AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Lifestyle Business For Sale

Are you looking for a lifestyle business for sale? A lifestyle business can give you both time and financial freedom. But how does it work? A lifestyle business uses automation and other people’s products. A business model known as affiliate marketing lets anyone leverage the internet and generate an income which can be built in a flexible way from anywhere. All you need is an internet connection and a laptop.

You don’t need any products of your own either. With affiliate marketing you can promote and sell other people’s products through referral links, or affiliate links. In this article I’m going to explain a little about what a lifestyle business is and how you can build one of your own to create more freedom in your life.

Lifestyle Business For Sale – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business models available today. With affiliate marketing, you can refer customers to other people’s products and services for a share of the profit. There’s thousands of affiliate programs available throughout the internet. Amazon, for example, is one of the most popular programs. Anyone can join Amazon’s partner (or affiliate) program and earn money by referring customers to any product on Amazon.

When someone makes a purchase through your referral link, you are credited with the sale and earn a commission. Depending on the product’s value, and commission structure, this amount can vary. Amazon pays between 1% and 11% commission in their affiliate program. See Amazon affiliate marketing commission.

So if you recommend a product a product on Amazon and successfully refer a sale, that’s what you earn. There’s other types of products too which pay differing amounts of commission to affiliates. Digital products can pay from 30-100% commission, depending on the product. Then there’s high ticket products and recurring income affiliate products too. See affiliate marketing business models for more on this.

Lifestyle Business For Sale – Why Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing isn’t the only lifestyle business you can choose. Other models offer similar levels of flexibility and freedom. Drop shipping and Forex marketing offer similar ways to earn through the internet. However these businesses are generally more involved than affiliate marketing. With drop shipping you need to take orders and deal directly with customers. See also affiliate marketing vs drop shipping. With forex marketing expect to spend a couple of years learning and you’ll also need a large trading bank to make it work.

Affiliate marketing on the other hand can be done quite cheaply and is much more accessible. You will however need to spend a period of time learning in order to make affiliate marketing profitable. Access a free webinar to learn more and get started.

Lifestyle Business For Sale – What An Affiliate Marketing Business Can Give You

An affiliate marketing business can give you both time and financial freedom. By automating sales of other people’s products online you can generate income streams which grow over time. Eventually it can replace your existing employment and give the the ability to work from anywhere and leverage the internet for income, rather than trading your time for it.

A “lifestyle business” is a business which gives you more time and freedom and lets you build a life on your own terms. Your business can be built around your chosen lifestyle, rather than the other way around, as with a job, or a traditional bricks and mortar business.

Work to your own schedule and even around existing employment
Start from anywhere with only a laptop and internet connection
Escape the trap of trading time for money, as in a job
Remove yourself from employment and the need to have a job, boss or commute.

Affiliate Marketing – What It Takes

An affiliate business can give a lot, but what does it take to build a lifestyle business with affiliate marketing? How difficult is affiliate marketing and can anyone do it?

There’s a huge drop out rate with affiliate marketing but this is also partly due to the accessibility of the business. Anyone can “give it a go” which explains partly the 95% drop out rate. See affiliate marketing failure rate. So to become successful as an affiliate marketer, you only need to think differently to the 95% and become part of the 5% who make it work! This takes some determination because affiliate marketing is definitely not easy.

Many people who start learning affiliate marketing quit far too easily. It takes time to build an email list. A list of 10,000 subscribers for example doesn’t happen overnight. But as your email list grows so does your income. New affiliates don’t understand this and get demoralised when their small list of 40 subscribers doesn’t translate into an overnight burst of income. I was there too, wondering why things weren’t working. To keep going, you need to keep educating yourself and find a mentor who can keep you going. See affiliate coaching program.

Get Started

You can get started with your own lifestyle affiliate business here. You’ll get access to:

A step by step modular set up of your own digital product range, email marketing system and website
Access to over 10,000 Linkedin learning courses to help you with every aspect of building a lifestyle business from scratch
Access to live and recorded training events run through the online business community
Further training and resources are also available – personal mentoring and coaching can be accessed through a range of customised products and services

Click image below for access -secure checkout and full money back guarantee.

Time Freedom Opportunity

A few years ago I was looking for a time freedom opportunity. I needed something I could work around contract work in the film industry. I would work sporadically and then it would come to an end. Since work was always spontaneous, and I had little notice, a 9 to 5 job was difficult to work around, so I looked to the internet for something which I could build on and work flexibly.

Initially I looked at Forex marketing, but I didn’t have the capital to invest. I later found an eBay business model detailed in this article. But it was time heavy and I wasn’t making enough from it. I remembered how I had found the eBay business. It was from the purchase of an ebook – an electrical guide which I downloaded from the internet.

This struck me as the time freedom opportunity I was looking for. A digital downloadable book would allow me to make money on autopilot if I could learn how to set up a website to sell it from.

Time Freedom Opportunity

A time freedom opportunity has to have automation in it. Most people trade time for money in a job. They are never able to escape their jobs if they always trade their time for money, since time is the limiting factor. But if you can learn how to use products instead, you can sell products online in your sleep. Since people are purchasing products online continually all over the world. A good time freedom opportunity today is the internet.

After my lightbulb moment, of discovering the ebook idea I set about creating my own ebook. I wrote an ebook about how to be a stuntman, which is what I knew about at that time (see my about m e page). The main problem was I struggled getting people to find my book. So after putting myself on a marketing course, I discovered a business model which was even better. It’s a model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can promote and sell existing products on the internet for a share of the profit.

Products which I could use were far better than my ebook, so I abandoned the ebook idea and instead focused on affiliate marketing.

Time Freedom Opportunity – Affiliate Marketing

A time freedom business works on autopilot, selling products globally and giving you an income which grows over time. It does this by using two main strategies:

Selling desirable products which can be accessed over the internet instantaneously (as an affiliate you don’t need to personally own these products and you can earn by referring them).
Using automation to promote those products

Another main key to building a time freedom business is with the use of recurring income affiliate programs. With a standard affiliate product, you can earn only a “one-off” commission when you make a sale. But with memberships and software products you can earn an ongoing income from every sale you make. This compounds over time so you can eventually replace your existing income from employment. Once you do this, you’ve created a passive income from the internet and it’s hands free! See hands free business models.

Tools Of Automation

Affiliate marketers use all kinds of automated tools. The main tools of an affiliate marketer are:

A website – to attract an audience
An email autoresponder – see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
A marketing platform – to find targeted visitors for your website and affiliate products

Many affiliates use paid marketing platforms, although there are many other ways too. (See 22 ways to promote affiliate products).

Email List

An autoresponder is an automated email service which helps affiliates collect email addresses and automate delivery of queued up email messages. Through communicating with subscribers, and offering some kind of value, affiliates can recommend products and earn income through referrals.

All affiliates start out with zero subscribers, but once you learn how to generate subscribers, an email list can be built up to reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.

With a larger list of engaged subscribers, and a good product to offer, affiliates can ultimately automate this process, giving them both time and financial freedom.

Get Started

If you’re serious about building an income from the internet, you’ll need to invest some time learning the strategies for building an email list of your own and selling the right products for your audience.

Access an all in one business system and training program which gives you:

A step by step modular set up process – set up your sales system through following the modules
Products to sell – a range of digital products you can promote immediately (once setup)
A push button affiliate website – ready in only a few steps
Full training and support – access to live and recorded training seminars
Access to over 10,000 training courses through a partner program (Linkedin Learning). Access by clicking on the link below.
Further training and support available for more personal and one on one coaching.

Promote My Affiliate Link Free

To promote my affiliate link free, I use a number of strategies. First and foremost it’s well worth having a website. A website is your digital property which you can use for generating traffic to your affiliate links through your content. Although there’s tonnes of ways to promote your affiliate link free, it all starts with a piece of “digital property” you call your own. Although there are free blog sites such as Blogger.com, Hubpages.com and WordPress.com, having a website of your own has more authority.

Visitors to your own hosted domain will trust your content more than a blog post on a free blogging site. Search engines trust owner hosted websites more too, and will rank them more favourably than free blog websites. To promote my affiliate link free, I start with creating a website. If you know nothing of how to do this, you can get started here with a program which offers you an easy step by step process to set up a site.

Promote My Affiliate Link Free – SEO

To promote my affiliate link free from a website, I start with a goal in mind: free traffic from the search engines. Getting free traffic to your website from the search engines is quite tough. There’s plenty of competition. One way of doing this is to build your website around a specific keyword which you want to rank for. This website, for example was built around the keyword affiliate marketing mentors.

Before starting out you’ll want to research keywords within your niche. To find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, use Google’s free keyword planner. Then compare your chosen word on Google with a search to compare the relative competition. More on this concept in the article: create niche websites.

Promote My Affiliate Link Free – Content

You can use the same strategy to build content on your website. Target specific long tail keywords which offer low SEO difficulty. Write content using an SEO plugin. I use Yoast SEO. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress. As you choose content to write about, make sure it lines up with your products.

Think about the search intent which will be used when someone types the keyword into a search engine. What are they looking for and might they be interested in your affiliate products? If the answer is yes, that’s the kind of content you want to create. If no, then keep searching!

Blogging is a long, slow process but there’s a number of other strategies you can use to help bring people to your affiliate links for free.

Promote My Affiliate Link Free – Ebooks & Autoresponders

Ebooks are a great way to promote your affiliate link for free. An ebook can be used to build an email list from a website. From an email list you can send out messages on autopilot which bring people to your affiliate links. See the power of email marketing. You can even get a free autoresponde r for affiliate marketing.

As you start to generate traffic to your website from your blogging and link building efforts, most of your visitors won’t make a purchase. Only a small percentage of your website visitors will buy from your affiliate links. But if you can offer them something on your website, such as an ebook, you can get them to subscribe to your email list. Once on your list, you can build a relationship with your subscribers over a much long period of time, sending them to your affiliate products as you do so.

On a website, a visitor only has a small “window” of opportunity to purchase something. On a email list, this time period is dramatically extended.

Link Building

Once you have some content on your website, link building becomes a useful way to:

Build pathways for people to find your content – and visit your site.
Improve your SEO score and increase your visibility in the SEO rankings

Your link profile is one of the major ranking factors used by the search engines, especially Google. Think of links as naturally occurring “votes” for your website which come from other sites which recommend your content. As your content gets more views, more people will naturally link to it, providing it is worthwhile!

This is why creating high quality content should be a priority when you get started with blogging. To build links to your website you can reach out to other bloggers in your niche and offer to write guest posts, linking back to your website. You can also comment on blogs in your niche, leaving links as you do so. If back linking isn’t your strength, you can always outsource this strategy too. (See image above).

Social Media

You can also use social media to promote your affiliate links for free. Place your link in your profile bio. It can help to have a website again here for a few reasons:

A long, messy affiliate link doesn’t provide the context which a website does
People are less inclined to click on an unknown affiliate link than a contextual domain name link, especially if it’s a long, messy link.
It looks more professional
A website attracts an appropriate audience

Social media can also be used as a means to build links to your content on your website. A good social media plugin to use for your blog is Revive Old Posts which automatically syndicates content throughout your social media platforms. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Link Cloaking/shortening & Domain Name Forwarding

Link shortening is a useful tactic too when it comes to link promotion. A long, messy link doesn’t look as clean as an shortened link. Here’s a few link shortening services:

Bitly.com
Tinyurl.com
Ow.ly
Rebrandly.com
Tidyurl.com

You can also purchase a domain name which gives your link more context and meaning. Then, forward your domain name directly to your affiliate link. A clean domain name looks more professional and has more context than a messy affiliate link which has neither meaning or context.

Here’s an affiliate link: http://d463b5gmw66qlm7cl7m8z10wbj.hop.clickbank(.net). There’s no context with this link and it could lead you anywhere. Plus, it looks messy!

Compare the above link to a domain name such as this: learnpianoforbeginners.com. This domain immediately has a context so potential visitors will know immediately what the domain name is about and whether they will be interested in the product/information or not.

Blog Burnout – What To Do If You’re Burning Out!

If you’re a regular blogger you’ve probably experienced blog burnout! Even with a topic you love, it can be difficult continually creating new content. Eventually burnout becomes inevitable if you’ve been blogging for long enough. After all, there’s only a finite amount of things you can blog about within any specific niche. You can broaden … Continue reading “Blog Burnout – What To Do If You’re Burning Out!”

If you’re a regular blogger you’ve probably experienced blog burnout! Even with a topic you love, it can be difficult continually creating new content. Eventually burnout becomes inevitable if you’ve been blogging for long enough. After all, there’s only a finite amount of things you can blog about within any specific niche. You can broaden your niche, choose a different topic, or delve deeper into your own niche, looking for ideas which float your boat!

I’ve always found it better to blog about topics I have an interest in, though. In a topic which is unknown to you, it’s so much harder. One such scenario was when I built a blog about mushroom harvesting.

I knew nothing of this topic and was experimenting with ranking a niche website. (See micro niche website). After several months of blogging on this topic, I drew a blank. Unfortunately for me, I had picked a topic I had neither love for, or interest in. Each piece of content had to be thoroughly researched because I didn’t know my subject. So it was super time consuming to write about something which I wasn’t passionate about.

Blog Burnout – What To Do

I’ve been a blogger for several years now and have many blogs. Initially my blogging was sporadic. I only blogged when I felt like it and had the motivation. It worked in at least I kept going, albeit sporadically. But this doesn’t serve you well if you want to make money from your blog.

Over the longer term I made some sales through blogging from my blog content. This gave me the inspiration to commit more to regular blogging. I knew it worked so was highly motivated at this point. Whereas previously I was full of doubts! But soon burnout ensued! I set a goal of 400 blog posts and gave myself only a few months to achieve it. But I couldn’t sustain this amount of creative action! Creativity needs space, and so I eventually hit a brick wall.

Some days blogging felt as bad as a 9 to 5 job! My main motivation for earning from a blog was to escape the 9 to 5 and live on my own terms. When your passion business starts feeling like drudgery it’s time to reexamine your goals and take a step back.

Blog Burnout – Tiny Steps

If you’re not familiar with Micro Habits, there’s a couple of good books on the topic. Atomic Habits by James Clear and Micro Habits by Stephen Guise are two good ones I’ve found. Using the advice of these books has helped me maintain a good blogging habit which I have maintained without blog burnout. At times, writing a blog post feels like running through treakle. It’s these days which are the most testing. If every day feels like this, you’re not going to keep up your blogging habit for long. But if only one or two days are like this, and you have a strategy for overcoming writers block, or blog burnout, you can keep going.

A micro habit is a tiny habit which is so small it seems insignificant. A blog post can be one of your micro habits. Ideally choose a micro habit which you can perform even on your worst days. Over time, micro habits lead you to your bigger goals. But in the short term they help you overcome momentum and get the ball rolling. They empower you and make you feel good!

Your micro habit for blogging might be 3 blogs posts a week. Or it might be a blog post a day. Whatever you can sustain for the long term is your best bet. If your blogging frequency is what’s causing you to burnout, it might be worth reconsidering how often you write.

Blog Burnout: Queue Up Ideas For Content

Another strategy which has helped me come up with content ideas is to create a list of content ideas. Some days I’ll lack inspiration, but if I have written down ideas which inspired me previously, I can draw on them when I’m lacking motivation.

When inspiration comes, write it down. When you come to write a blog post, you’re not always going to be in that inspirational state. So when you are inspired, make sure you channel those insights before they are lost.

I use Google’s keyword planner for inspiration for blog post ideas but also read a lot of inspirational material which I can use in blogging content. So if you’re coming up against resistance, look for books which inspire you.

Inspiration is definitely the antidote for blog burnout!

Take A Break

It sounds obvious but the more you push against something which doesn’t move, the more tired you become. Put down those rocks in your back pack and learn to let go! This is something I’ve struggled with because once you see how blogging can work, you want to maintain your focus for the long term. When your passion wanes, it can be hard to let go when you’ve established a habit of blogging.

When it comes to making money from a blog, sales will come when they come. There’s no rushing them with blogging. When one of your posts brings in a sale, it’s a magical experience. But pushing for more and more is the best way to burn yourself out. Let go of the outcome and trust the process. Learn to give yourself a break. Come back when you are refreshed and have some new vigour and motivation again.

Blogging is a great way to earn an income, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Learn to recharge your batteries when you reach saturation point, and learn how to recognise when this happens so you can take some time out.

Make staying in the game your intention, rather than overworking to the point of exhaustion!

Use Leverage

If you’re reaching blog burnout point but still want your blog to grow, consider hiring help. You can pay someone to write for you, build backlinks to your blog or write guest posts for you. Fiverr.com offers a range of opportunities for bloggers to find freelancers who will help.

You can also use a number of plugins which can help you leverage your old content which you have already written. Revive Old Posts is one such plugin and it allows you to syndicate older blog content you have written automatically throughout your social media profiles. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Focus On The Small Task In Front Of You

If your focus is making money from your blogging, and you aren’t making any yet, it can be very frustrating. If you’re looking for the results of your blogging but without this feedback, you become more and more dissatisfied. It’s a negative feedback loop which can lead you to burning out and quitting. Once you can recognise this and deal with your dissatisfaction, blogging can again become a joy.

There’s a few strategies I’ve used to help me let go of the outcome, and focus on the process:

Recognise when you’re frustrated and stop
Start a gratitude journal – writing down what you’re grateful for daily
Start a meditation habit – become aware of your thinking processes
Use exercise to transmute that frustrated energy and let it go!
Read material which helps you with your mindset – self help/psychology books.

Don’t focus on the long journey ahead of you with your blogging. Focus only on the small step you can accomplish right now, today.

Motivation Vs Habit

Motivation vs habit? Which is better? While motivation will get you going, habit will keep you going for much longer. Motivation can always fade away when you’re having a bad day or if things don’t work out. If your actions are linked to your daily motivation levels, you’ll find some days are more difficult than others. One day you’re up, and another day you’re down. But once you have developed a strong habit, it will be difficult to stop, even on your worst days. Strong habits stick with you for months and years.

Have you ever noticed yourself going through a “fad” such as giving up drinking alcohol, or going to the gym? Initially, you are full of enthusiasm and you might stick to your promise for a few months. But after that something gives and you drop off. The reason is that you haven’t build a strong enough habit around your long term intention. Motivation gets you only so far, habits will carry you further.

Motivation Vs Habit – Micro Habits

If motivation will only last so long, you need to develop micro habits when you are motivated so you can stick to them when you’re not! Micro habits are so small that they circumvent your laziness and kick you into action. Here’s a few micro habits examples:

A single push up
Eat an orange for breakfast
Write a blog post
Cut out milk in tea
Read a page of a book daily
Listen to 5 minutes of an audiobook

A micro habit is so small that even on your worst days you can achieve them. But in all likelihood, once you have “assumed the position” and got started with it, you’ll find yourself doing more than the minimum. As time goes by, it will feel wrong not to do your micro habits.

Motivation Vs Habit – Compounding Over Time

Over time micro habits have a compounding effect which is greater than a short burst of a few months of hyper activity. That gym membership which only lasted 3 months is no match for a micro habit which lasts years – even if the habits are less tangible in the short term! So instead of trying to rearrange your life and get super motivated in short bursts, use micro habits instead. They’ll more easily fit into your life without a dramatic change, and have longer term effects because they are easier to maintain.

With motivation, you might very well have a fit of inspiration and get inspired to go “all out” to get in shape, learn a new skill or change your life in some other way. But this spirt of enthusiasm seldom will last if you haven’t put a structure in place to help you maintain it. What micro habits do is allow you to put a structure in place to keep the wheels of your intention turning when you have lost the initial spirit of that motivation.

The Plateau Of Latent Potential

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits you can see the above picture. It shows the “plateau of latent potential”. The graph shows the expectations of many given outcomes in terms of what you expect to happen (see the straight line). For example, going to the gym for a short time you might expect dramatic results. When you look in the mirror after a couple of weeks and nothing much has changed, you may doubt your progress and this can easily hamper your enthusiasm.

Your expectations don’t match up to the results you’ve been working towards. Rather than motivate you on to work harder, this can have the opposite effect and you give up! If only you had maintained the necessary motivation for long enough you would see results where the two lines intersect (what actually happens and what you think should happen).

This is a truism whether you are working out in a gym, building an internet business or any other longer term endeavour. To break through you need consistent action over the longer term. Atomic, or micro habits can help you achieve this.

Summary

While motivation is good, it doesn’t last. For some things which need a long time to accomplish, motivation won’t work! You also need a long term strategy you can maintain even when you are lacking the necessary motivation to keep going. This is where micro habits come in. With a micro, mini or atomic habit, you set yourself up for success by overcoming the prior momentum you have in your life already with tiny, easily achievable steps.

If motivation is only temporary, you need a system to back up your motivation when you’re running low on enthusiasm. That system is mini habits!

You might also be interested in Cybernetic Transposition which is a tool developed for achieving seemingly impossible goals using meta stories and mantras. See Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition.

How To Align Conscious And Subconscious Mind

Wondering how to align conscious and subconscious mind? The conscious mind is your waking state. But your subconscious mind lies beneath and controls many of the outcomes in your life, often without your awareness. On the surface, you may think you are “trying” all you can to achieve some outcome in life, but unless you can align the conscious and subconscious mind, all your best laid plans can be completely derailed.

The conscious mind could be considered the iceberg exposed above the waterline. The subconscious or unconscious mind could be considered as the rest of the iceberg which lies beneath the waterline.

How To Align Conscious And Subconscious Mind

Unless all parts of your mind are working together, your unconscious behaviour patterns, thoughts and beliefs can derail your best laid plans. Unless you make these unconscious patterns conscious, they will control your life and you will call it fate.

“Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will direct you and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung

But how do we make our unconscious behaviours, thoughts and beliefs conscious? Firstly we need to shine the light of awareness on our old, habitual thoughts, words and behaviours. Are they all lining up with our intentions and goals which we say we want? For example, say you plan on losing a stone of weight in the next 3-5 months.

You get a gym membership and start working out. But your old behaviour patterns work against you and before long you find yourself over eating and drinking on weekends. Despite turning up to the gym for 2 months, your interest wanes and you quit before you reach your goal.

Your old behaviour has taken control of your goal and you’ve decided that eating out late and drinking alcoholic drinks is more important than your original goal! What happened?

How To Align Your Conscious And Subconscious Mind – The Self Image

The self image is a good measuring device as to how well you will do at accomplishing a specific goal. The self image is a large part of your subconscious programming and you “feed” it all the time with your conscious thoughts.

“I’m an early riser because I like to do such and such”, “I hate my job”, “I’m not very good at exercising”, “I’m an athlete.”

These are examples of what you might tell yourself given a certain view of yourself, who you are and what you’re capable of. By changing the self image to that of the person you want to become, you can tap into a deeper part of your subconscious mind and better control certain outcomes which otherwise would be much more difficult.

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who discovered that many of his clients were still unhappy even after plastic surgery. He started working with his clients before surgery helping them to change their self image. Many clients decided they no longer needed to change their appearance because something inside had changed permanently.

Self Talk

Pay attention to your inner dialogue if you want to change some aspect of your life. It is constantly talking, to others or to yourself inside your head. Your inner dialogue is feeding the subconscious mind on a near constant basis. Unless you learn to control this voice, and notice the subtle suggestions it makes as to what is or is not possible, the harder with will be to align your conscious mind with the subconscious mind.

Using the example above of weight loss, imagine you have set the goal of losing weight over a 3 month period. Your conscious mind decides on the goal and you join a gym and start taking some action. But your inner dialogue keeps telling you to eat the same (bad) food, or that you deserve that nice glass of wine. Old habits dominate your behaviour unless you change the programming and alter your self talk and self image.

Aligning All Parts Of The Mind With Mantras and MetaStories

Most people have mantras they are not aware of:

I’m a failure
Money doesn’t grow on trees
I’ll never be…
It’s easy for them but I…
Life’s a struggle
Why is everything so hard?
Why can’t I…

Many of these “programs” were taught to us while we were growing up before we had the conscious reasoning faculties to reject them. In fact, most of our underlying beliefs were picked up before we were 10 years old. To align the conscious and subconscious mind, you need to choose a new program you can use to replace old programs which are sabotaging your efforts to make a positive change:

Money comes easily and frequently
Things always work out for me
I lose weight easily
I get paid for being me
Life is easy and effortless
I can do anything I set my mind to

Of course your conscious mind might reject some of the above suggestions. So it’s a good idea to choose new ideas which can be used in a positive way which you have less of a resistance to. Of course your old mantras which don’t serve you will likely have been around for years, possibly decades. So repetition on new ideas will take some time to become habits.

Cybernetic Transposition

Stuart Lichtman was an MIT professor who developed what he called the cybernetic transposition technique. It is a method of aligning all parts of your mind to work together in achieving a seemingly impossible goal. Check out his book below.

The method involves creating a personalised mantra or “meta-story” based on exercises explained in Stuart’s book. By repeating this story over and over you can reprogram your subconscious mind to “flag up” a specific goal which is then focused on by the unconscious mind like a magnet.

Your subconscious mind gets to work even when you aren’t thinking of your goal, and finds ways to bring it about even faster. This is often what is happening when our subconscious and conscious minds are not in alignment. Only we find that we don’t achieve what we want. Our conscious mind is focused on achieving something we want, while our subconscious mind is repeating old beliefs which aren’t in alignment. No wonder why so many people struggle achieving their goals!

Visualisation

Visualisation can be used to communicate to the subconscious mind. With visualisation you are communicating in feelings and images directly to your unconscious mind. This is powerful because the subconscious mind talks in feelings and images during your dreams.

If you learn to relax deeply and do creative visualisation, you may be able to make far more effective changes in your life than you would by thinking, worrying, planning, and trying to manipulate things and people. – Shakti Gawain Creative Visualisation.

Vlogging Vs Blogging: Which Is Best?

Vlogging vs blogging? Which is best? With both blogging and video blogging (v’logging) there’s a huge potential for generating an income from the internet. But before you can make money from a blog or vblog, you’ll need to generate traffic. This means creating content and a lot of it. Both v’logging and blogging are cheap ways to generate traffic which can be monetised through advertising or using affiliate products.

But there’s a lot of other bloggers and v’loggers out there which means you’ll be creating content for several months before you see any major benefits. Are you prepared to do this and how would you prefer to do it?
As a video blogger you’ll be the face of your content. If you’re more into creating video than writing content, video blogging might be the way to go. If you’re more of a blogger, consider taking this route instead. Of course you can do both and a little of each can work wonders for traffic generation.

Video blogging can take the form of presenting and explaining and also teaching and instructing. Some video bloggers create DIY or “how to” video blogs explaining something to their audience. Before deciding on an approach, it’s worth considering ideas for your content and how you prefer to create content.

V’logging VS Blogging – Cost

One of the major benefits of v’logging over blogging is that you can use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok to showcase your videos absolutely free. Of course there are free blogging platforms too, such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com but it’s worth getting your own domain name and hosting if you’re serious about making an income from blogging. With the free platforms, it can be more difficult attracting the attention of the search engines and getting free traffic.

You can purchase a domain name for less than $10 a year and hosting can be purchased for less than $10 a month. It’s well worth making the effort of doing this with a blog. You’ll be taken more seriously with your own hosting and your own domain name gives you more authority. Free blog platforms aren’t seen in the same way both by visitors and the organic search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc).

Some video bloggers invest in microphone, lighting and background imagery. But you can easily get started with video blogging with only a laptop and internet connection. All you really then need is a smart phone to record from. Lighting and a good quality microphone are the essentials and most people already have a mobile phone they can record with.

Vlogging VS Blogging – Time Commitment

Since you are the face of your video blog, it can be more difficult to outsource your video content. But with a blog, you can outsource written articles more easily to other freelancers. This can free up your time for other activities. Both blogging and v’logging are time consuming and you’ll need a lot of content in order to generate a good income from either. Editing is another consideration with video blogging and this can be a time consuming factor, depending on the kind of videos you’re creating.

Initially both strategies can be tough because you won’t have a lot of content at the start. As your content grows you should see your income grow too, if you have done a good job of it! However, as with any online venture nothing is guaranteed. If you monetise with advertising, using Google Adsense, for example, you’ll need a huge amount of traffic to make it pay.

So it’s worth using affiliate products as well or instead of ads. Affiliates use their online presence to promote affiliate products and make commissions based on the sales. So with a blog or video channel, you’ll need to carefully choose affiliate products which align with the subject area you are covering in your content. See how to know your target market.

Competition & User Experience

There’s a lot more written content on Google, than video content on YouTube, which can make it more difficult to get traction as a blogger. Plus you can access other video platforms if you decide to go the v’logging route (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook etc.). So some might suggest that video content is less competitive than written.

Video content too is preferable to many, who use YouTube as a research tool rather than Google. With a piece of video content you can build more trust more quickly than with written content, which is why some marketers favour video over blogging. In a short 5 minute video you can explain a lot. Whereas in a piece of written content it can be more difficult to convey certain ideas.

So ultimately which is better? Vlogging vs blogging?

Both blogging and vlogging are cheap methods of building an online presence which can be monetised. But there’s huge competition in both and building a sustainable income from your efforts will likely take some time and dedication. With this in mind, it’s worth choosing a strategy which suits your personality. If you are happier on video, then that’s a good fit. Equally, if you’re uncomfortable on video, or prefer writing, this might be a better choice.

PPC Vs Organic Marketing

PPC vs organic marketing – which is better? With PPC – pay per click, you pay an advertising platform such as Google Adwords for clicks on your adverts. When someone clicks they go through to your website. Traffic is pretty instant and you immediately find out whether you can make your campaign work financially, assuming you track all your sales. This can take some time and investment, but you can also set a daily budget you can afford so you can test out various adverts and find which ones work the best.

With organic marketing it’s a much slower strategy. You don’t get immediate results and you often need to spend time creating content before you can track your results. Blogging or v’logging are examples of organic marketing. Over time as your “digital footprint” grows, you can get traffic for free. This is especially good if your content gets ranked on Google or goes viral. However, this can take months or years before this happens, or it may never happen! In the meantime you can spend a lot of time creating content which doesn’t convert website visitors into buyers. See also niche blogging for profit for a blogging strategy.

PPC Vs Organic Marketing – Scalability

So depending on your own personal situation, you may want to spend more time creating content to generate free traffic over several months. Alternatively, if you’re too busy for content creation, use PPC campaigns to get traffic immediately to your website. Test and measure your advertising and find a strategy which is profitable.

Once you get to this stage you can scale up very quickly with PPC. Simply increase your daily budget once profitable. You immediately get more visitors, subscribers and sales – if you’ve done your homework first with a smaller budget.

Organic marketing doesn’t offer such a scalable strategy. With organic marketing if a certain article is performing, you can’t necessarily replicate its success with other content. However, you can run paid marketing to the content which is working for you. So over time you can combine your PPC and content marketing strategies for the best outcome – more on this later.

PPC Vs Organic – Competition

If your business is in a very competitive niche, you may find content marketing is very difficult. In a less competitive niche you can more easily get the attention of the search engines and rank your content for your main keywords.

But in a very competitive field this is incredibly difficult. There are tens of thousands of other websites competing for the keywords you’re aiming for with your content. So getting traffic from content marketing in a competitive field can be a very long term project. There’s no guarantees with SEO either (search engine optimisation) and many content marketers give up after months of hard work.

In a competitive field too, paid marketing is very expensive because other advertisers are paying for top listings. So you can either pay for advertising your business or potentially spend months or years fighting to optimise your website and get ranked for some of your keywords.

Combining PPC & Organic Marketing

As a compromise you can combine both PPC and organic marketing. You can also choose your budget when using PPC so it’s an affordable option for most businesses whatever your budget it.

Once you have created content on your website, you can use Google’s Adwords platform to target your content with a dynamic advert. The dynamic advert automatically searches your website for suitable content and creates dynamic ads which showcase appropriate content and matches it to Google search traffic.

You can also target your best performing content once you know which website articles are the best at converting visitors into subscribers/customers.

Summary

Some business models and niches are better suited to using PPC because they are in competitive niches. With a competitive niche, you can really struggle getting the traction you need through only using organic marketing. It can take years! In a competitive niche paid advertising can be expensive so you’ll need a good business model to make it profitable.

In a less competitive niche, you can make organic marketing work really well if you’re prepared to put the effort in and create a lot of content. But this doesn’t happen overnight and many content marketers will spend months or years creating content in order to get free traffic. Many will quit after several months when nothing seems to be happening!

In general, think of organic marketing as a much longer term strategy. PPC is good because you can get traffic very quickly and scale it up once profitable.

Affiliate Marketing Is It Profitable?

Affiliate marketing is it profitable? Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which affiliates refer customers to other people’s products online. If you make a sale through your unique affiliate link, you earn a commission on that sale. For an affiliate to be profitable in their affiliate business, they need to learn how to generate sales on a consistent basis. Even though many affiliates are successful and build profitable businesses, there’s no guarantees that a new affiliate can replicate this success.

There’s various affiliate marketing business models and affiliate marketing promotion methods too. Profitable affiliates will often have spent some time learning the strategies which are able to make them profit. To replicate their success means following in the actions which they took, or carving out a niche of your own.

Affiliate marketing can be profitable yes, but also many affiliates aren’t profitable and they quit before even making a single sale online. See affiliate marketing failure rate.

Affiliate Marketing Is It Profitable? – Marketing

To make affiliate marketing profitable you need to invest time and money in building an affiliate business which is sustainable over the long term. This can take some time and financial investment. The ease or difficulty of this journey will depend on the route you take. Like any business, there’s no guarantee of success. Affiliate marketers who are successful have often put a lot of time and effort into their businesses.

To become profitable you need to consistently earn more from sales than you do in marketing. At first you should expect to spend some money on your marketing. Or alternatively you can spend time building content instead. Content creation will likely take much longer than through using paid marketing strategies. So depending on your circumstances, you may opt for either of these main marketing strategies, or something in between.

The fastest way to build a profitable online business is through paid marketing and building an email list of subscribers. With an email list you can build relationships with your subscribers over a long time period. From a website you only get a few minutes of their attention. Plus, with a list you can build thousands of subscribers over time who are interested in your products. If you offer good value through email marketing, you can build rapport and your subscribers are more likely to trust what you tell them. See also the power of email marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Is It Profitable – Business Models

A low value physical affiliate product will pay far less than a high ticket digital product. So, depending on the affiliate marketing business model you use, you can generate more or less income in the same amount of time. Certain products pay you ongoing commissions from previous sales too. So if you choose to sell recurring income affiliate programs, you are more likely to become profitable once you start selling. These are products which carry membership fees such as training courses or software products.

A lot of recurring income commission programs offer tools and training for affiliates themselves. Once an affiliate is generating a full time income through affiliate marketing, they are unlikely to end their membership if these products help them run their business. So if you have referred a membership or software product which carries a recurring commission, you could earn lifetime commissions from many of your sales. See lifetime commission affiliate program.

High ticket digital products pay some of the highest levels of commission too. Using these kinds of products can give you an advantage. not only will you earn much larger commissions but this also means using the more expensive paid marketing strategies is much more accessible. This also means you are able to scale up your business more quickly. If you only rely on content creation for an affiliate business, it can take much longer to become profitable.

Summary

Is affiliate marketing profitable? As with any new business, it doesn’t start off as profitable. In order to sell affiliate products online and make a profitable business from affiliate marketing, you need to learn how to promote and sell products online.

In order to generate more income than you spend on marketing your affiliate business, you need to learn how to generate sales consistently. This can take some time to learn. But once you master the ability to sell products online, you can do it over and over. You can even automate the sales of products online and scale up to a global audience.

Before you get to this stage many affiliates struggle to even make a single sale. See affiliate marketing failure rate. This is perhaps the hardest part of the journey because you are filled with doubt while learning. Once you make a single sale online, you have proved to yourself it can be done!

Affiliate Marketing Reality

What is the affiliate marketing reality? The truth about affiliate marketing is often hidden by marketers intending to sell you their courses! If you believe it’s easy to make money as an affiliate, you’re more likely to purchase a course or buy into a program. In reality affiliate marketing is a tough nut to crack and it’s not for everyone.

Yes, you can make money as an affiliate, but this can take months or years of work. Not everyone can work alone under their own steam. With affiliate marketing you’ll need a great deal of self motivation to succeed. Many affiliates quit before they even make a sale. The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high at around 95%. This means of all the people attempting it, only 5% actually succeed and make an income from it.

Affiliate Marketing Reality

But it’s not all bad. Part of the reason why so many quit at affiliate marketing is that there’s such a low barrier to entry. Anyone can join an affiliate program and promote a product online through their unique affiliate link. That doesn’t make them successful affiliates however.

To become successful, you need to stay the course and actually start making sales. Making your first sale online is a monumental moment and it should be celebrated! You need to celebrate small wins. But before this happens there’s a lot of time and effort which goes in. Most won’t make it through this long, arduous road which offers no guarantees.

Many newbie affiliates simply quit when they put some time in and get nothing in return. But you need to keep putting in the work in order to break through and start earning revenue. Depending on the direction you take in your marketing, and the affiliate marketing business model you use, this can take months or years.

Blogging, for example is a very slow marketing strategy. As a beginner I thought I could throw up a website and instantly earn from it without paying for marketing. Nothing happened for a very long time! Only when I understood the reality of affiliate marketing did I change my behaviour and start working at the right activities. Before that I expected far too much for very little input. I suspect many new affiliates are the same.

Affiliate Marketing Reality – Financial Freedom

Affiliate marketing is a path to financial freedom. Of that there’s no doubt. Many long term affiliates have set themselves free of the need for employment. This is one of the motivations for newbies to get involved in affiliate marketing. But there’s an investment involved on both time and money.

Without a financial investment in your affiliate marketing business, you’ll have to work much harder using free traffic generation strategies. These types of strategies can take much longer than through using paid marketing. Without an email list it’s much more difficult selling affiliate products too, although you can get a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

affiliate marketing reality — A high ticket affiliate product – the amphibious Sub-surface vehicle (submarine) – Access free videos here.

The best thing you can invest in as an affiliate is your education. When you understand the various affiliate marketing business models, you’ll want to use subscription affiliate programs which pay you recurring commissions. High ticket affiliate marketing products can pay you much more than most other products too. With a high ticket sales funnel, you can more easily afford paid marketing and scale up your business more quickly.

Without investing in a high ticket business model, you’re stuck with lower paying affiliate products which limit you to cheaper and free marketing strategies.

Automation

The automation which goes hand in hand with affiliate marketing can allow affiliates to a earn passive income long after they stop working; especially if they use recurring commission affiliate programs. Through using marketing platforms and email marketing software, affiliates can automate their marketing to sell products around the clock, even when they are away from their laptops.

But setting up such a system means investing in the right tools, software and know-how. This means commitment and unless you have a good mindset towards your affiliate business, you’re likely to quit before you see positive results. There’s a time period of learning and understanding. You don’t simply set up an advertising campaign and start making sales immediately. There is a period of learning and failing.

This can be psychologically tough, especially if you’re spending money on advertising and not making immediate sales. For an affiliate to get through this period and keep going takes a lot.

Mindset & Perseverance

The pull of financial freedom is often what gets affiliates through these tough periods in building their business. If you’re not massively motivated to build a profitable business, it will be much easier to quit.

Many people come into affiliate marketing because of difficult circumstances and they simply “have to” make it work. These are the people who will succeed. If you have a “I’ll give it a go” mindset, you probably won’t last. It’s far easier to proclaim affiliate marketing does not work and quit, than persevere and prove to yourself that it does!

Competition

Depending on your marketing strategy as an affiliate, and there’s many, you will come up against a lot of competition. (See 22 ways to promote affiliate products). As a blogger in this niche it’s been a long hike to get my content seen on the search engines. Video is the same and many organic marketers will create thousands of pieces of content before they break through and start making a regular income from affiliate marketing.

But again, if you use recurring income affiliate programs and learn how to use the right marketing techniques, you can save yourself a lot of blood and tears and get results far quicker. It comes down to developing your knowledge, having a growth mindset and “never quit” attitude.

Summary

The affiliate marketing reality I have come to know is very different to what I initially believed affiliate marketing was as a beginner. I thought I could jump in, throw up a website and make millions overnight! How wrong I was. Before I made my first sales online I had written a lot of content and tried many marketing strategies. It didn’t happen straight away for me. The one sale I made was a “one-off” and it didn’t happen again for a long period of time. I jumped from one strategy to another though, and wasted a lot of time trying to do everything on the cheap.

If you’re serious about building an income online with affiliate marketing, it can be done. Just don’t expect to hit a home run straight out of the gate! For a free video training series to learn more about the various affiliate models available, click here.