AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

What Is Better Than Clickbank?

What is better than Clickbank? Clickbank is often a starting place for new affiliates and there’s thousands of digital products available in Clickbank’s marketplace. What makes Clickbank good is the choice of products and the higher than average commission rates because they’re digital products. If you use a website called CBEngine, you can quickly locate certain products which are the best performers and those which offer recurring commissions too!

Recurring commission affiliate programs offer the opportunity for affiliates to earn ongoing income from previous sales. Selling these kinds of products can make a massive difference to your affiliate business. However, the products themselves need to be of high quality, and this is sometimes what lets Clickbank down. Although they have a lot of high quality products, there’s also many that aren’t such high quality.

If you’re selling products as an affiliate, it’s worth choosing those which you want and need yourself. That way, you are being congruent in the selling of them and can back up your recommendations with personal experience too!

What Is Better Than Clickbank – Software Products

Not every affiliate product is offered on Clickbank. Aweber, for example is a vital software product, used by affiliates, which you can promote as an affiliate. Aweber is an autoresponder software which is needed for affiliate marketing. This makes it a great product to promote. The affiliate program offers recurring commissions. On a high quality product like this, you are more likely to maintain your customers memberships than on a low value product.

Here’s a few of the products available which are high quality, offering recurring commissions and larger value commissions because they’re digital products:

Lead pages – Is a business tool which lets you build custom made landing pages. Earn 30% commissions
The Six Figure Mentors – Offers training, tools and software for building online businesses from scratch. Commissions of up to 40% on a high ticket product range and 20% recurring commissions.
SEM Rush – Is an SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) tool for website development and traffic generation. Earn 40% commissions.
Convertkit is an email marketing services, again a business tool. It offers 30% commissions
Elegant Themes – Offers WordPress Themes and Plugins for use with websites. 50% commissions are offered.
ThriveThemes – Again WordPress themes offering 35% commission on sales and 25% recurring commissions.
Social Pilot – Social media scheduling marketing and analytics.
Live Chat – Live chat support offering tools for increasing conversions through websites. 20% commission.
Rose Hosting – Website hosting offers 50% for the first month and then 20% recurring commissions.
Shopify – Online store builder – 20% recurring commissions.
Aweber – Email marketing service offers recurring commissions of 30%

Product Choice & High Ticket

Your product choice as an affiliate has a large bearing on your rate of success in addition to your chosen promotion method/s. High ticket items offer much larger commissions than the standard Clickbank product which has a typical value of around $100, (offering around $40 commission). A typical high ticket product pays out $500 per sale, which is worth more than ten times than of the standard Clickbank product.

Selling high ticket products as an affiliate has a number of advantages.

The same amount of work can lead to a much larger commission.
Less sales are needed to make your business profitable.
Paid marketing is a more tenable option with high ticket products.
With lower value products, it’s much harder making a profit while spending on advertising.

There are both high ticket physical and digital products you can use as an affiliate. Checkout this helicopter you can promote from a site called Hammacher Schlemmer.

Hammacher Schlemmer pays affiliates 8% commissions on product sales which is less than the average commission on Clickbank, but the products can be pricy meaning a higher payout. Selling this helicopter would allow an affiliate to earn $31,600 on a single sale!

Other Platforms Like Clickbank

Here’s a few other platforms which can be used as alternatives to Clickbank:

JVZoo
Rakuten Marketing
Skillshare
Avangate
Market Health
eBay Partner Network
ShareASale
Amazon Associates
CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction)
Udemy

Depending on how you approach affiliate marketing, some of these may be more suitable than others. Amazon associates pays lower commissions than Clickbank (1-20%) compared to around 40% for Clickbank products. But Amazon may be a better fit for you depending on your marketing strategy. Physical products do sell well. eBay has a similar payment structure to Amazon.

For more information on the different types of affiliate product you can use as an affiliate, access a free video series here.

Affiliate Marketing Success Rate

What is the affiliate marketing success rate? Between 2017-2018, the search volume for the term “affiliate marketing” rose by 44%, according to Google Trends. But despite this massive uptick in awareness of affiliate marketing, only around 5% of affiliates go on to make it their full time living.

As of 2016, 84 percent of publishers and 81 percent of brands have adopted affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is incredibly effective for product owners since it is performance based. Advertisers (affiliates) only get paid if they actually make the sale! This means affiliates take all the risk, with both their time and money!

Affiliates themselves are flocking to the arena hoping to make a living on the internet without any products or services of their own to sell. It’s easy to see why. If you can earn a full time living from affiliate marketing, you can live on your own terms, working from anywhere on your laptop!

Affstat report 2016 — *See* Affstat full 2016 affiliate marketing benchmark report here.

Affiliate Marketing Success Rate

The Affstat 2016 report shows that most affiliates will earn under $30k a year, and even less. Many preferred not to answer the questions in the report about earnings. All beginner affiliates start out making nothing, and some never make any sales at all!

The image below represents the countries represented for the report. Of course affiliate marketing is a massive industry so it would be impossible to compile data across the globe for every affiliate.

The generally held view is that there is a massive affiliate marketing failure rate of 95% which leaves only 5% of affiliates who stick it out.

But why the massive drop out rate? Affiliate marketing is a massively over subscribed industry and this means there’s huge competition. According to Investopedia, just about 9% of affiliate marketers make more than $50,000 a year. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make.

Affiliate Marketing Success Rate – Why So Many Fail

Affiliate marketing is often thought of as a get rich quick scheme and the barriers to entry are very low. With a traditional business, you have much larger costs. With an online affiliate business you only need a laptop and internet connection which most people already have. As such, many people can “have a go” at it with little or no investment and low risk. If you had to invest hundreds of thousands into a business, buy a building and employ staff, far fewer people would be eligible or make the effort!

This “easy” option, low barrier to entry and “get rich quick” view makes affiliate marketing appear to be a quick fix and easy access business. Unfortunately affiliate marketing is not easy and so many beginners will find out the hard way that selling affiliate products takes time and dedication. It is the long term affiliates who earn the most.

Most new affiliates won’t earn anything before at least putting in a few months, if not years of work beforehand. The short term view of this, particularly if you’re used to being in paid employment is that “affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work“!

The 5% who succeed with affiliate marketing have a longer term view and stick with it despite the problems.

What Most Don’t Know

Most newbie affiliate marketers will also fall into a number of traps which they don’t know about. Building a business is hard and takes time and effort. If you imagine affiliate marketing to be easy, you’ve fallen into the first trap!

This assumption will hamper your business because you won’t take it seriously enough or hold yourself accountable. It’s also not easy to be your own boss and you need to prioritise your time so that you are being productive.

As an employee shifting into entrepreneurialism, it can be an easy mistake to assume that time in front of the computer is always time well spent; since time at work is paid time! But affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means you only get paid for making sales. Therefore you need to become the master of your time; prioritise your time according to the most important activities for your business.

Not all affiliate products are the same either. Some pay incredibly low commissions. Physical products pay way less than digital products. By choosing subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products, the same amount of work can be far more lucrative to an affiliate.

To Be Successful

To be successful as an affiliate, you only need to come into it with a better attitude than most! Knowing that most will fail should prepare you better already! Don’t expect it to be easy, get help and support, use the right products and build an email list of subscribers.

An email list is a massive benefit for an affiliate. Expect to work hard building up your list to at least 1000 subscribers in order to give an affiliate business a chance. Long term affiliates have had the same struggles as those who quit. they just look at those problems as lessons and not failings!

Learn how to “fail forwards” and learn from your struggles. With the right attitude, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. Just make the decision never to quit and you’ll eventually make it! Access a free video series to learn more here.

Fast Track Affiliate Marketing

Is it possible to fast track affiliate marketing? Since there’s a huge variety in the products you can promote, and the way in which you promote them, it makes sense that some ways are better than others.

When I started learning affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s, I made a lot of mistakes. I used low value products and slow, laborious strategies to get people to buy them. My marketing strategy was flawed and I only made peanuts when I eventually did make a sale. In the early days my sales were sporadic and there would be months in between the sales I made.

Selling a low value product from Amazon would also make me only a tiny commission. Success never lasted and before I knew it I was back to the 9 to 5 job, which I hated.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve learned a huge amount. The mistakes taught me a number of valuable lessons. I hope this article can help you shed some light on affiliate marketing and that the lessons I learned can help you move forward more quickly with your own affiliate business, whatever you’re doing.

Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Product Promotion (Organic) & Intent

I used organic strategies when I began as an affiliate and it’s worth noting that this can work well, although typically it’s a slow-lane approach. There’s a couple of ways you can fast track your organic marketing strategies and it starts with intent. Search intent to be more precise.

My very first sale came from a product review. Reviews are good because they attract the right kind of traffic – specifically buyer traffic. Buyer traffic is traffic, or visitors, who have a strong intent to buy something. They are looking for something to solve their problem. A product review attracts someone who is looking specifically at a certain product. They want some final information before making their buying decision. If your review gives them that, they will naturally buy through your affiliate link.

Another strategy you can use is a “how to” piece of content. With “how to’s” you show someone how to do something. A good way to align your “how to” content with an affiliate product is to include your product in part of the solution. So for example you can show someone how to do keyword research, and promote your keyword tool through your affiliate link at the same time.

Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – List Building

It took me a long time to discover the power of an email list. If you haven’t got one already you can get one here and access for free. An email list gives you control over your traffic. While organic traffic takes a huge amount of effort to build up, paid traffic costs you money. With a list, you can get your visitors to opt in and subscribe to your email newsletter.

This gives you the chance to build more long term relationships with your website visitors. Without a list, you rely on your traffic converting into sales immediately from a website. Since only a tiny proportion of visitors make a buying decision at first glance, the power of email marketing allows you to connect with them multiple times over weeks, months, and even years.

Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Subscription Products

Low value items you might find on Amazon will only pay you a tiny portion of their value in commission. Amazon typically pays only 3-10% commission which means on a $100 product, you’ll only earn between $3 and $10. Once you have referred the sale, you have effectively handed a customer over to the product owners, Amazon. You make a single “one time” commission and the company makes a customer for life!

With subscription products however, you can earn ongoing commissions from each sale, potentially for life. With a high quality product which offers huge value, such as business tools and software, a business can’t live without it. As such the business owner will be likely to maintain their membership to these kinds of products for life! If you refer the sale, this means you earn commissions month in month out for years, just for referring a single sale!

Subscription products are a great way to increase the potential of your business and give you the ability to earn more regularly from even only a few sales. When you’re starting as an affiliate, this is huge for your bottom line and for encouragement and belief.

Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Digital Products

Digital products too offer a greater advantage to affiliate marketers. With physical products you typically earn a lot less. Digital products will often pay between 30% and 40% commissions, compared with 3%-10% for physical products. So a sale of a digital product is therefore worth more for what can amount to the same amount of work.

There’s a huge variety of digital products available to promote for affiliate marketers. Software products and memberships will often pay the most and pay a recurring commission. Because there’s less cost involved with delivery and storage of digital products, product owners can afford to pay affiliate more because advertising is the largest cost for them.

High Ticket Items

High ticket items are typically those which pay out $500 and above. Once you learn the skill of selling online, you will largely be doing the same activities whether you are promoting low value physical products or high ticket digital products. So it makes sense to promote the latter because you stand to make much larger commissions for the same amount of work!

Paid Marketing & Landing Pages

The fastest way to build an affiliate business is through the use of paid marketing strategies. But paid marketing is expensive, so you’ll do better if you have a high ticket sales funnel with a range of high ticket items and subscription items to promote. But don’t just send traffic to a website because you’ll waste an awful lot of money doing this. Use a landing page and capture your visitors emails to build your email list.

Sending paid traffic to a landing page is far more effective than sending paid traffic to a generic website. On a website, the visitor can browse around and look through your content. But send them to a landing page and they only have two options: sign up to your list, or leave. This gives you more opportunity to build your list and generate more income from spending less, since on an email list you’re much more likely to sell something to someone.

You can also split test different landing pages to find a good template which coverts the best. This will save you money and help you become profitable more quickly.

For more information on the different affiliate models available, access a free video series here.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Scam?

Is affiliate marketing a scam? Affiliate marketing is definitely not a scam, no. It’s a legitimate business model in which third parties are rewarded for recommending other people’s products and services online.

When someone buys a product online through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission for making the sale. The sale is tracked back to the affiliate marketer’s unique link. They receive a commission based on the value of the product they have sold.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means that for a large percentage of new affiliates, making money from it is a considerable problem. As a new affiliate without any experience, it can take some time before you see any results in terms of sales. It is during the first few months of learning affiliate marketing where most people will quit, believing it to be a scam! But just because affiliate marketing is difficult, doesn’t make it illegitimate.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Scam – Why Affiliates Struggle

New affiliates struggle for a number of reasons. Often people will give up long before they should, having lost hope. But like any business, affiliate marketing takes time and effort in order to become successful. Most businesses will fail in their first 5 years and affiliate marketing is no different. A massive 95% of affiliate marketers will drop out. That leaves only 5% who carry on long enough to make it into an income. See also affiliate marketing failure rate.

Initially beginner affiliates will have a lot to learn before they can even make a start of their affiliate business. Websites, for example, can take months before they show up in the search results and get regular traffic. Even using a paid marketing strategy, which is faster, it can take several months before you gain traction. If in these few months you lose belief in what you’re doing, it’s far easier to quit than to carry on!

Affiliates have many barriers to overcome and the first of which is their own belief. If you believe affiliate marketing is a scam, and that there’s no hope for making money from it, this will affect your actions in a negative way. It’s impossible to make a success of something if you already don’t believe it’s possible. You won’t even try!

Overcoming Doubt

If your mind is full of doubt you’ll definitely struggle to make money from affiliate marketing. Doubt holds you back, and your actions flow from your beliefs and attitudes. To become successful as an affiliate marketer you need to promote and sell affiliate products. If you don’t believe in your products, or in the business of affiliate marketing, it’s already a barrier to your success.

To build a successful affiliate business takes time and effort; more than most people expect. Some courses and “gurus’ even profess that affiliate marketing is easy in order to sell their courses! This of course gives the beginner affiliate a false expectation of what affiliate marketing really entails. When reality doesn’t match up to this expectation, it can be easy to think that affiliate marketing is a scam.

By assuming this, you give yourself a way out! If you take responsibility for your lack of success, a different picture is painted. You need to keep working and enduring more challenges in order to break through and start making sales.

All of this starts in your mind, long before you either fail or succeed with affiliate marketing. So overcoming the seeds of fear in your mind is a useful first step in achieving something positive from affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Training & Expectation

Since the main aspect of affiliate marketing is the actual “marketing” skill, many affiliate training courses focus on helping new affiliates with this. Training can take the form of mindset, psychology, and the various actual marketing methods you need to implement as an affiliate such as:

Blogging
SEO – search engine optimisation
Video marketing
PPC – pay per click
Tracking
Optimisation
Etc

There’s various ways you can do affiliate marketing and everyone’s experience of it will differ according to their own personal approach. A course might not be right for everyone and you can still fail at affiliate marketing even after investing in your training and education. The key is to commit to the journey, get help and support and make it an ongoing priority to build an affiliate business over the longer term. Don’t expect to start earning from affiliate marketing without having put the work in first for several months or years.

Learn more about the different types of products you can promote as an affiliate with this free video series.

How Legit Is Affiliate Marketing?

How legit is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is as legitimate as any other business. The affiliate model works through tracking back affiliate links to the third party referrers. When a sale is made, the referring affiliate gets credit for it and is paid a portion of the sale value. This makes affiliate marketing an attractive proposition; you don’t need any products of your own to make money from it.

Affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as some make out however. Some marketers will over state how easy it can be to earn money online in order to sell their course. To earn from affiliate marketing takes some considerable effort. (See affiliate marketing failure rate). There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too and not all affiliates use the same strategy. Some use paid marketing, and others create content through blogging or uploading videos to YouTube.

Depending on your marketing strategy and understanding of affiliate marketing, it can take several months or years to make it pay a consistent amount. In the beginning particularly, affiliate income will be variable and inconsistent, particularly if you’re using an organic marketing strategy such as blogging. But over time it can grow into a more substantial amount if you stick at it long enough.

How Legit Is Affiliate Marketing – Training

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join if you decide to become an affiliate. But product promotion is the key element if you want to make any money out of it. How you choose to promote your affiliate link will determine how successful you are. To become successful takes more than most people think when they start. It can take years to make a consistent income from it.

Training is therefore an important part of affiliate marketing and there’s plenty of training courses which offer to help you in this regard. A truly legitimate course won’t claim over the top results for you because this is totally unrealistic. Any course which does claim that you can make “fast and easy money” is lying to you! So this is an important thing to realise. Affiliate marketing isn’t an easy thing to learn and become successful at.

Like any business it can take years to succeed and most businesses will fail in their first 5 years. It is no different with affiliate marketing and just because it offers convenient flexible hours doesn’t mean it will pay out, particularly if you are doing the wrong things.

How Legit Is Affiliate Marketing – Performance Related Pay

Affiliate marketing offers performance related pay and while this means you can earn a potentially uncapped income, the opposite it also true – you can earn nothing! All beginners will start at this point and unless they do the right things in their business, it can be easy to quit having seen no results. Even after several months of work this can still be the case if your results bring about no sales.

This can be demoralising as a beginner and many drop out at this stage. So you’ll need a big enough reason to become successful because there’s plenty of hurdles to jump in order to make sales consistently.

The affiliates who break through and eventually make a career out of it have often been at it for several years. They have learned some techniques which work and do them consistently.

Affiliate Strategies & Products

You can also speed up your affiliate marketing progress by using certain products and strategies which work faster. Subscription affiliate programs, for example, pay out recurring income from each sale you make. High ticket affiliate marketing offers the affiliate the chance to make larger commissions for often the same work as a smaller one would take.

Paid marketing offers a faster way to generate traction than organic marketing does too. See PPC vs organic marketing. Using a high ticket sales funnel can be a better way to get traction more quickly using paid marketing, because it offers the chance of higher commissions and recurring commissions.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which third party referrals are rewarded with commissions based on sales. However, affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means if you don’t make sales, you don’t earn anything. Many beginner affiliates will struggle making money with the business model and drop out.

To give yourself a good chance at succeeding with affiliate marketing it’s worth investing in your training on an ongoing basis, and treating it seriously as you would any other business. Long term affiliates have often overcome many of the difficulties which beginners will see as insurmountable when they quit.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing here.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Beginners

What is the best affiliate marketing strategy for beginners? Since it can take some time to generate traction with affiliate marketing, it’s worth choosing a strategy you can maintain for the longer term. Paid marketing strategies are much faster of course than free ones, such as blogging.

But they also cost more too! So it’s worth choosing your strategy carefully keeping in mind your own individual circumstances. How much can you afford to spend on advertising while you learn? Do you have the time to create content every day, or are you working full time?

Whatever you do as a beginner, it’s always worth building an email list of subscribers. A list puts you in charge of your traffic. Without an email list, you will be relying on sending traffic directly to your affiliate products. This can be a more precarious way of doing affiliate marketing and it can be more difficult to make sales. With an email list, you can build trust with your subscribers by offering value driven emails which help them with a certain problem.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Helping Not Selling

The most successful affiliates have figured out a way to help people – either with their products, their content or through their email list. By helping people you are gaining their trust and delivering value. The “helping” intention will bring you much more success as an affiliate than trying only to “get” from people through selling.

affiliate marketing strategies for beginners

Don’t try and get, give and you’ll naturally attract more people who will get to know, like and trust you. When this happens, they will also buy from you too! A good example of a very successful affiliate website is moneysavingexpert.com. This is an affiliate website which helps save people money. The products listed on the site are affiliated companies and services but the primary aim of the site is one of service – helping people save money on their bills, credit cards and purchase.

When you’re only trying to “get” from affiliate marketing, it can be much harder because this intention will naturally come across in everything you do.

Choosing Your Products

So when it comes to choosing products to sell as an affiliate, it’s also important to choose products which you align with and value yourself. It can be very difficult promoting products over the longer term if you have no affinity with them! How can you legitimately sell something you don’t want, value or need yourself?

By choosing to promote something you believe in, you can be much more congruent in your efforts of promotion; whether than is blogging, video creation, paid marketing or email marketing. It’s also worth looking at what you ultimately want from your affiliate marketing business. Do you want more financial freedom? Or are you only looking for a small secondary income to supplement your job?

Your marketing methods will also be determined by what you can afford. If you’re working full time, you might be better using paid marketing for your business. If you are doing this, it’s much easier to make a profit if you use high ticket affiliate items and subscription affiliate programs which pay recurring commissions.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy For Beginners – Organic Vs PPC

Organic marketing is what bloggers and video creators do. They create a lot of content and share it via social media platforms. Over time, their content gets traction from their bank links, shares and organic listings on the search engines (such as Google). Depending on your strategy and topic, this can take several months before you see the return on your investment. It can even take years in a particularly competitive area/niche.

With paid marketing, you can see results much faster, but of course it requires more investment. If you’re going the paid marketing route, you can increase your profit margin through using subscription products and high ticket products. It’s also worth combining paid marketing with list building, as discussed earlier in this article.

Content building obviously takes quite a bit of time. You’ll ideally choose a topic you have an interest in or passion for. It’s very difficult building content in a topic you know nothing about, or don’t have an interest in. Remember, you’re competing with many other online marketers who will have much more passion and interest than you in certain areas. So it’s worth choosing a topic wisely before you begin. Make sure you can monetise your topic, and that there’s a product in your chosen area which you want to promote.

Different Ways To do Affiliate Marketing

There’s many different ways to do affiliate marketing. In this article I’m going to explore some of the ways to promote affiliate products. Here’s a quick overview of some of the methods of product promotion:

PPC – Pay Per Click paid marketing platforms
Email marketing – collecting subscribers on an email list and sending out regular messages via email
Blogging – writing content on a website
Video blogging – creating and uploading video content to YouTube or TikTok
Unpaid social media marketing – using your social media presence to find customers
Domain name forwarding – forwarding a domain name to your affiliate link for use in advertising
Link cloaking – using link cloaking and shortening software
Email signature – using your affiliate link or website domain in your email signature
Content syndication – used with blogging or video blogging
Link building – used with SEO (search engine optimisation) and content marketing
Landing pages – used to collect subscribers and add them to your email list
Banner advertising – advertising a product with a banner on a website
Off line advertising – newspapers, magazines, car stickers, flyers, business cards, banner advertising

Different Ways To Do Affiliate Marketing

One of the most popular methods of affiliate marketing is to send targeted traffic to a landing page and collect emails. Over time, affiliates can build their email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. By sending out useful emails on a regular basis, they can build a relationship with their subscribers. Once they have built trust, their subscribers are more likely to buy from them through their affiliate links.

To find targeted traffic is often the most difficult aspect of affiliate marketing. You can either pay for it, or work for it if you’re using a cheaper or free marketing strategy, such as blogging. Paid marketing is by far the easiest because you can simply turn it on by running a campaign. Platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook and YouTube offer the ability to pay for traffic. Once you figure out how to make a profit with a small budget, you can increase it very quickly to increase sales. Simply turn up your daily budget to reach more people.

With blogging, you have a much slower route. You need to create a lot of content in order to get only a modest amount of traffic. How much traffic you get will depend on your content marketing strategy, your niche and the work you put in. This strategy can take months before you see any substantial numbers of visitors.

Different Ways To Do Affiliate Marketing – Tracking

One of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is done mostly online is the ability to track sales from each individual method. Without tracking, (and if you run a number of different strategies side by side), you won’t know which ones are performing the best. As such you can’t decide which ones to keep paying for and which ones to stop running.

Once you have made some successful sales, you’ll want to know which of your advertising campaigns have brought them in. Before this can happen you’ll need to test out a few strategies to see what works for you.

With an offline advertising campaign, this can be more tricky. You can’t get people to click on a flyer, for example. So you can’t track the click. But you can send people to specific websites and have a different website on each advert. But this is a lot of work to keep up with. So by using clickable links, you can track the website url where you send individual customers. You can then determine which ads are performing the best without a lot of trouble.

Whatever methods of advertising you choose as an affiliate, it’s important to track your sales so you can make decisions on which campaigns are working the best.

Most Popular Methods

The most popular methods with affiliates are paid marketing, blogging, v’logging (video blogging), email marketing and social media strategies. There’s many strategies affiliates use on social media. Facebook, for example offers the ability to find potential customers through the various groups on the platforms.

By setting up your profile to showcase your offer, you can find and connect with people with a variety of interests and hobbies. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Most successful affiliate marketers will have an email list of subscribers. An email list puts you in greater control of your traffic. Relying on sending traffic directly to affiliate products means you can spend a lot of time and/or money without recouping your investment.

A list lets you connect with your subscribers over a longer period of time. People can buy from you from your email list months or even years after they sign up to it. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to get free access to an autoresponder for list building.

Building an email list of subscribers with an autoresponder, is generally considered the best way to do affiliate marketing, whether you do it via paid traffic or organically through blogging or content creation.

Paid marketing is far faster than content marketing, but it can be expensive so you need to have the right affiliate products in order to make it profitable. See also subscription affiliate programs and what is high ticket affiliate marketing.

Things To Know About Affiliate Marketing

Here are some things to know about affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which people get paid for referring customers to products online. It’s a little like recommending a friend to a nice restaurant. Only, the affiliate gets paid when someone makes a purchase based on that recommendation.

Affiliates use affiliate links which are tracked back to them when a sale is made. They are then credited with the sale and paid a commission. Companies use affiliates to promote their products and services because it’s a very cost effective way to advertise. Affiliates only get paid when a sale is made. This works well for companies who are able to extend their market reach with many affiliates who promote their business/products.

For affiliates, if they can make a consistent profit from their marketing efforts, it means they can become self employed and work for themselves from a laptop from anywhere globally.

Things To Know About Affiliate Marketing – Beginners

Beginners can struggle when they are learning affiliate marketing. In fact most affiliates will quit (around 95%). See affiliate marketing failure rate. This is because it’s not easy making money from affiliate marketing. At first there’s a lot of work to be done and a lot of learning to do. This all takes time and effort. Results might come only after a long period of learning and through trying out several marketing strategies. It is this period which is the most difficult and many will see their efforts as futile. That’s generally when they quit!

But if you know this, you’re much better prepared to keep going and if you do, you will eventually break through and start making progress. The learning curve is steep for affiliate marketing. Once you start making sales consistently, you’ll have some results to draw from. Until this happens it can be difficult to believe in affiliate marketing.

A good analogy of the affiliate marketing journey is the Chinese Bamboo tree which gestates under the soil for up to 5 years. Once it breaks through the soil, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks! If you didn’t know about the Chinese Bamboo tree, you would probably assume your plant is dead! Affiliate marketing can be like this too, on the positive side, and grow very quickly once you are making consistent sales.

Things To Know About Affiliate Marketing – There’s Many Ways To Do It

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing although the successful marketers have generally all got email lists. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to get your own email marketing service. An email list lets you control your traffic. As you build an email list, and offer useful email messages, you can build trust with your subscribers. When they get to know, like and trust you, they’re more likely to buy your recommended products (through your affiliate links).

Top affiliates build their lists of subscribers into the tens and even hundreds of thousands. A single email sent to a large email list can mean many sales on the same day! As a beginner, your list will be very small, and so you won’t see the same success as someone who has been building their list for several years.

Email lists can be build quickly and slowly using different methods. Some affiliates will use free methods of traffic generation which take some time. Others will use paid marketing and build their email list very quickly. You can also promote affiliate products in other ways and even without an email list:

Blogging
Social Media marketing
YouTube, TikTok
PPC – pay per click marketing (paid marketing)
Niche websites
Landing pages
Etc

Different Products Pay Different Commissions

Another thing you should know about affiliate marketing is that there’s a huge range in commission percentages. Some products will pay from 1-10% in commissions whereas others will pay 30-40% commissions. Digital products tend to pay more than physical products and of course larger valued products offer better commissions too.

The largest commissions can be found from top valued digital products such as training courses and mentorship programs. The smallest commissions are from physical products with a low price. So your choice of products to promote as an affiliate will have a large bearing on your success.

things to know about affiliate marketing

You will need to sell considerable more of a low value physical product, for example, to make the same amount as selling only one or two high valued products or digital products.

Some Products Keep Paying You Long After The Sale

Some affiliate products will keep paying affiliates for the referral long after the sale, even years later! This is definitely something you should know if you’re considering being an affiliate marketer. In the early days as a beginner, you will likely have a few weeks or months of not many (or any) sales. When a sale does come in, the success can be short lived with a one time commission. But with subscription products, you can earn a monthly income from each sale you generate.

Even with a small commission of $20 a month, 5 sales would mean a monthly income of $100 – passive income. 100 sales would mean a monthly income of $2000. Of course there is attrition – the dropping off of members over time. But if you choose your products wisely and use those which offer the most value, customers will keep using them for years. An example is a software product which is needed to run a business, such as an autoresponder (email marketing service).

Selling this kind of product can give you lifetime commissions which come in month after month. See subscription affiliate programs.

High Ticket Products Pay The Most

High ticket products are those which offer commissions of $500 per sale as a minimum. You can promote both digital and physical high ticket products as an affiliate. Here’s an example of a high ticket physical product available from a site called Hammacher Schlemmer.

Hammacher Schlemmer pays its affiliates 8% commissions on sales they generate which means you could earn $31,600 in commission for a single sale. Compare this to promoting a product from Amazon which sells for $40 and you would earn only $8 given their top commission rate of 20%. Amazon affiliate marketing commission rates vary from 1% – 20%. So as you can see, you’ll need a lot of the lower value sales to make up for only a single sale of a high ticket item.

While not everyone is in the market for a $395,000 helicopter, people do buy these kinds of items. Once you learn how to sell online, selling a higher valued item will often require the same work as selling a low value product. So it’s clear that your product choice plays a strong part in your success as an affiliate.

Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing?

Who can do affiliate marketing? Pretty much anyone with a laptop and internet connection can become an affiliate marketer. Affiliates refer people to products and services online. All you need to do to become an affiliate is to join a partner/affiliate program and learn how to promote your affiliate link. People from all walks of life become affiliates to either earn a secondary income, or completely replace their existing income.

Not every affiliate succeeds in doing this though, and many affiliate marketers will quit. In fact something like 95% of affiliates will quit which means only 5% succeed in making affiliate marketing an income source. However, this statistic also shows how easy it is to join an affiliate program and start. Becoming successful as an affiliate is a different thing entirely.

If you have a laptop and an internet connection, you can easily join one of the many affiliate programs available. Amazon is a popular program which allows pretty much anyone to join. Have a look at some of the requirements to join Amazon’s affiliate program here.

Some affiliate programs require to you to already have a good number of followers or website traffic. Others may only require you to be a website owner. Some don’t require anything other than filling out a form. To earn from affiliate marketing you need to promote your affiliate link successfully and get people to purchase products through your link.

Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing – Cost

There is a cost involved in affiliate marketing but you can get started for next to nothing if you’re on a tight budget. You can join many affiliate programs for free. You can even promote your affiliate link for free through various online strategies. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products and promote my affiliate link free.

However the free strategies you can use will often take more time and effort than the more expensive options. As a basic starter kit for affiliate marketing you will really require:

A laptop or home computer
An internet connection
An email marketing service – (see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing)
A website of your own (you can also use free blog websites and/or YouTube), but a website you own yourself is recommended.

With these tools you can build a blog or start creating videos for YouTube if you have a smart phone to record from. You can also invest in lighting equipment, a microphone and other online software which might help you create more professional content – such as editing software. But you can get by without them.

It’s also worth investing in your education as an affiliate marketer. Everything you do will be based on your knowledge. If that knowledge is flawed, so too will your results! Access a free video series here to learn more about training and mentorship.

Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing – Location

Affiliate marketing isn’t limited by location. So wherever you are in the world, providing you have access to an affiliate program and the internet, you can promote your affiliate link in any number of ways.

You will need a method to take payment and so you should have a bank account or a Paypal account. Some affiliate programs will pay directly into your bank account and some will pay by bankers cheque or through an online payment portal such as Paypal or similar.

If you don’t have access to any of these, you’ll struggle to get paid as an affiliate.

Who Can Do Affiliate Marketing – Age

Some affiliate programs do have an age limit of 18 years as a minimum. However, not all do. Amazon doesn’t have an age limit although you’ll need a method of payment. Some junior affiliates will get help setting up payment processing from an adult, or find some other way which they can make work for them.

Most social media platforms have an age restriction of 13 years old. So if you’re planning on using social media as your advertising tool, it’s pretty open for younger affiliates.

Some paid marketing platforms (such as Adwords) have an age restriction of 18 years and require a credit card, or debit card to access them. So this can limit your ability to market in certain ways. However there’s many younger affiliates who find a way to make it work for them.

See also how old do you have to be for affiliate marketing.

Time

While some people use the excuse to not do affiliate marketing as not having the time, affiliate marketing is certainly a way to escape the rat race. Ultimately it can give you more time because you can earn passively from it. See passive income and affiliate marketing.

However, you still need to spend time working on your affiliate business in order to make it profitable. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing, and according to your lifestyle and working patterns, you can fit it in accordingly.

If you have the space in your day, you can use it to create a lot of content, for example. But if you don’t have much available time, you can make automation work harder for you through using paid marketing and email marketing. See also the fastest legit way to make money online.

Content marketing is a cheaper method of doing affiliate marketing but it will take longer than using paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel, which requires greater investment.

You can speed up the process and make it more efficient by using subscription affiliate programs (which pay recurring income) and high ticket affiliate products, which pay larger commissions. If you are short on time, and work long hours, this is definitely the better route. But if you have less capital to spend, content marketing may be more suitable for those circumstances.

Mindset

The affiliate marketing failure rate is high with 95% of affiliate marketers quitting. See affiliate marketing failure rate. The ability for anyone to “give it a go” means there’s going to be a high drop out rate. Affiliate marketing is a business and therefore not like a job. You get paid by your performance, not for the hours you work.

So it’s up to you to make affiliate marketing work for you. Many of course don’t manage it, but this can be for several reasons, such as lack of experience in business, wrong mindset and from previous experiences and expectations as an employee, for example. Bringing an employee mindset to a business will typically not bring a good result. See mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur.

Having the ability to learn and grow is therefore pretty important if you want to become successful as an affiliate. A growth mindset is the belief and ability to develop and grow yourself, and not limit yourself to what has happened in your past. Often affiliates will bring the wrong mindset to their affiliate business, look for an easy win, get disappointed and leave. Those who stick it out and learn from the challenges are the 5% who succeed and make it work for them.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is definitely not for everyone. If you’re serious and committed to learning it for the longer term, it might be a good fit for you. But if you expect it to give you a return without much input from you, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

To learn more and get started access a free video series here.

Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

The Google keyword suggestion tool, or Keyword planner, is a great help if you’re a content creator or a PPC (pay per click) advertiser. It lets you see clearly what keywords are being searched for in your particular niche/topic. So for example, in the area of affiliate marketing (which this site is largely based around), I can see what keywords are being looked for.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the tool and keywords which came up when looking under my main keyword. I used the keyword “affiliate marketing” for this search, but you can use any keyword which is relevant for your own website:

Most of these keywords are high volume searches. As you can see, “cpa marketing”, for example gets 22,200 views every month! That’s a huge amount of traffic. However, if I were to create some content for this particular keyword, I would have a hard time getting it to the top of the search pages. The SERPs – Search Engine Ranking Pages show the best content for the search term as determined by the search engine. This could be Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc. But in the case of Google’s keyword planner, it’s clearly the data from Google!

To rank content for the search term “cpa marketing” would give you a tonne of traffic, but ranking content is more difficult the more competitive the keyword is. If you’re running paid marketing, and using this keyword term, you can pay to show your advert for it. The top of page bid shows the lower range of what marketers have historically paid for showing their advert for this term. The image shows that you could pay £0.10 pence (per click) to show your ad for this term.

Using The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool For Finding Content Ideas

If you’re a blogger, you can find ideas for writing content using this tool. However, those with a tonne of monthly traffic are typically very busy! You’ll find huge competition for these search terms. So writing content for them will be unlikely to get you found on the first page of Google.

Instead, you can search for longer tail keywords which offer less competition. If you do this, your chances of getting your content ranked on Google, and other search engines, is higher. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, you can start by typing your main keyword into Google’s keyword suggestion tool.

Click on the average monthly searches tab until you see the lowest number of monthly searches for terms in your category.

This will then give you a bunch of keywords which are generally longer tail (contain more words) and have less competition. Scroll through them using the tabs at the bottom of the page.

When you find a good keyword suggestion which you’d like to create some content for, you can compare the relative competition by doing a simple Google search for that keyword. So I’ll use the example of “best niche for affiliate marketing 2020” from the planner. I then type this into Google and look for the number at the top. I also search for the same term in brackets, or phrase match.

The number denotes the competing pages for that particular term. Anything below 10 million is what I generally go for. And 40,000 in phrase match means less competition than most.

Other Ways To Use Google Keyword Suggestion Tool

Another strategy you can use is to add the terms “what”, “where”, “when”, “how” and/or “who” to your main keywords. This will show you the phrase you search for and any relative search queries with those terms added.

Here’s an example of this idea using “affiliate” and “who” as the search terms:

Excluding Terms With A Google Keyword Search

You can also add a filter when using the Keyword planner so as to show keywords which either contain your chosen filter, or not. For example, if you want to remove the keyword “free” from your search results, you can use the filter.

This could be useful if you’re a blogger and want to exclude searches for free stuff because this kind of search typically won’t lead to as many sales as a keyword containing a more buyer related keyword. See also how to know your target market.

Buyer keywords are those which show an intent to buy, or are closely related to your affiliate product. Those seeking freebies are much less likely to buy, so often bloggers won’t create content which attract the wrong kind of audience for their affiliate products.

You can also use the negative keyword filter to remove any terms you don’t want to show up in your results.

Using A Website And The Keyword Planner For Keyword Ideas

You can also use the keyword planner in conjunction with a website, either yours or someone else’s. Type the website domain name into the planner using the “Start With A Website” tab.

The tool will then give you details of keywords which relate to the content on that website.

Location Targeting

You can use Google’s keyword planner to target specific locations for your searches too. This is useful if you’re looking for keywords ideas and have a locally based business, for example.

By limiting the results to a specific geographic location, you get a better idea of the number of searches in your area. This can help you determine whether it’s worth creating content around a specific keyword, or running an advert in your business location.