AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

SEO For Affiliate Websites

Good SEO for affiliate websites can mean the difference between getting affiliate sales and not getting them. With good SEO (search engine optimisation), a website can gain the attention of people using organic search. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo are the main search engines which are used the most – Google being number one for use.

The best outcome for an affiliate website using SEO is to rank highly for the keywords on their site. However, this won’t always work in practice. If many competing websites are targeting the same keywords, they surely can’t all rank on top of Google for them! Only one site can actually rank at the top of Google. The rest will have to settle for lower rankings which get less traffic.

Even a top listing on Google search will have to share the search queries with the second, third and other listings, in addition to any paid adverts which sit above them. But good SEO for affiliate websites can mean the difference between getting free traffic and not getting any traffic at all! So is it worth the effort, or should you just pay for advertising?

SEO For Affiliate Websites – Longer Tail Keywords

Depending on your affiliate niche, you may have more or less competition. In the affiliate marketing niche, it’s very competitive. SEO will have an impact for long tail keywords, but many shorter tail keywords in a competitive niche like affiliate marketing will be hard or impossible to rank for.

Older sites which carry greater authority and thousands of back links will likely grow faster because they get all the traffic. More people will link to these resources so it gets more difficult to compete with the longest runners who have large marketing budgets and a huge following.

Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty can be an answer. Long tail keywords have less competition than the shorter ones. By finding these “gold mines” and creating great content for them, you can use SEO to boost your affiliate marketing website.

SEO For Affiliate Websites – Niche Websites

Niche websites are another option for affiliates too. A niche website is very specific and relates to a specific topic. This website “affiliate marketing mentors” has been built around that specific keyword. Keyword based domain names can give a new website a boost, especially if they are in a less competitive area.

While I can’t outrank the likes of Neil Patel, for affiliate marketing keywords, I can target the low hanging fruit with long tail keywords and keyword based niche websites. You can do the same, whatever niche you are in! See micro niche website for more on this topic.

A niche website can target long tail keywords with its articles and with the domain name alike. With a good content marketing strategy, it can gain some free traffic over time.

Content Marketing & Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress which helps you write SEO friendly content. It helps you put your keywords in image alt tags, headings and throughout your text. SEO is important for affiliates who get their traffic from the search engines. So if search engine marketing is your thing, make sure you are clued up about SEO on your site. The best way to do so is to get a free WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

If content marketing is your affiliate strategy, SEO will have more of an impact on your business. But if you are using paid advertising, and driving traffic to build an email list, don’t spend too much time on SEO. Most new affiliate websites won’t gain much traffic without a lot of work. Blogging as a strategy for affiliate marketing, for example, is a slow process. You’ll need a lot of content on your site and to promote it well before you see much happening.

If you intend to get free traffic to your website, you’ll need to focus on content marketing, link building and other SEO strategies.

Link Building

Top sites which rank on Google have a lot of back links. It’s one of Google’s main algorithm ranking points. Older sites have thousands of back links and are very difficult to compete with.

If you’re new, you can’t compete with these kinds of sites for a top listing of a competitive keyword. Google will “sandbox” new sites anyway for months before they show on their searches. So only the “die hard” bloggers and website builders will have a chance.

Building links to your content is a good idea if you plan on getting free traffic. Aim for longer tail keywords though at first, because these will be easier to get listed for. A link can bring you traffic by itself, even though Google doesn’t rank you highly. Getting links is therefore a good idea for both SEO and direct traffic purposes. Guest posting on another popular blog in your topic niche is the generally cited advice for bloggers. Or you can pay for someone else to do link building for you.

Your website’s link profile is seen by Google (and other search engines) as a ranking factor. But Google also sees who links to you and how long your links have taken to build. An unnatural linking profile will flag up to Google and show them you’re trying to “gear” the system. They can penalise you for this if your links aren’t natural. A natural link profile will include different link text as more websites recognise your content and link to it over time. So be careful if you do your own link building not to make all links the same!

Ideally start with awesome content which is sharable. If your content is good, people will naturally link to it anyway, and the link building will happen naturally over time!

Job Vs Entrepreneurship

Job vs entrepreneurship? Which is better? A job pays a regular salary and there’s no financial commitment involved. You trade your time in a job, and whatever your situation or experience, a job can give you an instant income, if you can find one.

Entrepreneurship on the other hand is a means to escape working for a boss, or having a job. It requires investment and commitment and there’s no guarantee of an income. Entrepreneurship is more risky in that regard, but many people have reached the end of their working tolerance and look to entrepreneurship as a way out of being an employee!

An online business is one of the best ways for employees to become entrepreneurs. Access a free video series to learn more about online business here.

Job Vs Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs invest in their businesses in both time and money. Long before they are profitable, they often work long periods with no financial compensation for doing so. Entrepreneurs create value through some product or service they provide. Affiliates, for example, use marketing strategies to promote other people’s products online. There’s no guarantee of income through entrepreneurship like there is with a job. A job pretty much guarantees you a certain amount of money, for trading a certain amount of your time.

Entrepreneurship can be a way to increase your income through leverage. With a job, the only form of leverage is your time. If you stop working, you stop getting paid. With a business, you can create leverage through systems and by using products and services instead of your time. This can, over time, give you more freedom and ultimately entrepreneurs can generate time and financial freedom without a job or a boss.

Not all would-be entrepreneurs are successful. In the affiliate marketing space, which is a product referral business, many would-be affiliates quit shortly into their entrepreneurial journey. See affiliate marketing failure rate. It takes a huge commitment to become successful as an entrepreneur, but the stakes are high and it can lead to greater choice and freedom.

Trading Time For Money

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-jobs-quit-great-resignation-b1936991.html

The rate of employees quitting their jobs is at an all time high in the US (see above). Trading your time in a job gives you your basic needs, but you’re stuck trading time for money, often at the whim on an unruly boss who has no respect for you.

A recent poll conducted by Gallop showed that 85% of employees dislike their jobs, many citing their boss as the main reason. Once you an in a job, and start living to your means, it can be very difficult to quit. If you have built your life on a job over a longer period of time, you’re often more trapped by it because you become dependant on it. Especially if you have started living beyond your means and accrue debt.

Many employees are looking towards entrepreneurialism as a means of escaping the rat race and becoming their own boss.

Ideal Scenario – Job & Entrepreneurship

The ideal way to begin your entrepreneurial life is while you still have a job. A job gives you the income with which to build your entrepreneurial life. The fastest way to become an entrepreneur is through starting an online business.

Anyone can promote and sell other people’s products online without any product or service of their own. But to do so takes time and effort, and will involve long periods without making any profit. Building a business takes time and effort. Much of the systems of an online business can be automated which means you can set them up to work around existing employment. Work around office hours until you have built up some regular income from your entrepreneurial endeavours.

Once your regular income exceeds that of your job, on a regular and consistent basis, you are in a better position to quit your job and go full time with your business. But you don’t have to! You have the choice. Without a side “gig” you will forever be stuck trading time for money.

Online Business Benefits

One of the main benefits of an online business is that you can work on it around existing employment and build it up over time. An online business can give you a passive income too. By using automation and through the selling of other people’s products and services online, anyone can benefit from an income which can ultimately be automated and scaled to a global audience.

With recurring commission affiliate programs, you can earn an ongoing income from previous sales. This income compounds over time the more products you sell and can eventually replace any existing income you might have. This takes time and effort, and income is never guaranteed. But once you understand how to sell a single product online, you can sell many more. Over time, especially with recurring income affiliate products, this income grows exponentially.

Although an online business can give you the freedom to live anywhere and become financially independent, there’s no guarantees. With a job though, you’re potentially stuck with a limited income which you’ll never escape by trading time for money continually.

Job Vs Entrepreneurship – Summary

A job is a great way to earn money by trading time for it. Entrepreneurship is a great way to become free of a job by using products instead of trading your time for money. Through the use of systems and automation, anyone can use the internet to generate an income over time.

An online business takes time and effort to build and there’s no immediate results. So many online business owners quit because they don’t see anything happening immediately. But entrepreneurship isn’t like a job. You don’t get paid just for turning up. With the business model of affiliate marketing, for example, there’s performance related pay. So unless you actually sell products online you don’t get paid.

The best way to build an online business is while you still have a job to support its growth. Once your online income overtakes that of your job, you’re in a good position to decide whether you want your job or not!

Access a free video series to learn more about online business models. So which is better? Job vs entrepreneurship? You decide!

Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing

There’s many challenges of affiliate marketing you’ll need to overcome even before you make your first sale. Challenges in your beliefs, the products you find, and also your marketing strategy.

When I started out on the affiliate marketing journey, I found many hurdles which stood in the way of making an income online. One of the very first affiliate challenges is in finding your direction. With so many affiliates promoting their offers through their websites and email marketing, it can be daunting to enter the affiliate space. You’re constantly being inundated with email offers, all pushing you in a different direction!

This is the information overwhelm stage. It’s easy to quit at this point because there’s simply too much conflicting information. It’s well worth choosing a training course and sticking with it at this point!

Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Information Overload

Information overload comes to most affiliates at one stage or another. One of the problems with working online is that you determine how much information you put in front of you. If you’re keen, you’ll try and take a lot in, and this can lead to burnout! It’s important to prioritise your time and do one thing at a time.

If you have signed up to a lot of offers, you’ll get a lot of emails in your inbox. This can lead to another problem which is shiny object syndrome! With shiny object syndrome, you jump from one affiliate marketing course to another. I did this for some time before making any progress at all! Have a look at some of the courses I took in my digital profit course review.

I jumped from course to course but they all taught something different, so it was difficult to make any progress. Many courses claimed that earning online was easy too, which didn’t help! So I would leave one strategy for another one, completely abandoning any progress I had made in one direction.

Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Being A Busy Fool

It’s easy to gravitate towards the activities which you are happy doing with affiliate marketing. You can waste an awful lot of time browsing the internet, chatting on social media and not doing the activities which will lead to you making progress.

Even getting stuck in education mode can be limiting. Watching videos and learning can feel like you’re making progress, and you are in a way. But you don’t want to stay here, in constant learning mode. You need to actually apply what you’re learning or you’re wasting your time!

I became a busy fool too! I wasted so much time designing logos and making websites look pretty, meanwhile no-one could find them and I wasn’t making any sales! No traffic = no sales.

Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Traffic

Whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate, you will need to generate traffic. There’s many ways to do this and your choice of traffic generation can have a massive impact on whether your affiliate business is successful or not. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. With a blog, traffic generation will be slow. You’ll need to create a lot of content before you see much in the way of traffic, let alone sales. With paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much faster.

But if you choose the blogging route, you can expect some more challenges. Blogging is a cheap strategy to generate traffic. By turning that traffic into leads, you can more easily convert those leads into sales. This will also depend on the particular products you have chosen to promote. Blogging at first is pretty tough. You can spend a lot of time blogging, without seeing much in the way of results. So your belief needs to be pretty high if you’re going down the blogging route.

Over time, if you stick at it, you should see some traffic come in from your previous blog posts. But this can take months, or years, depending on how regularly you blog and how you promote your content. See also blogger problems.

Traffic & Paid Marketing

If you choose to go down the paid marketing route, it’s a good idea to choose recurring income affiliate programs to promote. High ticket affiliate offers will give you more chance at being profitable too, should you choose the paid route. With low value physical product, being profitable while using paid marketing is much more difficult. Digital products will pay more and you can earn ongoing income from memberships and software type products. So it’s worth choosing carefully the products you decide to promote. See affiliate marketing business models.

Although paid marketing is much more scalable than content marketing, it also requires you to risk capital and test and measure your campaigns. This is another affiliate challenge and you should expect to do some learning here. Most affiliate marketers don’t hit a home run on their first time out. Many of their advertising campaigns simply don’t work. The key to generating an income with affiliate marketing is to expect to do a lot of failed activity first, learn from it, and get better!

That First Sale

Making your first sale as an affiliate marketer is a monumental achievement! Make sure you celebrate small wins. A small win can be getting your first website visitor. It can be setting up an advertising campaign or getting your first lead on your email list. The first sale is usually achieved after a lot of other small wins like these. Keep up your enthusiasm by giving yourself rewards whenever you achieve something of merit.

challenges of affiliate marketing - pareto's principle

Once you’ve achieved your first sale online, congratulate yourself because it’s a massive achievement. Don’t set out to make huge amounts from your affiliate business overnight because you’ll be massively disappointed! Then you’re more likely to quit. The affiliate marketing failure rate is high with around 95% of new affiliates giving up before they get anywhere. But remember you only need to commit to the process and make a decision never to quit to be in the 5% of ones who make it!

Belief In Your Product

One of the challenges of affiliate marketing is the fact that a product might become obsolete. If you’ve spent months or years promoting a product though content generation, this can be a tough one. Your content which now gets traffic points to a product which is no longer available. For this reason, it’s worthwhile finding products and services which have been around for some time and which are going to last.

It’s also worth diversifying your affiliate product portfolio and creating your own email marketing list. With your own content and email list, you can more easily pivot should something change with the products you’re promoting. With a variety of products on offer, you leave yourself less open to this eventuality.

A friend of mine heavily relied on promoting products from Amazon. Amazon recently reduced affiliate commissions and changed their API – (website interface which connects affiliate websites with their products). This caused massive problems for Steve as he had thousands of links to Amazons affiliate products in his blog posts.

For any affiliate product you promote, it’s worth keeping up with changes in their terms and conditions. If they change something and you’re unaware, your old links may no longer work!

Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing -Belief

Belief that your affiliate business will work is a huge challenge, especially for new affiliates. It was for me too. If you’re creating content on a regular basis, with nothing to show in terms of affiliate commissions, it can be much harder to keep going than if you have some results.

Likewise if you’re running a paid marketing campaign, you can spend a large amount of money before you build your list and make a return. This is tough, especially if you’re on a limited budget.

belief versus hesitancy — An affiliate needs a “whatever it takes” attitude and should not have a doubt in their mind!

Before running up such expenses, it’s worth testing your sales funnel with a small budget. Try different advertising campaigns before scaling up. Stick to a low, manageable budget and test and measure cautiously. Although this can be frustrating, it’s much better to manage your spending than to get impatient and over spend, blowing your budget all at once!

Much of this can be helped by choosing a product or service which you deeply believe in. If you’re thinking that the product you promote is a scam, and only promoting it to make money, how do you think your marketing efforts will come across to your subscribers and website visitors! Align yourself with your products and the value they have.

Choose products you believe in and can get behind. Any doubt and scepticism will show in your marketing efforts, either towards your potential customers, or in your marketing mindset and psychology. See affiliate marketing psychology. This can stop you from taking the required action needed to succeed as an affiliate.

For more challenges of affiliate marketing see 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.

Summary

As you can see, there’s a great deal of challenges for an affiliate to overcome if they are to succeed and build an income online. An affiliate needs a “whatever it takes” mentality and any mental reservation and hesitancy can cost them dearly.

Affiliate marketing is a business and it takes time and a lot of effort to get the wheels off the runway. But if you do it right, your efforts can be rewarded over and over again with subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions.

Once you have generated your first sale online, you’re much better armed to know with certainty what can work to make online commissions. You’ll also have a much stronger belief when you are able to make a sale. So this should be the aim of a new affiliate marketer – to make their very first sale online. Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Blogging

What are the advantages and disadvantages of blogging? Whether you are building a business or already own one, blogging can massively increase your internet reach. A blog is a great thing to build on over time to improve your online presence.

But depending on the particular business you are operating, the digital space you intend to reach can be already well saturated. In a competitive business field, you can find it’s very difficult getting traction with your content. Plus, it can be difficult coming up with new blog post ideas. If you’re alone in your business, and create all your own content this can be all the more so.

Disadvantages Of Blogging For Business

There are several disadvantages of blogging for business. For starters blogging is incredibly time consuming. Do you have the time to create blog posts? In the time it takes to create a well thought out blog post, you could have set up an automated advertising campaign which will run forever! A single blog post won’t have the same impact as a paid campaign. Nor will it be as scalable and fast in generating website traffic.

Blog posts don’t always attract an audience straight away either. Google will often “sandbox” content for months on a blog. This means it won’t index and list your content on its free search results listings for months. Even if your content does eventually get listed, it may be way down in the search results at the bottom of page 1, or even on a later page.

advantages and disadvantages of blogging

This means you will need to promote your blog posts as well as writing them, costing you even more time. If you can’t afford to outsource your blogging as a business, you will need to set out time and energy to write them. It can be months before you see the results of your blogging campaigns too. A blog post might well bring in targeted visitors to your website. But you’ll need to write some good quality content to out match existing content on the web. Depending on your particular business niche, and the relative competition, this can be tough. In a more competitive industry, your chances of getting free listings for your main keywords are vastly reduced.

Disadvantages Of Blogging Platforms

While blogging platforms like Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com offer free blogging opportunities, the platforms aren’t well liked with the search engines. So in order to get more visitors to these kinds of platforms you’re going to need to work a whole lot harder with promoting your blog posts.

A blog post on a free platform can look less professional too. With your own domain name, you immediately have more credibility. If you’re a business, you definitely want to get your own domain name and hosting. Imaging visiting two different websites.

One is on a free platform and the other has their own domain name: e.g. www.localplumbers.com and www.localplumbers.weebly.com. The owned domain name is immediately more professional looking. For the sake of a small hosting fee and a cheap domain name which is less than $10 a year, it’s well worth upping your game if you’re in business online!

The advantages of blogging platforms like weebly, hubpages and blogger.com are of course that they are free to use and it’s easy to get started on them. Buying your own domain name and getting hosting takes a little more commitment. But this will be your online “shop front” and it’s well worth getting this right if you intend to be in business for long!

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Blogging – Affiliate Marketing

One of the best advantages of blogging for affiliates is that it’s cheap! Using paid marketing can become costly. When you’re starting out too, you should expect to spend money on advertising just while testing out your campaigns. So if you don’t have a lot of disposable income, this can be risky. Blogging on the other hand is less costly in terms of cash layout. (See also advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing).

Blogging costs next to nothing even with your own domain and hosting. It requires a commitment of time and some creative flair to keep blogging though. Many bloggers will quit because they don’t get the traction they want immediately.

Blogging as your only marketing method is pretty tough. You’ll need to spend several months or even years before you can see a regular income from a blog. There’s tonnes of content online and many other competing bloggers who have been around a lot longer.

Top blogs have lots of content and thousands of back links. This makes it more difficult to get your blog posts seen when you’re starting out. Expect to promote your own blog posts in order to get visitors. Don’t rely on Google to rank your content as it might never happen!

Not Scalable

A blog post can generate you free traffic over time, and many of them can bring in a whole host of new customers very cheaply. However, it takes a long time to build up your “bank” of blog posts and a lot of effort and creativity. Blogging isn’t scalable like paid marketing is. With paid marketing, once you see you are profitable, you can simply increase your marketing budget to grow your business. But with blogging, if a particular piece of content is doing well, it can be hard to replicate this success. Some content will do well and other content will be largely ignored.

On the other hand, once you have built a huge library of content, it can work for you for years to come. As your content grows over time, so does your digital “footprint”. If you craft your content well, to target your perfect customer, this can serve your business for years after you have created the content. See how to know your target market.

Summary

There’s advantages and disadvantages of blogging. As a long term strategy, blogging gives anyone the opportunity to create a digital footprint which they can use to generate income; either through their own business or the affiliate marketing model.

But this takes a lot of time and effort and depending on the niche you are blogging it, it can take months or even years. A competitive niche will be more difficult to get your content seen for than one which has less competing websites. Many bloggers start out with high hopes and quickly give up when they realise just how much effort and time is involved.

Over time though, if you stick at blogging, it can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously. See passive income and affiliate marketing. Blogging can of course be used in addition to other marketing strategies. As a sole marketing strategy, blogging can be tough. But in addition to using other marketing strategies, it can give you an organic traffic stream as a complimentary addition to using paid marketing, email marketing and/or social media marketing.

A regular blogging habit is what you’ll need if blogging is your primary marketing strategy. This can be tough to keep up, especially in the beginning. Make sure you choose a topic you are interested in and/or passionate about. choosing a topic which you’re indifferent to will be much harder!

So those are some advantages and disadvantages of blogging! Can you think of any more? Please comment below with any feedback! Thanks!

Why Building An Email List Is Important

Here’s why building an email list is important, not just for affiliate marketers, but for any business owner. (You can also download this article as a pdf document here: email marketing pdf.) With a website, you can attract traffic to your business. But on a website a visitor will generally only stick around for a few minutes. After that, they are gone, perhaps forever! If you have an offer on your website, which allows visitors to turn into email subscribers, a longer term relationship can be built.

Once someone is on your email list, you can communicate with them for days, weeks, months and even years! On a website, you have less than 10 minutes to make a sale. With an email list you can offer value from your emails over a much monger period of time. If you bring your subscriber a lot of value in your email messages, they are much more likely to get to know, like and trust you.

Why Building An Email List Is Important

Attention is the scarce resource in today’s market place. With hundreds of thousands of websites online, catching someone attention on your website is a short term affair! But if someone signs up to your email list, you have captured their interest (and attention). If you continue to provide useful information through your emails, your subscribers will start to develop more trust in you. Once this happens, they are more likely to make a buying decision. Plus, you extend the time period that this can happen with an email list.

With a digital affiliate product or training of some kind, an email list is all the more important. It’s obvious what physical products are and customers often know if they want a physical product or not. But with a digital product, it can take a little more persuasion to show someone the value in what you are selling.

Customers also take from 6-8 “touch points” in order to make a buying decision. They simply don’t buy from a website straight away. A touch point is where you connect your customer with a product, or through your emails. So from a website, they only get one touch point. But on an email list, they have several. Assuming they open your emails once they have joined your list, they are much more likely to purchase from you than from a single website visit.

Why Building An Email List Is Important

Customers who may otherwise have forgotten about you and your offerings are reminded about you through email marketing campaigns. With an email list, those customers who are most interested in your products/service will be kept informed of any discounts or updates to your offerings. You can also communicate your product’s value more effectively over a longer period of time.

Email lists can grow into the tens of thousands too! With a small email list, you won’t see huge growth in your business. But as your list grows, you should see more of your subscribers making purchases. As an affiliate marketer this is particularly important because in the early days it’s a tough ride! As a new affiliate marketer, building a list is one of the best things you can do for your business and motivation. Many affiliates quit far too early because they don’t get the traction they want. When there’s nothing to see in returns, it’s hard to keep going.

An email list can help compound your efforts over time. As an email list grows past 1000 subscribers, you are likely to see older subscribers taking action. Older subscribers who joined your list months ago, will have received an ongoing email campaign for a lot longer than newer subscribers. If your messaging is congruent with your offer, (and what your subscribers want), this can help massively to grow an affiliate business.

Without an email list as an affiliate you are relying on website traffic alone to close the sales for you. With an email list you have the compounding effect of building longer term relationships with potential customers through email.

Know, Like And Trust

There’s millions of websites on the internet which are trying to sell you something. The most trust worthy sites have become more popular over time. Sites like eBay and Amazon are those which have earned people’s trust because they have been around a long time.

Sellers have reviews which customers can check out before making a purchase. Despite the growing trust in online purchases, the cheap cost and convenience, some customers remain cautious of buying online. This is rightly so because there’s still plenty of unscrupulous scammers after your hard earned money! Unfamiliar websites and products are therefore met with scepticism which can be overcome with the power of email marketing.

Once you start to receive useful information through email marketing, which is helpful and informative, you begin to trust the person sending those messages. With spammy messages who’s only aim is to sell, you’re much more sceptical. So if you design your email marketing messages to be helpful and genuinely offer value, you have more chance of building a longer term relationship with your subscribers. Build first, sell later. Don’t sell first because you will lose your subscribers trust immediately, and they’ll unsubscribe.

Summary

So you should now now why building an email list is important. Whether you are in business for yourself, or have an affiliate business, an email list can help you grow and increase your income by connecting more regularly with more people. As your list grows, you should notice more of your leads are making purchases. Your email messages should be congruent with your offer, of course. So whatever you use as a lead magnet to get them to sign up, should relate to your email messages and the products you sell.

If, after several thousand subscribers you don’t notice an up tick in purchases, there’s something amiss and you should look at your marketing funnel more carefully to see what is wrong. It could be your marketing efforts are targeting the wrong kind of subscriber! See how to know your target market. Or, your messaging might not resonate with your audience for some reason.

For more training and help with growing an affiliate marketing business, including if you’re starting from scratch, check out this free video series.

Drip Campaign Examples

Looking for drip campaign examples? Drip campaigns are designed to lead your potential customers towards your products and services. A good drip campaign will automate the process of nurturing your leads through your funnel. See also lead nurture funnel.

When someone signs up to your email list on your website, they should automatically receive an email follow up campaign which builds trust and offers value. A good campaign will help subscribers understand your product/s and make an informed choice of whether to make a purchase.

Drip campaigns can also be trigged when certain subscribers take specific actions. This makes a campaign more personal to subscribers depending on the actions they take, or don’t take.

For example if someone has signed up to your list, but not watched your free video series, a campaign targeted at those who haven’t interacted yet can start with “hey, you haven’t watched this video yet”! This builds more congruence with your subscribers and can help generate more interaction.

Drip Campaign Examples – Segmenting

Segmenting customers by the actions they have taken is a good way to define a drip campaign. For example, say a customer has cancelled their membership. You can segment all your cancellations so they will receive a follow up campaign to win them back. Here’s a campaign run by Netflix which is designed to showcase Netflix’s offerings through regular emails and win back customers.

Over a 3 month period, should you cancel your Netflix membership, the brand sends out a series of emails showcasing new listings and reminding the customer what they are missing out on! Pretty clever eh! Plus it’s all automated so whenever someone opts of of their membership, Netflix will have set up a “segment” in their email marketing system. All un-subscribers will automatically switch over on to the new segment and receive the re-engagement campaign.

Segmenting By Engagement

Some of your subscribers won’t engage or even open your emails. So you can create a re-engagement campaign directed at those people specifically! Here’s an example of a possible re-engagement campaign you can use to get people on your list to connect:

According to the actions (or lack of actions) taken by your subscribers, you can tailor make email messages to increase engagement. Since an email list costs money to build and maintain, you don’t really want to keep a large list uninterested subscribers. So by talking to your subscribers in a more personal way like this, you can determine who keep on your list, and create more engagement.

You can create segments of subscribers based on their previous actions:

Did they open their initial email
Are they engaged with your follow up campaign
Did they watch your video series or read your ebook?

With each segment, you can communicate a different message which is more personalised according to what your subscribers have done.

Drip Campaign Examples – Your Offer

The offer you use to entice subscribers to join your list is pretty important. Unless your subscriber has a strong motivation to see your emails, they might simply not open them!

Images and a strong benefit driven offer are vital to increase your engagement with subscribers as they join your list.

The use of visuals in this offer makes it immediately appealing. Plus the follow up email reminds subscribers of the unique images on the blog itself.

Time Based Drip Campaigns

If you’ve collected some information from your subscribers, with an online form, you can use this date to send out timely messages. If someone has purchased insurance, for example, insurance companies will often send out an email around the time of year when the initial enquiry came in – even if the customer didn’t purchase! Car insurance is an example of this.

Here’s another example from TopShop using customers date of birth information to re-connect on their birthday!

Limited Time Offers

Black Friday deals and limited time offers are often used in email drip campaigns. This can be useful to reengage customers who have not made a purchase for some time.

Memberships & Cross Promotions

Memberships are great for online businesses because they offer ongoing payments. See recurring income affiliate programs. But members are also much more engaged than subscribers who haven’t purchased anything at all! Here’s an example of how the Dollar Shave Club is cross promoting other products they offer to existing members of their subscription service.

Micro Habits To Change Your Life

What are some micro habits to change your life? A micro habit is a tiny, easily achievable task which is ridiculously easy. Once micro habits are established, and perpetuated over years, they have the power to change your life. To make a dramatic change in your life seems daunting. Many people join a gym in January and set out a tough regime to workout and train regularly.

But by March they quit because they simply can’t sustain the effort they have set for themselves. A micro habit is a single push up a day, for example. Everyone can do a single push up. You can do a single pushup if you get no sleep or wake up with a hangover! That’s what your micro habits should be like – easy to do even on your worst days.

By setting an easily accomplished micro habit, you set the wheels in motion to sustain it more easily. Once in the push up position, it’s also much easier to do 2, or 4 or even 10 pushups, especially when the habit is well established. But initially, you should set it at a crazy easy level, so you maintain it.

Over several months of keeping this up, it will start to feel wrong not to do it. At this stage you know you have mastered the habit. You can start building on it if you like, but your main focus is simply keeping up your micro habit – 1 push up a day!

Micro Habits To Change Your Life

A micro habit won’t change your life overnight. But the idea of a micro habit is to generate a behaviour which will last. Compounded over several years, micro habits can be incredibly powerful. You already have habits which work for you, or against you. What time do you go to bed? When do you get up? These are likely to be habits you have created. Making it a habit to go to bed an hour earlier and get up an hour earlier can change you life.

Taking exercise every day can change your life. In our busy world, health takes a back seat and many find themselves not exercising at all. Medication takes the place of exercise when people become ill (often through lack of exercise!) Exercise has been shown to be more powerful than the best anti-depressant drugs, for example. So exercise is a good place to start if you want to choose micro habits to change your life.

Micro Habits To Change Your Life -Blogging

One of my micro habits is blogging. With a blog, you can set yourself just a single blog article per day, or week. Just write a single post a week and in a year you will have 52 posts. In 10 years you’ll have 520 posts!

I started blog posting several years ago now and it remains as one of my micro habits. At the moment I write about 5 a week. So in a year I’ll have written 260 blog posts – if I keep it at this rate. But when I started, I simply wrote something to get the wheels turning! My blogs now bring in a passive income from the internet through sales which come from my blog articles. See passive income and affiliate marketing.

Generating income from the internet doesn’t happen overnight. But if you make a mini habit out of learning affiliate marketing, over many months or years you can build an income from it which can set you free from a job.

Using Mini Habits To Remove Bad Habits

You already have some micro habits which you maybe don’t want. Eating too much or drinking alcohol perhaps. Or maybe you smoke and would like to quit? A micro habit you already have can be slowly removed using the Micro habits strategy. Instead of smoking 10 cigarettes a day, smoke 9! Make the first step towards your best outcome super easy to achieve and you will be more likely to take and sustain the action required.

Give yourself a difficult objective and you’re much more likely to fall short.

Habit Stacking

Once you have successfully created a micro habit you can stick to, you can add on other similar steps to your mini habit. So for example if your micro habit is one push up a day, after 30-90 days of doing your habit without fail, it will feel wrong to miss it! At this stage you can add something similar to your existing micro habit.

Add on a single sit up, for example. Over time as your micro habit becomes more engrained in your daytime ritual, you will naturally want to increase your repetitions too and add more to it. But keep your micro habit small and simple for those difficult days when you don’t feel like it. That way, you’re more likely to sustain it even in difficult times.

A small daily habit like a single push up won’t be life changing by itself. But the habit sustained over years can be built upon. It will stick with you if you maintain it and over a longer period of time this can be incredibly powerful.

Summary

A micro habit is simply a tiny, easily achievable task you can do right now, today. Rather than trying to change your life with a drastic and massive overhaul, change something small which you can build on over time.

Choose an area of your life which you would like some improvement on. It could be about a relationship, fitness, strength, income or anything. Then decide on a suitable step which you could do every single day. Make the step ridiculously small and almost insignificant. But the step should be easily achieved and you should be able to do it every day without fail – even on your worst days.

Over years, this will create a new habit which is unbreakable. This can be built on and results will come over time simply by maintaining your mini or micro habit.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

What are the advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing? It’s common for marketers to rave on about affiliate marketing because it serves them to do so! “Hey – affiliate marketing is great! Look how much money you can make!” But not everyone succeeds with affiliate marketing.

In fact the affiliate marketing failure rate is quite high at around 95%. That means only 5% of those who attempt affiliate marketing actually go on to make an income or make it their living. However the flip side of this coin is that nearly everyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing, which might explain the drop out rate too.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing

But affiliate marketing is a pretty awesome business model if you can make it work for you. It allows you to work from home, or anywhere, and build up an income around existing work commitments. Not many jobs offer the same versatility. There’s no income cap to affiliate marketing which means it can be incredibly lucrative.

But again, only if you can get it working for you, which many struggle with. Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model which means if you manage to sell products online, you earn income related to your efforts. This is a double edged sword which works for those who are determined enough to make it work, but not for those who aren’t.

If you are one of those self motivated types, who makes it their mission to earn from affiliate marketing, it can be a great living. But if you’re a “dabbler” who is only going to give it a couple of months and “see how it goes”, you may be wasting your time.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Affiliate Marketing – Lifestyle

But I don’t want to be all doom a gloom about affiliate marketing. It’s the best thing I’ve found, and I’ve had a stab at a lot of things, including becoming a stuntman!

I thought being a stuntman would give me the lifestyle I really wanted. But it actually brought a lot of uncertainty; I didn’t get enough work to pay the bills and I had to juggle a number of other part time and temporary jobs around it, which was exhausting. Affiliate marketing was the versatile strategy I needed in those circumstances. Jacking in jobs when the phone rang for stunt work wasn’t a good long term strategy! When the stunt work finished, I was unemployed again and needing an income.

Once I found affiliate marketing I had something to build on alongside my other work. It gave me a way out of the film industry too. One of the best things about affiliate marketing for me is that it has given me more choice about my lifestyle because I’m not stressed about money constantly, as I used to be.

No employment has given the same freedom in terms of working and choosing my own hours as affiliate marketing has. It’s probably one of the best ways for anyone to build an income around existing employment as an escape method!

However..

But it definitely isn’t easy. Sustaining an income from affiliate marketing was one of my biggest struggles. Getting the right information up front is difficult because so many people are telling you what you should do. Affiliate marketing is lucrative, but this also means it’s very competitive.

There’s so many affiliates telling you that their program is best – because they earn every time someone buys it! This means as a beginner it can be overwhelming coming into affiliate marketing. At first you’ll probably subscribe to a number of email lists for information. Knowing which direction to take here can be daunting to say the least.

Even if you choose a path, it’s difficult to sustain the necessary work. Another email can swerve your off to another path. Shiny object syndrome can attack, and you can jump from one course to another with false promises of an easier ride! I did that too! I jumped from course to course, determined to learn how to earn an income online. Here’s a digital profit course review of some of the courses I took.

Even if you’re determined, and work hard, there’s a long uphill struggle before you see any results. Building an email list takes time. Affiliates with 100,000 email subscribers can tell you how much they earn, but not how long it took them to build such a list. When you start you’re starting at zero subscribers. Rich affiliates can show you their earnings too, but not show you their expenses! When some affiliates spend $20k+ a month on advertising, they may even be making a loss but showing earnings of $10k+ a month (to encourage people into their program) – (and not declaring their advertising costs)!

Attitude & Intention

The best way to do affiliate marketing is with a “whatever it takes” approach. Without such an approach you will likely not succeed with it. The long slow hill up towards even making your first sale online is too much for many people who don’t realise that the journey is a long one. But the downhill ride is so much sweeter once you have put in the work. Once things are up and running, you can make money in your sleep.

The automation of the business systems can work for you and affiliate marketing income can replace income from employment. Think about the implications of that! in a job, no matter how hard you work, you’re always going to have to keep showing up to get paid. With affiliate marketing, you can continue to get paid long after you stop working! But initially this is hard to see, especially if you have no results to show for all your hard work.

With recurring income affiliate programs your sales keep earning for you. So once you have made a few sales, you can see a recurring monthly income even if you stop!

Strategies: Fast & Slow, Cheap and Expensive

Depending on the strategy you choose as an affiliate, you could see results showing more or less quickly. With an organic strategy and low value physical products, you could be working much harder for less. But with a high value sales funnel, which pays more, you can build an affiliate business much more quickly and it can be more profitable.

high ticket funnel — The high ticket sales funnel

The paid marketing route is much faster than the cheaper organic marketing route. So depending on your patience levels, (and bank account), you will need to choose a suitable route for you. Blogging as a strategy, for example is for the patient affiliate. If you don’t want to spend the next several months creating content for a tiny trickle of free traffic, go another route!

If you’re stuck in a career and have no time, use paid marketing to build your business more quickly. See fastest legit way to make money online.

Summary

There’s advantages and disadvantages of affiliate marketing. It is performance related which is a pro and a con depending on whether you can make it work for you. It’s incredibly flexible and you can choose how and where you work. But again this can be a problem if you’re not used to being self motivated and self disciplined. The earning potential is uncapped but most people who try affiliate marketing will quit because they earn nothing!

Affiliate marketing should be considered a long term plan, not a get rich quick scheme. With the right mindset and the correct affiliate marketing business model, it can work if you put the work in and keep growing. By using subscription products which pay you recurring income, affiliate marketing can be less of a challenge than by using cheap, low paying products. High ticket affiliate marketing is another consideration for new affiliates. With high ticket programs you can earn substantially more when you make a sale.

An affiliate marketing business is much like a Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese bamboo has a 3-5 year gestation period where nothing breaks the surface of the soil. After this, the tree can grow 90 feet tall in only a few weeks. Before quitting/starting affiliate marketing, consider the Chinese Bamboo analogy.

Autopilot Passive Income

Is it really possible to create an autopilot passive income? In this article I’m going to explain how this is possible and realistic using a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can sell other people’s products and services online. So you don’t even need your own products! Certain products continue paying you long after you have made the sale. Recurring income affiliate programs pay you ongoing commissions for referring sales.

For products which carry membership fees such as training services and software products, the product owner stands to earn from customers who maintain their memberships for a lifetime! With a recurring fee, these customers are worth a lot to product owners. That’s why they pay affiliates recurring commissions too! As an affiliate you only need to refer a sale once to earn a recurring commission. Refer lots of customers and you earn lots of recurring revenue – effectively giving you an autopilot passive income!

Autopilot Passive Income – What’s The Catch?

The catch is you need to learn how to sell these kinds of products. That’s a learning curve but anyone can do it given the time and motivation. Checkout a training resource here. Affiliate marketers use all kinds of tactics to sell their products and services. There’s lots of types of affiliate products too and not all of them will pay recurring commissions. See affiliate marketing commission rates. But if you’re looking to make an autopilot passive income from affiliate marketing, recurring commission products give you the best advantage.

The way in which you make your sales can also be placed on autopilot. Many affiliates will run advertising sending subscribers into their sales funnels. A sales funnel is basically a marketing setup in which products are offered to subscribers through email messages. This process can be automated too and once you have become profitable, this system runs largely on its own. Here’s how it works.

Autopilot Passive Income Through Email Marketing

An online marketer or affiliate, runs an advertising campaign through a marketing platform. They send targeted visitors to a landing page where they collect emails and follow up with email messages.

This whole process is automated, although there is some work setting it up. Get started here. Emails are sent out to subscribers offering certain products and services. When a subscriber buys a product, they are automatically offered more products in the sales funnel.

With a good sales funnel you can earn from multiple products and services:

Subscription products – pay you a recurring income
High ticket affiliate products – pay you larger than average commissions
One time sales – earn a commission for each sale
Combining these three earning strategies can give you the best return

Autopilot Passive Income – Other Strategies

Once your sales funnel is running profitably you can leave it running – potentially forever! As new sales come in, you will earn ongoing commissions for subscription sales you make. With a profitable paid marketing campaign you can also increase your marketing budget and scale up very quickly – reaching more people with products which you offer.

There’s other ways to promote affiliate products too, without using paid marketing. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Blogging, article writing or video marketing can all be done without paying for advertising. This is a much slower route though and takes a lot of time and effort. Whereas the paid route can mean you are making sales much more quickly.

Many affiliates will create a blog which can become a passive source of income over time. As your blog reach grows, you should find you get more and more visitors over time.

If you are selling recurring income affiliate products from your blog, your income will grow exponentially as you make more and more sales. Blogging is quite a slow strategy to generate an income online. But it requires much less investment than other marketing methods.

Summary

Generating an autopilot passive income isn’t only available to people who can invest in the stock market or purchase property. Affiliate marketing offers the opportunity for anyone to learn how to make referral commissions through online content or running paid advertising – sending people to products online.

If those products which you promote carry a recurring commission, it’s all the easier to make a passive income. Affiliate marketing does take some time and effort to generate a single sale online. But once you have learned this skill, you can repeat it again and again. If for each sale you make you earn a recurring commission, this compounds over time.

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

How To Change Subconscious Beliefs

Wondering how to change subconscious beliefs? If you’re looking for this article you have probably realised how powerful your subconscious mind is. It’s far more powerful than your conscious mind and it attracts things according to a consistent world view. So if you’re currently struggling to overcome an aspect of your life, you have probably come up against some unconscious belief which is holding you back.

Subconscious beliefs are powerful because you have built them over a lifetime. Your consistent world view is built on experiences which shaped you. Most of your biggest unconscious jigsaw pieces were adopted in childhood before your conscious reasoning mind developed. You learned about the world much like you learned how to talk – unconsciously.

You may have an unconscious belief about money, love, work, career or relationships. “Life is hard”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, “rich people are greedy”, “men/women are jerks”, “people always let you down” are just ideas. If you recognised any of these as your own, it’s potentially stopping you from achieving the good you desire.

How To Change Subconscious Beliefs

Things you picked up before the age of 10 are the most powerful. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung. Changing your unconscious beliefs isn’t easy. They will have been with you for years and the are under the surface of your conscious attention. But if you are constantly struggling against something, it is likely to be a subconscious success blocker. You just need to know how to remove success blockers.

Becoming more conscious of your ideas, beliefs and attitudes is one way to shed some light on the issues which are holding you back. One way to do this is to notice how you talk, particularly about yourself. What do you say about the things which you are struggling with? How much energy are you giving in your speech and self talk to your problems? How much energy are you giving to their solutions? Have you talked yourself out of happiness and fulfilment?

How To Change Your Subconscious Beliefs

Here’s a powerful exercise which can give you some insight into where your attention is going on a daily basis.

You’ll need a timer and a pen and notepad. The timer should be set for irregular intervals which you can’t predict. Ideally you should know or expect it when your timer goes off, so hourly is not great because it is more predictable. 2.5 hours or something random works well. Set your timer alarm to go off at intervals through the day.

Each time your alert goes off write down these three things:

What were you doing? What were you thinking? Do you want this?

Do this exercise for a week and you will see where your attention is going on a regular basis. Meditation is also a great tool to use to learn more about what your inner dialogue is giving energy to. You might find it is the very issue you want to fix.

How To Change Subconscious Beliefs

Now that you have brought more awareness to your inner dialogue and focus of energy, you can stop giving energy to the things you don’t want. Negative self talk and focusing on your limitations and excuses might be just some of the things which come up for you when doing the above exercises.

You will have likely been telling yourself what you can’t do for years. Any limiting ideas which come up for you in the area you would like to improve in your life should be duly noted. Here’s some examples of limiting beliefs which you might be telling yourself over and over:

It’s easy for them but…
I can’t do that because of…
Relationships are impossible
Life’s a struggle
It’s not easy
If only I’d have had…
Work is meant to be miserable
I’ll never find..
I’ll always be broke
I never have any money
I’m not good enough
etc.

Your subconscious mind is wise and listens to everything you tell it. It is keeping you safe by giving you the life you talk into existence through your ideas and self talk. If you keep on telling the same story, you keep getting the same results. You can’t change something if you are opposed to it in some way.

Changing Your Patterns With Powerful New Suggestions

Every time you tell yourself something you are reinforcing an idea which grows into a belief. Beliefs are powerful because they are the precursor to action. If you don’t believe you can achieve something, you won’t even try it. You therefore create evidence that what you believe is true through your actions, (or inactions) further entrenching your ideas.

Noticing your behaviour, self talk and dialogue is a good first step but you can also choose some new powerful suggestions to replace your old limiting ones. Each time you notice yourself say or think a limiting idea, stop and re examine it. This is a powerful moment to create lasting change.

I am worthy
Money comes easily and effortlessly
I enjoy my work
Yes – I am good enough
I deserve to be happy
I deserve love in my life

Changing long standing ideas and self talk can be a major task, particularly at first. Be gentle with yourself and simply notice. Choose some new positive affirmations to tell yourself instead of the old, limiting ideas which are your habits.

It will take some time and repetition to make new unlimited ideas and mantras your natural default suggestions. You will have put years into reinforcing old, limiting ideas which are going to be deeply routed in your belief system, unconscious mind and life.

So telling yourself everything is hunky dory when it isn’t will be a challenge. You can still be truthful to your feelings without reinforcing your limiting ideas though, so initially just softening your harsh suggestions should be the goal. Over time, you can introduce some opposing beliefs when you are ready.

How To Change Subconscious Beliefs – Repetition & Emotion

Stuart Lichtman’s Cybernetic Transposition uses all areas of the brain to create a “Meta story”. This meta story becomes a subconscious “flag” which you can use to change any area of your life. It’s powerful because it gets you to use all of your senses and repetition to program your subconscious mind to focus on a specific outcome you would like to create.

If there’s an unconscious blocker to your success, it can be overcome through using repetition of a new story which you introduce to your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is indifferent and creates whatever you program it to focus on. When we are unconscious of our thoughts, words, mantras and limiting beliefs, they can stop us from achieving success in many areas.

A meta story is a powerful new idea/story you can introduce to your subconscious mind which replaces your existing limiting ideas. When you focus on a new intention and replace old limiting ideas with new unlimited ideas, changes can happen quite quickly.

Your meta story is a new story you are going to create regarding some success you want to achieve. Through daily repetition, you reinforce the idea to such an extent that you are going to be subconsciously “flagging up” the idea, even when you don’t think about it. Your subconscious mind will work on creating the outcome you choose.

Most people are completely unaware that the things they talk about are limiting their success in life. When a powerful suggestion is repeated continually, you overwrite the old negative and limiting ones because they have no more space! Over time, new suggestions take hold in the subconscious mind and replace the old ones.

Remember though that old beliefs have been built up over long periods of time. So you will need to make daily habits out of repeating new mantras once you have them. Access Stuart Licthman’s book on Cybernetic Transposition here.

Summary

It takes time to change beliefs which have been built up over a number of years. Old ideas will have come from when you were younger than 10 years old and before you developed conscious reasoning.

Notice your self talk, and how you talk about yourself to others. By spending some time on this, you will see a different side to yourself. Just notice at first and pay attention to your self talk – (how you talk to yourself in your head), and how you feel about yourself.

As you do this, you will notice some of your talk is negative and limiting. How does this conversation stack up against what you are struggling to achieve/create? If you’re feeding yourself negative emotions and limiting ideas, does this support your ambitions and goals?

Create some new affirmations which do support what you want to achieve. As you notice old, limiting ideas come up in your consciousness, replace them with your new mantras. Repeat positive affirmations daily and develop a mantra you can use in place when the old ideas come up.

Over time, your new ideas will replace your old ones. But this takes work and you’ll need to repeat your new mantras continually over a long enough time frame. Old beliefs will have had years to develop and you might struggle at first because you are so entrenched in older ideas which shape your world view and keep you “safe”.

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