Author: AffiliateMentor

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

Download this eBook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” – Click the image for access

Welcome to my step by step affiliate marketing for beginners pdf guide! In this guide I’m going to share some of the basic steps you can take to get started as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliates earn money online through the promotion of other people’s products and services. Once you have learned how to promote products online successfully, you’ll have learned a skill which can serve you for life.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

Top affiliates have learned how to sell products and services to give them an income which can completely replace their employment income. As such they can afford to quit their jobs and become full time affiliate marketers. Not everyone manages this and many affiliates will quit. I hope you’re one of the 5% who makes affiliate marketing your full time income!

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

To get started as an affiliate marketer you can join any of the many available affiliate programs. There’s thousands of programs you can join online. Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program that anyone can join. All you need to do is sign up to Amazon’s partner program to become an affiliate. You can then promote any of thousands of products on Amazon’s website.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

Once you have joined an affiliate program you can sign into the affiliate portal and access your unique affiliate link. Your affiliate link is a unique link which tracks back any sales and rewards you if you made the referral.

Another popular place for affiliates is Clickbank. Clickbank offers thousands of digital affiliate products. Digital products are good for affiliates because they offer higher levels of commission. A physical product will typically pay from 5%-10% commission compared to 30%-40% for digital products.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Product Promotion

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products but here’s some of the most popular strategies:

  • Blogging – writing content on a website and linking to your affiliate products
  • Video marketing – upload videos to YouTube and TikTok and promote affiliate products through your content
  • PPC – pay per click marketing – use marketing platforms such as Adwords, Facebook and YouTube to promote products to a global marketplace
  • Social media – there’s many strategies both paid and unpaid you can use on the various platforms: Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Twitter etc.
  • Email marketing – it’s advisable for new affiliates to use email marketing because it helps you control your traffic and get more traction more quickly. Access an autoresponder for free here.

Whatever strategy you decide to use as an affiliate, it’s advisable to join an affiliate program which can help you through the learning phase with coaches and accountability partners. On your own, affiliate marketing can easily seem daunting. But when you have support, training and encouragement, you’re much more likely to follow through with it and become successful. Access training and support here.

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

Step By Step Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy will often depend on the training you get and your personal circumstances. With PPC – pay per click marketing, you can get an affiliate business running quite quickly with enough of a daily budget. Once profitable it can be scaled up quite quickly.

affiliate beginners guide

With other marketing methods such as blogging, or organic video marketing it can take quite some time before you start to see sales coming in. Everyone’s experience is different and according to the products you decide to promote, and your marketing methods, it can take anywhere between a few months and a few years to start seeing regular commissions and profits.

If you have a lot of time, you might choose a cheaper organic marketing strategy such as blogging. If you’re working full time and are looking to replace your existing income, you might want to choose the faster marketing methods which are paid platforms like Facebook, Adwords, YouTube etc.

Subscription & High Ticket Products

To get traction as an affiliate more quickly, it’s well worth looking at subscription affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate products. With subscription products, such as memberships and software products, you can earn ongoing commissions from sales you generate. This can make a massive difference in an affiliate business because each sale counts towards your ongoing monthly income, rather than giving you only a single commission. Over time your monthly income increases with each sale you generate.

High ticket items can also have a massive impact on your affiliate business. While many beginners think higher value items are harder to sell, once you understand marketing this isn’t so because you have a global audience to sell to. By choosing the right audience to target your marketing towards, a large value sale can be achieved with the same amount of work as a low value product which pays a tiny amount in comparison.

high ticket products

Combining The Three Affiliate Commissions

A good business model is vital for success as an affiliate marketer. More than 90% of affiliates quit. Partly this is because they choose the wrong products to promote and/or use the wrong marketing strategy to sell. Combining multiple commission strategies into your affiliate business model can help you massively. The three basic earning strategies from affiliate marketing include:

  • OT – One Time commissions – you get paid a single commission for each individual sale you make
  • S – Subscription commissions – pay you ongoing commissions for monthly memberships and software type products
  • HT – High Ticket items pay you larger amounts per sale, making it easier to use paid marketing platforms and make a profit
the three main affiliate earning strategies

Summary

Anyone can learn the strategies to sell other people’s products online as an affiliate. The main key steps are:

  • Choose an affiliate product to sell – many affiliates use products they themselves have already purchased and then join an affiliate program which sells it.
  • Join an affiliate training program – it’s well worth investing in your marketing skill which is the biggest challenge most affiliates face. Access a training course here.
  • Choose your marketing strategy – blogging, paid marketing, email marketing and social media marketing are all types of marketing strategy. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
  • Learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. It can take some time and effort before you see any results. Keep going and don’t quit! The most successful affiliates are long term affiliates who stick at it for several years.

Affiliate Marketing Presentation PDF

(ACCESS AFFILIATE MARKETING PRESENTATION PDF HERE FOR DOWNLOAD)

In this affiliate marketing presentation pdf I’m going to walk you through the basics of affiliate marketing and how to get the most from your own affiliate business.

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the referrer (affiliate) earns commissions by referring sales to existing products, services and brands. Affiliates don’t have to own products themselves or even fulfil on the product delivery. This is all handled by the product owner. An affiliate simply recommends a product in order to earn commissions from their referrals.

affiliate marketing presentation pdf
Access this four part video presentation here.

To get started with affiliate marketing, you find a program and sign up. You then get access to your unique affiliate I.D. and link. Promote your affiliate link and earn commissions based on sales you generate. There’s thousands of affiliate products you can promote as an affiliate marketer. As an example, Amazon has an affiliate program. Anyone can sign up to Amazon’s partner program and promote any of thousands of products available from the site.

affiliate marketing presentation pdf
Access this four part video presentation here

Affiliate Marketing Presentation PDF – Commissions

Not every affiliate program pays the same so it can be wise to do some research to determine the best kinds of products to promote. Amazon for example pays between 1% and 11% on their affiliates sales. But typically, (for most of their product range) they will pay between 3% and 10%. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

Amazon commision
Access workshops here.

Despite this being fairly low compared to other affiliate marketing commission rates, Amazon does offer a unique advantage. When someone buys through your affiliate link on Amazon, and then they also fill their cart with other products, you can earn commissions on those product sales too! This can stack up, particularly if they are doing their Christmas shopping, for example and buy a lot of products at once!

Another form of commissions which affiliates can earn is recurring commissions! Recurring commission affiliate products are typically those which offer ongoing value such as software products, memberships and tools for online businesses. One such product is Aweber which offers a recurring income affiliate program.

Aweber - selling software products
Access Free Video Workshops here.

Recurring commission affiliate programs offer some of the best potential for affiliates because you can earn an ongoing income from each and every sale you make. This can soon add up and compound over time. With one-off commissions you need to keep making sales in order to keep getting paid. With recurring commissions sales add up to monthly income rather than stand alone commissions!

Aweber, for example pays 30% commission for product referrals month in month out.

Affiliate Marketing Presentation PDF – Digital Vs. Physical + High Ticket Products

affiliate marketing presentation pdf

As you can see with the above example, a digital software product pays out a much larger percentage of the sale value to affiliate marketers than physical products to.

Typically a physical product sale will earn an affiliate between 5% and 10% in commission. In contrast, a digital product will pay between 30% and 40% commission on average, with certain products paying even more!

High ticket affiliate products too are worth considering for affiliates to promote. A typical high ticket product will pay out much larger commissions for affiliates because it carries a larger price tag. As such you can earn much larger commissions from high ticket products.

high ticket products

Although many beginner affiliates believe that high value products will be harder to sell online, this isn’t really true.

When you understand how to market online, and which customers to target with your advertising, it’s far easier to promote high value products than low value ones. The same amount of work can also make you much larger commissions and you don’t have to sell as many items to make more income! Selling high value items is a smart way to work as an affiliate.

Examples Of High Ticket Items

high ticket example

Here’s an example of a few high ticket items you can promote as an affiliate marketer. The mixed martial arts trainer sells for $7000 and pays out $560 in commissions for referrals.

Here’s another product: the exercise spa! This product sells for $10,000 and gives affiliates an $800 commission on any sales they generate!

affiliate marketing presentation pdf

Here’s another high value affiliate product, again in the exercise niche.

affiliate marketing presentation pdf

The climbing wall treadmill sells for $9,950 and pays affiliates a commission of $800 per sale.

affiliate under water craft

Here’s another high ticket product – the amphibious sub surface watercraft or submarine! This product sells for $300,000 and offers a $24,000 commission! Whatever you may think about such high priced products, there are people who buy them and as an affiliate you can promote globally to pretty much anyone. So why not promote the products which pay out the most?!

Promoting Affiliate Products

The key ingredient in affiliate marketing success is successful promotion of affiliate products. Affiliate marketing is a creative industry and there’s many ways you can attract an audience online and sell other people’s products. Here’s just a few strategies which affiliate marketers use to sell affiliate products:

  • Blogging
  • Email marketing
  • PPC – pay per click advertising
  • SEO – search engine optimisation
  • Social media marketing – paid and organic strategies
  • Video marketing – using platforms such as YouTube and TikTok
three ways to earn as an affiliate
Stuart explaining OT – “One Time” S – “Subscription” products and HT – “High ticket” Products

One of the best ways to earn from affiliate marketing is to combine the three types of affiliate products:

  • OT – “One Time” commissions – one sale one commission
  • S – Subscription commissions – earn ongoing commissions from subscriptions, software and membership
  • HT – High Ticket products – pay over $500 per sale in commissions

Access the free workshop video series here to watch the full presentation in video format.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy PDF

(DOWNLOAD AFFILIATE MARKETING STRATEGY PDF DOCUMENT HERE)

In this affiliate marketing strategy PDF I’m going to share some of the most popular affiliate marketing tactics. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products. According to your own personal preferences, available time and budget, you should choose accordingly.

Top strategies include PPC – (pay per click marketing), organic marketing methods such as blogging and v’logging (video blogging) and email marketing.

beginners

You can also do a combination of more than one strategy too. But it’s often recommended to choose a strategy and get good at it before jumping on to another one. That way, you actually get some traction with your strategy first and don’t fall prey to “shiny object syndrome”.

Shiny Object Syndrome means you’re always looking for an easier solution to product promotion/affiliate marketing. As such you can easily get stuck in the constant search for the “perfect solution”; which of course doesn’t exist in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy PDF – Blogging

I’m going to start off with blogging because it’s a cheap strategy anyone can do. If you want a steady stream of affiliate sales for free, you’ll need to become a content creator. Paid marketing is of course much faster and often more reliable. Blogging on the other hand is a slow strategy which can take months before you see any tangible results. If you enjoy blogging though, and have a topic which you are passionate about, blogging can be a good strategy. But expect to put in several months of regular content creation. Depending on your chosen topic, it can take even longer to generate results from blogging.

niche blogging

See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

You can even blog for free using free platforms such as WordPress, Blogger.com or Hubpages. If you’re serious about making money through blogging though it’s well worth building your own website. On a free platform it can be more difficult to get free traffic from the search engines. Google, and other search engine platforms rate owner domain names and give them more authority than free blog platforms. See also this article for details of setting up your own website.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy PDF – Email Marketing

Email marketing can be used in conjunction with pretty much any other marketing strategy. You can use email marketing with blogging, pay per click marketing and even social media marketing. It’s a useful tool which every affiliate should use. When I started using email marketing my results skyrocketed! Before this I was trying to sell directly from a website which is much more difficult.

affiliate marketing strategy pdf

On a website someone only has a few minutes to make a buying decision. Most people need at least a few “touch points” with a product before they make this decision. Email marketing lets you extend the time period of “getting to know you” of your customer. Through email marketing you can build a list of subscribers and build a relationship with them over the longer term. It’s much harder to do this on a website.

A blogger can build their email list by offering something to giveaway on their website, such as an ebook or pdf download. From a paid marketing platform, affiliates can send traffic directly to a landing page and collect subscribers information by giving something valuable in exchange. Whatever form of marketing you’re using, do email marketing! Here’s a link to a free autoresponder you can use to get started.

PPC – Pay Per Click/Paid Marketing Platforms

PPC or pay per click marketing is the fastest and most scalable form of marketing for affiliates. However before you can scale up an affiliate business, it’s important to know your numbers and already be profitable. Many affiliates spend upwards of $20k a month on marketing but they don’t start at such a large amount. They usually start testing their advertising at a low daily budget. Once they see their campaigns working, they slowly increase it, testing and measuring while they do so.

PPC platforms include:

  • Google Adwords
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Bing
  • And Many Other Social Media platforms
affiliate marketing strategy pdf
YouTube can be one of the most effective marketing platforms available

Many affiliates will try a paid strategy and give up shortly afterwards because nothing happens. So it’s important to realise that not every campaign you run will be profitable immediately. The benefit of paid marketing is that you can see very quickly whether something is working or not. While with organic content marketing, you can work for a long time before seeing whether your efforts will be rewarded, or not!

Paid marketing is also much more scalable than organic content marketing. If a certain piece of content does well, you can’t necessarily translate this success to newer content. But with PPC, once you have a successful campaign, you can easily increase your budget to put your ad in from of a larger audience, knowing that it already works!

Affiliate Marketing Strategy PDF – Paid Marketing & Email Marketing

Many affiliates use PPC campaigns in conjunction with email marketing. They send targeted traffic to landing pages and collect email subscribers by offering something to their visitors. This is a very effective form of marketing because you have a scaleable strategy (PPC) and a follow up strategy to help build relationships over the longer term.

From an advert placed on YouTube, for example, a clickable link takes visitors to a landing page which offers to deliver a series of emails helping them solve some problem.

affiliate marketing strategy pdf
An example of a landing page

On the landing page, the visitor only has two options: sign up to the free material or leave the page. This is far better than sending traffic to a website where people can browse around and not take a specific form of action. Once you get an email from your visitor you can continue to follow up with them, offering value in your emails and promoting affiliate products.

YouTube Organic Marketing

Many affiliates will build an organic marketing campaign using only YouTube. This takes a lot of time and effort and you’ll need to upload videos on a regular basis to YouTube. Over time and through optimising your videos for specific keywords which relate to your business/products, you can attract a growing audience for free!

Depending on your particular topic, it can take weeks, months or years to generate enough traction to make a consistent income from affiliate marketing. In a competitive topic it will likely take a lot longer than in an uncompetitive topic because of the competition on the platform for videos of a certain nature.

If you enjoy making videos and are a good presenter or talker, this might be a suitable strategy you can use to promote your affiliate products. You need to create videos which will attract an audience who will relate to the products and services you are promoting.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies PDF – SEO

SEO or search engine optimisation can be used with any online content you create but it’s more relevant for content creators like bloggers and organic YouTube marketers.

Through optimising content you put on your website (or on YouTube) you can attract the attention of the organic search results and get free traffic.

Although good SEO doesn’t always mean you’ll rank on the first page of Google, it’s a useful strategy if you’re going for any kind of organic reach. As you create more and more content, if your content is SEO optimised it will have more impact and get more attention. Google uses a number of factors to rank content and determine where to place it in the search results:

  • Content quality and volume of content
  • Number of back links pointing to your site
  • Age of the domain name (with a website)
  • Website authority
  • How visitors interact with content
  • Your link profile, what rate they are added and where are they from
  • And many other factors

Using Social Media Sites For Traffic

There are many social media sites which can be used to attract traffic to affiliate products too. Here’s just a few of them:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin
  • YouTube
  • Tumblr
  • TikTok
  • Snapchat
  • Reddit
  • etc

Here’s a simple facebook strategy you can use to attract more people to your products.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy PDF – Using Facebook For Traffic

First set up your Facebook profile with a link to your main website. You can also showcase your ebooks if you have any on your Facebook profile. Once you’ve done this you should have a profile which clearly defines you, what you offer and who you can help with your products/service.

using Facebook for marketing
Here’s an example of how you can set up your Facebook profile to showcase your website/offer

When complete you can then join groups which are relevant to your target audience (more on this later). Ideally find groups which are relevant to your product in some way. So if you’re selling fitness products then you would join fitness related groups.

Once joined you can interact with members of the groups. Don’t spam them with your links, simply interact and help people with their problems. Spend some time daily doing this and over time people will gravitate towards you, especially if you have a good picture on your profile. As they see your profile, some will visit your website and/or sign up to your offers.

Using Quora For Traffic

If you’ve already set up an affiliate website, it can be a struggle getting people to see your content. A simple strategy to get more website visitors is through using the Q and A website Quora.com.

On Quora there’s many questions you can answer which are relevant to your products and services. Find questions which will likely be a good match for your potential customers. Answer them fully on the site and link back to content on your website which helps further answer questions.

You are allowed to do this on Quora.com, providing you offer value first on the site itself and don’t just spam Quora with your links! See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Your Target Audience

finding your target audience

Knowing your target audience as an affiliate marketer can save you a tonne of time and effort. Your “target audience” is that slice of the marketplace who are most likely to purchase your product or service.

You can determine this by looking at your existing customers and finding some common traits. For example, a local DIY store might have an audience of over 35 year olds as their main demographic.

They will also live close to the store if it’s a physical location. Running a global advertising campaign for a local store will likely waste a lot of money. In this scenario it’s far better to target locally based people over a certain age (35), since you’ll waste much less advertising budget on your correct demographic.

A local store is a simple way to explain target audience. For a globally based business, it can get more complicated. Advertising platforms can narrow down your audience based on many demographics:

  • Age
  • Location
  • Sex
  • Interests
  • Connections
  • Pass times
  • etc.

The more you understand your target audience/perfect customer, the better able you are to focus your advertising dollars on the right slice of the marketplace and make your adverts count!

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF

In my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF ebook I share some of the main things I think you should know as a new affiliate starting out. I started learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s, and it’s no easy feat making an affiliate sale online.

affiliate marketing for beginners pdf

There’s a variety of strategies you can employ as an affiliate in order to generate a single sale. Here’s a few of them:

  • Blogging
  • PPC – Pay per click
  • Email marketing
  • Video marketing – both paid and free (organic)
  • Social media

As a newbie, you’ll be keen to get started and start making those commissions. But I hope you will at least read through my Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF guide first (access here) because it will prepare you much better for the journey. I made many mistakes as a newbie affiliate and if you read this ebook, you’ll be much better prepared for success than I was!

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Traps To Avoid

There’s a few traps you’ll want to avoid and prepare yourself for as a new affiliate. Shiny Object Syndrome is the tendency to jump from one course to another looking for the easy win! Let me tell you there’s no easy win! I did this for years and no sooner had I started out on one particular training course than another “shiny object” caught my eye. The next course promised “faster and easier”, so I jumped ship and started again with a new strategy.

affiliate marketing for beginners pdf

The Busy Fool

The problem with this approach is that you never get any traction with any given strategy. Becoming successful with affiliate marketing is a little like push starting a freight train! Once it’s going, you can add a little more effort until it’s at full speed! But getting it going from a standing start takes some will power, belief and motivation.

Being a “Busy Fool” is another trap to avoid! It feels nice starting your own business but you have to remain vigilant. Don’t get complacent with your time and start wasting it. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model so if you don’t make any sales you don’t get paid. Getting those sales early will give you the necessary momentum to continue on. Not getting them can mean you lose belief and encouragement, making the journey more difficult.

If you’re not used to being your own boss and managing your own time, it can be easy to dawdle and spend time on fruitless activities which you enjoy, rather than those which move your business forwards.

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Business Models & Products

When I started out as an affiliate newbie, I chose products from websites I used such as Amazon and eBay. Both platforms have affiliate programs – also known as “Partner programs” which let you join them and send people to the various products on the sites. But you should know that these platforms offer the lowest levels of commission, from 1% to 11% commission. So if you sell a $100 product from Amazon, for example, you’ll only make $1-$11 on that sale!

See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission for details of their rates.

affiliate marketing for beginners pdf

If you’re selling low value physical products from these sites, be aware that you’ll need to sell in large volume to make a good income from your affiliate business. There are other types of products which can be much more lucrative and it’s worth considering the types of products you’d like to sell from the outset. Digital products typically pay much more in terms of commissions and can pay from 20% to even 100% commission on certain products.

Subscription affiliate products offer some of the best earnings because you can earn ongoing commissions for each and every sale. There’s also high ticket products too which offer the highest rates of commission available for affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Mindset & Motivation

Although pretty much anyone can become an affiliate, not everyone succeeds and builds a profitable business through affiliate marketing. This can be for a number of reasons but the sheer volume of people “having a go” at affiliate marketing is testimony to the fact that so many drop out.

I hope that you are not simply “giving it a go” because this attitude seldom works for affiliate marketing! It takes a lot more than dipping in your toe to make an affiliate business work and something like 95% of affiliates drop out and quit! See affiliate marketing failure rate.

the mindset of successful affiliate marketers

The right mindset and attitude is therefore a massive factor in whether you’ll become successful as an affiliate. This is therefore worth cultivating and particularly in the early stages there can be a lot of hurdles to overcome. If you’re well prepared mentally, and have a “never say die” kind of approach, so much the better. You’ll surely face adversity when approaching affiliate marketing and your resolve to overcome obstacles is part of the journey!

I even believe that it is adversity which makes you improve yourself personally and that affiliate marketing is both an inward and outward journey. Often the money at the end of the “trail” isn’t the most important part, but the personal growth is!

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF – Marketing Strategy

Whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate marketer, you’ll need some kind of marketing strategy. There’s many different tactics and ways to promote affiliate products so you should choose carefully. Your choice will also depend on your circumstances and if you’re time rich you may want to focus on content creation and look towards generating organic traffic. This can be done through various strategies such as blogging, video blogging and using unpaid social media marketing tactics.

If you have less disposable time, you will probably want to get things automated as quickly as possible and scale up your business fast. If this is the case you should be looking towards using paid marketing. Paid marketing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Adwords for example are useful if you have less available time and want faster results.

Whatever method of marketing you choose it’s always worth building an email list. Email marketing is a powerful way to collect subscribers and deliver your marketing message through email messages. See also the power of email marketing. Access a free autoresponder here.

Best Business Model

Most affiliate products only pay you once. This is known as a “one time” commission. After that the customer has found the company providing the products. That company then acquires the customer and potentially earns from a lifetime of sales in the future from your referral! It’s a sweet deal for companies like Amazon who continue to lower their commissions and change terms to make affiliate’s lives more difficult! But it’s not such as great deal for affiliates who only receive tiny commissions on these kinds of referrals!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

Product Ranges

If you want to give yourself a head start as an affiliate, choose programs which offer multiple products within a range of products from which you can earn. Promoting a product range as an affiliate gives you much more potential to earn in the future from sales you have generated. Up-sells are useful to affiliates particularly when a built in sales team closes sales on the affiliate’s behalf. An up-sell is another product within a range which offers more value to a customer.

The three main types of affiliate commissions are:

  • OT – One time commission, you get paid only once
  • S – Subscription products
  • HT – high ticket products pay you larger than average commissions.
Access FREE Videos here

With a good product range such as the SFM Digital Business System, you can benefit from all of these kinds of commissions and a built in sales team, up-selling products on your behalf.

Timescale & Marketing Strategy

Depending on your marketing strategy you can build an online affiliate business over the course of months or years. Most affiliates will take at least a year to get traction in their affiliate business but it depends on the strategy you are using and your marketing budget; and of course product range.

With a high ticket sales funnel, you’ll earn a lot more from sales you generate and therefore you’ll be able to afford the more expensive advertising platforms. So according to your “buy in” level of a high value product range, you’ll be able to access the highest levels of commission.

affiliate marketing for beginners

Of course you don’t need to purchase affiliate products in order to sell them. But with a high ticket digital product range, the more you invest the larger your earning potential when it comes to re-selling.

If you take a cheaper approach to marketing, such as with blogging, expect it to take much longer. With a paid marketing strategy, a good marketing budget and high ticket sales funnel you can start generating traction much more quickly. Some affiliates do manage to replace their income inside of a year with this strategy; although these results aren’t typical. See also how long does affiliate marketing take.

With low value products and an organic marketing strategy, it can take years to gain traction. You’re far better off at least using subscription affiliate programs to speed up your journey!

Access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners!

If you’re serious about starting your own affiliate marketing journey, you can access Affiliate Marketing For Beginners PDF here! Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll get back to you.

You can also join a community of online entrepreneurs and start your affiliate journey by getting access to tools, training and support here.

Affiliate Marketing Tips And Tricks PDF

(Download affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf in pdf format here)

In this affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf I’m going to share some of the things which have worked best for me. My name’s Tim Halloran and I’ve been an affiliate for over 10 years now. In that time I’ve discovered several affiliate strategies, some of which have worked to great effect and some of which haven’t!

As a beginner affiliate I made a lot of mistakes so I’m also going to share some simple ways to avoid them! Some of the most common mistakes affiliates make are:

Affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf
  • Shiny Object Syndrome – looking for the “next best thing”. I did this for years and wasted a huge amount of time looking for the fastest solution to my problem – panic! Jumping from course to course seldom works. You need to commit to a single course of action for long enough to make progress and learn from your mistakes.
  • Being a busy fool – I was a busy fool for some time! I spend hours on actions which only entertained myself rather than driving my online business forwards. A quick remedy – focus on money producing activities, (which are not necessarily the ones you like)
  • Going it alone – Get help – affiliate marketing can be tough. If you’re all alone, it’s so much easier to fail when the going gets tough. Join an online community here.

Affiliate Marketing Tips and Tricks PDF

In addition to personal issues such as wasting time online and jumping from course to course, it can be a mistake to choose the wrong products to promote and/or use the wrong marketing strategy. When I first started learning affiliate marketing I made these mistakes too. I was desperate and this too is a bad place to be if you’re planning on making a living from the internet.

A saying in Forex marketing is that “scared money is lost money”. Similar to Forex, affiliate marketing takes some time and dedication to learn. Don’t expect to outrun an employment wage in a few weeks. It’s amazing though what can be achieved in only a few years. So keep your eye on the longer term prize!

beginners guide to affiliate marketing

So, what are the wrong products to promote as an affiliate? While there’s no definitive answer to what is “right” or “wrong” with affiliate marketing, you ultimately want to get paid. Choosing to promote low value physical products means you’ll need to sell in bulk to make a good income. This can be tough for a couple of reasons:

  • Selling in bulk means you’ll need a lot of traffic
  • You can either pay for traffic or create content – which takes much longer

Selling low value physical products is therefore not a great strategy for both of these reasons. It can take months before you realise your content marketing strategy is not working! After which you’ve already spent a heap of time creating content! Paying for traffic is expensive and this is much more difficult with low value products. Spending on advertising while trying to squeeze a profit from low value products which only pay tiny commissions is not a good strategy!

Affiliate Marketing Tips And Tricks PDF – Business Models

It’s wise to be aware of the different business models available in affiliate marketing. Amazon is one of the lowest paying affiliate programs out there and although there’s a tonne of products to choose from on the site, most of them will only pay peanuts in commissions. Checkout Amazon’s commissions rates here.

You’ll see that commission rates go from 1%-11%. So the most you can make on any product on the site is 11% commission! Contrast this with digital products which typically pay above 30% commission on a sale.

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OT – one time, S – Subscription and HT – High ticket affiliate products.

If you also choose to promote subscription affiliate programs, you can make a whole lot more for the same amount of work!

Subscription programs offer ongoing value and take the form of membership products and software products. If you sell a subscription product to someone who continues to use the product for a lifetime, you’ll keep earning commissions for the lifetime of their membership! This makes a huge amount of difference when you’re trying to get an affiliate business off the ground. Those regular commissions come in month after month for the sales you’ve made already.

With “one-off” commissions you only get paid once and you need to keep selling over and over to keep earning them!

Affiliate Marketing Tips & Tricks PDF – High Ticket Affiliate Marketing

What is high ticket affiliate marketing? A “high ticket” affiliate product typically has a much larger price tag than standard affiliate products. Usually this is over $500 and therefore high ticket products pay larger commissions. The highest type of affiliate commissions come from high value digital products because they carry the largest price tags AND the largest commissions. However you can also find high ticket physical products which pay out superb rates of commission.

Here’s a submarine which pays out a whopping $24,000 commission and has a price tag of $300,000! So even a small 8% commission can make a massive difference to your bottom line as an affiliate if you use the right kinds of products.

Affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf

Before discovering high ticket and subscription products, I struggled for years. This knowledge alone could have shaved years off my affiliate struggles!

Marketing Your Affiliate Products

There’s so many ways you can market your affiliate products too! Some people like to use video, and others like blogging. Some use paid marketing, and others choose social media. There’s also faster ways and slower strategies when it comes to affiliate marketing. Blogging, for example is definitely a slower strategy. If you’re impatient and want results more quickly, or don’t have the time for blogging, you’re definitely better off choosing another marketing strategy. See this article: 22 ways to promote affiliate products, for more strategies.

Building an email list has definitely been the best thing I’ve done for affiliate profits! Before I discovered the power of email marketing, I was struggling trying to sell products directly off my websites. But since I also struggled getting traffic due to my strategy and lack of support (for some time), I seldom made a sale.

Affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf

An email list can make a massive difference to your affiliate business. It puts you in charge of your traffic. On a website, a visitor only has a small time (a few minutes usually) to make a buying decision. After that they will leave, potentially forever! But if you can get their email address, you can extend this period for days, weeks, months and even years and decades!

Since most customers need a few touch points before they make a buying decision, selling directly from your website is a less effective strategy than through email marketing. In addition with an email list you’re learning to control your traffic, rather than relying on SEO (search engine optimisation) or paid advertising for it! Get access to a free autoresponder here.

Play To Your Strengths

Whatever marketing strategy you use to build an email list, choose something you can do consistently. If you have less time, use paid marketing. If you have more creativity, choose video marketing or blogging. Many affiliates will quit long before they get any results and one of the main reasons is not having a marketing strategy they can do over the longer term.

The fastest and most effective marketing strategy is definitely paid marketing. But this still takes time to learn. Not every campaign will be profitable right out of the gate.

niche blogging for profit

So expect a learning curve with whatever you choose to do. I’m a fan of blogging, but before this became a regular habit, I struggled for years! With a long term strategy like blogging, you should ideally pick a topic you can stick with for the long term. It’s a slow and labour intensive marketing strategy and if you don’t have the patience or creativity to keep creating new posts, choose something else!

If you’re happy shooting lots of video, use that instead. If you’d rather not show your face, look at email marketing or blogging. Or use paid advertising instead!

A simple blogging trick I use is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Procrastination & Doubt, Health & Well Being

Procrastination and doubt can easily kill your ambition of becoming a successful affiliate marketer. Consider this your enemy. It can take a long time to get traction with an affiliate business. Even if you use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing, (one of the quickest strategies), you’ll likely face some doubt on your affiliate marketing journey.

You need to combat this with strategies which help you maintain a positive state of mind and optimistic outlook. I find reading motivational books a huge help. See motivational books pdf free download.

It can also help to meditate and take regular exercise. Get to know when you’re in the optimum state of mind for working and when it’s a bad idea to work!

Learning to control your state of mind with the information you feed it is pretty important for affiliates, or anyone who is self employed. Your business is you! So if you’re not looking after your health and mental and emotional well being, it will have an impact on your business.

Stay The Course!

Most affiliates will quit after only a short amount of time. If you’re forewarned of this you’re forearmed! Of course affiliate marketing is easily accessible and this can account for some of the high drop out rate. But also the beginning phase of affiliate marketing is fraught with problems as you get to grips with learning a new skill.

Everyone’s experience is unique in affiliate marketing and will depend on their own learning and growth. Some affiliates will take a paid marketing route, and others will go for the cheaper, but longer road of free marketing. It’s worth knowing that many of the tactics you use won’t produce immediate results, particularly if you’re blogging or using organic marketing methods. You will need to learn from mistakes as well as successes. The first goal should be something very easy to obtain so you gain some traction and enthusiasm for the journey. If you look too far ahead, it will seem like a huge undertaking.

Affiliate marketing tips and tricks pdf

Celebrate the small wins on the journey too and give yourself time to develop. The affiliates who earn the most are often too the ones who have been at it for the longest!

Stick at it and enjoy the journey! Access a free video series here to learn more.

Overcoming Poverty Mindset

Overcoming poverty mindset can take some time and hard work. Most of us have at least some limiting beliefs about money and scarcity. A poverty mindset doesn’t necessarily only have to be about money either. If there’s never enough, and you’re constantly struggling in your finances and in life, there may be a deeper route cause to your problem other than simply money alone. Money is only the surface problem (symptom) many people are facing. But what causes this as a problem for so many?

Do you feel like you’re never enough?

Many of the deeper routes to a poverty mindset are set in the early years of development before we have a conscious reasoning facility in place. Before we are 10 years old, we have absorbed a huge amount of information. Most of this gets buried in the subconscious mind where we don’t see it. Only when some problem arises later in life are we made more consciously aware of the deep lying beliefs which hold us back from a more fulfilling life of abundance and joy.

Overcoming Poverty Mindset

“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will control your life and you will call it fate” – Carl Jung

Money doesn’t grow on trees, rich people are greedy, “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”. These are just a small sample of beliefs which can arrest your financial progress. If you’re struggling with money, chances are good that you’ve picked up (and believed) at least one or two negative beliefs about money.

overcoming poverty mindset
(A Paradigm is a belief system which holds you where you are!)

How do you view the rich and wealthy? If you secretly despise, (or openly despise them), how will you feel about yourself once you are wealthy? Of course the answer should be obvious but many people go through life hating that which they actually want for themselves. Holding feelings of anger, jealousy or hatred towards someone because they are better off than you will seldom attract you to a similar position.

Most people will collect most of their underlying beliefs about life and themselves from their early experiences. What did your parents believe about money? How much did they earn? How did they talk about money, lack and abundance? Revisiting your early years can give you some clue as to the extent of your underlying beliefs around money, abundance, lack and poverty. Look back (without judgement) and just have some curiosity around some of the ideas which you will have picked up.

Overcoming Poverty Mindset – Thoughts Become Things

Thoughts do indeed become things and whether you subscribe to Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret or not, or the law of attraction, most cannot argue with this quote from Henry Ford:

henry ford quote

But it’s not just your conscious thinking process which may be repelling ideas of abundance and happiness. It’s also (and mostly) your unconscious reasoning process which is built upon by your constant inner thinking processes. If you’re serious about overcoming poverty mindset, you need to start paying attention to your thoughts and words. Are they sending money and abundance away?

If someone you knew was constantly berating you, talking badly of you and secretly hating you, would you enjoy time in their company? Most likely you would pick up on their anger and hatred (at some point) and stop spending time with them. If you have a poverty mindset, you are likely spending some time talking away money from your life. Start observing your behaviour both inwardly and outwardly as a first step towards uncovering your behaviour.

Your Story & Speech

The story you tell yourself is an obvious description of how you perceive yourself and view the world. Start paying attention to what this story is saying. It’s your “script” for your poverty mindset. It will likely have a “poor me” theme and some backlog of unhappiness in it, explaining your problems.

You may not be consciously aware yet that this script needs to flip if you are to escape the poverty mindset which is holding you from a happier life. Remember you’re still writing it and it can be changed.

poverty mindset
A poverty mindset will keep you “Stuck” forever – until you learn that you’re the cause!

Avoid talking about the bad in your life and start focusing on what is good already about your life. If you’ve been unhappy for sometime this can be a challenge. To help this you can start writing a gratitude journal.

Watch yourself and your speech and notice when you are talking against money, wealth, abundance and joy. Old habits die hard so it might take a few weeks of observation before you can start changing what you normally say regarding the things you want to change.

Law Of Attraction – Gratitude

All of the books on the Law Of Attraction talk about gratitude.

  • Working with the law – Raymond Holliwell,
  • Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill,
  • The Science Of Getting Rich – Wallace Wattles,
  • The Secret Ronda Byrne etc.

See motivational books pdf free download for these and more titles.

Gratitude changes your constant thinking process and by doing so alters your dominant state of mind. Since beliefs have taken years to develop, it will take some time and effort to shift your thinking, especially around your existing limiting ideas around money and lack. One way of practicing gratitude is to start a gratitude diary. Each day, spend some time writing down the things you are already grateful for in your life. Start with small things like clothes, health, food and shelter.

As you get better at journalling your gratitude, you will naturally change your dominant thinking processes and look for more things to be grateful for.

Poverty Mindset Vs Growth Mindset

A poverty mindset thinks things will always be like they are. You may assume you’ll never have enough money, or more money. A growth mindset sees the potential of a different future scenario. A growth mindset doesn’t disqualify potential opportunities. A poverty mindset will look at an opportunity and only assume the worst!

Choose a growth mindset and start learning something new. A poverty mindset will keep you stuck for years because you see the negative in everything. To change, start talking to yourself in a more nurturing way, rather than a “never good enough” manner.

If you consistently tell yourself “you’ll never amount to anything”, or “you’ll never be good enough”, your only outcome is to never try anything. Instead, start noticing this debilitating voice of descent and change it to something which is more growth orientated and supportive.

Who You Surround Yourself With

You’ll never spend so much time with anyone but yourself. Are you feeding your mind with positivity and encouragement? Or are you sowing seeds of decline and disappointment?

“Guard well your thoughts when alone and your words when accompanied.”
― Roy T. Bennett

Who are the people you spend most of your time with? Are they encouraging you to succeed and do better in life? Or is the opposite true?

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Jim Rohn

“According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, [the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.”

Your Self Image

Your self image is a great precursor to the outcomes in your life. If you have a negative self image and think badly of yourself, this can bring a whole host of problems including lack and limitation.

To change your self image takes a lot of work because it’s so well engrained in your mind. A good book on the subject is Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho Cybernetics. See how to align conscious and subconscious mind.

How To Stop Trading Time For Money

Wondering how to stop trading time for money? Unless you escape this trap, you’ll always have to keep working. Whether you earn $10 an hour or $100, trading your time for money will always keep you trapped! There’s always a cap on your income because there’s only so many hours you can work!

how to stop trading time for money

If you stop working, you stop getting paid! The best way to escape this trap is to change your relationship with how you make money. Instead of relying on a job to make money, find a strategy which lets you make transactions without you being there!

One such strategy is a business model called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you sell other people’s products online for a share of the profit. These transactions can be automated and sold to a global audience.

A simple example is the selling of an ebook! Ebook sales can be completely automated. Sell from a website and make the product downloadable. Affiliate sales follow the exact same principle.

How To Stop Trading Time For Money – Sell Affiliate Products

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models used today. Affiliates use their affiliate links to refer customers to products all around the world. When someone purchases a product through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission based on that sale. Since you don’t need to personally delivery the product, or deal with customers, the sole focus for affiliates is generating sales through their links.

niche blogging

They do this in a number of ways:

  • Blogging and creating online content
  • Advertising using paid marketing platforms (e.g. Google Adwords, Facebook etc.)
  • Using an email list – (email autoresponders can automate email delivery)
  • Through use of social media platforms
  • Uploading videos to YouTube/TikTok etc.

How To Stop Trading Time For Money

You can’t work harder than an online selling system! You can’t outwork A.I. through trading your time for money! Online selling systems are used by affiliates to sell products around the world. Once up and running these systems can be scaled up to reach global audiences; selling products and services to people all over the world.

beginners

Through the use of automation, affiliates can generate leverage through this process. This means they can replace their employment income through selling of affiliate products. What’s even better is that this process can be automated, freeing up their time as well as generating an income.

No matter how much you earn in a job, you’ll always need to keep turning up! When you stop your income stops. This isn’t true for affiliate marketing. As well as using automation in the process of selling other people’s products, affiliates can also generate leverage in their earning ability by selling recurring income products.

Recurring Income Affiliate Marketing

Recurring income affiliate programs pay ongoing commissions for previous sales. These are programs such as software and membership products which carry monthly membership fees. If you use a recurring income program, you can earn an ongoing income from all your previous sales!

Products which are used for online businesses, in particular, are more likely to offer lifetime commissions. That’s because they offer so much value to their customers. If you owned an online business which became profitable, and you needed a tool for the running of that business, you’re going to maintain your membership of that particular product. These are the kinds of products which will give you a regular ongoing commission for a lifetime!

Automation Of Sales

Affiliates make online sales using automation and this is how to stop trading time for money. When you can make an automated sale online you have effectively altered the relationship with how you make money! So even if your first online sale only generates you $10, you should consider this a monumental achievement! Once you have learned to make a single sale online, you can make many more! You can also generate more leverage through using softwares and systems which can connect more customers to products more quickly:

  • An autoresponder – an email marketing software which collects emails and automates email messages
  • Advertising platforms – Facebook, Google Adwords and YouTube for example allow you to put your advert in front of a huge scalable audience worldwide

Use of software products (which offer recurring commissions) and high ticket products can also make a huge difference to what you can earn and how quickly you can earn it with affiliate marketing. See also high ticket business model.

Get Started

If you’re serious about escaping the rat race and want to stop trading time for money, access a free workshop video series here to get started. You’ll learn the most effective ways to get up and running quickly with the affiliate marketing model.

Escape Wage Slavery

One of the best ways to escape wage slavery is to understand how it works. Most people will get a job because it gives them financial stability. They work regular hours and this gives them a pattern to build their lives around. But the job can be taken away at any minute by their employer, so ultimately there’s no real security in a job.

Once you have established yourself in a job, you get comfortable with a regular wage. This comfort is part of the the trap and most people will slowly begin to live beyond their means. They will acquire a car on credit, or buy beyond their (immediate) means using a credit card. They get a mortgage on a house they want, which ties them to their agreement for decades.

Once these ties are in place, it becomes impossible to leave a job because it would now cause such instability as to be traumatic. Each purchase that you couldn’t afford entrenched you further in the job. This means you’re trapped in it and even if you wanted out, there’s no option! Over time, even the best job in the world can become tiresome and especially in later years you realise you want your time back; either to travel, spend with family, your partner or friends.

Things become less meaningful compared to your peace of mind and you realise you’re trapped.

Escape Wage Slavery

Can you really escape wage slavery? Working in a job is what most people do to earn money. They trade their time for money which limits their ability to earn. Even in a well paid job, there’s a limit because there’s only so much time in the day. To escape wage slavery you need to change this relationship you have towards earning money.

Of course you can always get a better job; more money by earning more per unit of time. But you’re still trading time for money. If you stop showing up to work, you stop getting paid.

What’s even worse is if you’re working a job and living beyond your means. Slowly you are falling behind, building up debt that you can’t afford to repay. The is a downward cycle which leads to more and more debt and traps you in a job. There’s a few ways you can control your spending to escape wage slavery. See also money habits of the wealthy.

One way to escape wage slavery is to use products instead of time. With product sales, there’s no limit to how much you can make. Your time can be freed up since you’re no longer trading your hours for money. With a clever business model called affiliate marketing you can even use other people’s products to generate sales online. You can also automate the process which removes your time from the equation. Use products instead of time if you want to escape wage slavery.

Escape Wage Slavery – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model in which affiliates can earn commissions based on the sales of other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate and earn through referrals. It’s a little like recommending a restaurant to a friend; only when your friend visits the restaurant and buys a meal, you earn a referral fee.

beginners guide to affiliate marketing

What’s good about affiliate marketing is that you can build up an affiliate income alongside a job and it can give you some leverage. In a job your income is always fixed to the amount of hours you work. But with affiliate marketing you can build automation into your business and make money independently of your time.

Over time and if you put enough effort in, your affiliate income can overtake your employment income and you can leave your job permanently!

Escape Wage Slavery – How Does This Work?

There’s a few ways in which affiliate products can help you escape a job. Affiliates use all kinds of tools and software to help them promote and sell affiliate products. Many of these can be automated and scaled up so you can reach a global audience and sell without personally being there. Affiliates use identifiable affiliate “links” which are tracked back to them so they can earn credit for making online sales.

One of the largest affiliate programs is Amazon. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any product from their vast selection. When you make a sale through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission. The products are shipped directly to the customer and you don’t have to deal with product inventory, shipping or customer service! Your sole job as an affiliate is to refer products through your affiliate links.

Types Of Affiliate Product

There’s various types of affiliate products available to promote as an affiliate. Amazon’s product range is mostly physical products but you can also promote and sell digital products and software. These kinds of products can be the best to sell particularly if they carry recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs let affiliates earn ongoing commissions for referring a sale.

A single sale of a recurring commission product can give you a monthly income for life potentially! So it’s worth choosing your affiliate products carefully since a sale of a physical product is typically worth much less. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

escape wage slavery

High ticket products too are worth looking into. With a high ticket product an affiliate can earn considerably more than with standardly priced items.

Use Of Automation In Selling

Affiliates use automation to promote affiliate products. Some of the techniques they use involve the use of online advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. In conjunction with using advertising platforms, many affiliates use automatic email marketing software. An email “autoresponder” is one of the most popular tools which affiliates use.

escape wage slavery

The email software allows affiliates to collect subscriber’s email addresses from a website and deliver a series of automated messages promoting affiliate products and services. Top affiliate marketers build lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A single email sent out can earn them thousands in commissions when their email list is large enough! Plus this can all be done on complete autopilot!

Can Anyone Become An Affiliate?

Anyone with a laptop and internet connection can apply to join an affiliate program and get a unique affiliate link which they can promote. The hard part of affiliate marketing is sticking with it long enough to start generating sales regularly. Many affiliates will quit in the early stages of this business so it’s worth getting help and support if you intend on building an income from affiliate marketing.

Access a free video series to learn more about it here.

Affiliate Marketing Journey

The affiliate marketing journey is full of twists! My affiliate marketing journey took many turns. Since discovering affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s I took several different routes. One course I took taught blogging and use of Google Adsense. I would make tiny amounts after months and months of work! Then I took another course which taught paid advertising, use of email marketing and selling a digital affiliate product. My Adwords account got shut down shortly afterwards much to my dismay and I couldn’t get it back. Back then, Google Adwords was pretty harsh and losing your account meant you had lost it for good!

I tried another course called the Keyword Academy which taught blogging on your own website. Months in to this strategy and I still hadn’t made any money! Again this was using Google Adsense! On and on it went. My affiliate marketing journey wasn’t fun. But I knew if I cracked it, it would mean I wouldn’t have to work another crappy dead-end job! So I didn’t ever quit!

My Affiliate Marketing Journey

Long after my affiliate marketing journey started I found another course which is the one I promote now. The SFM Mentors taught me a few strategies for selling affiliate products and within a few months I had made my first even high ticket sale. High ticket affiliate marketing was something I was completely unaware of for most of my early days as an affiliate marketer. Recurring income affiliate programs were also new to me. By using both high ticket and recurring commissions I was able to achieve far more far more quickly than I had done in the past.

beginners

But the success didn’t last forever. I was soon wondering why I wasn’t getting anywhere. The answer was of course my lack of understanding. While the top affiliates knew to reinvest their commissions into their marketing budget, I spent mine and had assumed (wrongly) that I’d cracked it and wouldn’t need to work again! How naive I was!

It was some time before I picked up the training again and admitted to myself that I needed to keep learning. You can’t outrun bad thinking when it comes to running a business. I wasn’t well versed in business and simply expected affiliate marketing to be easy. How difficult is affiliate marketing? I found it to be pretty difficult. The hard part is sticking at it when nothing is happening. But if you do, eventually it blooms and you can start making sales in your sleep! How long this takes will depend on the route you take.

Affiliate Marketing Customer Journey

The affiliate marketing customer journey is something I was unaware of as a beginner in affiliate marketing. The customer journey is the “journey” your customer takes from your advert to your landing or sales page to your email list and finally to the affiliate product you are promoting. This journey is of major importance because to a large degree it will determine whether someone purchases an affiliate product from you or not.

As a short explanation, lets look at the path a (potential) customer takes from hitting your advert to clicking through to your website landing page. Lets assume your advert is a video advert which they see on YouTube. You explain the product in your video and the benefits of what it can do for them. Perhaps you are promoting a free video series or downloadable book.

Once they click on your link and go through to the landing page, they are confronted with a choice. Do they sign up and give you their email address, or leave? A good customer journey will connect the advert and the landing page by connecting them in some way. Perhaps use a picture on the landing page which is similar to the video, or which shows up in the video. Any disconnect from your advert to the landing page will have the effect of putting off a number of potential subscribers. To increase conversion rate on a website or landing page, you need to create a well connected customer journey between the two. Good use of colours, text, and a clear benefit driven call to action are important factors to consider.

Once someone takes the action of following up on a landing page and opting in, you should give them what they expect from your email messages. If your emails aren’t aligned with the subject matter in your earlier video advert, they are likely to react to this disconnect and unsubscribe quite quickly.

If this happens you’re not going to be able to even get them to your affiliate products. Hence why customer journey in affiliate marketing is so important. Without a clear and concise connection through all of your marketing materials, (advert, landing page, website, emails and affiliate products), the disconnect will likely drive away customers.

affiliate marketing journey

Shortening Your Affiliate Marketing Journey

My affiliate marketing journey took years before I was able to make a consistent income. Yours can be much shorter. Much of my struggle was mental before it became physical. I doubted each course I took, and in the back of my mind wondered if they were all scams! This doubt doesn’t lead to fruitful activity! I stalled, procrastinated and threw in the towel many times! But I always came back because I needed it to work for me, such was my situation.

Affiliate marketing is tough and there’s no guarantees. You’re effectively in business for yourself. There’s no shortcuts, but there are better ways of doing things than the many ways I failed with. High ticket products and subscription products are just a couple of the things which made my journey shorter. Use them if you want to avoid many of the problems which I faced.

Get help! For years I struggled alone and only found a mentorship program in 2014. You can access it here through these free videos. Or dive straight in and get started here.

Website Optimisation Strategy

A website optimisation strategy can help you use SEO (search engine optimisation) to optimise the existing content on your site. Many sites can be improved with just a few small changes. The main SEO things to change are based around the keywords you want your site to be optimised for.

Some keywords are more competitive than others so you can also implement a blogging strategy to get your site ranked for certain keywords which relate to your business. See also SEO organic ranking.

Some main SEO points to update on your site can be quickly changed using an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO – if you’re using a WordPress based website. If not, you can manually optimise certain criteria for optimum performance. In May 2020 Google announced page experience signals:

  • Mobile friendliness – make sure your site is mobile friendly
  • Safe browsing – get a security plugin and make your site secure
  • HTTPS – can be achieved with a simple plugin (see best blog plugins for WordPress)
  • Content accessibility via a lack of intrusive interstitials (pop-ups) – avoid using pop ups, or too many distracting CTA’s

Google changes their algorithms constantly to give the user a better experience. For the best results you can follow their guidelines and keep yourself informed of updates.

Website Optimisation Strategy – Basic SEO

Basic SEO criteria is to optimise each page of your website, and the website settings for your main keywords. Headings, titles, image alt attributes and subheadings all have a bearing on your SEO rankings for your site and individual pages. The fastest way to optimise these elements is with an SEO plugin. Once you’ve optimised you can also start adding content via blogging to build your authority and create on-site links.

niche blogging for profit

The more content you have on your site, the more authority you’ll have in your niche. A good strategy for building content is to use Google’s keyword planner which will give you related keywords based on your topic/niche.

See how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. This is a good strategy you can use in any niche to build your on site authority through creating content on a regular basis. Over time you should see more website traffic if you keep generating more content which is relevant for your potential customers.

SEO Elements

Google ranks SEO based on a number of criteria including:

  • The speed of your website
  • Mobile friendliness of your site
  • It’s security – use Secure http (https)
  • The content
  • On site SEO
  • Off site SEO (back links and source of back links)
  • How visitors perceive your content and time on site
  • etc.

Google uses hundreds of ranking factors to decide how to rank a website on its search results listing (SERPs – search engine results pages).

website optimisation strategy

Competition

Regardless of your website optimisation strategy, if there’s a huge number of competing websites for your chosen keyword/s you may still rank poorly in the search results. This is because an older website with many thousands of back links will be difficult to compete with, especially if it has a high authority with Google.

So ideally optimise your website as much as necessary, build content on a regular basis and look for other marketing strategies alongside an SEO content building or website optimisation strategy. PPC advertising is a much faster and more effective way to advertise and worth delving into as well. See PPC vs Organic marketing.

If you’re attempting to rank a keyword on your site and there’s a huge amount of competing sites for that keyword, it’s much more difficult to get organic traffic for it. As an alternative option look for long tail keywords which offer less competition. Build an organic marketing strategy alongside a paid marketing strategy.

Checkout The Hoth for SEO services!