Author: AffiliateMentor

How Long Does It Take For Affiliate Marketing To Work?

How long does it take for affiliate marketing to work? To start making money from affiliate marketing it can take several weeks or several months, depending on your marketing strategy.

If you are focusing on a cheaper strategy which relies heavily on SEO (search engine optimisation) for example, expect to be working at it for several months before you can make consistent sales. On the other hand, with a paid strategy you can start generating results much more quickly. With paid marketing and email marketing, for example, you can see sales within a few weeks, depending on your marketing budget.

how long does it take for affiliate marketing to work

With a large marketing budget you can quickly put your marketing message in front of a large audience, and this can speed things up dramatically. Blogging on the other hand is much more limited, at least at first. Over a period of months though you can build enough content to start getting more regular traffic and consistency.

How Long Does It Take To Make Affiliate Marketing Work – Speeding Up Your Results

You can make faster progress with affiliate marketing in a number of ways such as:

Slower marketing strategies are those such as blogging and other organic marketing methods. These can take much longer to get traction with as an affiliate. However, over time organic content can compound to generate more and more traffic as your content grows.

How Long Does It Take For Affiliate Marketing To Work? Study Time Vs. Marketing

When you start as an affiliate marketer it will be necessary to spend some time learning. You’ll need to set up a website, or a landing page. You might choose to use paid marketing and if so you’ll need a compliant website/landing page and access to a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, Bing (Microsoft Ads), Facebook, YouTube etc.

beginners

You might also spend some time looking for the kinds of affiliate products you want to promote. This all takes time and that’s before you start off with actually marketing your product. In general you should expect to spend a few weeks or months in learning mode as a beginner in affiliate marketing: researching, studying, watching and absorbing materials. Your ratio to studying and doing will be something along the lines of 90:10. Once you have figured some things out you will want to switch this to 80:20 marketing to studying.

Don’t get caught up in being a perpetual student without implementing some ideas that you have learned. Your real learning begins when you start making mistakes and failing! There’s a saying in affiliate marketing “fail forwards”. Which means unless you’re trying stuff out and making mistakes, you’re not really learning.

When It Works

When you start generating sales with affiliate marketing it might not be consistent. This also might come after a long period of nothing much happening too! If you’re an organic marketer (blogging/YouTube channel), expect it to take much longer than with paid marketing.

When you make a sale congratulations! But this is only really the beginning. You will then have to determine which activities brought about the sale and focus more on doing more of that!

how long does it take for affiliate marketing to work

Most of your advertising campaigns won’t work straight away, and a small list of subscribers will have much less of an effect than a large one. So it’s important to have a long term focus with affiliate marketing because over the longer term, your experience will help dramatically.

As you collect more data, you’ll know which actions produce the best results. This is Pareto’s principle or the 80:20 rule which states that 80% of results come from only 20% of actions. When you focus on the money producing activities which make the best out of your time, you’ll be in a much better position as an affiliate. At this stage you can dramatically speed up your results through learning from your data.

Summary

It can take several weeks or months to get any traction out of affiliate marketing and it depends on your learning style and the actions you take. Some people will naturally take longer than others to generate traction. Over time, if you stick at it, you will start generating sales. Once you are at this stage you have some data of your own to work with. You can then focus on the actions which have generated the best results for you, rather than wasting time on superficial activities.

Affiliate marketing does take time. It’s a shame so many quit before they see any results because if you stick at it, it can be very worthwhile. The early stages of affiliate marketing are definitely the most difficult. You need to believe in the journey and that you will eventually break through and start generating income. Having help and support is vital if you’re serious about making affiliate marketing your living because there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

For step by step training and support join a program here.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Affiliate Marketing?

How long does it take to learn affiliate marketing? This is difficult to answer because everyone learns at different rates and not every affiliate course is the same. If you dedicate some time to affiliate marketing, you can learn much more quickly than if you can only spare a few hours a week.

Most affiliates will spend a certain length of time in “learning phase” and then they will try out some tactics. Once you have some strategies to implement, it can take weeks, months or years before those tactics bring in results. This depends on the particular tactics you use and your marketing budget.

how long does it take to learn affiliate marketing

For example, if you’re a blogger, and you decide to create written content on a website, it can take several months before your blogging generates traction for your affiliate marketing endeavours. With paid marketing, this can be done much more quickly.

In general you should expect to spend several weeks or months learning affiliate marketing before you can make any headway in an affiliate business. Although much of your learning will be through trial and error.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Affiliate Marketing? Your Marketing Strategy

Depending on your marketing tactic and the amount of time you have available to work on an affiliate business, it can take several weeks or several months before you even make your first sale. This is after the initial learning phase. Once you have made an affiliate sale, consider this a great achievement.

Once you start making sales, you can zone in on the activities which created that sale. Before this happens, it can be easy to spend time on a variety of tasks, many of which don’t produce your best outcome – affiliate sales. But once you get some “feedback” from your affiliate business, in the form of a sale, you know what works. This is great for your belief and for your focus.

how long does it take to learn affiliate marketing

Before this happens affiliate marketing can be frustrating for many beginners which explains the large drop out rate. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

While you’re learning affiliate marketing you won’t be creating content or making sales. But this time is well worth the investment because the better you understand affiliate marketing, and the many different business models of affiliate marketing, the more likely you are to succeed in the long run.

While learning affiliate marketing you’ll be digesting video material and attending webinars and seminars. You can get started here with step by step training.

This can take some time: weeks or months depending on the rate at which you can watch, read and digest the material. The real learning starts when you apply what you have learned and begin your own marketing strategy.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Affiliate Marketing – My Journey

With my own personal journey in affiliate marketing it has taken several years before I have made a consistent income from affiliate marketing. I did however have one or two short lived successes early on, but these were sporadic because of the marketing strategy I was using: mostly blogging.

Once I learned to use email marketing and subscription affiliate products, my business took a giant leap forwards quite quickly. So it doesn’t have to take you as long if you take the right steps from the start. With subscription products you can earn ongoing commissions for referrals, rather than one off commissions. So your work can quickly produce a regular income if you use these.

how long does it take to learn affiliate marketing

One of the problems with affiliate marketing is that there’s much conflicting information over how to do it and which course to take. Because there’s so many affiliates promoting their course, it can be easy to jump from one strategy to another, without really getting anywhere. So it’s important to expect a longer journey with affiliate marketing and you need to put in some time to generate results (or feedback) for yourself.

Expect to be working on your affiliate business for several months at least before you can expect any financial return.

Months Or Years?

Affiliate marketing can be profitable quite quickly with the right strategy and products. However, most affiliates will take longer than a few months to make it work for them. There are of course exceptions and everyone is different. In the community I belong to I know a couple of people who replaced their job income inside a year. But that’s not typical.

Affiliate marketing is a performance based business so if you don’t make sales you don’t earn any commissions. On the other hand, there’s no limit to the amount of products you can sell, since it’s a global business and you can sell to anyone around the planet. So once you have learned to sell a product, you can repeat that success.

how long does it take to learn affiliate marketing

As a beginner it’s worth holding on to this idea when times are tough and you don’t have any results to draw confidence from yet. Remember the bigger picture that ultimately affiliate marketing can replace your current income. However it won’t happen overnight. You need to put in some serious effort and hard work before you can reap the rewards in affiliate marketing.

See also how long does affiliate marketing take and how long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing.

Summary

It can take several weeks to get to grips with affiliate marketing. Then it can take several weeks or months to develop a marketing strategy which you can get good at. Once you start making sales, you can learn from your mistakes and your wins too.

Depending on your marketing strategy it can take weeks or months to generate traction. With paid marketing you can do it faster with a large enough budget. Cheaper strategies like blogging will take much longer.

Ultimately affiliate marketing is a constant process of learning and development. Most affiliates will struggle initially but over time if you stick at it you can make a passive income from your efforts. Access a step by step training course here to get started.

How Long For A New Website To Get Traffic?

Wondering how long for a new website to get traffic? Getting traffic to a website organically can take some time and it will depend on a few variables:

  • Your chosen niche/topic and the relative competition
  • How much content you generate and how you go about sharing it/promoting it
  • The back links you build (and those your visitors build)
  • The share-worthiness of your content – how good is your content?

In a relatively uncompetitive niche you should find you are getting traffic from your social media shares quite quickly if you do this regularly. You can automate this process with a clever plugin called Revive Old Posts which syndicates your posts as they are published (and re-syndicates older posts too).

niche blogging

To get traffic from the search engines will usually take much longer though. Google particularly can be a hard nut to crack and they typically will place newer sites in a “sandbox” for some time before giving them any credibility at all! If you target longer tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, this can be a way around the problem, although some keywords will still be competitive.

Even though you may not rank well in Google for some months, other search engines can be more forgiving, especially if you’re in a less competitive niche. Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com etc can rank you more quickly and give you free traffic.

How Long For A New Website To Get Traffic? Checking Your Online Presence

Within a few weeks you should be able to find your website with a quick search on Google for your actual domain name. Use “yourwebsite.com” on a Google search to see if it shows up. Of course this kind of search won’t bring any traffic but it’s a way to see whether you are even appearing on the search engines. Usually the other search engines will show you before Google does.

How Long For A New Website To Get Traffic?

This search shows that at least you are showing up for your own domain name. If you don’t show up for such a specific search like this it might mean you have been “sandboxed”. If you have, it can be weeks or months before you eventually show up in the SERPs – (Search Engine Results Page).

How Long For A New Website To Get Traffic? A Competitive Niche & Keyword Domains

Within a very competitive niche you shouldn’t expect too much in the way of getting free traffic without a huge amount of work. For example in the affiliate marketing space, it can take months or years to start showing up for even the least competitive keywords. In a less competitive niche, or if you’re targeting specific keywords within your domain name, this can happen much more quickly.

Keyword domain names can help you gain traction if you’re attacking a very competitive niche. This site, for example has targeted affiliate marketing mentors within the domain name.

More on this strategy in this article: how to rank an affiliate website.

Useful Plugins For Bloggers

A new website may never rank for its chosen keywords and you shouldn’t expect too much from a small website without creating a good amount of content. In a competitive niche, you will need to work much harder, and for longer than in an uncompetitive niche.

Bloggers may need to create a lot of content in order to attract the attention of the search engines and get free traffic from them. There’s a few plugins which can help bloggers with their SEO (search engine optimisation): See best free blog plugins for WordPress. By using specific keywords within your content, you have a greater chance of getting ranked for those particular keywords. Yoast SEO is a plugin which helps with this. Share your content too, using social media share plugins and place social share buttons on your site to encourage your audience to do the same.

How Long For A New Website To Get Traffic?

The key to generating free search traffic begins with quality content. Google uses a number of factors to determine how to rank particular websites on their search results page. One of these is back links and Google will look for a natural link profile which shows people naturally linking to your content. They won’t do this for content which doesn’t provide some value. So content is king!

Getting Your Own Traffic

If you’re an affiliate with a new website, it can be frustrating waiting for Google to rank you in order to start generating traffic. So it’s far better to have a strategy which doesn’t completely rely on search engine results.

After all, in a competitive niche, you may not get any free traffic for some time anyway. So, far better to take some responsibility for creating your own traffic. If and when the search engines do eventually reward you for your content, it will be in far greater doses if you’re created and shared a heap of content already on your website!

To get more traffic you need to create more content. Ideally learn more about your target audience first so you can target your content towards those people who will take the most action on your website. See how to know your target market.

Use Google’s keyword planner to find long tail keywords in your niche. Then use the plugins mentioned in this article to automate a sharing strategy throughout your social media presence. Keep doing this and make it a habit. You should start generating traffic through your social media platforms. You can also build backlinks yourself by reaching out for guest post opportunities. Or hire a professional SEO company to do it for you:

hoth SEO professionals

See also how to increase website traffic organically.

If you stick to this strategy for long enough, you’re much more likely to be rewarded by the search engines with rankings of your content. If it doesn’t happen, you have your own strategy anyway! You can also run paid marketing campaigns using Google’s Adwords platform. I’ve found dynamic adverts work well with blogging. See this article for more on this strategy.

Part Time Affiliate Marketing

A part time affiliate marketing career is something which can be built around existing work or commitments. With affiliate marketing you are promoting other people’s goods and services online in exchange for a commission based on sales you generate.

Many affiliates come into affiliate marketing on a part time basis; looking to grow their business alongside a job or career. Over time, your affiliate business can eventually replace your employment income.

high ticket funnel

The best way to do affiliate marketing part time is through using a scalable strategy. Paid marketing and a high ticket sales funnel, for example, will bring you the best results in the shortest time. To do this you can set up a digital sales funnel which has a range of high ticket items in it. Access one here.

You should also be promoting subscription based affiliate products within your product range. This gives you a monthly recurring income based on your membership/software sales, which can make your business more sustainable more quickly.

Part Time Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

But there are many ways to build an affiliate business and that’s just one of them. Paid marketing offers the fastest strategy but it’s expensive, and you’ll need a high ticket offer to be profitable while using some of the more expensive paid marketing platforms.

If this is out of reach, there’s other ways to do it too. Many affiliates work part time on cheaper marketing methods such as blogging. While blogging will take much longer than the paid marketing route, it is preferable to many affiliates because it’s low cost and you can chip away at it over the longer term.

niche blogging

Bloggers create content on a website and promote it via multiple platforms. Over time, if they stick with it, their content can attract free traffic from the search engines. When their visitors grow in numbers they should see more people taking actions on their website.

Bloggers can sell affiliate products directly from their content through contextual links in their articles. Or, they often use email lists to build relationships with their subscribers and sell products through email marketing.

Part Time Affiliate Marketing – Time Management

If you’re going to be working on a part time basis, it’s important your work counts towards building your business every time you are in front of your computer/laptop! A big problem for new affiliates is time wastage. In the initial phase of affiliate marketing you will probably be learning a lot, consuming information and studying a marketing strategy which suits your circumstances.

Once you have picked a strategy, you need to be aware of how you spend your time. A “Busy Fool” is a term which is often used within affiliate marketing. It’s easy to be a busy fool as an affiliate; working on activities which don’t move your business forwards. An example might be making your website look nice, rather than driving traffic. Or, spending time on a logo, when you don’t have a marketing strategy going.

Some jobs can be outsourced and they should be too, if they take you away from the most important use of your time. Fiverr.com is a good source for affiliates to outsource work they don’t want to spend time on.

It’s especially important to outsource work if you’re only working part time on your affiliate business. Managing your time well will mean you can get more work done in a shorter amount of time.

Part Time Affiliate Marketing – Consistency Is Key

Whether you’re working part time or full time on your affiliate marketing business, consistency is key. Most affiliates will work for some time before they are able to start generating consistent success. This is why so many affiliates quit the look at their results far too early!

If you’re working part time on your affiliate marketing business this is important to understand. Results will take longer if you’re giving less time to your business. But you can speed up results by:

  • Using high ticket and/or subscription affiliate programs.
  • Using a marketing strategy which can be quickly scaled up (i.e. paid marketing)
  • Maintaining consistency in your marketing method, whatever it is. Blogging for example will compound over time if you stick at it, so results will grow more quickly the longer you stick at it
  • Joining a community and getting help and support

With a slower marketing strategy like blogging, it’s important to know that in the first instance, results will be slow. Over time as you grow your content, you should see the odd sale here and there which isn’t consistent. This can take some time, months or even years depending on your affiliate niche/topic. It can be demoralising if you’re unsure of your strategy. But stick with it and your affiliate business will grow if you stay consistent!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

A good analogy for affiliate marketing is the Chinese Bamboo tree. It takes several years of gestation before shoots even break the surface of the soil! But once this happens, the Chinese Bamboo tree can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks! Affiliate marketing can be like this too, particularly with content generation which takes time to produce.

But as your content gets found and shared, and as the search engine starts showing your content more regularly, your results can snowball. The same is true of building an email list. (See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing).

chinese bamboo
The Chinese Bamboo Tree can grow 90 feet in a matter of weeks!

As you begin with building your email list you may find nothing much happens. But once you pass 1000 subscribers you should see some sales. Once you determine which habits create the most benefit to your business, you can focus your attention and time on those specific tasks. This grows your business more quickly and eventually you can leave it running without putting much effort in at all!

How To Become A Successful Blogger And Make Money

Wondering how to become a successful blogger and make money? Blogging is great cheap strategy to make money online but it does require a huge commitment to make it work. There’s millions of blogs in a variety of topics so you need to stick at it for some time to generate traction in your area/niche. Many bloggers will quit because they simply don’t get enough traffic to their blogs to make money from. Or, they get the wrong kind of traffic, which is more difficult to monetise.

niche blogging

A good place to start if you want to become a blogger, and make money from your blogging is with your topic. By choosing a topic you align with, it can be much easier to maintain your enthusiasm over the longer term. That’s what’s required from blogging – long term enthusiasm. Many bloggers don’t earn from their blogging until they are months or even years into their project. So expect to be blogging regularly for some time before you can make it your living.

How To Become A Successful Blogger And Make Money – Income From Your Blog

Income from blogging isn’t straight forward either. You can monetise a blog in a few ways but the main two are advertising, with a program such as Google Adsense, and affiliate marketing. With advertising, you place code on your website and Google Adsense converts that code into relevant adverts for your audience. When your visitors click on your adverts, you receive a percentage of advertising revenue. Although this amount is typically very small, depending on your topic, over thousands of clicks this can add up. With a huge volume of traffic to your blog, this can be very lucrative and also passive!

Getting a huge volume of traffic to your blog is the hard part and this is what takes the most amount of time.

how to become a successful blogger and make money

The other way to monetise a blog (used by most bloggers) is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you recommend and refer visitors to products from your blog. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. Again, you need a lot of traffic to sell affiliate products from your site. Plus, only a small percentage will actually buy. Your traffic needs to align with your product too, so choose your products wisely and offer something on your blog which your visitors will want or need.

How To Become A Successful Blogger And Make Money – Your Blog Topic (Warning*)

Your blog topic is probably the most important decision you’ll make about your blog. Once you choose a topic, you’ll need to create a lot of content in that particular area. Ideally, choose a topic you either have an interest and passion for, or at least know something about. This will make your journey towards becoming a paid blogger more pleasant and potentially much quicker too! That being said, monetisation is also a key factor if you want to make money from your blog. Without an effective monetisation strategy, you won’t make money. But equally without enough traffic to your blog you won’t make money either!

Tying these two things together is vital if you want to become profitable in your blogging. You choice of topic should join a passion or interest of yours with the products you are selling.

how to become a successful blogger and make money
Ikigai – Finding the balance between monetisation of your blog and enjoying writing is a major key

A word of warning! I choose a topic which wasn’t easy to monetise nor easy to write about! It was “when to harvest mushrooms“! A strange topic I know but as a beginner I found a relatively uncompetitive niche and thought I could make some money by getting my website to rank on the top of Google, (See how to rank an affiliate website for this strategy).

My site did actually rank but there were very few affiliate products within this niche which were profitable. I also ran out of enthusiasm for my topic relatively quickly. Despite writing about this dull topic for several months (apologies to mushroom fans!), I couldn’t bring myself to continue! Each blog post had to be researched thoroughly too, since I knew nothing of this topic! So ultimately the blog was doomed! I let it go but it taught me an important lesson: choose a topic you love, or are inspired by. Writing will be more enjoyable and you’ll keep going for longer!

A Topic Your Love Or A Topic Which Is Profitable?

Choosing a topic you love is often the advice you are given when building a blog. For bloggers, you’ll need to create a lot of content over a long period of time to be successful. Otherwise you’re likely join the ranks of the many failed bloggers who’s blogs are sitting dormant or have dropped off completely. Ultimately this means you’ll need o enjoy your work. As with the story above, if you are starting to hate blogging after only a few months, it’s probably going to fall short of what you need to do. But if you choose a topic which inspires you, you’re more likely to keep going long enough to start breaking through and generating traffic.

how to become a successful blogger and make money

However, that being said, you also need to think about how you will monetise your blog. Using only Adsense to monetise your blog can leave you very vulnerable. Suppose you get your account shut down? Or you don’t get enough traffic to make a realistic income from Adsense. Using affiliate products for blog monetisation gives you more scope for earning. With the right products and services you can even make recurring commissions and high commissions over $500. See recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate marketing.

Ideally find an affiliate product you love too and that you align with. This might take some time and digging but a good product can help you choose your blog topic and make it more profitable too.

Watch this free video series to learn about the different affiliate products available.

How To Become A Successful Blogger and Make Money – Email Marketing

Successful bloggers use email marketing. They build a list of email subscribers from their blog by offering something to give away to their visitors. I use a couple of ebooks on my blog posts to give to visitors in exchange for their email address. Then, I follow up with a series of useful emails and a video series explaining the best affiliate marketing business models to use. Here’s one of my ebooks which I use to build an email list:

beginners guide to affiliate marketing

Email marketing gives bloggers a massive advantage so it’s well worth getting an autoresponder so you can build an email list from your blog.

Access a free autoresponder here.

aweber

On a website, or blog, a visitor only has a small time to make a buying decision and purchase one of your affiliate products. But once you get them on your email list, this time period is drastically extended. I’ve had people buy products from my email list even years after they have signed up to it! This simply wouldn’t be possible without an email list, just from a blog.

To get people on your list, offer some ebook download, or a product which is provided from an affiliate program you join. See ebook lead magnet for more on this.

See also on this topic: Create free website and make money, how to rank your blog post on Google, Find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Real Success Is enjoying What You Do

Hopefully you should have some idea now about how to become a successful blogger and make money? Please comment below if there’s anything you think should be added to this article. Real success means more than just money of course! Enjoying the process is key to becoming a successful blogger. If you simply don’t enjoy the process of blogging, you might want to choose another direction. Working on things you are enthusiastic about is a key to success in many ways, not just financially.

One way of determining whether this journey is right for you is to see yourself having already arrived at having built a successful blog. Do you enjoy what you’re doing, or want to quit? Having built a large amount of traffic from a blog you can always sell it too at some point in the future if it’s profitable. Access a free video series and learn more about the various ways you can earn online by clicking the image below:

how to become a successful blogger and make money

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing?

Wondering how to do high ticket affiliate marketing? High ticket affiliate marketing is done in the same way as with any product. There’s a huge benefit to selling high ticket programs though, other than the obvious higher levels of commission.

Being able to earn high commissions (from high ticket products) means the higher cost paid marketing platforms are within reach in your marketing strategy. With lower value products, it’s very difficult to make a profit while selling low value items.

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing
high ticket submarine

But with a high ticket offering, you can use these platforms and make a profit more easily.

To start selling high ticket products you need to join a high ticket program. You can join one through this website or see this article highest paying affiliate programs list which offers some options.

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing – What Are High Ticket Products?

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? High ticket products carry a much larger price tag than most products you’ll find with affiliate programs. A high ticket item will usually give the affiliate at least $500 in commission. This is obviously much better than selling a low value product and making only $50 commission; especially if you consider that the promotion methods can e much the same with both types of product.

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing – Hammacher Schlemmer

Hammacher Schlemmer pays affiliates 8% commission on its product range. But if you choose a high value product to promote you can earn a slice of a high ticket item valued at $395,000, for example. Here’s an example of a high ticket product on the site:

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

Hammacher Schlemmer charges nothing to join their affiliate program and for a sale of this item you could earn a cool $31,600!

Some affiliates think that high ticket items are out of the reach of most online shoppers and they would be right. But some people do buy these products and if you spend your time as an affiliate promoting these kinds of products, you can earn considerably more from what can amount to the same amount of work.

Admittedly these products won’t sell in the same volume as a $50 product from Amazon. But a $50 product from Amazon will pay only $5 at 10% commission. Many products on Amazon pay even less than 10% too! So in order to make the same commission as a single sale of the helicopter above in Amazon sales you would need to sell 6,320 items to make the same as one sale of the high ticket product above!

So, even though selling a higher value product may be more difficult, it’s not 6,320 times more difficult! You can join Hammacher Schlemmer’s affiliate program through commission junction. Then learn how to promote affiliate products through a training course.

Product Promotion – Your Target Audience

High ticket items do sell online but you will need to target the right audience in order to make any sales. This of course is true for all affiliate products. With a high ticket product it’s no different. You need to get to know your target audience and work on a marketing strategy which works for you according to your budget and resources. Here’s a few basic affiliate marketing strategies:

  • Blogging
  • PPC – Pay Per Click (paid marketing)
  • Email marketing – see the power of email marketing
  • Social media marketing (both paid and free)
  • SEO – search engine optimisation
  • Off line marketing – banners, newspapers, magazines etc

Knowing your target audience will allow you to better understand them and where they hang out. With high value products, you need to put your marketing message in front of people who have the cash to buy. What magazines do they read? Where do they go online? How do they find the products you will be selling them?

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

Here’s another product from Hammacher Schlemmer, the five person Exploration Submarine. Here’s another one for a single person:

How To Do High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

A quick search of Google’s keyword planner shows that there are many searches for people looking for submarines! Here’s what came back from a search using the planner:

keyword research using Keyword planner

As you can see, people do in fact look for these kinds of products online. These are monthly searches for submarines. As an affiliate, you need to put yourself on the search engine results as a “middle man” to make your affiliate sale. But this is just one example of how an affiliate might make a sale. There’s many other ways besides Google.

For example, an affiliate might build a niche website about submarines offering lots of information. Then they can attract some of these monthly visits and make some sales if they link to the product!

For more affiliate marketing strategies see 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

High Ticket Digital Products

The Six Figure Mentors offers one of the highest ticket digital affiliate programs available. Their products offer coaching and mentoring for aspiring entrepreneurs.

You can join their program though this link. The commissions you can earn depend on your level of investment. The higher up the sales funnel you go the more you can earn from sales you make.

All In Mentors

Products offered are:

  • Business tools and training
  • High ticket sales funnels
  • Done for you funnels
  • Help with creating an online business
  • Coaching
  • Mentoring

Learn more about The SFM and other online business strategies through this free video series.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Better Than Drop Shipping

Why affiliate marketing is better than drop shipping? Affiliate marketing and drop shipping are both business models where you can earn money selling other people’s products.

Drop shipping is a selling method where the store that the sellers run doesn’t keep the product in stock, but when the customer orders the product the seller will buy the product from a third party. Then they have them send the product directly to the customer.

beginners

Affiliate marketing is simply a process of promoting other people’s products in exchange for a commission when people buy the product through your unique affiliate link.

Both business models heavily rely on online marketing strategies to find customers for products and services.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Better Than Drop Shipping

Both business models are similar. However, with drop shipping you will need to deal with customers, since you’re running a customer facing online e-commerce store (or online shop). Drop shippers can set their own prices and so long as they make sales, this can mean they can earn more per sale compared with certain affiliate products. Affiliate marketers have less control over pricing of the products they choose to promote and commissions are set by the product owner/s.

However, affiliates can decide which products and services they choose to promote. This more than makes up for the shortfall and affiliates can choose to promote products which carry residual income and high ticket commissions. Recurring income affiliate programs pay out over and over again for individual sales. High ticket affiliate programs offer larger than average commissions.

A high commission affiliate product offering 8% commission

If you’re an affiliate you don’t have to deal with customers. You simply refer them to the product directly through your affiliate link. If you make a sale, the product is delivered by the owner not you. With drop shipping you will need to arrange delivery of the product from the third party. Should there be a problem with delivery of a drop shipping product, you’re culpable to the customer! With affiliate marketing you don’t deal with deliveries. However, should a customer request a refund, you’ll bear the cost!

Cost

With drop shipping you’ll need your own e-commerce website and customer services. This can mean a greater cost. With affiliate marketing you can get started for next to nothing.

There’s lot of competition in both drop shipping and affiliate marketing, but with drop shipping you’ll need to build a brand, which can be difficult. Your website will be showcasing your products with drop shipping and it’s important to get this right. In addition you have no control over your supply chain as a drop shipper. Should something go wrong, it’s on you!

why affiliate marketing is better than drop shipping

As an affiliate there’s a variety of ways you can promote affiliate products. Affiliates can use many platforms to get their message in front of an audience and this suits more people. Some affiliates like blogging, and others use email marketing. Some use paid marketing and others use social media.

Affiliates benefit from a more hands off approach than drop shippers. They can build their affiliate business in a variety of ways. They don’t have such a hands on need in their business and can work whenever and wherever they choose. With drop shipping you’ll need to be on hand when someone makes an order, or employ someone who can offer customer support.

Affiliate Marketing Or Drop Shipping?

It’s difficult to say which is the better model between affiliate marketing and drop shipping. Everyone is different and it really comes down to personal preference. However, I do believe affiliate marketing offers some huge benefits to drop shipping:

  • It’s more hands off
  • You have more choice in how you run your business
  • No customer services needed
  • You can work as a blogger, video marketer or social media influencer, or build an email list or work on social media sites
  • It’s cheap to start – much cheaper than drop shipping if you choose a free marketing method
  • Simply refer people to products with no need for personally fulfilling orders
why affiliate marketing is better than drop shipping

With drop shipping you need a strong brand or online presence. You personally take orders from a website and while this can give you more pricing control, it also means you dealing with customers. You have no control over the supply chain so if there’s a problem you have to deal with it!

Both business models rely heavily on online marketing. So success with either model will depend heavily on your ability to find customers with your online marketing methods.

Learn more about the various online business models in this free video series.

See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.

Who Is Affiliate Marketing For?

Who is affiliate marketing for? Anyone can become an affiliate marketer and people start learning affiliate marketing from all kinds of backgrounds. Top affiliates are often influencers with popular channels on YouTube and large numbers of followers. But that doesn’t mean you need a large following to start doing affiliate marketing. Anyone can learn affiliate marketing and it’s a very accessible business model.

how affiliate marketing works

To become successful with affiliate marketing you need a strong desire to succeed and a willingness to stick with it over the longer term. Affiliate marketing is definitely not a get rick quick scheme but rather a genuine business model which rewards product referrals. As a performance based business, many people from a sales background make good affiliates. But you don’t have to be a sales person in order to do affiliate marketing.

Affiliates can join program with existing sales materials and focus on activities which they enjoy, rather than focusing on selling, if they don’t consider themselves as “sales’y” people!

Who Is Affiliate Marketing For? Anyone Who Wants More Time, Freedom & Control

Anyone who wants more time, freedom and control over their life might find affiliate marketing fits the bill. Affiliate marketing can give you more autonomy, independence and the ability to live life on your own terms. So if you find working for a boss, or in a job you hate, undesirable, as many do, you may want to learn how to become an affiliate.

However, this counts for a huge amount of the population and a recent Gallop poll showed that as many as 85% of people are dissatisfied in their jobs/careers.

who is affiliate marketing for

Can affiliate marketing be the answer for so many? Well probably not in fact because around 95% of affiliate marketers will quit. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Affiliate marketing is after all a business. If you don’t make any sales as an affiliate, you don’t earn any money. That’s why so many drop out because they don’t make any sales early on. But if they stuck at it, would it work for them?

Who Is Affiliate Marketing For? Entrepreneurial People

Many new businesses fail too and selling affiliate products is a business like the others. The main difference with affiliate marketing is that nearly anyone can “have a go”. This “have a go” mentality combined with ease of entry perhaps explains the massive drop out rate. Most people don’t know what it takes to build an online business. When it doesn’t go as planned, they quit. Why is it that affiliate marketing does not work for these people, and who is affiliate marketing really for?

who is affiliate marketing for

The top affiliate marketers have been at it for years, not months. Most people believe they can accomplish a lot in a short time earning online, but forget what is possible over a few years. I think this is why a lot of affiliates drop out. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make.

Beginner affiliates start with zero traffic, and this can be tough. Months of work may not materialise as cash in the bank. But affiliate marketing is much like the Chinese Bamboo tree which takes 4-5 years of gestation period before growing 90 feet in 5 weeks! While affiliates can see income quite quickly, most affiliates will experience some set backs in the early months. This is where many will quit, believing that it doesn’t work.

You Need A “Why?”

In order to overcome the difficulties within the affiliate marketing business model, you need a strong desire to succeed. This comes from your main reason for starting an affiliate business – your “why?”. Without a strong enough “why”, you’ll never figure out the “how”, and likely you’ll join the 95% who drop out.

Many affiliates will start because they have been made redundant, hate their work, or are looking for a new challenge, or they just want another income source. I started as an affiliate back in the early 2000’s because I was struggling making ends meet with a stunt career I had chosen! See my about me page.

I wanted a way to work in my own time which would eventually give me an independent income so I didn’t need to keep doing all the jobs I was doing. I used to fill in between stunt contracts with many temp jobs since my stunt work was sporadic and limited. And I was sick of it! That was my “why”!

What’s your Why?

Can I Become An Affiliate?

Anyone can become an affiliate marketer. You only need a strong desire to learn and to be able to work on it consistently. You don’t need your own products or to deal with customers directly. Much of the technical side of an affiliate business is taken care of with software and technology which takes the difficulty out of building an online business. People can learn at any age too. However, building an online business is not easy! It can take some time to generate a consistent income and it’s not for the faint of heart!

Some affiliates have built large businesses within a year, but this isn’t typical. Most affiliates will take longer, depending on the business model they use and their marketing strategy.

If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate marketer, the best thing you can do is educate yourself. All your actions will be built on your understanding so with a greater understanding you should be a more effective affiliate.

Access a free video series below to learn more. (click image)

who is affiliate marketing for

What Is Clickbank Affiliate Marketing?

What is Clickbank affiliate marketing? Clickbank is a digital marketplace where affiliates can find products to promote for a revenue share.

Clickbank is a middle man between product owners and product referrers. Product owners (vendors) place products on Clickbank. Product referrers (affiliates) promote them online for a slice of the sale value.

Clickbank is one of the first places where affiliates will go looking for products to promote. The advantage of promoting a digital product over a physical product is that the levels of commission are typically much higher with digital products.

what is clickbank affiliate marketing

Amazon is another place where affiliates can promote products. Anyone can join an affiliate program and earn money through product promotion. Clickbank facilitates the transfer of referral fees to affiliates and gives digital product owners somewhere where they can easily promote their products.

What Is Clickbank Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which affiliates get paid for successfully selling someone else’s product online. They do this through a unique affiliate code which is tracked back to them. When a sale is made through your own unique affiliate I.D, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Clickbank is popular with affiliates because it offers so much scope for monetising any given topic. So if you have a Yoga website, Clickbank will have a Yoga based product you can promote from it. If you’re interested in fishing, Clickbank will have a fishing based product to promote on your website.

what is clickbank affiliate marketing

Whatever topic you have an interest in Clickbank will often have a product related to it. This makes it an incredibly versatile platform; affiliates can monetise existing businesses and websites/ blogs with related products.

What Is Clickbank Affiliate Marketing? Who Is Affiliate Marketing For?

Affiliate marketers come from all different kinds of backgrounds and many are those who wish to escape a 9 to 5 job or are looking for a career change. An affiliate can build an income online without any products or services of their own to sell. This makes it a pretty attractive career choice for many who are looking for an independent income.

All kinds of people become affiliate marketers but many affiliates are social media influencers with YouTube channels or a strong online presence.

However, you don’t have to be a massive influencer to benefit from affiliate marketing. Some affiliates join a program to build an extra income from an existing website. If you have an interest based website or blog, you can easily add a banner for a related product from Clickbank to monetise it.

Best Products To Choose On Clickbank

There’s a huge variety of products on Clickbank. Ideally as an affiliate you should promote a product you genuinely can recommend. If you know, like and trust a product, it’s easier to recommend it. If you don’t know it, it’s much harder to talk intelligently about it! When you have purchased a product yourself, you’re in a much better position to recommend a product, knowing its value.

In terms of commissions, some of the best products to promote are those which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs can give you an ongoing income, rather than a one off commission. This is obviously far better for cash flow! To find recurring income products on Clickbank you can use a site called CBengine.com. Click on the CB recurring tab which will take you here.

finding products on clickbank

Other Considerations & High Ticket

Clickbank isn’t the only place to go for affiliate marketers. There’s also sites such as JVZoo.com, Awin.com, ShareASale.com and many others. There’s also companies which will pay you much larger rates if you sell high ticket afffiliate products. A high ticket product typically pays out much larger commissions (typically over $500 per sale).

Here’s an example of a high ticket product you can promote if you join the Hammacher Schlemmer affiliate program:

high ticket affiliate marketing

The commission rate is 8% on the sale of this and other items you’ll find on the site. That means a sale of the “Amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft” will earn you a commission of $24,000! That’s far better than the typical commission affiliates will make selling products from Clickbank. Most products on Clickbank will sell for only around $100 and pay 30-40% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of them to make a similar amount as the high ticket products!

what is clickbank affiliate marketing

How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing?

Wondering how to get traffic for affiliate marketing? Without traffic affiliates can’t refer customers to products. Without customers, they don’t make any money! So, traffic for affiliates is like fuel for a vehicle! Without it it just won’t work! There’s lots of ways to get traffic if you’re an affiliate and depending on your marketing budget, or lack of it, this can take some considerable time and effort.

With a large marketing budget, affiliates can build huge email lists very quickly. Email marketing is definitely something you should do if you’re an affiliate marketer. It lets you control your traffic and build relationships with your subscribers. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they’re much more likely to buy from you. If you give them lots of useful information through your emails, they’re much more likely to open them too!

Grab free access to an email autoresponder here.

how to get traffic for affiliate marketing

How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Email Marketing

From a website a visitor only has a small time slot to make a buying decision. Most customers will need several touch points with a certain product or seller before they make a buying decision. That’s why email marketing works for affiliate marketers.

It lets them connect with potential customers many more times than a website can. You can also build a large database of subscribers with an email list and this allows you to build relationships with many people through automated emails and broadcasts which you send out regularly.

To build an email list you need traffic though! You can offer something on your website to encourage your website visitors to join your list. No website traffic? More on building website traffic later in this article. An ebook is a great tool to use on your website to get your website visitors to jump on your email list. See ebook lead magnet for more on this.

How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Blogging

Yes blogging is a great way to get more visitors to your website. Blogging is tough though and it takes some serious dedication to get enough content on your website to draw in consistent traffic. Depending on the topic of your blog, this can take months or years of work to do. There’s lots of ways to write content on your blog but a simple strategy I use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

niche blogging

Shorter keyword terms will be much more competitive and so it’s very difficult to get your content ranked on Google using them. So instead you can aim to rank your content for the “low hanging fruit”. See how to rank your blog post on Google.

Depending on your topic, this strategy may be more or less successful! The key is to keep going for the long term, building an endless array of content for your website visitors. To do this takes time and commitment so you’ll need to choose a topic which you can happily blog about for the longer term.

Choosing a topic you’re unfamiliar with will mean you’ll need to research your topic more carefully for each piece you write. This can get tiresome, especially if you have no interest in your topic. So it’s wise to choose a topic you at least have an interest in. See also best micro niche for blogging.

How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Dynamic Adverts (for existing content)

If you already have some content on a website you can use paid marketing in order to increase your traffic quite quickly. Set up a “dynamic” advert with Google Adwords and simply paste in your domain name to the platform. Dynamic adverts automatically create keywords relative to your content and show adverts which are suitable for your audience. You can even set up an advertising campaign with a tiny daily budget to suit your needs.

how to get traffic for affiliate marketing

You’ll find the dynamic search feature in Google Adwords dashboard when you set up a paid advertising campaign.

Or you can use Google Adwords to send traffic directly to any website by choosing your own keywords. Bing (now Microsoft) also offers a similar service and tends to be slightly cheaper.

How To Get Traffic For Affiliate Marketing – Quora

Here’s a cheap alternative too which compliments a blogging strategy. You can use Quora to directly answer questions which relate to your blog content. Then, post your blog links in with your answer. Providing you offer some genuine value on Quora.com, you should be allowed to post your links if they aren’t affiliate links and they relate to your answer.

how to get traffic for affiliate marketing

I’ve used this strategy successfully for some time now and over time your “pool” of Quora content will grow and bring you a nice stream of traffic to your blog content.

Again this is another slow strategy and you should spend some time each day doing this. Over a few months of doing this you’ll start to see traffic coming from Quora. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Landing Page & Paid Marketing

One of the best ways to get traffic for affiliate marketing is to send paid traffic to a landing page and collect your subscriber’s information. Then follow up with email marketing campaign promoting your products.

Many affiliates don’t do this because they use products which pay too little. If you’re promoting products from Amazon for example, you can only make single “one off” commissions. Plus the commission rate is very low on Amazon (between 1% and 20%). See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

how to get traffic for affiliate marketing
A landing page collects email details so you can follow up with email marketing campaigns

If you only make tiny commissions it becomes unviable to run paid marketing campaigns and still turn a profit. So you need better products which pay better commissions. Using high ticket affiliate products and subscription products is an answer.

With a high ticket sales funnel which contains subscription products, you have a much larger return on investment when using paid marketing. So profiting with a paid marketing becomes much more attainable.

Paid marketing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Google Adwords are used by some marketers. They tend to be more expensive that some social media platforms and Bing (Microsoft) advertising platforms, for example.

Unpaid Social Media Strategies

There’s also a heap of unpaid social media strategies you can use to get traffic for affiliate marketing. One such strategy is to use Facebook groups. Set up your profile so as to showcase your offer and include an easy to see link to your website. Then join multiple Facebook groups where your target audience will hang out. See how to know your target market for more on this.

start an online business

Once you get into the groups you can communicate with other members and help them. Answer questions and join the chat. Just don’t spam because you’ll probably get removed from the group!

Over time as you connect with more users you should see people visiting your Facebook profile and some will ask to add you as a friend. Keep this up for some time and you’ll start to see people clicking on your link and visiting your website/landing page. See unpaid social media marketing for more on this.

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is another option for content creators. If you’re a regular video or blog post creator, you’ll want to learn some SEO skills. SEO is important if you’re going after free traffic from the search engines. If you’re a blogger, there’s a variety of SEO tools which can help grow your traffic:

  • SEO plugins
  • Social media share buttons
  • Old post Syndicating tools
  • Push notification plugins
  • etc.

See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Summary

There’s a tonne of different tactics for generating traffic for affiliate marketing. Ideally focus on one until you get good at it before moving on to another. Slower strategies which are free may take months to generate the kind of traffic you can get in a day with a large marketing budget. But choose something sustainable for you according to your budget and available time.

See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.