamics of a friendship can change dramatically if you succeed beyond the success of your circle, or in a different way. So there are subconscious conflicts going on beneath the surface, even if your circle doesn’t let on overtly.

Ideally find people on a similar quest to you. You can join an online community of entrepreneurs here.

#6 …Giving Vs Getting, Producing Not Consuming

When I became an affiliate all I could think about was pasting my affiliate link and getting those sales. I was desperate for a sale. Unfortunately, desperation is seldom a great marker of success! After joining an online business mentorship program (access here), I got given some great advice:

Give first, get later – switch your mindset to giving/helping, rather than to getting

I realised I was mostly focused on “getting”, in my affiliate endeavours. This came across in my email messaging, my advertising and my writing. It was a great realisation. So I started thinking about my intention when writing a blog post. Over time, I was able to switch from “getting” to helping.

This made a massive impact for me. Things changed quite clearly and I was enjoying the process much more because I wasn’t obsessing about my results (or lack of them).

Giving also means producing content rather than absorbing it. Just think about how much content you absorb/consume on a daily basis. Most of us are consumers and not producers. By switching your activity to producing content, rather than only consuming it, you’re helping people and leading them to your affiliate products simultaneously.

Recap/Summary

So there’s my 6 game changers for struggling affiliates. Here’s a quick recap:

Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese Bamboo tree – work on fertilising the soil and watering it – grow in knowledge and experience and don’t look for results until you’re in full swing with your affiliate habits. The work will pay off, but you must be patient. The Chinese Bamboo grows 90 feet in only 5 weeks once it breaks the surface of the soil. The same is true of affiliate marketing if you take the right action steps (and keep taking them)
Think big and get the right knowledge – thinking small seldom creates large results. So think in terms of the volume of people you can reach, how you can serve and the right action steps for your given situation and circumstances. The wrong knowledge can take you far off course.
Be a “sniper” not a battle front soldier – a sniper knows his target. So don’t blast everyone online looking for the sale. Know your target audience and customer avatar, and make every action secure in that knowledge that you’re targeting the right type of person with every action you take.
Take full responsibility – is your self image or identity sabotaging your best efforts. Make an effort to notice and understand the programs running in the background of your unconscious mind. See my post on how to change your subconscious beliefs.
Your circle of influence – are your closest friends and relatives unconsciously wishing your failure, or do they genuinely want your success? Do you take advice from people who are more successful than you, or less? Find other affiliates by joining an online community.
Become a producer rather than a consumer, start giving/helping rather than trying to constantly “get” from your affiliate marketing business. Take an inventory of the time you spend consuming material online versus producing it.

How To Earn More Money Online With Less Effort

If you’ve tried earning income online you’ll know how frustrating it can be, but what if there was a way to earn more money with less effort? Well, read on because there is….

When I started out looking for ways to earn online, I began with blogging. My first sale came from a software product I had bought which helped me build websites. I wrote an article reviewing it and someone bought it! I was over the moon, I knew now that I’d made a single sale online, I could make many more.

But my method of selling wasn’t scalable, and only a handful of people saw my review. Soon after that, my account on Hubpages.com (a free blogging site) was suspended and I lost my content. However, I had gained a valuable foothold on my affiliate marketing journey, and the first sale is an important step forwards. If you know with certainty that it’s possible to sell a product online, you have already put yourself in front of many struggling affiliates whose doubt and scepticism holds them back!

How To Earn More Money Online With Less Effort – Paid Ads + High Ticket Items

While content marketing can take months and even years to gain traction with, there’s a faster and simpler method: using paid advertising. While paid advertising can be prohibitively expensive for smaller items, if you choose to promote high ticket affiliate marketing products, your return on investment is much larger. In addition to using high ticket items, it’s also worth choosing subscription products too.

Subscription products pay you a recurring income. So when you make a sale it’s compounded effort. You continue to earn from the membership for the lifetime of the customer.

So for a simple comparison say you promote a low value product from Amazon at $100. A physical product will pay out 10% as a maximum (sometimes less) to the affiliate. So you can only make $10 per item for referring that particular product. This means, if you’re paying for advertising, you must spend less than $10 to make a profit per item! However, if you choose a high ticket item which pays $400 for a sale (plus recurring income from a subscription) there’s much more leverage. You now have up to $400 to spend on advertising to make a sale, rather than $10 to come out on top!

As a beginner in affiliate marketing you can expect some of your ad campaigns to hit, and others to miss. But with only $10 it’s going to be much more difficult finding a winning advertising campaign that’s consistently profitable.

How To Make More Money Online With Less Effort – A Scalable Strategy

With paid advertising you have a scalable strategy. Whereas if you are planning on blogging to sell your affiliate products, prepare yourself for a very long journey! Both strategies of content marketing and paid advertising have their merits however. With content marketing, you can gain traction over a long period of time. When you do, it is the content which is working for you, bring in sales organically. But this can take a long time. Plus, when it happens, it’s much more difficult to scale up.

With a paid advertising campaign, there can be some learning involved initially. It can take some testing before you hit upon a campaign which works. However, when you do, you can simply scale up by increasing your advertising budget. This just isn’t as feasible with content marketing.

So, to make more money online with less effort, focus on a strategy which is scalable. Once you find a campaign which works, you can run it consistently on complete autopilot. With content marketing, you always need to create more content and it can take months or years!

How To Make More Money Online With Less Effort – Use An Email List

For a long time I didn’t have an email list. It was only after a couple of years of struggling as an affiliate did I get the good advice to start building one!

If you don’t have one get one here free.

There’s some really, really good reasons why you need a list to become successful as an affiliate marketer.

Here they are:

Selling directly from an advertising campaign is sometimes disallowed by marketing platforms
Many people don’t buy on their first time seeing a product/website – so they will bounce and you’ll waste your ad budget
It takes 6-8 “touch points” with a product/website before a customer will buy
Running paid advertising is expensive so it’s worth collecting their details for your list, giving you more opportunity to sell over a longer timeframe (even months or years after they subscribe)
Having someone’s details means you can follow up with them and send them to a product multiple times
You can build trust through your email messages – much more difficult on a website or with a single interaction
Organic marketing takes a long time and a lot of effort, paid marketing is expensive, getting someone on your list puts you in greater control of your traffic

Build “You” First – Start With The Foundations

The foundations of your affiliate business is your understanding of how it works. Unless you pay some attention to your online business education, your business is going to be flawed from the start.

Imagine building a skyscraper on the foundations of a cottage! How long do you think it will last? It may sound silly, but that’s what most people do when they attempt to build an online business without any experience of business.

The foundations of your affiliate business is you – your education. To get a good foundation:

Start with a step by step course/program
Make good habits out of working on your business daily
Build your knowledge as well as your business
Keep learning and growing, but shift to doing once you have some knowledge
Get started as soon as possible with a marketing method and stick to it for several months until you’ve mastered it!
If you’re struggling, return to the basics – foundational learning and development.

Summary

So there it is! That’s how to earn more money online with less effort. Keep in mind that whatever you do it’s going to take time and effort. But that effort is better placed when you have a solid foundation and you choose a scalable marketing strategy and a business model which supports long term growth.

Lets have a quick recap for those who skipped to the end!

Use high ticket and subscription items – which gives you more leverage and more room for error when you’re learning
Use a paid marketing campaign which is much faster and more scalable than using content creation which can take months or years and isn’t scalable
Build an email list (get an email autoresponder here for free) – an email list gives you more control over your traffic plus you can create multiple touch points with customers, build trust and sell over a longer period than is possible from a website alone
Start with your education – invest in “you” because you’re the foundation of your business. A business will never grow beyond the thinking of the person who runs it! Access an online training resource here.

Pros And Cons Of Amazon Affiliate Program

What are the pros and cons of Amazon affiliate program? Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate program and has been around for decades. In July 1996, Amazon.com launched the first widely used affiliate program on the Internet. See also when did affiliate marketing start? Since then, millions of people have attempted to make money using Amazon’s product range.

However there’s some down sides to using Amazon despite their huge range of products and widely accepted customer base.

Pros And Cons Of Amazon Affiliate Program

Amazon’s affiliate program is one of the most popular. Everyone knows the brand and studies show that 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from Amazon than another e-commerce website. Amazon is well trusted, so if you send someone to the site through your affiliate link, there’s less trust issues than with some other affiliate programs.

It’s fairly easy to join Amazon’s affiliate program too, although there are certain requirements. Once you have joined and your application is accepted, you can start using affiliate links from Amazon to direct your website visitors to certain products on the site.

One of the benefits of using Amazon is the ability to make extra commissions when your referrals place multiple items in their shopping basket. So at Christmas, for example, a referral could mount up to multiple commissions. You can earn from multiple items, even if you’ve only referred one of them.

Pros And Cons Of Amazon Affiliate Program

There’s literally thousands of products you can choose from on Amazon, too. This means that whatever topic your website covers, there’s probably a suitable product you can find on Amazon to monetise it with.

Amazon’s commissions aren’t the best though, so it’s worth having other income sources if you’re an Amazon affiliate. Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 20% although most commissions fall between 1% and 10% with Amazon games taking up the 20% category. Here’s the breakdown of the UK commission structure for Amazon, although this is know to be changeable:

Amazon’s rep isn’t exactly good from the affiliates point of view. They consistently cut commission rates and make it more difficult for affiliates. So if you’ve spent years building content and linking to Amazon, they could easily change the rules and cut you off!

Although Amazon is international, they technically have programs for each country which you’ll need to apply separately to each one! See how to monetise international traffic on Amazon here.

Summary

Amazon’s a good idea if you want to add another income stream to your affiliate business. It lets you monetise a website in almost any topic because of the large choice of products on the site. More people are comfortable with buying from Amazon which means you don’t have to do so much pre-selling as an affiliate to make a sale. You can also earn from your referrals other purchases when they checkout if you’ve sold them an item.

There’s a few downsides to using Amazon though too. The main one is most products pay peanuts. Small items are hardly worth selling because they pay so little. So you’ll need to sell a lot of products to make a good amount.

Amazon regularly changes their terms and conditions and lowers commission rates for affiliates too. This is frustrating when you’ve built a tonne of content and suddenly the rug is swept from under you and you’re no longer eligible. So making Amazon your main source of online income is risky.

For better commission rates choose subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate products which pay more and reward you for life.

How Do I Make Income Through Blogging?

I’ve just received an email from my list asking “how do I make income through this” pertaining to my latest email message on the post “how to stay in the flow state for blogging“.

There’s a couple of main strategies people use to earn through a blog. One is advertising; using an Advertising platform such as Google Adsense to place ads on your content. When people click on the content, you earn advertising revenue. I personally haven’t had much success with this strategy, although it does work the amounts are incredibly small. So you need a huge volume of traffic to make it work – and free traffic at that, which is difficult to obtain.

The strategy I’ve had the most success with is affiliate marketing, hence the name of this site: “affiliate marketing mentors“. With affiliate marketing you sell someone else’s product from your blog. These are what I believe to be the main factors in making this strategy work.

How Do I Make Income Through Blogging? – Product Or Topic?

Blogging can be a tough way to make an income and you shouldn’t expect the money to suddenly come suddenly flooding in as a beginner. Although you can have some quick success as an affiliate, to make money consistently takes a little more effort.

Some people say to find a product you want to promote first. But, if you’re going to be blogging for traffic generation (to find visitors to buy your product) you’ll need to create a lot of content over a long period of time. So choosing a product first might not be the best idea because that means you’ll be blogging in a topic you might not be familiar or even interested.

So I would recommend choosing a blog topic first which you can align with a product you want to promote. Unless you can consistently create content for your blog, you’re better off using paid advertising instead, to build an affiliate business. This is far faster too, if you’ve got the budget for it. If not, blogging it is!

How Do I Make An Income Through Blogging – Why Your Blog Topic Must Align With Your Product Choice

To sell something through your blogging, you must align your blog topic with the product you’re going to be promoting. Otherwise, you’ll spend a huge amount of time building traffic, and nobody will be interested in what you’re selling. Think about why you would find a particular website, for example. Imagine you’re looking for information on how to fix a toilet seat. You land on the website, and they are selling picture frames. Would you buy one? Of course not! You’re looking for information about fixing your toilet seat – you’re not shopping for picture frames!

You might buy a tool, or a bracket to help you fix your toilet seat. You might even buy a toilet seat! But you are definitely not in the market for a picture frame while you’re trying to solve your toilet seat problem!

Unless you align your blog topic with a suitable product which can help your audience, you’re not going to sell your affiliate product. So for starters think long and hard about the product which will align with your particular interest for your blog.

How Do I Make An Income Through Blogging – Your Blog Topic

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet so in order to get noticed and pick up some of that much desired traffic you’re going to need to create a lot of content. It can take several months to build traction from blogging, even several years. This will depend on how competitive your particular topic/niche is. In a competitive topic, you’ll have more competing websites online , so it’ll take longer to generate traction than with a topic with few competing websites.

Ideally choose a topic you can become obsessive about and keep creating content in. That’s likely what it will take to generate the traffic you need to build an income. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

If you find an untapped niche, which has low competition, it can of course happen much more quickly. Or, if you can throw some marketing budget at your blog, this can help too! See also, best niche for blogging.

Cashing In On Your Blog Traffic

In order to “cash in” on your blog traffic you need to sell something to your visitors. This is done through finding a suitable product which helps your audience in some way.

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from online. So it’s worth spending some time on this, finding the best product in your niche to promote. Unless you already have something to sell of your own, or have a service to sell, it’s probably not worth creating your own product initially. There’s plenty of high value products you can promote online without going to the trouble of product creation.

The best affiliate products to promote are firstly the ones which are the best for your audience and secondly those which offer the most value. If you misalign your product choice with your blog topic, it’s going to be difficult to sell anything. But find a good match and you can sell them more easily through your website.

Selling Affiliate Products From A Blog – The Email List

To sell an affiliate product from your blog you will want to offer some giveaway product to encourage your visitors to sign up to your email list. You can get an email autoresponder service here for free. This lets you collect subscribers from a blog and deliver automated messages to your subscribers.

To get website/blog visitors to subscribe to your email list, you can create some giveaway. I use an ebook on this website, for example. You can get a copy of Affiliate Marketing For Beginners here.

Ebooks are good lead magnets which attract website visitors to your email list. Once you have a “lead magnet” offer on your website, you can build out some email messages which automatically send out to your email list of subscribers. You can use these messages to promote your affiliate product using your affiliate link. An affiliate link is a unique identifying link which you use to sell your affiliate products through. When someone buys a product through your link, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Back To Blogging

While it may take some time initially to create a lead magnet such as an ebook, once you’ve set it up your email marketing can be automated. Messages are sent out on autopilot to your subscribers as they join your email list.

With a few carefully crafted email messages, you can sell your affiliate offer to your subscribers as they join your list, all on complete autopilot!

Once setup, you’re going to need to build that email list though and this is done by creating more content through blogging. There’s many other ways to get traffic to your website free. You can also pay for advertising if you’re less inclined to create lots of content through blogging.

But blogging is a good, cheap method of generating website traffic. Just make sure the blog posts you write are going to attract the right audience who will want and need your products.

Link Directly In Your Blog Posts

You can also place your affiliate links directly in your blog posts too. Use banners and images which you can get from your affiliate program. Here’s an example of an image I found through the affiliate program I use:

Most affiliate programs will offer banners, images and other marketing materials which you can use to help you generate sales through your blog. It can be a little more difficult selling products directly through a blog post.

Most visitors to a new blog will be hesitant to make a purchase if they don’t know you or trust you. This is where email marketing can help you sell online. By offering value to your subscribers through your email messages, you can build trust and lead people to your affiliate products.

How To Get Paid For Online Referrals

Getting paid for online referrals is one of the best ways to earn money! You can earn from your armchair, with your feet up! You can earn from your laptop, from anywhere in the world. Once you’re making sales online, it means you can earn an independent income from anywhere. The implications are great. You can work in your own time and in your own way, quit your job and never have to work a job again or have a long commute again.

However, the downside is that there’s work involved in attaining this achievement. Firstly, you will need to learn a few new skills. You’ll also need to find a suitable product (or products) which you want to sell online and a method of selling it! There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join and millions of products to choose from.

Certain products can pay much more than others too, so it’s worth doing some research to find the best kinds of products to sell. Subscription and high ticket products are the best in my personal experience. With a high value subscription product, you get paid recurring income from memberships which you have referred. High ticket items pay much larger commissions so you can get large paydays even with only a few sales.

With the right type of products, too, such as software products which are essential for business for example, customers will always maintain their subscriptions because the products are so necessary.

How To Get Paid For Online Referrals – Selling

While product choice is an important factor in getting paid for online referrals, your method of promotion is also as important. If you don’t find a method of product promotion which works, you won’t sell! So it’s definitely worth arming yourself with the right training and education for a good foundation.

Selling online is not a matter of being a “salesy” type person either. With the right marketing method, online sales can happen in your sleep without any “hard-selling” on your part. By using selling systems which drive traffic towards your offer, you can even sell in multiple countries worldwide – and on complete autopilot!

Once you have learned this skill, you can use it again and again to sell anything to almost anyone online. Access a training resource here to get started.

The main methods affiliates use to sell online are:

Paid advertising – using platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, and social media
Email marketing – an important part of selling online is automating email messages to deliver value (and your offers)
Content marketing – content, (like this blog post), can be used to attract an audience organically through various means (social media, SEO (search engine optimisation), email marketing etc.)

How To Get Paid For Online Referrals – Choosing A Product To Sell

Choosing a product to sell is often where you begin the affiliate marketing journey. A lot of affiliates start out on Amazon because there’s so many products to choose from. You can find Amazon’s affiliate program here and anyone can join. Once inside an affiliate platform, you can access your unique identifying links – known as affiliate links. By selling a product online through your unique identifying “code”, you’ll earn commissions and get paid a portion of the sale price of any given product you sell.

Certain products will pay more than others. For a comparison, most physical products will pay between 1% and 10% commission. With digital products you can earn from 30%-40% commission. Digital products pay much more because they can be delivered automatically over the internet. As such there’s very little cost involved in manufacture and delivery. Whereas with physical products there’s more costs involved in manufacturing, postage and handling.

So although Amazon is a popular choice for affiliate marketers when they get started online, it doesn’t offer the highest levels of pay available. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% for most of it’s affiliate products. You can also find products in almost any category with a simple search online. Simply type in to a search engine “{your topic} affiliate program” to find products in almost any niche.

Promotion Of Your Affiliate Link

Once you have found a product through joining an affiliate program, you can get your affiliate link. This is just a link of code which you can attach to your blog posts, email messages or use throughout your social media platforms. There’s many ways to promote your affiliate link, but the most leveraged method is through using a paid advertising platform. Many affiliates will start with Google Adwords or Bing which lets them create ads related to their product.

aweber -how to get paid for online referrals

While some affiliates send traffic directly to their offers, this is often thought of as a waste of advertising budget. It’s far better, especially if you’re paying for advertising, to collect emails and start building an email list of subscribers who you can serve somehow.

An email list gives you much more control over your traffic, whereas paid traffic is expensive to acquire, organic traffic takes time to build. But once you have captured an email address of a visitor, you can deliver value to them and build some trust.

Top earners from referrals always have an email list of subscribers to promote their products to. So it’s definitely worth getting an email autoresponder if you’re going to sell products online. You can get one free here.

Free Marketing Methods

While paid marketing is much faster and more scalable way to selling affiliate products online, it does take some time to learn. While learning a paid marketing method, you can expect to spend some advertising budget while you make a few mistakes. So it’s worth starting with a small budget you can afford to lose.

But if paid marketing isn’t appealing to you, there’s also a cheaper solution which is organic marketing. Organic traffic can be built upon through content creation and many affiliates use this approach to generate website traffic and sales.

This can be done through blogging, video (e.g.YouTube), or using social media to interact and connect with people.

While a free marketing method can take longer to attract an audience to sell to, it compounds over time. So the more content you have, the easier it becomes to attract customers over time. A blog or a YouTube channel are two possible avenues for organic traffic generation. See also how to get traffic for free.

Finding The Right Audience – Your “Customer Avatar”

The “customer avatar” is the right person to attract to your website if you want to sell a specific product. Since there’s so many people online at any given moment, trying to sell to everyone results in selling to no-one!

In order to get paid for online referrals, you must attract a specific audience who see the value in what you’re selling! For example, if you had a DIY store, the type of person who usually shops with you might be of a certain age. You might attract mostly people aged from 30-50, for example. This “data point” is worth a lot to you once you figure it out and understand who is most likely to want your product.

As you learn more about your customer avatar, you can collect more and more “data points” until you have built up a very specific customer profile. Once you understand “who” that is, you can target them more specifically.

Getting paid for online referrals is much easier when you understand your customer avatar. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet for more info on this.

What To Expect

To get paid for online referrals you must join an affiliate program, get your affiliate link and learn some kind of marketing/promotion method. Getting your affiliate link is the easy part, but content promotion is where many affiliates get stuck. There’s a large drop out rate in affiliate marketing for this reason – most affiliates struggle making money with their promotion method.

So it’s definitely worth investing in a course of study to get the right foundations first. Once you have got some basic training, you must start with a marketing method and learn through trial and error! This can be a little frustrating at the beginning but if you have a good understanding of your product and your customer avatar, you’re already ahead of most affiliate beginners who attempt it.

With paid marketing and organic (free) marketing methods there are upsides and downsides. Free marketing is obviously cheaper, however, it will take much longer to get any traction. Paid marketing is much faster and you can get a more immediate feedback to see if it’s working or not. With blogging or video creation (content marketing) it will take a lot longer before you see any results.

The tipping point in blogging, for example, where the sales are coming in without much effort, might be weeks/months down the line. With paid marketing, you can expect results within days, depending to your marketing budget.

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How To Stay In The “Flow” State For Blogging

Keeping yourself in a state of “flow” is important if you want to make a habit out of blogging. This can be challenging, especially if you’re unsure of your direction. Ideally choose a topic you can become obsessively passionate about. That way, you’ll never run out of ideas to blog about.

But it’s also important to set up your daily routine to help you maintain consistency. If you’re all over the place with your daily routine, it’s going to be tough keeping up with a blogging practice. I find a good routine for me is to blog first thing in the morning. If I have a late night, or drink too much alcohol, it massively effects my ability to be creative and stay consistent.

Consistency is what you want with your blogging. Successful bloggers have made a habit out of posting blogs regularly.

How To Stay In The “Flow” State For Blogging

First, you have to “get” into the flow state. The flow state is a state of mind where you are consistently creative enough to keep writing blog posts. In this state, ideas come to you easily, and you write freely. To help you find the state of flow, choose a topic you can easily write about. Ideally it should align with a passion or interest you can consistently come up with ideas for. If you find yourself getting stuck then it could be you’ve chosen the wrong topic.

Of course your environment has a part to play too. Make sure it’s tidy and you’re not distracted by clutter – a tidy space means a tidy mind and although I like a bit of mess at times, it definitely effects my ability to focus on the task in hand and come up with ideas.

I also find social media a distraction. So if you’re spending hours scrolling your feed, ask yourself whether it adds or subtracts from the flow state you want to maintain. I’m a big fan of psychology books and often get ideas from them for my blog posts. So keeping a book on the go which inspires me definitely helps.

I also read other blog posts when I’m coming up with ideas for my blogs. If I’m not certain of my blog post I’ll scour the internet looking for inspiration.

How To Stay In The Flow State For Blogging – Why Consistency Is Key

Consistency is key to blogging and if you don’t keep up your blog habit, your traffic will dwindle and die! But before you can make it a habit, you must start! If you’re struggling getting stated with blogging, the first thing you should do is look at your state of mind. Ask yourself what mental baggage are you carrying? Spend some time clearing your mental space with some meditation. Are you in a state of panic? If so this definitely won’t help you in your creativity.

I find I work best in a calm and relaxed state of mind, but you will find your own “perfect” state with a bit of practice. You might even find a little bit of fear helps you get going! Here’s a few things I use to help me reach my best blogging mental state for productivity:

Meditation
Reading a book about my topic, or something inspiring
Clearing your workspace
Reading blog posts about your topic for ideas
Listening to music and lifting your “vibe”
Exercise

Not Feeling It? Shift Your “Vibe”

Remember some days just aren’t blogging days. So on those days I like to strategise about potential future blogs. Or focus on some other activity which moves my online business forwards, such as paid advertising, video or just research.

Find books which cover your area of interest. I’m personally a big fan of the self help genre and often use them for my blog posts in one way or another.

If you’re struggling with your affiliate business I always find it helpful to detach from it and work on myself. This could be doing some form or exercise, setting goals, journalling, reading or writing out my gratitude journal.

Here’s a post on the power of gratitude for an affiliate business. I think a gratitude journal is one of the best tools for a blogger. Gratitude quickly shifts your mental and physical “state” to a lighter and higher vibration.

A Mental “Check-in”

I’ve personally found particularly destructive circumstances for your creativity are those shown on the lower level of the emotional guidance scale (shown above). These are emotions of anger, jealousy, unworthiness and powerlessness. Often I might watch a video of someone online, for example, which might trigger feelings of unworthiness. Some leader type such as Tony Robbins might even have a negative effect on me because I compare myself to him! How stupid I know!

If I get into an argument, it can affect my mental state for long after the quarrel, too, affecting my ability to create content. We often carry around a lot of mental baggage and “noise” which affects our ability to come up with spontaneous ideas.

I find a mental “check-in” helps me detach from what’s going on inside and become more present. This in turn helps you return to the flow state where ideas come more freely. So if you’re carrying a lot of mental indecision, noise, unworthiness and so on, it’s likely holding you back from being creative.

To help switch off the mental internal “noise” I use:

Meditation
Exercise
Mindfulness exercises – moving meditation such as kung fu exercises (Siu Lim Tao is a kung fu exercise I practice regularly)

Look At Your Consumption Habits

What information are you consuming on a regular basis? Is it information which inspires you and gives you ideas for your blog posts? Or is it social media conflicts and problems with the state of the world! I often catch myself “doom” scrolling social media finding all the problems with the world. This puts me in a negative and fearful state from which is can be very difficult to return!

So if this happens for you, it might be worth having a “digital detox” and finding some new information to consume. As already mentioned in this post, I find self help, psychology and mindset books, as well as certain business books are inspiring.

What books inspire you and give you ideas for your blog posts? Make a habit out of reading these kinds of books and you’ll find you’re much more inspired for your blog posts than if you constantly doom scroll social media sites instead!

Summary

So there’s a few ideas for how to stay in the “flow” state for blogging. Staying in a positive mindset is paramount if you want to make a good habit out of blogging. If you find yourself “blocked”, don’t force it. Just shift your mental state instead!

There’s lots of ways you can “gear” your brain to stay in a state of flow. Firstly take an inventory of your consumption habits and remove those which put you in a negative state of mind. This could be social media scrolling for example. I’ve definitely found Facebook throws me into a negative state when I see how great everyone’s life “appears” to be on their news feeds! So I avoid the platform if I want to be creative and write!

Take regular check-in’s with your mental “inner” space. Notice what situations and circumstances throw you off and start avoiding them! Look for inspirational books, and follow other bloggers who inspire you. Sign up to inspirational email lists so you get regular ideas dropping into your inbox!

If you find yourself in a negative state these are some simple tools you can use: