AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Low Cost Affiliate Program

Looking for a low cost affiliate program? If you’re serious about becoming a successful affiliate you’ll need:

Step by step training
Access to software
Training and support

The All In One package gives you access to tools, training and the support you’ll need to launch an online business from scratch, even with no previous experience. One of the most important aspects of building an online business is mindset development. This is a factor which many programs neglect to include or mention.

The All In program gives you access to everything you’ll need including regular live meetings online with coaches and mentors.

Low Cost Affiliate Program

The SFM All In Package gives you access to over 10,000 e-Learning courses in Business, Marketing, Creative and Technology.

Microsoft Lynda: (Under the Linkedin umbrella of companies) recently partnered with SFM as a way to offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the SFM curriculum.

DigitalMarketer: (The world’s longest standing and most highly respected B2B and B2C marketing training company) also partnered with SFM and now offer their own training as part of the SFM curriculum.

You can also access a ready made sales funnel which offers a step by step setup process and a range of products to sell. You’ll be able to access software to set up a pre-populated affiliate website and set up your own email marketing “selling system”.

Low Cost Affiliate Program – Benefit Of A Product Range

A product range is included in the All In Membership package and you can set it up by following the steps in the first few modules.

inside the back office and step by step training

Most affiliate programs only offer a single product to sell. With the All In Package you can promote the built in product range as an affiliate, or use the training to promote any given affiliate product of your choice. The benefit of a business system (sales funnel) which offers multiple products is that you can:

Earn recurring commissions from sales of subscription products
Earn higher ticket commissions from the higher valued items within the range
Benefit from a built in sales team who close sales on your behalf

With most affiliate products you only get paid once when you make a sale. With recurring commission affiliate programs, you can earn more consistently through recurring commissions once you start making sales.

Mentors All In – What You Get

Here’s just some of what you get with Mentors All In:

Online business from scratch – with a digital sales funnel you can set up and profit from
The system for selling online – learn strategies for marketing from regular live training events and recorded sessions and webinars
Digital business lounge – access to plugins, tools and tech which makes your life as an affiliate much much easier
Access to over 10,000 courses – teaching all elements of online marketing and selling
Daily live coaching webinars – learn mindsets of those who have succeeded online and ask questions
Past live event footage – access to recordings and webinars to help you on your online journey
Extra training bundle – Bulletproof Ads – Multiple training videos covering all elements of advertising online (Facebook, Landing pages, Linkedin, YouTube etc.)

What To Expect

Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which people earn commissions from the sales they generate. To succeed as an affiliate takes a huge commitment and daily steps towards your larger goals. No affiliate program can guarantee your success, only you can do that!

However, what you can expect from the Mentors program is a commitment to your success. You’ll be able to access a proven business model which has helped thousands of affiliates achieve their dream of earning an income online. Co-creators Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek have been showing up in person for their affiliates since they founded the SFM company back in 2010.

Unfortunately due to the world wide situation and Covid, the live in-person Masterminds and seminars which happened globally had to be sidelined. Since 2020 Stu and Jay have revamped their online business platform and continued to show up regularly for their members. Here’s a pic of me with Jay at a live event in 2015 in London.

Like with most things in life you get out of something what you put in. No affiliate program is an instant “magic fix” or can claim any earnings for its members. Individual results will always vary. But if you’re serious about learning a new skill, and willing to put in the effort and time, you can make an income from the skills you learn, however you choose to do it.

Access Mentors All In here and start your online journey!

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products

Are you wondering how to make money selling other people’s products? A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you do exactly that.

Join an affiliate program
Get a unique affiliate link which directs people to the product and is “coded” to you.
Learn how to generate sales with that link.
Collect your commission on sales you generate.

Anyone can join an affiliate program, although some programs require you to have an up and running website or some kind of online following. But the vast majority of affiliate programs don’t require anything other than you to create a profile. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone can earn commissions by referring customers to products on the site.

There’s a heap of other affiliate programs too covering all kinds of products and services on the internet.

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Product Promotion

The trickiest part of making money selling affiliate products by far is promotion. Some affiliates are bloggers, and promote affiliate links through their articles. Others will use paid advertising and build an email list of subscribers, promoting affiliate products to their list. There’s no “one size fits all” strategy with affiliate marketing although the top affiliates generally all have an email list, so it’s important to get one. (See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing). You can also promote affiliate products using:

SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building – to increase web ranking on the search engines (e.g. Google)
Social media marketing – both paid and free strategies can be used
Video marketing – using TikTok or YouTube for example
Ebook creation – ebooks can be used as lead magnets to help encourage website visitors to join an email list or sold directly from a website

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Choosing An Affiliate Product To Promote

You can choose any product you can find on the internet providing it has an affiliate program attached to it. Many products you find online will allow you to promote it through your affiliate link and earn commissions. However not all affiliate products pay an equal amount in commissions.

Physical products for example tend to pay less in commissions than digital products. Amazon’s commission structure goes from paying just 1% commission to around 11%. Digital products such as training courses and digital downloads tend to pay from 20%-40% commissions.

Subscription affiliate programs/products are a good idea for affiliates to promote because they offer ongoing commissions on each sale. So a single sale can bring in commissions for months or even years. High ticket products are those priced at a higher value than most online products and services. They typically will sell for over $500 and so you can earn a lot more on their sale. Ideally use a high ticket business model which offers a product range which includes high ticket and recurring income products for the best return on your investment.

List Building

List building is the preferred way to sell affiliate products online for a couple of reasons. Whether you pay for advertising to get people to your products, or whether you’re a content creator (like a blogger), you’ll need people to purchase your products to make money.

To get people in front of your affiliate products either takes time (in terms of generating content) or money (with paid advertising).

By sending website traffic to a landing page and collecting emails you get much more control over that traffic. With a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes and then they are gone forever. With an advert, sending someone directly to an affiliate product, the same applies.

But on an email list you can continue to build a relationship with your subscribers for weeks, months and even years. Building an email list gives you control over your traffic. See also the power of email marketing. From a list you can continue promoting your affiliate products over a longer duration. Studies show that most people need several “touch points” before they make a purchase online.

how to make money selling other people's products — Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-cee/consumer-insights/consumer-journey/study-reveals-complexity-modern-consumer-paths-purchase-and-how-brands-can-make-inroads/

Using Paid Advertising Combined With Email Marketing

Combining paid marketing platforms with email marketing creates a powerful way to make money selling other people’s products. Email marketing allows you to extend the “getting to know you” period of building trust and paid marketing allows you to test and measure your advertising quickly.

Although initially there’s some learning with paid marketing, over time and with practice it can give you the best opportunity for selling items en-mass. Compared with other marketing strategies such as blogging and video blogging, for example, it’s much faster and more effective.

However paid marketing is costly and this means it’s far better to use the kinds of affiliate products which pay the most. Digital products which offer multiple payment strategies, software and membership products ( which pay recurring commissions), and high ticket products offer the best opportunity when using paid advertising.

Other free strategies are slow and less scalable. Blogging, for example can take months or years to generate traction, depending on the relative competition in your particular topic/niche.

Get Started

Learn how to make money selling other people’s products. Access an all in one business system and training program which offers:

A ready made digital sales funnel
All the software you need
Push button website builder
Access to training and coaches

SEO Organic Ranking

It’s not easy to get an SEO organic ranking if you’re a blogger or own a website. Depending on your niche/business it can be more or less difficult. With a competitive topic, getting content ranked (for a particular keyword) can be a huge challenge. In a less competitive niche, it can be much more attainable. Whatever niche you are in however, you can target long tail keywords to give yourself more chance of a ranking. Or, low competition but obtuse keywords can work well too!

With a long tail keyword there’s far less competition as with strange and obscure keywords which aren’t often used in competing content.

The “ranking” companies (aka spam emails) which tell you they can rank your site number 1 are mostly lying to you! How do they know they can rank you? And for what keywords to they claim to do it? Of course they can’t in many cases. At best they still can’t promise anything! A particular niche might be hugely competitive and Google ranks sites according to multiple criteria, many of which you may not qualify for:

Domain age
Back links pointing to your site
Authority of sites pointing back links
Content on your site
Domain authority
Visitor paths and time on your content
Click away rate
Plus many more

A new site will therefore take much longer to rank their content than an authoritative site with tens of thousands of back links. Sites which have been around for decades will take the bulk of SEO traffic. Where does this leave new websites? How can new sites get a better SEO organic ranking?

SEO Organic Ranking – Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are a good place to start. While you may not easily rank for shorter keywords which are suitable for your site, their long tail derivatives offer much less competition on the like of Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo.com To find these hidden gems you can use all manner of keyword tools but Google’s free Keyword planner is a good place to start. Place your main keyword into the planner and the tool will give you multiple long tail derivatives of your main keyword. These keywords are already being searched for on Google and the numbers you get will denote the monthly search enquiries for each individual keyword in the list.

Once you find a good longer tail keyword which is appropriate for your audience, you can create some content targeting that keyword on your website.

SEO Plugins

A good SEO plugin is Yoast SEO which helps you optimise your content based on your chosen keyword. Yoast SEO is a free plugin which connects with any WordPress website. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. Other plugins can help you get more social shares from your visitors (social share button) and help syndicate your content so you can get the most from it.

Sharing content and promoting it is just as important, if not more, than creating it! Without views on your content, it’s more difficult for Google and other search engine bots to “see” how people are interacting with it, and therefore determine its value and SEO rating.

The more social media sites you can share your content on the better. As more people see and interact with your content, more should also like and share it. This can create a cascading/compounding effect and even lead to content going viral.

BackLinks

Back linking is a pretty important part of SEO and often the most difficult part. Initially it’s important to concentrate of building valuable content which is share-worthy. But back linking is also a major ranking factor and has a huge influence on your SEO organic ranking.

To help build. backlinks to your content start with giving huge value in your content. Content is king! Share as much as possible on social media. If people find value in your content they should naturally share it too. People will link to content over time if it provides value and is deemed useful. They won’t link to bad content! Over time this produces a natural looking link profile which can be seen by the SEO search bots. It’s therefore important to build a natural looking link profile since Google will see an unnatural one and mark it accordingly.

To help your link building you can:

Reach out to other blogs and websites in a similar niche to your own
Offer to guest post for other bloggers, in exchange for back link
Enlist the services of a professional link building company
Blog comment on websites and blogs in your niche
Build back links manually by creating off site links from other websites

SEO Organic Ranking – Keyword Domains

Keyword domains are another way to gain the attention of the search engines and potentially get an SEO organic ranking. Nothing is guaranteed in SEO but a keyword domain can have a positive effect. Often the search engines will look favourably on a domain name which contains the main keywords you intend to rank a website for. This of course does depend largely on the competition already ranking for your chosen keyword.

With a locally based business this can especially have a good effect usually because locally based businesses compete in a smaller circle for the desired keywords. See building a niche website for local based business.

Long Tail Keywords With Low SEO Difficulty

One of my favourite tactics is to target long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

As described above, use Google’s keyword planner to do this, or some other keyword tool. Find a long tail keyword relevant for your business and compare the relative competitiveness with a quick Google search. Do this by typing your keyword into Google on a desk top computer and looking for the number at the top of the search results. A large number (over 100 million) will have much more competition.

You can also do a phrase search by putting your keywords in quotes “like this”. Again, this search gives you a small insight into the relative search results competition for your chosen keyword. Look again for the number at the top of the search results. Less than 10,000 means there’s more chance of ranking for this keyword. More than 30,000 means there’s much more competition for it, and chances of ranking are more unlikely.

Sell Items Online Locally

You can sell items online locally with a variety of different websites:

Facebook Market Place
eBay
GumTree.com
Gezow
Craigslist
Vivastreet
Friday-Ads
Free ads

You can even get rid of unwanted items for free using donation websites too such as:

Sharebay
Freecycle.org
Freegle
trash nothing!
Streetbank.
Toy-cycle.
FreeFong.

Sell Items Online Locally – Facebook Marketplace

Facebook marketplace is a good place to start if you have something to sell online in your local area. Unlike eBay, Facebook marketplace doesn’t charge you for listing your items. You’ll need a Facebook profile to list something. Head over to Facebook Marketplace and click on the link for “create new listing”. Details on creating a Facebook account here.

Sell Items Online Locally – eBay

eBay has been a staple selling place for decades now for me! I’ve sold a tonne of stuff over eBay and even found a clever way to buy and sell for profit using the site. Checkout the article on it here.

Unlike Facebook Marketplace eBay does charge you for listing items to sell. Depending on how you sell them and what your item sells for costs can vary. eBay is a good place to use though if you decide you won’t get market value selling on Facebook.

To create a listing you’ll need an eBay account. Once you’ve set up click on the selling link under your “My Ebay” tab. Then click on list item.

Ebay is good for listing local items because you can find buyers who will collect. Just make sure you list correctly and under item delivery put for collection only. Otherwise you’ll end up getting bid from people wanting you to post. This is ok for small items but if you’re selling something large make sure you know how much postage costs before listing or you can end up with a large bill!

Selling Items Online Locally – Gumtree

Gumtree is a UK based online classified advertising website which has more recently expanded into other countries including the US. To post an advert on Gumtree you’ll need an account. once set up simply click on “post an Ad” and you’ll be let through the process.

Using Gumtree is generally free but they do charge for certain services.

Craigslist

craigslist.org offers a similar service to Gumtree enabling people to sell their items through locally based ads. The site is an American classified advertisements site which offers listings in 700 cities and 70 countries. It offers a number of different categories to list your items in and is available in most countries.

Posting is free on Craigslist and to post you’ll need to find your city and click on the “create a posting” at the top right hand side of the page.

Other Strategies

There’s other strategies you can use if you’re a regular seller of some service. Google My Business will let anyone with a locally based business create a free listing and sell their services. It only takes a few minutes to set up and you’ll need to verify your address for a listing.

You can build your own website to sell stuff too. If you’re locally based, one strategy to do this is through using your city name in the domain name. See also how to make a website to sell stuff and building a website for a local business.

Buying And Selling Online Locally (& Nationally)

Using eBay’s advanced search you can browse locally if you check the box for your local area and collection in person.

Many items sell for much less than they are worth because sellers don’t want to post them. Pick these up at bargain prices locally and resell and offer to post them.

You can also use these same websites (listed above) to find bargain items to resell on at a profit. eBay is particularly good because of its advanced search feature which lets you find specific items for low cost. You can then resell at a higher price with a better listing. Here’s three links which can help with this:

Online Earning Skills

Online earning skills can range through a number of topics. From Forex marketing to freelancing. There’s import export businesses, drop shipping businesses and affiliate marketing. Many bloggers earn money through writing content on their site. Some earn an income from buying and selling on eBay.

Online earning skills are more important than ever right now (post Covid) because so many people have found themselves out of work, struggling to make a living. If you can earn an income from your laptop, you have a skill which can last a lifetime. It can allow you to work from home or anywhere and it can protect you from the vulnerability of redundancy and job loss.

You may have to build online earning skills over a number of months or years and the main problem with earning online is that it can take some time to build a reliable income from them.

Online Earning Skills

There’s a huge variety of ways to earn online but one of the most popular strategies is through affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you earn commissions based on the products or services which you refer customers to. You don’t need your own products and there’s many affiliate programs which allow you to earn from referring customers.

Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs. Most people are familiar and comfortable with buying from Amazon by now. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program once they have met the partner program criteria.

Once you have joined an affiliate program you can promote the affiliate link in order to make commissions based off your sales. This is where the skill comes in. To learn affiliate marketing does take some serious commitment. Affiliate sales can be sporadic at first so it’s important to keep learning in order to make affiliate marketing work for you over the longer term.

Online Earning Skills – What Affiliates Do

Affiliate marketers generate content, run paid ads, build email lists and promote their products anyway they see fit. You can promote affiliate products in a number of ways and not every affiliate marketer uses the same skills to promote their products. Most top affiliates will however use an email list. The power of email marketing is pretty important if you’re serious about building an internet based business.

Anyone can purchase an email autoresponder and use it to start generating leads. You can even get free access to one – see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

An email marketing software is useful because it allows you to control your audience. Most affiliates will struggle initially with traffic generation. Whether they are a blogger, or run paid advertising, getting people to find your products is key.

With an email list you can build a relationship with the people who you have interacted with online. On a website, you only get a couple of minutes to make a sale. But once you get your visitors email address, you can send email messages over a much longer time period. Often email subscribers will make a purchase from an email list months or even years after subscribing to a marketers list.

Online Earning Skills – Getting Subscribers

To get subscribers to join an email marketing list you need to offer something of value to them. Before you can sell someone a product or service, they need to first get to know, like and trust you. The relationship building part of promoting affiliate products is based on building trust and offering huge value to your email subscribers. To get subscribers you can initially offer something for free from a website or landing page.

A simple example of this is through using an ebook. Ebooks are simple and effective tools which can be used for list building. Offer an ebook on your website in exchange for your visitors email address. Follow up with email messages which offer value and promote useful products which your subscribers will find useful.

Blogging

Blogging is a simple strategy for getting people to affiliate products. By writing content which bridges the gap between information people are seeking, and affiliate products which they want, affiliate marketers can make commissions based on the sales they generate.

Blogging is a long term strategy however and depending on the niche or topic you choose, it can take months or even years to generate traction. Bloggers create content regularly to attract a specific audience which is appropriate for the affiliate products they have chosen to promote. Because there’s so many different topics to choose from, it can be wise to pick one which has less competition than the most popular themes.

Still, some topics will be more profitable than others too, so it’s also prudent to align your blog topic with something which is both profitable and interesting for you. See also best micro niche for blogging.

Online Earning Skills – Scaling

One of the best reasons to learn affiliate marketing is its ability to be grown and scaled. When you are working in a job, you are trading your time for money. So no matter how well you get paid, your relationship with income is always built on your ability to show up and put in the time.

The same is true of freelancing jobs you can find on sites like Upwork.com and Fiverr.com for example. Those kinds of online earning skills are incredibly useful if you have them, but your income will always be tied to your output.

With affiliate marketing your income is based on sales you generate and as such it’s an infinitely larger opportunity to create leverage through automation and the sale of other people’s products.

The best way to build a large scalable online business is through using paid marketing and an email list. Paid marketing platforms such as Adwords, Facebook and YouTube, for example, allow affiliate marketers to use algorithms, targeting and tracking to optimise their advertising campaigns.

Over time, they learn how to run automated advertising campaigns which bring in customers for their products and services. Once this strategy is fully understood and profitable, you can easily increase advertising budget to scale up to a multiple figure business. Plus this can all run on a virtual autopilot!

Get Started

Are you serious about learning some new skills? Access a free video series here to learn more and get started.

How Does Clickbank Work?

How does Clickbank work? Clickbank is often one of the first stop shops for affiliate marketers. It houses a huge assortment of affiliate products which anyone can use to make money online. But how does this work? Simple, you join Clickbank.com and find a product you want to promote. Grab the affiliate link and set about promoting it.

Joining Clickbank and finding a product is easy. Getting customers to buy it is the difficult part of affiliate marketing. Why is this? Anyone can join an affiliate program and get their unique affiliate link. But once you have completed this part of the journey, your job as an affiliate is to promote that affiliate link and make sales. This can be done in a variety of different ways.

How Does Clickbank Work?

To join Clickbank you’ll need to go through their application process. To get paid you’ll also need to add a payment method while signing up. This process is relatively straight forward and pretty much anyone can join without too much hassle. Once you have joined the platform, you’ll want to find a product to promote. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, it may be worth buying a product which will teach you some kind of affiliate promotion method too.

How to sign up for a Clickbank account.

That way, you can promote the product you’ve bought, and also write a review of it. Having legitimately purchased it yourself, you’ll be a genuine customer and therefore be able to write a legitimate review. Although you don’t technically need to purchase an affiliate product first to promote it, it’s way better if you do. Integrity in promoting affiliate products online is a key element to building trust with your potential customers.

How Does Clickbank Work – The Marketplace

In Clickbank’s “marketplace” you’ll find a huge array of products you can choose from. If you already have a website, or are interested in a certain topic, it might be wise to choose a product in that particular topic. With an existing website which already has traffic, you can simply grab a marketing banner from one of the product owners (aka vendors) and paste it on your site. This can give you an almost instant way to monetise an existing site which is already generating traffic.

In the marketplace you’ll find a whole heap of topics and categories where you’ll find many products which you can promote. As an affiliate, you’ll earn a percentage of the product sale value when someone buys through your affiliate link. Each affiliate link is unique and tracked back to the person who brought in the sale. Clickbank will pay you according to the products you are able to sell.

Choosing Products From Clickbank

Your choice of product is pretty important because not every product will sell as well as another. Some products will be very popular too which means there could be a lot of competition online for the various marketing methods available. If you’re going to build a blog around your topic, for example, it’s worth checking out the competition first before you start. A highly competitive niche will be much harder to gain traction in with a new website.

Ideally choose a product you would purchase yourself too. If you don’t want to purchase a product, it could be an indication of your audiences preferences too! Many affiliate marketers will use paid marketing to promote affiliate products from Clickbank but there’s a variety of marketing methods which can be employed. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Gravity On Clickbank

The “gravity” score on any given Clickbank product will tell you something about whether it’s worth considering for promotion. The gravity score appears in the data underneath a product in the marketplace.

clickbank marketplace — Grav = Gravity score and denotes how popular a product is with affiliates or how many are being sold

A high gravity score means there’s lots of this product being sold by affiliates. A low gravity score means that not many are being sold. If you’re a beginner you might imagine that choosing the highest gravity score is the best option. But you’d be wrong! A high gravity score will also mean there’s many other affiliates who are promoting this product. This might mean there’s a lot of competition and therefore it will likely be harder to sell it yourself (depending on your marketing strategies).

So it’s wise to choose a product with a median gravity score which means it is selling (therefore sellable) and which doesn’t have too much competition. A good gravity score for a beginner to choose would be somewhere around 20 to 80. High gravity scores of over 100 will likely have a lot of affiliates promoting the product, and therefore that will make it harder to find customers through the various promotion methods.

Clickbank And Commissions

Clickbank is popular because it offers a lot of digital products which can work well for affiliates because of their higher commission levels. Many of the products on Clickbank pay over 30% commissions when you refer a sale. This is much higher than many other affiliate programs which offer low priced physical goods. Amazon, for example, only pays affiliates between 1% and 11% commission on referrals. So a single sale from a digital product is worth 3-30 times as much as selling a low commission product on Amazon.

Some Clickbank products also pay recurring commissions. To find them, you can use a site called CBEngine.com.

Recurring products pay out ongoing commissions month after month. They are great for beginner affiliates because they allow you to make more consistent income more quickly from an affiliate enterprise. See affiliate programs with recurring commissions.

High Ticket Commissions

Most products on Clickbank only sell for around $100 or so which will only give an affiliate a $40 commission on each sale. High ticket affiliate products are good for affiliates because they carry larger price points and therefore offer larger commissions.

A single high ticket sale can earn as much as 10 or even 100 lower value sales.

For more information on affiliate marketing, access a free workshop series here.

Summary – How Does Clickbank Work?

Clickbank is a popular place for beginners to find affiliate products to promote. because they are digital products on Clickbank, they offer a higher level of commission when you make a sale. Physical products tend to pay much lower levels of commission. Recurring commission products let you earn ongoing commissions from product sales and high ticket products are the best paying for “one off” sales.

Once you have chosen a product to sell, the hard part of affiliate marketing is product promotion. It’s easy to join a program but more difficult to get traction as an affiliate and build a profitable business from it. Access a free workshop series of videos here to learn more about the different business models available.

Why Affiliate Marketing Works

There’s many reasons why affiliate marketing works. It works particularly well for product owners. They use affiliates to promote and sell their products and services. If an affiliate fails to sell anything, they don’t have to pay them! This is far cheaper than hiring an employee and paying them a wage. It’s also cheaper and more cost effective than running their own advertising campaigns and potentially wasting money on testing and measuring campaigns.

This arrangement works for affiliates too because they get performance related pay. Top affiliates can earn very large incomes so the business attracts entrepreneurial types who are willing to take risks because they want financial independence and the ability to earn a large income online.

An online income is pretty attractive. It can release anyone from a job, a boss and a commute. That’s a huge incentive, even if many affiliates fail in making it into a viable income. See also why affiliate marketing does not work!

Why Affiliate Marketing Works – The Product Owner

The product owner or “vendor” is the person or company who owns the affiliate product or service. Amazon, for example is such a company. Amazon pays affiliates between 1% and 11% commission based on the sales generated by their affiliate marketers. That’s pretty low by industry standards. Top paying affiliate programs will offer much more. Digital products, for example, can pay out 40-50% commissions and above.

But for many companies, creating an affiliate or partner program means that they can get affiliates to do the heavy lifting as far as advertising is concerned. Considering many advertising campaigns won’t work, that’s a great deal! It means the risk is passed on to the affiliates who are working purely on a performance basis. No sales means no income for affiliates but it means the risk is taken on by the affiliates and not the product vendor, in terms of advertising.

Meanwhile the product owner can of course run their own advertising campaigns too, and determine whether it’s worth having affiliates as well.

Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing works for many affiliates because it can give them an alternative income source which is completely independent of their employment. Many affiliates will build up their affiliate business alongside a job. Affiliate marketing is perfect for this because you can work on it whenever you like, doing as much or as little as you can fit in.

Affiliates who work long hours can automate much of the process if they focus on running paid advertising. Although this comes with a learning curve, it’s a good option for anyone who is wanting to escape their current situation by building a separate income source through promoting products and services over the internet.

Successful affiliate marketers can build an income which eventually surpasses that of their regular jobs and this gives them complete autonomy over their lives. They can choose where to live, how to work and work remotely from anywhere in the world from a laptop.

The flip side is of course that affiliate marketing does take some time to generate income. There’s a learning curve which many fail to appreciate and they give up too quickly. See why do affiliate marketers fail and affiliate marketing failure rate.

Getting Affiliate Marketing To Work

Getting affiliate marketing to work and generate income can take some time. How long this takes will depend on your strategy and business model. The different affiliate marketing business models will have a say in how you can advertise too, as well as your potential earnings.

Affiliates can spend months or even years working away without getting anywhere! Here’s a few different affiliate marketing strategies which can be used to make sales online:

Blogging – this article is an example of a blog post
Paid marketing – many affiliates use paid marketing to promote products
List building – is recommended for affiliate beginners and allows them to reach a growing number of people through automated email messages
Social media – paid and free strategies can be used to lead people to various products online

With low value physical products such as those mentioned from Amazon, affiliate’s income is limited to selling many individual items over and over. This is difficult to do with paid marketing because it is so expensive and Amazon products pay so little.

With a different business model such as digital products, you can earn larger commissions. It’s also worth using:

A multiple income funnel – containing multiple products from which to earn
High ticket products – which have larger price tags and commissions attached
Subscription affiliate programs – pay ongoing commissions from previous sales. These are items like software products and memberships.

When Affiliate Marketing Works

Affiliate marketing works once you’ve put in some time, learned how to promote products and improved at it over time. Once you have put in the time for long enough, and learned the appropriate techniques, you can start generating sales on autopilot.

This doesn’t happen overnight and there’s definitely some groundwork to do before you can do this. But once you do start generating sales, you have some data and will have learned from genuine experience. You can now repeat this success many times over. As you get better, and if you use automation in your business, this can also be scaled up to attract more people to your messaging worldwide.

Once you know what works as an affiliate, your job gets a lot easier. Before this happens you can find affiliate marketing to be quite difficult. But eventually you start seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, and you can generate a steady income.

When this happens give yourself a pat on the back because it’s time to celebrate.

Summary

Affiliate marketing works because there’s billions of people online and a hefty slice of them are researching things they want to buy already. Many people are finding online businesses and looking for ways to leverage the internet to generate an income from home; particularly post pandemic.

Or they are looking for guides and help and advice in the many different areas and topics. Affiliates who succeed learn how to place themselves in between the customers and the products. They do this in a variety of different ways, but if they are determined and consistent in their approach, they can learn from their mistakes and failures just as much as from their successes.

This is the key to learning affiliate marketing – stick with it and never quit! Access a free video series here to learn more about affiliate marketing.

How Affiliate Marketing Works Step By Step

How affiliate marketing works step by step:

You join an affiliate program or “partner program” such as Amazon
You get a unique affiliate link to promote – through the program’s dashboard/members area
Learn how to promote your link through a training program – e.g. blogging, list building, paid marketing, social media etc.
Work on your promotion method until you make a sale
Rinse and repeat and learn from your experience

How Affiliate Marketing Works Step By Step – Joining An Affiliate Program

Anyone can join a partner program and access a unique affiliate link which they can then use to promote a certain product or service. Amazon, for example has one of the most popular affiliate programs. To join some programs, you need to have an existing website, or some ability to promote. However, some programs only ask you to set up an account with them and give them some details about yourself.

Clickbank.com is another affiliate “go-to” for many new affiliate marketers. Clickbank offers a huge variety of digital products which anyone can sell through signing up with a Clickbank account and finding a product to promote in Clickbank’s marketplace.

If you already host a website of your own in a particular topic, you can also search for affiliate products related to your existing online presence. Simply search for “{your niche} affiliate program” on a search engine (Google, for example).

Your Unique Affiliate Link

Once you have joined an affiliate program, you can go to your dashboard or the members area and browse sales materials. Most affiliate programs will at least have an area where you can collect affiliate links to send people directly to specific products or to a main website where there’s a choice of products. Some will also offer sales materials such as banners and videos which you can use in your promotion methods.

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

An affiliate link can look a little messy and by itself isn’t immediately appealing. But you can link in text and use images and banners in your copy to make clicking on a link more appealing.

This is where many new affiliates struggle. With access to an affiliate program and your own unique affiliate link, the next step is to learn a strategy for promoting it in a way which attract the right audience so you can actually make sales online and earn commissions based on those sales. This is the most difficult part of affiliate marketing so it’s the one which requires the most of your attention. It’s well worth joining a program which can give you that training. Access training here.

How Affiliate Marketing Works Step By Step: Learning How To Promote Affiliate Products

Product promotion is done by a number of different methods. You can choose any given strategy or use a combination of many. most successful affiliates pick a single strategy first and focus on it for long enough to break through and start generating sales. This can take weeks, months or even years depending on your marketing strategy. Here’s a few of the most common strategies used by affiliate marketers:

Blogging and V’logging – writing content and uploading video content are two simple and organic strategies. They take time and effort but are cheaper than using paid marketing. See niche blogging for profit.
Paid marketing – many affiliate marketers use paid platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Adwords etc. They either send traffic directly to affiliate products or to their content or into a sales funnel (through a landing page).
Social media marketing – some affiliates use social media platforms without paying for advertising using various methods. See unpaid social media marketing.
List Building – Most successful affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and follow up with automated messages to help them promote affiliate products. See the power of email marketing.

Join a program to help with this step here.

Work On Your Promotion Method Until You Make A Sale (However Long It Takes!)

Depending on the promotion method you choose, it can take some time before you start seeing results from an affiliate business. If you’re a blogger, it will take considerably longer to generate traction than through using paid marketing and list building, for example. With a large marketing budget, you should expect to see things happening much more quickly compared to free marketing strategies.

Many affiliates get disheartened in this stage and give up, so building on your belief and joining others on the same mission can help a lot.

If you’re building an email list from scratch you’ll need to focus on a strategy to get leads. A major key to success with affiliate marketing is to keep your eye and intention on the bigger picture while working on the small daily tasks you can achieve every day.

A considerable amount of time will be spent in learning mode as you begin. But once you have learned some things, you should spend less time learning and more time implementing. Focus on small wins initially like website hits, getting a marketing campaign going or creating a piece of content regularly. Celebrate small wins and over time with consistency you’ll be celebrating the bigger wins too!

Once you make your first sale congratulations, you’ve now achieved something great. Learn from what you have done and focus on the actions which brought about the best outcomes. See pareto’s principle.

Rinse & Repeat & Learn From Experience

Making your first sale online is a magical experience. However small your commission is consider this a major breakthrough. Many affiliates will give up long before this even happens so if you’ve made it this far pat yourself on the back!

But a single sale isn’t going to replace your main income overnight! Even a high ticket sale will only go so far. Continue to learn and develop your affiliate business and build on what is working for you. There’s often a lot of work to be done in affiliate marketing before you reap the rewards. Consider frequently what a successful affiliate business will do for your life:

A passive income
Replace income from work
No more job, boss or commute
Live and work anywhere
Become financially independent (from a boss/job)
Become financially free
Be happy!

The affiliates who success have a big “why”. Those who quit don’t have a strong enough reason to keep going when the going gets tough!

Join an all in one online affiliate program which offers tools, training and coaching here.

Blogging As A Hobby

Blogging as a hobby can be incredibly rewarding, both personally and even financially. I’ve been a blogger for several years now and I find it therapeutic to blog. Initially I started blogging as a means to earn an income and it took much longer than I expected for this to happen. But over the years blogging as a hobby has become a part of my online business efforts which I enjoy the most.

I tried all sorts of topics when I started out and blogging is a great way to learn about things. Anyone can start a blog about anything by researching the topic which you’re interested in. You can even start for free using the many free blog platforms available:

Blogger.com
WordPress.com
Hubpages.com

I’ve found it’s best to blog about a topic you’re passionate about in order to keep up your motivation for creating regular content.

Blogging As A Hobby vs. Blogging For Money

Blogging as a hobby is a great way to approach it. Not all bloggers earn money from their blogs and if earning an income from a blog is your intention, this can take some time and dedication. Many blogs exist just because it’s an interesting and fun thing to do. If you want to earn an income online there’s faster and more reliable ways to do so. Checkout this video series for more info.

Blogging on the other hand is definitely a slow method of generating an income online. It can work, but you will have a lot of work to do in order to get enough people to come to your content.

If you decide to start blogging with the intention of making an income from it, it’s worth choosing a topic which you’re passionate about. Otherwise it can be difficult to put in the necessary work to make it happen. It’s also much harder writing about something you known little or nothing about. Each piece of content will need to be researched. With something you’re familiar with it so much easier and more fun! See best micro niche for blogging.

Blogging As A Hobby – Monetising Your Blog

There’s a few ways you can monetise a blog but the main ones are:

Google Adsense – or a similar advertising platform
Affiliate marketing
Your own products (e.g. ebooks, downloads etc.)

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a platform which you can join as a blogger to help you monetise a blog. Once you join, you can place some code on your content and Google converts that code into adverts which are appropriate to your visitors. So if your blog is about mechanics, the adverts which show will relate to this topic to encourage more advertising clicks. When someone clicks on your advert, you receive a commission which is a percentage of the advertising revenue made by Google.

Adsense pays only a small proportion of the advertising spend per click, so this is only tiny amounts. But with enough traffic this can become a nice passive income source.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular online business model in which bloggers and other advertisers promote other people’s products through their online content. Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetise a blog. Ideally choose an affiliate product to sell which is suitable for your audience. You can then promote the product directly from a blog, through banners and links, and/or build an email list and promote products through it.

An email list is often used by bloggers so they can monetise a blog with affiliate products. By giving something away on a blog, such as an ebook, you can collect emails and promote affiliate products to your list. See the power of email marketing for more on this.

Your Own Products & Lead Magnets

You can also use your own products to monetise a blog if you have them. Many bloggers will create ebooks and downloadable documents which they sell directly from their content. I use a few ebooks which I’ve created but rather than sell them I use them as lead magnets.

A lead magnet is something you use to encourage people to join your email mailing list. As you collect subscribers on an email list, you can build more trust with subscribers by sending a number of messages over a longer period of time. As you do so you can also promote affiliate products and your own products if you have any.

Blogging As A Hobby – Choosing A Topic To Blog About

Choosing a topic to create a blog about is probably the most important part of blogging as a hobby. You’ll want to enjoy blogging. If a blogging hobby becomes just about the outcome – what you can “get” from it, it can cease to be a joyful way to spend your time!

I’ve blogged about a variety of topics which “trying” to make money from a blog and many of them failed outright. The worse thing you can do is go into a topic with money as your only objective! There’s millions of other bloggers out there who are trying to do exactly that. What sets bloggers apart is that those who love their topic, and love to blog will always come across as more authentic, and stay in the game for much longer! This is what’s needed to both enjoy your blogging and to make money from it over the long term.

A short lived blog will rarely make any money! But if you love your topic, you’re much more likely to keep at it, and this gives you a clear advantage.

Ikigai & Writing A Blog

When I started blogging I didn’t know my topic. It was only through trying and failing multiple times did I actually make blogging both joyful and profitable. I eventually found an online business program which helped my find my way online. Access it through this free resource.

I learned about a Japanese term called “Ikigai” which roughly translated means “reason for being”. When you find a topic you care about, blogging is much easier! Ideally find a topic which you’re also able to monetise somehow. Not all topics can be easily monetised so this part of blogging as a hobby is worth some consideration.

If you’re not interested in making any money from your blogging, it’s easier to pick a topic! Write about whatever you’re interested in!

Blogging As A Hobby – Traffic

Getting traffic to a blog is what many bloggers struggle with. There’s lot of ways to get traffic as a blogger including:

Sharing your content on social media
Choosing catchy titles which are more clickable – See Buzzsumo.com for some of the most popular trending blog articles
Link building back to your blog posts
Optimisation for SEO – (Search Engine Optimisation)
Boosting traffic with paid ads

A successful blogger will eventually attract free traffic from the SERPS (search engines results pages) through their SEO. If their content is good, this can happen naturally over time as more people digest their content and naturally share and link to it. But you can also help this process work faster by writing content and targeting long tail keywords within your copy. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

Keyword Domain Name

Once you have decided on your overall topic for a blog, you can build a website around your main keywords. This can help you get more traffic through SEO in some cases. This website for example was built around the main keywords affiliate marketing mentors.

If you have a specific topic, like I did, it can help to find a keyword with low competition. Compare Google’s keyword planner for that term with the relative competition on search traffic. Once you find a good keyword which describes your topic well, and which you would like your site to rank for, you can purchase a domain name with your chosen keyword in it, if available.

If you want a broader topic, choose a more generic domain name which gives you a broader scope. I started off with just using my name for one of my earlier websites – see it here.

Getting Ideas For Content

One method I use with blogging is to find keywords which relate to my main topic. To do this you can type your main keyword into the Google Keyword Planner. The planner will then suggest more keyword ideas which you can use in your blog content.

A good strategy is to find long tail keywords which offer less competition on a regular Google search. If you do this with enough posts, over time many of your blog posts should start appearing in the search results. This does take some time and dedication through and you’ll need to make a habit out of blogging for some months before you start to see regular visits to your site.

Blogging As A Hobby – Mini Habits

Blogging as a hobby for me has been a regular habit for some years now. The benefit of blogging is huge both in enjoyment and from a financial point of view as well. Initially through I struggled making money through blogging for a while. But after some time, you can break through and generate a passive income through blogging.

If you make it part of your daily routine, and enjoy blogging, you’re much more likely to keep up with it and turn it into a passive income source.

Affiliate Marketing Questions & Answers

Do you have any affiliate marketing questions? Affiliate marketing is an online business model which is growing in popularity. More people are realising that it offers a means to earn an independent income from anywhere! All you need is a laptop and internet connection! But how hard is it? What’s the best way to start and can anyone become successful? These are some of the most common questions asked about affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Questions – What Is Affiliate Marketing?

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is an online referral based business model. The affiliate is basically a third party referrer who is paid a commission for successfully referring sales of other people’s products online. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. That means it has no limit cap but also that there’s no guarantee of any income at all! No sales equals no income!

Affiliate Marketing Questions – How Easy Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing definitely isn’t easy. Many affiliates join a program to get started and are disappointed by their results after only a short time period. The top affiliates have mostly been doing it for some time and many affiliates drop out after struggling for only a few months. The affiliate marketing failure rate is around 95%, but of course this includes the many who quit.

There’s many different ways to do affiliate marketing so not everyone’s experience of the business is the same.

What’s The Best Niche To Pick?

Affiliates will often have a specific topic that they specialise in. This is also referred to as a “niche”. This website, for example covers the niche of affiliate marketing and online business. The most profitable niches are generally considered to be those which offer income all year round, or “evergreen” niches. Top evergreen niches can be hard to get into because of the level of competing content for that particular topic. Here’s some of the top niches:

Making money online/Wealth generation
Health and fitness
Dating and relationships
Pets
Hobbies
Technology

The “best” niche isn’t necessarily in these highly competitive topics though. Many affiliates will choose a topic close the their hearts which is much less competitive. This gives them more opportunity to attract an audience because there’s lower levels of competition. See Best niche for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Questions – Can Anyone Do Affiliate Marketing?

Can anyone do affiliate marketing? Yes, as long as you can use a computer pretty much anyone can do affiliate marketing. Affiliates do all kinds of different activities to promote affiliate products. Here’s a few of the things affiliates do:

Blogging
Video marketing – YouTube/TikTok
Email marketing
Link building
Social media marketing – paid and unpaid
Connecting to people online
Ebook creation
Content creation

A lot of the technical aspects of building an online business using affiliate marketing has put people off. However, new technology and software has meant that there’s far less technical skills needed today for affiliate marketing.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?

Most new affiliates would like to know how long it takes to generate an income from affiliate marketing. Unfortunately there’s no definite answer to this question because it depends on so many factors. The marketing strategy the affiliate uses is one of the biggest factors which will determine the timescale of someone’s success. A slow marketing strategy for example is blogging. It can take several months or even years to generate traction through blogging alone. Conversely if you use paid marketing and build an email list, you can start seeing more regular sales within a much shorter timescale.

On the whole, the more money you can invest the faster you can build an affiliate business. You can invest in a high ticket business model and paid marketing. Without investment, affiliate marketing will be much slower. Additionally the use of subscription products can make a huge difference when you’re attempting to build a consistent income through affiliate marketing.

How Much Money Can You Make As An Affiliate?

There’s no cap on earnings for affiliates, so earnings can be unlimited. Some affiliates earn into the six, seven and even eight figure brackets. This is uncommon however and although there are top earning affiliate millionaires, this isn’t the case for beginners. Since affiliate marketing is performance based, everyone starts at zero. There’s a spread of earnings for affiliates which seems to increase the longer someone has been an affiliate for.

The highest earning affiliate marketers have figured out how to leverage their online presence someone and scale up to reach huge numbers of people. Most affiliates will quit within a few months because they get little traction. See also is affiliate marketing really profitable.

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

You can make any amount from affiliate marketing but initially it’s important to aim to make a single online sale. Once you figure this out, you can repeat it and multiply your success. But this can take months or years which explains why so many quit. How much does the average affiliate marketer make? It’s around $40k according to the 2016 Affstat affiliate marketing report.

Is Blogging Worth It?

Blogging is a slow strategy often used by affiliate marketers to generate website traffic. Over several months, depending on the content, a blogger can start attracting the attention of the SERPs. The Search Engine Results Page’s are shown by Google and other search engines and gives content creators the ability to get free traffic, if they make onto the first page.

Not everyone can get on the first page of the results page though of course because there’s so many other competing pages! But if you’re consistent and persistent in creating content, and sharing it, blogging can work wonders. If you’re successful as a blogger, you can monetise your site with affiliate products.

Free traffic and a well monetised site means you’re not spending money on advertising. When and if you start making sales, your income is all profit! But not everyone who starts out blogging actually makes it pay. Consider the competition in your niche before making a decision because it will likely take longer than you think! See also is blogging worth it.

Do You Need A Website For Affiliate Marketing?

Here’s another common question: do you need a website to become an affiliate marketer? While you don’t technically need a website to do affiliate marketing, it’s a good idea. Without a website you can promote your affiliate link in many ways:

Through an email list
Using landing pages to collect email addresses
Through your email signature
Through social media platforms

A website does offer a cheap way to get your products in front of potential buyers. Without one you’re limiting yourself. Many successful affiliates don’t concentrate on blogging on a website though, and instead opt for using paid marketing and build an email list. See also how to promote affiliate links without a website.