AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

The Power Of Intention Journalling

There’s huge power in writing out your intentions, or intention journalling. If you’re running an online business, but keep getting stuck, I would highly recommend it. It’s so easy to get caught up in routines and habits which don’t get you where you want to go. You think over the long term they will serve you, but what if they don’t?

If you’ve been doing the same things for a while, but they aren’t taking you to where you want to be, start journalling your intentions on a daily basis. This can be a simple mantra such as:

“I now make 10 sales a month/week/day“, or whatever feels appropriate. It should be something which motivates you forwards, and perhaps feels a little out of reach right now.

It doesn’t matter that it might not be true right now. Just that it is believable enough to repeat on a daily basis.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Limiting Beliefs

You may be aware of limiting beliefs. Those are beliefs which you may have picked up from your childhood which no longer serve you. They are still alive and kicking often because they were hammered into you by a parent with their particular mantras and “programs”. Think about something a parent might have said when you were young which limited your life somehow, for example:

Life’s a struggle
Money doesn’t grow on trees
Money is the route of evil
You must work hard for money

Those are just a few examples of limiting beliefs which are often picked up in childhood. They lay the foundations for the circumstances in your life through subconscious programming. It can take many years for them to appear, but the route cause may be a limiting belief which was repeated many times to you as a child.

Remember at school too, when you had to repeat things over and over to remember them. The times tables, spellings or even when you’ve been in trouble!

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Installing New “Programs”

Limiting beliefs can hamper your attempts to change your circumstances because they are “hardwired” into your subconscious mind. So no matter how hard you attempt to change things on the “outside”, your inner world continues to create hardship because of a limiting worldview/belief.

So for example, if you’re intending to create more abundance financially, but your limiting belief is that “money is limited” or “life’s a struggle”, it might always seem as though you never quite “get there” and you always find it difficult to make money no matter what you try. It’s no wonder, that’s the case if you’re running this old program.

You can shift these old paradigms by bringing them into your conscious awareness and replacing them by some new more powerful (and positive) ideas.

That’s what intention journalling does. It gives you something to repeat daily which is going to change your paradigm from the inside, rather than just struggling against old limiting beliefs on the “outside” of life.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Choosing A Powerful Intention

To choose a powerful intention to use as a mantra, find something you want to achieve or bring about in your life. So, for example if you’re building an affiliate business, it might be to make more sales online.

Here’s one of mine that I used for a while:

“I now make 10 or more affiliate sales a month”

I wrote it out every day at least 10 times. It also became a mantra I used regularly where I just repeated it regularly (inside my head). At the time, this was a good intention for me because I wasn’t quite making that many sales on a regular basis. However, I knew it was possible because I had made that many on occasion. If you choose an intention which is too far fetched for you to believe, you may have more conflict over using it.

Ideally choose an intention which scores 10/10 for desirability and 10/10 for believability. If you don’t believe it, you’re likely to discount it and if you don’t desire it, you’ll likely give up using it before it has time to take effect.

It’s worth pushing yourself here too as to what is possible. So stretch yourself a little and as you repeat your mantra, notice what comes up.

The Power Of Intention Journalling – Observing

As you write out your intention each day, notice what comes up for you. It might be some limiting ideas or conflict. Notice this and “tweak” your intention accordingly. You can also imagine how your life will look once you have achieved your intention. This is also a useful exercise (visualisation). See also my article focus and inspiration what you need for affiliate success.

However, it’s also important to suspend your disbelief a little. Set an intention which when it happens you will know that it is because of this work you have done in setting your intention. That might mean stretching what you believe is possible a little. However, you still need to make a habit out of writing out your intention every day. So if you are in conflict with your goal ,because you don’t believe in it, you’re unlikely to keep up with the practice.

There’s a great book which goes into more detail about this process by Stuart Lichtman. Stuart was an MIT professor who came up with a process he called Cybernetic Transposition. He “transposes a success from the past, and places it into a future event in your mind“. This is done through using what he calls meta stories, similar to the intention writing discussed here.

A “Flag” To Your Unconscious Mind

What this process does is “flag” up your goal to your subconscious mind so that it looks for solutions even when you’re asleep! So if you’ve been trying (and perhaps failing) to succeed with making sales in your affiliate business, this is definitely worth doing. All the attempts you make consciously are still going to come under the control of your subconscious belief system and programs.

So if you have a negative belief which is holding you back somehow, you may be unaware of it. No amount of hard work consciously will make things change. You need the conscious mind and the subconscious mind working together in partnership.

This is where the power of intention setting comes in. Make a daily habit out of this and do it for at least 30 days consistently, writing out your intention at least 10 times daily, more if you can. In Stuart Lichtman’s book, he recommends writing out your “meta story” 100 times a day.

After several weeks of doing this practice, or even sooner, you should notice some ideas coming up. Make sure you do them and follow through. These will be subconscious suggestions based on the intention you have set for yourself.

The Subconscious Mind

The subconscious mind is powerful and will bring about your intentions whether you realise what they are or not! By setting specific intentions for your affiliate business, you are consciously letting your subconscious mind know exactly what you want.

Most of us are running programs we known nothing about and then complain when they materialise in the world! We complain, focus on the negative things which we don’t want to bring about, but then they show up in our lives.

The subconscious mind doesn’t care what shows up! It simply obeys the commands of your programs and brings about events and circumstances which are congruent with the messages you convey!

If you spend all the time grumbling about life, focusing on the bad things, what you don’t have, and your lack and limitations, they keep showing up because you keep giving them your attention! To make change you need to consciously shift away from this pattern towards a more positive outcome which you truly desire.

The unconscious patterns of thought (and intention) are running the show if you let them. Intention writing is a means to change these to a very specific outcome which you definitely want to achieve.

Training The Mind For Success

As a beginner affiliate I never thought that training the mind for success was at least as important as my affiliate marketing strategy. So I kept on trying (and failing) over and over again. I was trying the same strategy over and over, and things didn’t change.

As the quote by Albert Einstein goes : “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things but expect a different result”.

In 2014 I found an online mentorship community and I dutifully joined it. Despite having been an affiliate for some time, I still wasn’t having much success. I knew if I gave up then failure was inevitable! So, I rolled up my sleeves ready to start again from scratch with an open mind.

While I learned some new strategies, there was also an emphasis on mindset and training your mind for success. This was definitely an aspect of affiliate marketing I was unfamiliar with and I believe one of the missing components which hold many affiliates from the success they desire.

Training The Mind For Success – Growth Mindset

With a growth mindset and full of self belief and the right knowledge, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. But that’s the biggest problem. Most people go in with over confidence, false expectations and a lack of knowledge and with self limiting beliefs. They soon quit! Their belief takes a hammering as they come up against the reality of making a living online versus their fantasy version of it.

95% of affiliates will quit which is testimony to the fact that affiliate marketing is not an easy business. But consider how many people can “give affiliate marketing a go” and this number isn’t all that surprising. Most businesses fail and it’s not just online businesses. But the fact that an online business is easily accessible to anyone with a laptop, means that a 95% drop out rate isn’t so discouraging.

Those who succeed with affiliate marketing are those who don’t quit, despite the difficulties, and this comes down to mindset, not techniques.

Training The Mind For Success – Belief

But how exactly do you train your mindset? Can you really work on your mindset, or are you just always going to be the same as you are? This question has huge implications because if you believe you can grow and change, you have a growth mindset. If you believe you can’t change, you won’t even try!

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

If you believe you can build a profitable online business, or not, you’re right! Belief is the catalyst for motivation and action because the actions you take are driven by a belief. Try and think of an action you take in your affiliate business which doesn’t have conviction behind it. Without conviction/belief in what you’re doing, you’ll soon give up!

When you lack conviction about something, you stop taking action. So it’s pretty important for affiliates to focus on building and maintaining their belief in what they are doing. Otherwise, they will quickly lose interest, focus and drive.

Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion

Mantras and intentions are a good method of instructing the subconscious mind. This happens whether you’re conscious of it or not. In Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, Hill likens the the subconscious mind to a “fertile garden spot..” where “..weeds will grow in abundance if they are not replaced by a more desirable crop”.

In this analogy, he is referring to your conscious “chatter” and the thoughts and intentions which are allowed to enter into the subconscious mind through autosuggestion. Our “garden spot” is our subconscious mind and we ‘feed’ it through the thoughts which we give the most energy to.
While this analogy might seem over simplified, and thoughts only have a subtle impact on our lives, over time they become attitudes and characteristics which define our very nature and reality.

To take charge of our thoughts is a good first step towards communicating what we want to our (more powerful) subconscious mind. It is our subconscious mind which delivers the “crop” to us over time: whether that’s a successful online business or a failed one!

Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion

For most people, the conscious mind runs mostly on autopilot, and we generate millions of random thoughts every day. Many of these are already heavily influenced by the major events in our lives and our childhood programming. This programming happens before we have the conscious facilities to override negative beliefs and limitations which might hold us back in life.

Therefore, if a parent continually spoke in terms of limiting beliefs, it’s likely you have picked them up. “Life’s a struggle”, “Money is the route of all evil”, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and so on. Through repetition, we have embedded many negative beliefs about money, life, love and happiness.

To change them you can use mantras and visualisations. A good mantra can help you overcome a lifetime of negative repetition of a limiting belief. But only if you make a habit out of it and repeat it over a long enough time period:

For example: “Money comes easily and frequently” might be used to replace a negative belief about limitation of money such as “money doesn’t grow on trees”! “I love and approve of myself” can be used to overcome a negative belief like “I’m never good enough”.

Mantras For Success

A mantra is something you consciously choose to replace/override some negative programming you might have running in the background of your mind. So, for an affiliate business, you might choose an empowering mantra such as:

I now make 10 sales a week/day
I easily make affiliate sales
I am a successful affiliate
I now make $10k a month in affiliate sale
I now make a living from affiliate marketing
etc.

Although it can be difficult to start telling yourself these things when it isn’t yet true, that’s exactly how you created your current reality – through repetition of mantras, many of which were negative in nature. Such as “I’m not good enough”, “I can’t seem to succeed whatever I do”, “It’s too hard” and so on. When you repeatedly tell your subconscious mind that idea which you want to appear in reality, your programming shifts and you’ll come up with ideas and brainwaves which will allow it to happen.

For this to work, you need to make it a part of your daily routine. Remember, you’ve probably been telling yourself something negative for decades! If your old mantras and inner dialogue are things such as “I’m never good enough” and “money doesn’t grow on trees”, you’re painting the reality you’re currently faced with. To change that reality you need to change the “paint brush”, that is your current mental chatter which perpetuates that reality.

Using Visualisation

For a long time, I used an “away from” motivation. I was motivated “away from” fear, debt and scarcity. But there’s a problem with this motivation. When you reach an oasis of abundance, calm and peace, and you’ve recovered from the stress, your motivation wanes. You fall back towards doing less, because your motivation is gone.

A more powerful way to self motivate is through a positive visualisation of a long term worthy goal. For example, the actor Jim Carey wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars and dated it 10 years into the future in 1985. 10 years later in 1995 he got the movie role in Dumb and Dumber and was paid $10 million for the film.

He regularly visualised himself meeting directors and getting work as an actor in Hollywood. He kept his check in his wallet and looked at it frequently, while visualising his goal.

Visualisation is a powerful tool for affiliates because it creates an attractive future which you can use to inspire you forwards. This is much better than running away from fear, scarcity and lack because you create a more positive and powerful “towards” motivation, rather than a fearful and negative “away from” motivation which continues to draw you to it, rather than towards something positive, hopeful and inspiring.

Focus and inspiration is what you need for success with affiliate marketing, not fear and scepticism.

Why Affiliates Need Focus

It’s easy to become distracted when you’re working online which is why affiliates need focus. Social media platforms are designed to suck our attention and they do a good job of it. Unless you’re mindful of that, you can spend all your available time online scrolling Facebook feeds and reacting to your notifications and alerts! Before you know it, your day has gone; wasted on unproductive activity.

time versus results in affiliate marketing

Even if you don’t use social media much, you can still get distracted by other things. Unhelpful habits can lead you down paths which lead nowhere. You can get stuck in “training mode”, watching endless hours of training videos; but without taking any action. Or spending all your time on a logo, but without having any website visitors.

It feels as though you’re working, but affiliate marketing is a performance based business. So unless you’re working on a marketing method somewhere in your daily routine, nothing comes from it all in terms of sales.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Training Vs “Doing”

When you’re juggling your time between family, your job and your affiliate marketing business, you need to zone in on the things which matter. Time spent unproductively is dead time which you’ll never get back! Spending time on the small things, which don’t drive your business forwards is known as being a “busy fool”. As an affiliate you must determine which actions are going to move the “needle” on your affiliate income.

In the beginning, you’re likely going to be watching training videos and setting up your sales system; your website and email marketing campaigns, for example. 90% of your time will be in “training mode”. But once you have some knowledge, it’s important to shift this to a 80/20 split, spending 80% of your time on a marketing strategy, and less time on learning.

You’ll still be learning. Only you will learn by experimentation not just from learning materials. If you want to learn to swim, you have to jump in the water. Trying (and often failing) at a marketing tactic is the “water” when it comes to affiliate marketing. Unless you get your feet wet, you’re not going to succeed as an affiliate.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Spreading Yourself Too Thin

As an affiliate there’s so many possibilities and strategies you can venture down. One day you can “try” blogging and the next day you can run an ad. The problem is, you can easily spread yourself too thin, jumping from one strategy to another, and never getting any traction in any.

Far better to pick a single strategy and focus on that wholeheartedly over the longer term. Become an expert at your particular marketing tactic. I took the scattered approach as a beginner, and jumped from course to course, looking for the “easy path”, “magic bullet” and “quick win”. Sadly, this approach is another example of spreading yourself too thin.

It can be very difficult to get traction if your attention is scattered across multiple marketing strategies. Or, worse still, you don’t stay the course in any strategy and constantly change direction looking for another (easier) route.

Why Affiliates Need Focus – Doubt, Scepticism, Fear

Doubt creeps in all too easily especially if you’re a beginner. You wonder whether your strategy will work or not. Should you bother? Is it worth your marketing budget, or your time? If your mind is plagued with doubt and scepticism, you’ll dither and never fully commit.

You’ll “try” one method, expecting some quick return, and then switch and “try” another. Since no method is guaranteed to work and most ad campaigns fail, you’ll most likely experience one “failure” after another with this approach.

But commit to the journey, and focus on one marketing strategy alone, and you’ll learn much more, even from your “failures”. Remember that the master has failed more time than the beginner has even tried! Clearing your mind of doubt, scepticism and fear is the first thing you should do. If your mind is clouded your intention is weakened. When you doubt, you tread too carefully, always pulling back, uncertain and therefore non committal.

Goals & Intentions

We all have doubts, it’s only natural. But if you focus more on your doubts than your intentions, they will eventually kill your ambition for your affiliate marketing business, if you let them. The antidote to doubts, fears and scepticism is to set a powerful goal, and regularly write out mantras to remind you of your highest intention.

When you don’t do this, your mind takes over. Most people’s mind runs on autopilot. They don’t take charge of it and when it’s filled with doubt, that’s what takes hold. Intention writing helps you gain clarity and focus as you write our your business intentions every day:

I have a successful affiliate marketing business
I now make 5-10k a month from affiliate sales
I write 5 blog posts a week
I now make consistent sales
I am committed to obtaining my first, hit, lead or sale

Intention writing is the antidote to scepticism, fear and doubt which runs in everyone. The key is not to let it take charge of your mind. Instead, commit to choosing an goal/intention which you are passionate about achieving. Write it out multiple times each day to remind yourself of your commitment, and especially when you’re feeling doubt.

The Meandering Affiliate

I’ve definitely been the “meandering” affiliate marketer. I meandered from course to course, tried one strategy after another, lost hope and dropped off, and then started all over again months later. This is not the path to success, let me tell you!

My sporadic work schedule only contributed to my doubts and scepticism. I would make a sale, then spend the week congratulating myself rather than focusing on what brought the sale about – or making the next one.

As soon as I made a sale, I would spend my commission, rather than reinvest it. I had no clue what I was doing for the large part! Over time though, I slowly built confidence as I started making more and more sales.

When I made a sale organically, it inspired me in my content creation. But there was a long time period where nothing much happened. This is tough. You don’t know what works and what doesn’t until you start making sales. But that only happens when you consistently work on a specific marketing method for some time.

It’s like the chicken and the egg. We want the egg to hatch, but carry doubt and fear with us, expecting proof that it works first! Without doing the work, the egg won’t hatch. To do the work, you need faith, belief and intention, which you must fuel yourself.

Summary

Affiliates need focus and not just focus for what they do in their affiliate business, but focus in how they think. If you continually give energy and thoughts to your doubts, fears and scepticism, you’ll find ways to stop your affiliate activity. Use mantras and intention setting to overcome the doubts in your mind.

If you haven’t made any sales yet, this can be a tough phase. You don’t have “evidence” that “it” works yet, so you’re full of doubt. But how can you work towards making that sale when you’re full of scepticism? How can you sell a product, if you don’t fully believe in it?

You’ll subtly sabotage your success if you are filled with fear and doubt. So you need to purge these thoughts before they take hold with strong goals and intentions which motivate you and drive you forwards.

Focus also means removing distractions and creating a clear, cohesive path towards your desired outcome. Stay consistent and work each day on a single activity which will carry your affiliate business forwards. Don’t get distracted by other “shiny objects”, social media or potentially “better” strategies which keep you jumping from one idea to another, spreading yourself too thin to get any traction.

If you haven’t started out yet you can get a step by step process here.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic

Paid traffic can be expensive so here are 10 ways to get more free website traffic! There’s many ways to skin a cat as the saying goes and likewise there’s more than 1 way to get free traffic to your website, too. Organic traffic is a great prize because it means any sales you make means 100% profit. When you’re paying for advertising to get traffic, you must deduct your advertising costs from your sales revenue. Often this can leave you with nothing, or even less than nothing!

Of course paid traffic offers the fastest way to build a scalable business. You can’t scale free traffic as easily as when using paid traffic. But if you’re out of ad budget, organic traffic is a good option, if you have the time. So here’s 10 ways you can get more traffic to your website completely for free!

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #1 – Create Content

Of course free traffic comes to your website because you’re offering something of value – your content. Without content don’t expect any free traffic! To build content takes time and a little dedication. A few posts simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to traffic generation.

The more content you create, the more opportunity you create to attract an audience to your website. However, before you rush off in high hopes of thousands of website hits, it’s worth asking yourself why you want traffic. If you want to sell something from your website, keep in mind that not all traffic will be “buyer traffic”.

Buyers are more valuable than any old traffic. So create content with this in mind. You could create thousands of posts on your website but without understanding your target audience (or customer avatar), your blog might simply attract the wrong kind of visitor – those who don’t care about your products. So write lots of content but keep in mind the purpose of your content – to attract buyer traffic.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #2 – Keyword Research & SEO

Let’s get more specific here even creating content can be a total waste of time if that content doesn’t get found. So you need to either promote that content, or make it so good that the search engines must rank it.

For a new website, this can be super tough since there’s so much content out there on the internet. Google will naturally rank content which has been around for a while, over a brand new website which has just been put up. They may even sandbox you for a while until you prove your worth!

10 ways to get more free website traffic

To get ranked on Google, or any of the other search engines, you can create content which is targeted towards specific keywords. Certain keywords have much less competition than others. With a new website, it’s worth targeting these because you’re more likely to get free traffic from the search engines for long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Ideally, find these keywords which also align with your affiliate products, if you’re promoting some affiliate product. That way, when someone finds your content, they are also interested in whatever it is you’re selling.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #3 – Post On Social Media

Once you have created your content, don’t sit back waiting for Google, Bing, or Duckduckgo to rank your content. It may not happen, particularly if you have a brand new website. You also need to do some self promotion too. Posting your content on social media is one way of doing this.

Posting your content on social media has a couple of benefits – it gives you a backlink from a highly ranked site, and it shows your posts to your friends/followers on those platforms. Backlinks are a major ranking factor so getting your backlinks on social media sites can help with your SEO – pushing your ranking potential further up the algorithm.

The number of people you add to your social media platforms, and how you interact with them also has a play in how many will see your posts. Get into a habit of posting your content regularly and you should see an uptick in your website traffic over time from this strategy alone.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #4 – Automate Social Media Posting

You can even automate posting to social media with post syndication software such as revive old posts or postplanner.com. See also the best free blog plugins for WordPress for some other useful plugins.

An automated social media tool lets you focus on creating content. Once you have set up your tool, you can simply post as normal and the tool will automatically post to your social media accounts. There’s many free plugins which help you with this and a variety of options with an “upgrade” which gives more functionality.

Some social platforms won’t allow you to post to your main page through automation, such as Facebook. However, you can automate posting to your facebook business pages which will allow you to get more views without a lot of effort.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #5 – Use A Social Media Share Plugin

Social media share plugins allow your visitors to easily share your content via their social media profiles. If you don’t have them, they aren’t going to share, or at least you’re making it much more tricky for them to do so. A plugin can give you this functionality and it only takes a few minutes to plug it into a WordPress site.

There’s several such plugins simply head to your plugin dashboard and search for “social media share”. You’ll see a range of plugins which fit the bill.

This is one of the simplest ways to get more free traffic so it make no sense not to do it! If you don’t want the icons getting in the way of your posts, you can even place them more subtly if you prefer!

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #6 – Quora

Quora.com is a question and answer website which you can use for free traffic to your content. Create content first which you can use on the site (see top of this article). Quora has some rules which you need to be aware of before you do this. If you repeatedly post the same content on its site, they will likely collapse/delete your answers. But if you answer questions relating to your topic fully, you can also post links to content which help answer questions more fully.

quora - using q and a websites for traffic

Quora is a great source for free traffic if you make a habit out of this practice. You’ll need a lot of content to do this and you’ll need to answer a lot of questions just to get a little bit of traffic. However, you can get a lot of traction with this method over time. Make sure you answer questions in as much detail as possible, and provide value in your answers on the site itself. Don’t just spam your links because you’ll get banned!

As your content grows, people will share your answers too, if you are providing good information. See also traffic generation with Quora.

10 Ways To Get More Free Website Traffic – #7 – Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is another way you can get direct traffic from other websites in your niche. You can also build your SEO (search engine optimisation) with this strategy so it has a double benefit. Start with a simple search on Google for: “your niche + dofollow blogs,”, “your keyword + dofollow blogs,” or “your niche + commentluv blogs”.

Commentluv is a plugin which is used in conjunction with blog commenting. It’s a good signal that a blog allows others to comment on their blogs and leave a link to a page or their website, or both.

Not all bloggers and websites allow blog commenting and it does tend to require some upkeep to filter out the spammy ones. But it’s worth finding those which allow you to leave comments because you can attract some direct traffic and increase your SEO score using this tactic if you do enough of it.

#8 Guest Posting

Guest posting has long been cited as one of the top ways of generating more traffic directly from websites in your niche as well as increasing your SEO score by getting legitimate links from high domain websites.

To find websites in your niche who accept guest posting, do a Google search for “guest post” + “your topic” or “guest post submission” + “your topic”.

Not all websites accept guest posts so you might have to do a little digging. Even then, you might have to produce some examples of your writing, or provide a high quality post in order to be accepted.

Once you find a suitable website in your niche, contact the owner and enquire about guest posting for them. As with blog commenting, this can take a bit of work to get going with. Many guest post opportunities also require a high standard of content for submissions.

#9 – Email Marketing

Yes email marketing is a fantastic way to increase your website traffic without paying a thing. You can even get an email autoresponder here for free which gives you up to 500 subscribers before you have to pay!

From a website, you can collect email subscribers by placing a form and offering some kind of giveaway. Even if you don’t have a giveaway, simply offer to join your list to get notified of your updates. Then, send new content to your subscribers.

With paid marketing, you have to pay. With organic traffic, you have to work hard at getting it. But with email marketing you collect subscribers from your website and that puts you in greater control over your traffic. Send subscribers to your new content as you publish it!

An email list also allows you to build longer term relationships with your subscribers. This can be harder to do with other methods where website visitors only see your content for a few minutes/seconds and then leave, usually never to return!

#10 – Push Engage

Pushengage.com is a push notification alert plugin which allows your website visitors to opt in using one click. When they do, they will be alerted to your new content as you publish it.

Push engage can give you a dramatic increase in traffic quite quickly, especially if you already have some traffic. There’s a free option with Push Engage with gives you up to 200 subscribers before you have to pay.

It’s a little like using an email list although it’s easier to subscribe to which means more people will opt in. Check it out here.

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How Do Affiliates Work On Themselves?

How do affiliates work on themselves? In one of my last posts “what to do when your affiliate business isn’t working” I touched on the importance of belief for affiliates. In particular, when things aren’t working, I mentioned working on yourself. But how do you work on “yourself” in a meaningful way in order to get better at affiliate marketing? Surely it make more sense to work on your affiliate marketing business, and that alone?

Belief is so important because all action stems from belief. If you don’t believe you can do it, you won’t even try. Conversely, if you’re charged full of self empowerment and belief, you’ll overcome the barriers which will easily ‘floor’ those with less gusto.

How Do Affiliates Work On Themselves? – Self Help/Psychology Books

I’ve always been interested in self help books and think they are a great idea for affiliates. Many books have helped me align my goals, get clear on what I want and gain the self belief to overcome the barriers to online success.

Books like Think and Grow Rich explain the mechanism of transmuting thought into reality. Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, explains how thoughts are like the “garden” of the subconscious mind. He states that weeds will grow if you don’t plant good seeds (thoughts).

We all have contradicting thoughts which send success away and limits to what we believe we can achieve. But if we work on understanding the mechanism with which we create our reality, it’s surely going to bear fruit for us. Here’s a few books which helped me with my affiliate business which spring to mind immediately:

The Slight Edge – Jeff Olson, Mini Habits – Stephen Guise, Sell Like Crazy – Sabri Suby, Stop Acting Rich – Thomas Stanley, Zero Limits – Joe Vitale, The Big Leap – Gay Hendricks, Quantum Success – Sandra Anne Taylor, Success For Life – Paul Mckenna, The Power Of Receiving – Amanda Owen, What To Say When You Talk To Yourself – Shad Helmstetter. Checkout my page on motivational books (free downloads) here.

How Do Affiliates Work On Themselves? – Circle Of Influence

Your circle of influence is another important factor when it comes to building a successful online business. If you’re surrounded with people who want your success, and actively encourage you, you’re likely to do much better than if you’re surrounded by naysayers who secretly want you to fail.

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

Working on yourself can also mean seeking out those people who will encourage, motivate and help you to succeed. You can get help and support with starting an online business from scratch here.

Have a look at those people you hang around with. Ask yourself whether they are helping or hindering you in your goals. Unless your circle has similar goals, aspirations and outlooks as you, they can affect you in a negative way. As the saying goes, “birds of a feather flock together”. If your “tribe” moans and complains all the time, and focuses only on the negative, you’ll be moaning and complaining before long too.

What Else Can Affiliates Do To Work On Themselves?

Another important area to work on outside your affiliate business is of course your fitness. Many successful entrepreneurs and executives understand that regular exercise contributes to overall well-being and improved performance.

You’ll perform better, it enhances your mood and helps you to avoid burnout. So if you’ve been struggling with your affiliate business and not exercising, it’s one of the easiest ways to improve your business, just by improving your exercise regime.

Exercise is proven to work far better than drugs for overcoming anxiety and depression. It’s a natural mood enhancer. Once your mood is improved, you’ll find this has a knock on effect to your belief and motivation around your affiliate business. According to a study’s lead author, Dr. Ben Singh, exercise was shown to be 1.5 times more effective than medication or cognitive behaviour therapy at reducing symptoms of:

depression
psychological stress
anxiety

So if you find yourself burning out, getting stressed and anxious with your affiliate business, you know what to do!

How Do Affiliates Work On Themselves? Lifestyle & Balance

When I first started affiliate marketing, I got so uptight about it that I neglected other areas of my life. I put far too much importance on it, and it cost me the loss of a relationship and other areas of my life. Stuart, one of my mentors, even put together a “lifestyle blueprint” in his online training program to help people understand how important balance is in their lives.

In it, he divided the main areas of lifestyle into four categories: health, wealth, self and social. You can write down a list of these categories in your own life to see how balanced it it. If you find yourself focused only on one area, to the exclusion of the others, you’re likely putting too much importance on it. This can lead to burnout, loss of relationships and a lot of stress.

Your affiliate business should enhance your life, not take it over! Don’t forget why you’re building an affiliate business in the first place. Is it not so you can enjoy life more? It’s an easy trap to fall into, working constantly and getting frustrated and angry, while disregarding other elements of life to the detriment of your own personal well being.

So another way to work on yourself is to treat yourself to some “me” time, and focus on your relationships and health, not just your affiliate business.

Goal Setting

Goal setting is a super important part of building an affiliate business. I struggled with this for some time before I realised how important it is. Without a goal, you can easily waste a lot of time meandering around, without a specific purpose. A goal sets you up for it’s achievement by defining it. If you don’t define where you want to go with your affiliate business, you can get caught up in its workings and the business runs “you”, rather than the other way round!

A goal should inspire you towards its achievement so it’s worth spending some time on it. It also clarifies in your mind what you should be working on each day and why. Goals give you clarity and purpose, without which it’s easy to get frustrated and procrastinate over the best course of action. With a clearly defined “blueprint” for your online success, and where it will take you, you will feel inspired and enthused to take action.

If you don’t feel that way, you’ve either chosen the wrong goal (perhaps one you don’t really want) or you don’t believe you can achieve. See my post on SMART goals for more on this.

Affiliate Study

Of course affiliates also need to work on themselves in regard to their business. This requires working on those things that perhaps you might want to avoid! While this is uncomfortable, the best sign that you should do something is if it makes you feel uncomfortable. If you only work in areas where you’re comfortable, you’ll get stuck inside your comfort zones and things won’t change much.

For example, I resisted shooting video of myself for a long time. I joined a community where they encouraged getting better on video with a 90 day video challenge. Although it was massively out of my comfort zone, I knew I had to do it in order to move my business (and myself) forwards.

The problem with the comfort zone is that nothing grows there. If you’re struggling with your affiliate business, do something new which makes you feel uncomfortable. Keep doing those things until the point when not doing them feels uncomfortable!

Affiliate study might mean testing new advertising campaigns, joining a course or getting some training in an area in which you’re unfamiliar with!

“If You Always Do What You’ve Always Done, You’ll Always Get What You’ve Always Got.” ~ Henry Ford.

Controlling Your State & Visualisation

One of the best skills you can learn as an affiliate is how to control your mental state. As someone who has wanted to throw their laptop through a window many times, I now know when to step away and preserve my “vibe” from the negative effects that anger and frustration can cause it! Once you’re angry and upset, you can forget about working on your affiliate business. It can totally wipe out the potentially productive day ahead of you.

So learning to notice when you’re getting upset, and are about to throw a “tizzy” is an important skill! A good practice is meditation for this. In meditation you are learning how to optimise your mental state and become aware of mental activity which might be counter-productive to your best intentions.

On a similar note, visualisation is a great tool for affiliate marketers too. When you visualise, you are reminding yourself where you want to go: both in terms of your business and in your mental state of being. Practice regularly and you’ll find it easier to slip into a positive state of being which is productive and enthusiastic. See also the post on focus and inspiration, what you need for affiliate success.

Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset

What is most important in affiliate marketing, is it techniques or mindset? When I was just starting out as an affiliate, all I wanted to know is ‘how’ to do it: how do I get sales online? As time has passed, I’ve come to understand how important mindset is for success with affiliate marketing. I tried many tactics to actually sell affiliate products, but many of them didn’t work, at least not straight away.

This is where your mindset comes into play. Without the right mindset, you’ll try a tactic, it will fail and you’ll assume (wrongly) that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. Many affiliates will throw the baby out with the bathwater here, and lump ‘affiliate marketing’ in with their tactic (which didn’t work) and their mindset (when they gave up). “It doesn’t work” they declare! In fact around 95% of affiliates will quit.

The ones who don’t quit, and look at their “failures” as an opportunity to start again with more wisdom, have the right mindset. So you can see that techniques aren’t the most important thing when it comes to affiliate marketing; mindset is.

Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset

Of course you need a technique in order to get your affiliate links in front of customers. But any given technique will bring about at least some challenges. With organic marketing, for example, your first blog post isn’t necessarily going to bring home the bacon.

Paid marketing too will definitely throw you some curveballs and most advertising campaigns won’t work on your first try. On a recent video one member of the community I’m a part of shot over 60 videos before he hit a winner! While some affiliates can get lucky and find a strategy that works quite quickly, most aren’t going to find this. I personally tried various strategies before I found one which worked for me.

Different strategies will suit different people too. If you’re working full time, you probably don’t have a lot of time for content creation, for example. So paid marketing is likely to be a better option for you. But whatever method you choose as a promotional tool for affiliate marketing, a “never say die” mentality is going to help you overcome the obstacles you’re likely to face on your journey.

Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset – Growth Mindset

Having a growth mindset means you can always learn some new skills and get better. With a limited mindset, you’re more likely to throw up your hands and quit. Affiliate marketing is a tough business and unless you make a sale, you don’t make any money. Initially there’s going to be some hurdles to overcome but over time your experience will help you choose the best course of action.

This is much more difficult when you’re new to affiliate marketing because you have no experience to draw from. As a result of this, your results can be slow and intermittent. You can spend a huge amount of time implementing a certain technique to no avail. This can be frustrating and disheartening when you’ve worked really hard but have no actual sales to show for it.

Don’t quit! Keep going, no matter how slowly. As you gain experience in affiliate marketing, you results can rapidly grow exponentially. Here’s why…

Why Results Grow With Experience

In the beginning you’ll likely be making lots of mistakes and learning the ropes as they say. But over time you’ll gain some understanding. Don’t stop learning because it is your own personal experience which is the most valuable thing with affiliate marketing. However much theory you learn, it’s never a match for personal experience; running ad campaigns, testing sales funnels, building content and so on.

The longer you can “stay in the game” the more experience you’ll accumulate. At some stage you’ll make a sale, or find a winning campaign. This becomes easier with time for two good reasons:

Firstly you’re experience shows you where your time is best spent – making you more efficient
Secondly, you accumulate data and traffic. With an email list for example, the longer you build it, the more people you have to sell to.

Therefore, results can compound later on in affiliate marketing if you stay the course.

Frustrated With Your “Tactic”

If you’re frustrated with your marketing “tactic”, perhaps you haven’t mastered it yet. What leads someone to master a tactic is a good mindset. Or, perhaps you expect too much from what you’re doing, expecting a lot from a little effort? A good mindset will carry you through the difficulties and help you overcome the obstacles.

If you aren’t aware of your limiting beliefs/ideas, any entitlement you’re carrying, or you expect an easy return on your efforts, you’re likely to keep running into problems and frustrations. Once you can shine the light of awareness on these issues (you may be carrying), you can change your behaviour and turn things around.

A Big “Why?” & Controlling Your State

In my early years as an affiliate marketer I experienced setback after setback. It’s a miracle I stuck with it as long as I did! The one thing which kept me going was an excitement and passion for what affiliate marketing can do for not just me but for anyone – it can set you free both financially and geographically. But for me, the biggest reason was so I could be independent of a job or a boss.

It’s important to remember your reasons for building an online business. When you hit a setback, which you definitely will, you’ll be much more resilient if you have a strong reason to continue. If you’re just doing it as a “side gig” and don’t really need/want it, you’re much more likely to quit.

Knowing your “why”, becoming aware of your limiting beliefs, and shining a light on any attitudes you carry which hold you back is part of a growth mindset. These “awarenesses” are just as important (if not more) than a strategy to drive sales in your affiliate marketing business. Controlling your inner state is also an important skill too.

When you lose your cool and want to throw your laptop through the window, this can lead to quitting as a beginner. Over time, if you stick with it, you’ll learn to know when to step away and maintain your most productive inner state for the growth of your business.

Affiliate Marketing: Techniques Versus Mindset

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and not all of them are going to work for you. But stick with one for long enough and at some point you should see some sales (depending of course on what you do). Still, nothing is guaranteed in affiliate marketing. But if you quit, you’re guaranteed not to make any sales! How long you stick at something which isn’t working is going to depend on a number of things:

Your belief and confidence in your marketing strategy
The training you received and trust you have in your mentor/coach
Your mindset – how long you can endure “failure” without quitting
Your understanding of your marketing method, and how much you can learn from it through your efforts over time

When you focus only on a technique, it’s easy to blame your tactic when things don’t work out. But if you focus on personal growth and your technique, getting clearer on your tactic, more productive and limiting negative state of mind which will inevitably surface, you are much more likely to succeed with affiliate marketing.

Summary

I haven’t covered any marketing techniques within this article but I have written a lot about marketing strategies before. If you’re looking for a strategy, type your tactic into the search bar to find previous posts on different marketing tactics for affiliates. Or read my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

As a beginner, I was solely concerned with marketing tactics. I just wanted something that “worked” so I could make an income online. I didn’t understand the importance of having and nurturing the correct mindset for success online. So I just went through the motions with my tactics and had frustration after frustration. If this sounds familiar, check out my post on what to do when your affiliate business isn’t working.

The answer is to look after your mindset as well as focusing on a tactic. Set goals and intentions and do the inner work too. If you can be consistent with your actions in affiliate marketing you’ll have much greater success than if you dip in and out, give up and then return later. Long term consistency trumps short term intensity.

For more information and to get regular emails to help you with your affiliate marketing business, join my email list on this website. For training and support click here.

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.