AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Paradigm Shift Meaning

What is the meaning of a paradigm shift? A paradigm shift is a shift in the belief system or unconscious mind which can bring about lasting change. Unless someone alters their deeply held ideas, they will keep perpetuating the same experiences and outcomes. A paradigm is a belief about the world, or yourself. Most people will struggle to change an element of their life because of an existing paradigm.

For example, if someone wants to lose weight, they join the gym. After a short burst of enthusiasm, the old habits take hold and they stop going. Soon it becomes a huge burden to get to the gym and workout. They give up and fall back into old habits. This is a common experience whether you’re trying to lose weight, make more money or learn something new. The continual thought processes which bring about and perpetuate your self image and beliefs are far stronger than the desire for change. This is why changing a paradigm is one of the most powerful things you can do for lasting change.

Paradigm Shift Meaning – Paradigm Shift Examples

To shift a paradigm can be difficult. As a young child a lot of information is absorbed into the subconscious mind without any conscious awareness. As an adult, we pick and choose what we find acceptable and can filter out those things we don’t believe. But a child doesn’t have this filtering system. So they absorb a lot of unconscious messages from parents and teachers which remain in the subconscious mind for decades, often without their awareness.

These programs can stop you from achieving something difficult, especially if there is a conflict within your belief system. For example, if you have received any negative programming around making money, (which most people have), this can stop you from attaining a financial goal. Your inner paradigm may have a negative belief about money which you picked up from a parent:

“Money doesn’t grow on trees”, “rich people are greedy”, “life is tough”, “making money is hard”, “you must work hard for money” are all examples of negative beliefs surrounding money. Negative behaviours you picked up can also affect your beliefs around money, even if they were unspoken.

If your paradigm around money is “you must work hard for money”, you’ll experience this as a reality because you won’t accept anything else.

Paradigm Shift Meaning – Shifting Your Paradigm

Paradigms are powerful because they operate unconsciously “below the radar”. So if you’ve struggled with something in life, chances are good that it’s because of some unconscious negative belief about yourself or life. If you’re struggling losing weight, for example, shifting your paradigm can be more powerful than running several marathons!

If you see yourself as overweight and lazy, for example, whatever you do consciously in terms of fitness can be easily overcome by a negative self image. The problem with an inner paradigm is that it follows you wherever you go! After the gym, you might fall back towards a bad diet. You might drink heavily and undermine whatever good you have done. Shifting your paradigm from “I’m overweight and lazy” to “I’m an athlete”, for example, can be more powerful than constantly struggling against this internal conflict.

Changing a paradigm which has been embedded since childhood is difficult. You will have had years of perpetuating your beliefs about yourself and constantly reinforced ideas which you repeat in your mind.

“I’m not good enough”, “I’m not worthy”, “Life is tough”, “no-one likes their job”, “It’s a struggle” etc are all negative statements which can solidify a negative paradigm over time. Paradigms are belief systems which can either adversely affect or positively affect your life in some way. To change your paradigm for a more positive one, you need to choose some better beliefs which support your new intention.

Repetition

10 years of repetition of a negative belief will have an impact on your life and well being. It can stop you from living a fulfilling and happy life. To change your old paradigm, you need to replace negative conditioning with new positive statements. “Making money is difficult” for example could be changed for “money comes easily and frequently”. “Work is hard”, could be changed for “I love what I do”. Or “I get paid for being me”.

Of course older repetitions of negative statements will likely have been following you around for many years. So changing them can be tough. You will be inclined to believe your negative statements more than your new, more positive ones. So at first you may resist doing the necessary work to make lasting change. But if you’re serious about changing your paradigms, it’s well worth the effort.

Your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. So if you believe work should be hard, you won’t find enjoyable or satisfying work. If you believe you’re not worthy of a happy life or relationship, you’ll keep sabotaging your outer efforts to make it come about.

Paradigms and Entrepreneurialism

Since this is a site about entrepreneurialism and affiliate marketing, it seems suitable to mention the connections here. With an entrepreneurial endeavour, such as building an online business, there can be all sorts of metal blockages which prevent you from making progress. Many of these can be paradigms which relate to money or work. If you’re an employee attempting to build an online business, old habits and ideas can hold you back. See mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur.

The mindset of an employee, for example, is one which trades time for money. You expect to get paid for the time you put in. In entrepreneurship, it’s different. You don’t get paid for time, but for results. This can explain why so many would-be entrepreneurs quit when they don’t get paid for their time. See affiliate marketing failure rate. They assume that a certain period of work pays a certain amount of money. They have learned this through working a job. But with a business, you don’t get paid for your time. Often entrepreneurs put in months without even getting paid for it.

This attitude may not be apparent to the business owner, and might just add to their frustration. After several months of hard work and nothing to show for it, they quit because they can’t envisage their business working. They remain at their old job and this further entrenches their ideas about how they must “work hard for money”. Although this belief may be true for them, it may not support a new self image as an entrepreneur, but rather reinforces their old self image as someone who trades time for money (and works hard).

Paradigm Shift Meaning – Summary

The meaning of paradigm shift is to alter your unconscious belief systems. Beliefs, self image and world views are picked up at childhood and these ideas are entrenched into the subconscious mind. They control behaviour and when attempting something new, can stand in the way of progress. For example, if you’re attempting to lose weight, but you see yourself as fat and lazy, your controlling paradigm (belief) will have more power than your attempts on the “outside” to lose weight and stay in shape. You give up and fall back to old habits.

By changing your paradigm, through conscious repetition of a new idea, in addition to outward actions, you can create far greater and more lasting changes than by outward actions alone. Seeing yourself as an athlete, for example, will create additional behaviours which align with this new belief. Your actions will include physical activities and improved diet. You won’t slob out or fall into old unconscious behaviour patterns because that’s simply not what an “athlete” would do!

But if you continue to perpetuate an old self image, you’ll continue to sabotage your efforts by continually reinforcing this idea of your self.

Why Do Affiliate Marketers Fail?

Why do affiliate marketers fail? Affiliate marketers fail for a number of reasons. Often they go in to affiliate marketing with unrealistic expectations. Barriers to entry with affiliate marketing are incredibly low which means nearly anyone can “give it a go”. This “give it a go” mentality is another reason many affiliates fail. There’s a whole host of hurdles and problems which affiliates will encounter too. Affiliates need to learn how to manage their time, avoid distractions and focus on the next step in front of them. This can be difficult, especially without a clear path which they can tread.

“Shiny object syndrome” is often cited as another reason affiliates fail. With all the affiliate products and courses available, each one promising more than the last, it can be easy to jump from course to course without making any progress. Planning and strategising is important in affiliate marketing. Without coaching and mentoring, it can be easy to become demoralised and quit. If you lack belief in building an affiliate business this will almost always lead to quitting.

Many courses can exaggerate the ease with which you can earn through affiliate marketing. This, of course, sells more of the courses but leaves new affiliates with unrealistic expectations that affiliate is easy. Why is affiliate marketing so hard? Like any business, building it requires a lot of hard work and consistency. If you are from an employee background, expectations and habits can work against you. See mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur.

Why Do Affiliate Marketers Fail? Employee/Entrepreneur Mindset

Affiliates come from all backgrounds and often with no business experience. In an job, you get paid for turning up and putting in a number of hours. With affiliate marketing you only get paid according to your performance. So there’s a period if time when you’re working on your business without seeing any tangible results in terms of income. This can be difficult, especially if you are used to trading time for money.

A business owner knows there’s a lot of work to put in before you can benefit from its success. But from an employee perspective, if you’ve put in several months and there’s nothing to see, you can assume that this means the business itself is flawed in some way. This can affect your belief in what you’re doing and when happens, there’s little drive to carry on.

Entrepreneurs have different skills to employees too. They are motivated differently. They know to feed their beliefs and keep their motivation high in order to succeed. This is a mindset skill which employees seldom have. Setting goals, building your beliefs with mantras and connecting with other like minded individuals is important for success with a business too. If you’re surrounded with naysayers who don’t believe in what you’re doing, it’s so much easier to quit.

Why Do Affiliate Marketers Fail – Quitting

Most affiliate marketers fail because they quit. Quitting is the number one reason for failure! So to ensure success as an affiliate you need to commit to a journey of consistent improvement. If you see affiliate marketing as a quick fix, it will seldom work for you. But if you commit to it, no matter what happens and bring an attitude of “whatever it takes”, you’re much more likely to succeed, however long it takes.

If you say you’ll give it six months, or “give it a go”, you’ve already decided to quit! The long term affiliates are those who succeed with it. Seldom can someone become an overnight success with affiliate marketing without putting in the time and effort for many months or years beforehand.

The Valley of disappointment – from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits

In the image above, James Clear shows the “valley of disappointment” as the gap between what we expect and the reality. This is a good representation for affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing there’s a long learning curve where nothing much happens. It’s a growth phase where you’re learning and growing. Once you start applying your knowledge it will take some time before you see the results.

What we expect to happen is a long way from what actually happens, depending on the action steps we take. But in many cases, this period of hard work with little to show is too much.

The Chinese Bamboo Analogy

I use this analogy a lot because it’s a useful way to show why many affiliates fail. The Chinese Bamboo tree has a gestation period of 4-5 years before anything shows above the ground. Someone who doesn’t know this will likely assume the plant is dead, and throw it away! That would be a shame because the bamboo tree will grow 90 feet in 4-5 weeks!

The same can be said with affiliate marketing. The initial “gestation period” can be anything from several months to several years, depending on your marketing strategy. But once you break through and start making sales online, you can repeat this over and over again with very little effort. Automation can allow you to make sales in your sleep and you can completely replace your income. This is the outcome so many affiliates want. But very few are prepared to keep going in the face of so much adversity.

Help & Support

Most new affiliates go it alone. They don’t change their circle of influence or get the help they really need. Look around you at your closest 10 friends. You are the average of your closest friends in many respects. Not many people are surrounded by internet entrepreneurs. More likely you are surrounded by people who would want to talk you out of trying such a thing!

Going it alone with affiliate marketing, while being surrounded by employees trying to talk you out of it is incredibly difficult. Your friends can pick holes if your online efforts and attempt to derail your journey. They often mean well, but this can be a major problem.

Your chances of succeeding is vastly improved by joining an online mentorship program and getting help and support. Coaches can help you with mindsets, setting goals and staying focused. Many drop out because they assume affiliate marketing is an easy thing. They don’t get the help they need or commit to the journey.

For more information on affiliate marketing, and to join a community and get help and support, access the free video series by clicking on the image below.

Affiliate Marketing Without Social Media

It is possible to do affiliate marketing without social media. However, if you exclude a potential source of customers, you’re giving yourself a handicap. People also search for affiliate marketing without a website, and how to promote affiliate links without a website, for example. I’ve also had people ask whether they can do affiliate marketing without a computer or a laptop; just on their smart phone! Personally, I don’t think this gives you much hope if you plan on building a business just with a smart phone! But where there’s a will, there’s most definitely always a way!

But affiliate marketing without social media can definitely be done. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and if you don’t use social media, you can still build an online presence in many other ways:

Blogging – on a website or free blog platform
V’logging – video blogging
Email marketing – build a email list
Paid marketing platforms: YouTube, Adwords, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, Linkedin

I know Facebook, Linkedin and YouTube are technically social media platforms, but they are also great marketing platforms for affiliate marketing. But if you’re determined not to use social media, you can use Adwords and Bing marketing platforms for your advertising.

Affiliate Marketing Without Social Media

If you’re dead against social media, your best bet for success with affiliate marketing is through building an email list. Most affiliate marketers build an email list and then provide their subscribers with information about their chosen topic. They also promote affiliate products to their subscribers. As your list grows, your income does too.

To build an email list in the quickest possible time typically requires you to use an advertising platform and pay for traffic. Adwords is often where many affiliates start out and you can set up adverts to show for specific keywords. For years I built an email list mostly through blogging, although this is a slower strategy than using paid marketing. Either way, you can avoid social media platforms using either of these strategies.

There’s many other ways to generate an income from affiliate marketing without using social media too. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

The Six Figure Funnel

One of the fastest ways to build an affiliate marketing business is through the use of a high ticket affiliate funnel. Most affiliate products only pay small amounts – see affiliate marketing commission rates. Some products will even only pay 1% commission! But with higher valued digital products you can make far more for an individual sale. With recurring income affiliate programs you can make an ongoing income from each sale.

With a sales funnel which contains both high ticket affiliate programs and recurring income products, you can earn far more for each subscriber on your email list than for a less profitable funnel.

This kind of funnel is the best kind if you want to build an affiliate business quickly too. It allows you to more easily use paid marketing to build your list. With smaller value products, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing strategies. Often low value physical affiliate products leave so little for profit than the only viable strategy is through free marketing.

Stuart explains three affiliate business models: “one time”, “Subscription” and “High Ticket” products in this free video series.

Affiliate Marketing Without Social Media -SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO or search engine optimisation is another way to build an affiliate business without using social media platforms. This can be done through creating websites and putting out content. This website has been built on a keyword “affiliate marketing mentors” specifically for SEO purposes. This is known as a niche website. Niche websites are built around specific keywords so that they can rank on Google, and other search engines, and get free traffic.

Although social media platforms can help with SEO, they’re not entirely necessary. You can build a website with the sole purpose of getting free traffic from your SEO. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic for more on this.

To do this, first identify an untapped niche, or sub niche in which to build your site. It should get monthly searches but not be too competitive. Use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords within your niche. Then compare the competition through doing a search on Google. See also micro niche website for more on this strategy.

Affiliate Marketing Without Social Media

As you can see there’s plenty of strategies to do affiliate marketing without using social media. There’s also several ways you can use social media too. So if you have an aversion to a social media strategy, consider using them in another way. Paid marketing can be used with social media which is a different strategy than the many free social media strategies which are available.

Consider also that an aversion to using something in your affiliate business can be a blockage to your success. Social media can be a great cheap way to build an affiliate business, especially if you’re on a tight budget. It can help with your SEO if you’re building content and using content marketing as your main strategy. Various plugins can help you automate content marketing through social media too, which means you still don’t need to spend time on social platforms if that’s not your bag! See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

But if your aversion to social media is strong I get it, social media can be a drain and if you’re not into it, it’s the last place you want to be. Your best bet is to find a strategy using paid marketing and building an email list.

Access a step by step training course which helps you set up a high ticket marketing funnel and includes pre-built emails for your list.

How To Promote Affiliate Links Without A Website

Wondering how to promote affiliate links without a website? There’s several ways you can do this and it’s worth considering getting a website too for a number of reasons. A website is a cheap way to create a “digital property” of your own where you can promote products.

You can of course use free blog platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com to do the same. But these platforms can limit your functionality and ability to rank content freely on Google and other search engines. Whereas your own website shows a greater authority when it comes to getting free traffic.

How To Promote Affiliate Links Without A Website – Social Media Profile

But if you decide not to have your own website, there’s loads of options too. Social media is a good starting point and anyone can use their Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or any other social media platform to promote affiliate links in their bio and profile. The more people who see your profile, the greater your chances of making sales through using this method. There’s a few strategies you can use alongside this method in order to generate more footfall to your social media profile.

See unpaid social media marketing for a marketing strategy using social media. Of course if you don’t use your social media platform much, an affiliate link in your profile won’t have much success in gaining clicks. So ideally you should use some kind of social media marketing strategy to bring people to your profile.

How To Promote Affiliate Links Without A Website – Cloaked/Forwarded Links

A spammy looking affiliate link looks bad, especially if there’s no context behind the purpose of clicking on it! A good way to disguise a long, messy affiliate link is to either use a link shortening site such as Bit.ly, Tinyurl.com etc, or purchase a domain name which is meaningful for your product.

Here’s what a long, messy affiliate link can look like:

https://bd97cblo44apkz9opcnj12yy5o.hop.clickbank.net/

The same link through a link shortener is https://bit.ly/3954f7k, which is much nicer looking. For an even better looking link, purchase a domain name which gives some content to the product. This particular affiliate link is about learning how to sing.

So a domain name such as learntosing.com would be perfect. Once you have purchased a domain name, (I use namecheap.com to purchase domain names for around $10), forward your domain name to your affiliate link. Then use your shiny new domain name for your advertising rather than a messy looking affiliate link.

A good domain name will encapsulate the purpose of your product and it’s far more likely someone will click on it if the product is a good match for them. With a long messy looking affiliate link, there’s less reason for someone to click because they don’t associate it with a particular outcome. Learntosing.com meets a particular need; someone who wants to learn to sing! The original affiliate link: https://bd97cblo44apkz9opcnj12yy5o.hop.clickbank.net/ has little meaning beyond the content with which you present it.

How To Promote Affiliate Links Without A Website – Email Signature

Another clever strategy I found is using your default email signature setting to link to your affiliate product. This will look much more professional if you’ve done the above step and bought a suitable domain name too.

Most email services will allow you to set up a default email signature with a link in it. When you send out an email, your signature and link, and anything you want is automatically included at the bottom of your email. This strategy is great and has made me several sales. What’s great about it is that it only takes a few minutes to set up and once done it’s there forever!

In Gmail, go to the cog in the top right of your email account and click on see all settings. Scroll down until you see email signature and enter your details into the box. Click on save and it’s all done!

Solo Ads

Solo ads are another strategy you can use without a website. With solo ads you pay for your message to be sent out to someone else’s email list. Your message and link is the only thing being sent out in that particular email message. Solo ad sellers build huge email lists and then charge for you to benefit from their audience.

Be careful with solo ads because often you don’t know the background of any given email list. Ideally choose a list provider with lots of good feedback and a list which is suitable for your particular product. For example, it’s a bad idea to advertise Yoga courses to an email list built around online businesses or affiliate marketing.

The best way to approach solo ads is to communicate with the owner before making a decision. Find out:

Do they stand behind their traffic?
Are they responsive?
Do they seem easy to work with?
Do you trust them?
Do you feel good about working with the list owner?
Is their traffic suitable for your affiliate offer?

If you answer no to any of these questions, find another list owner.

BuySellAds – Purchase Advertising On Owners Websites

BuySellAds.com is a website where you can connect to website owners who already get thousands of visitors to their sites every day. So rather than building your own website and spending months or years building content to get traffic, you can immediately benefit from the traffic of others.

Of course you pay for this service but it’s a way around having to get your own website. You pay to show advertising on websites which offer a suitable audience for your particular affiliate product/s. You’ll need to test and measure your advertising to know whether it is going to be profitable. Over time though, paid advertising is good because it offers a way to scale up your business when you are regularly making a profit from running an advert.

YouTube – Review Strategy

Although there are several YouTube strategies you can use, including paid marketing, reviewing affiliate products and posting your videos is a solid, well used one. Here’s the basic strategy:

Find an affiliate product you like and purchase it
Create a review video and upload to YouTube
Use your affiliate link in the description under the video
Use suitable keywords within title and description
Rinse and repeat for many products

Reviews are a good affiliate strategy across the board, whether you use written word or video. With a review, you are targeting people who are looking specifically at a certain product, or type of product. A review is often the last thing someone checks out before making a buying decision. So if you can get traffic to your reviews, the visitor is likely to use your affiliate link to make their purchase.

Free Blogging Websites

Free blogging sites such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com and Weebly.com all offer the ability to create some content and post your affiliate links. Some free blog writing sites have certain restrictions on certain affiliate links but they are often allowed if you choose to go this route. Hubpages.com was a site I started out with and I had one of my first affiliate sales from a review post I put on the site.

Although Google, (and other search engines) often downgrade free blog content, it can be a good place to start, and it’s free!

Ebooks

Writing your own ebook is an other great strategy for affiliate marketers. You can promote your ebooks on various platforms including those mentioned in this article. An ebook is great if you don’t have a website because you can place your affiliate links within the book itself.

A good strategy to use with ebooks is to write a book which connects your audience to your affiliate product in some way. You can even sell your ebook, although many affiliates give them away. Ideally use an ebook as a list building tool and also have your affiliate links within the book too. So you have two strategies to earn from them

Email List

Most website owners will also have an email list. Without a website, you can build an email list if you have access to a landing page builder software. A landing page is basically a single page website which allows visitor to opt in to your email list. If you don’t want a website, but want to build an affiliate business, it’s well worth having a landing page where you can collect subscribers information and follow up with email marketing messages.

An email list is one of the most important things you can build as an affiliate marketer. It lets you build a huge list of subscribers and promote your affiliate links to them via email.

For more on this topic see also:

Where to promote affiliate links and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Targeted Web Traffic

Targeted web traffic is massively important for affiliate marketing. Without good targeting, your visitors can arrive on your site with no great interest in what you’re selling. Un-targeted website traffic is a little like having random visitors arrive on your website.

But if your content is drawing in the right visitors to your site, you can expect to do much better with your leads and sales. The right visitors are massively interested in what you’re selling. Your content therefore should be a good match for the kind of people you want to attract to your products. Affiliates should get to know their customer avatar to help them create the right content for their chosen affiliate products.

Targeted Web Traffic – Customer Avatar

It sounds fairly logical that your content should reflect your product/s in some way and vice versa. But it can be easy to make this mistake, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. When I started out online I assumed everyone would want to buy what I was selling. I had websites cross promoting products which had nothing in common with the website content. This is a big mistake; someone visiting a website to purchase flower delivery, won’t be interested in an online business, for example.

So if you have an online business affiliate banner on an unrelated website, it’s going to be much more difficult to sell from. Remember the internet is an information gathering tool and most people don’t buy from websites anyway. A small percentage of your website visitors will take some action on your site such as sign up to your email list, or purchase a product. The rest are looking for information and will likely leave without taking any action.

Knowing your customer “avatar” is a good first step towards creating the right content to attract the perfect customer. See also how to know your target market.

Targeted Web Traffic – Knowing Your Audience

According to your product or service, you’ll want to attract the kind of person who will be a loyal customer for decades! This means knowing them really well. A DIY shop, for example, might have many customers. But most of those customers will likely fall into a more specific category.

For example, DIY’er are more likely to be older. So perhaps they are over 30 years old. With a local store, there will also be a geographical radius where shoppers will come from. Online businesses are different of course but location can still be a factor. With an online business, certain countries are more likely to better than others for your perfect customer.

Knowing your perfect customer will help you understand how to get more out of your website. To create targeted web traffic, you need to know your customers. Otherwise you can spend a fortune on wasted advertising or years on the wrong kind of content. Ideally find out as much as possible about your customer avatar:

Age
Location
Interests
Income
Family
Where they hang out online
Etc.

Targeted Web Traffic – Marketing

The fastest way to attract targeted web traffic is through using a paid marketing platform. There are many of these but Google Adwords offers a good place to start. There’s also Bing and Yahoo but Google is the main one. Head over to Google’s keyword planner and type in your main seed keyword. This will be the main focus or topic of your website and product/service. So if you’re selling car exhausts, your keyword will be “car exhaust”.

You can create an advert on Google Adwords in a few simple steps which the platform will talk you through. You can also set your marketing budget at a price point you can easily afford.

Use Google’s keyword planner to find those keywords which are most suitable for your business. You don’t want your advert to show oon those keywords which attract the wrong kind of person. For example, any keyword which contains the word “free” might indicate the searcher isn’t likely to become a customer.

So you can add the term “free” to your list of keywords you don’t want your advert to show for. This can save you heaps of cash! Again, the more you know about your perfect customer, the more you can target them with the right kind of advertising. Wasting money on bad performing keywords and locations can be more easily avoided when you know your customer!

There’s many platforms you can use with paid marketing to attract more people to your website. Here’s a few others:

Facebook
Linkedin
YouTube
Bing
Adwords
Yahoo

Ideally choose one platform and learn how to use it profitably before moving on to another.

Organic or Free Traffic

Organic traffic is much more difficult to obtain. You can build a website around your main keywords to give you a helping hand. But ultimately Google has the final say on whether your website ranks for your main keywords. Creating content on your site can lead to more free traffic and sales. Again, use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords which are suitable for attracting the right kind of person to your website.

Short keyword phrases on the planner will have many more searches than their longer term derivatives. However, these keywords are generally much more difficult to rank for in the organic search results. So it’s a good idea to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. (SEO = search engine optimisation).

By finding the long tail keywords which have less competition, and creating content for them, you can more easily find free traffic from the search engines. This isn’t guaranteed however and you’ll need to create a lot of content in order to make this strategy work for you. Download my ebook “Niche Blogging For Profit” for more on this strategy.

Internet Residual Income

There’s a few ways you can earn an internet residual income. Many internet business owners use a model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you can refer customers to other people’s products and services online. Affiliates link to products from websites, adverts, videos and emails. When someone purchases a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a percentage of the sale.

To earn a residual income from affiliate marketing you can:

Automate sales using online systems – e.g. advertising platforms, email marketing, websites and content
Use recurring income affiliate programs – earn ongoing income from previous sales
Create content which draws visitors to products through websites, YouTube channels and/or social media accounts

Internet Residual Income – Adsense

Google’s Adsense program is a program used by content creators which can help them earn internet residual income. There’s other similar programs but Adsense is the most well known. With Adsense, website owners place adverts on their content. When visitors click on those adverts, the website owner earns a small commission. Since advertising clicks can happen constantly and websites work 24 hours a day, this means a passive residual income can be earned through content creation.

adsense residuals from advertising revenue

YouTube too is another popular platform which can use this same strategy. By joining YouTube and Adsense, or using the YouTube partner program, content creators can create a passive income from their content. See how to earn money on YouTube.

Getting paid a passive income for advertising clicks means creating a lot of content. Since each click on an advert is only worth a small amount, you’ll need a lot of website or YouTube channel traffic in order for this to be profitable.

Internet Residual Income: Email Marketing

One of the fastest ways to generate an income from the internet is through email marketing. With email marketing, you build an email list and sell affiliate products to subscribers. Building an email list quickly can be done through using paid advertising.

As your email list grows you can more easily sell products in larger numbers. A small list of less than 100 subscribers isn’t likely to earn you a great deal. However, once your list grows beyond 10,000 subscribers and you have built a relationship with your list, you should be able to promote products and earn a good living.

Because email marketing can be automated, this can be a great way to earn an internet residual income. An email list can be built over a long time frame too more cheaply. This can be done through content creation. Although this is much slower than using paid marketing to build a list, it can be more appropriate depending on the affiliate products you are promoting.

High Ticket Products

If you’re paying to advertise and building an email list quickly, you’ll need a good high value product range in order to make a profit. Not all affiliate products are equal and some pay more than others. For example, a typical product from Amazon might only pay you between 1% and 11% commission.

But a digital product might pay you 40-50% commission. High ticket products are of much larger value than standard products and will pay more too. Plus you can also use those products which offer ongoing payments such as membership products and subscriptions. See recurring income affiliate programs.

High ticket sales are one-off commissions so they are not residual as such. However a good high ticket funnel can allow you to use paid marketing and more easily recoup your expenditure. If you also have recurring income products in your funnel, this can allow you to build a residual income more quickly online.

Ebooks For Residual Income

You can also use ebooks to build a residual income online. You can sell your own ebook or use it as a tool to build your email list. Then, promote affiliate products through your email list. An ebook is a good lead magnet and many people will sign up to your email list if you offer a useful ebook as a lead magnet. See ebook lead magnet.

Once you have created an ebook, you can use it for years to generate leads for an affiliate business. Once on your email list, you can automate emails to be sent out on a regular basis. These emails should help and inform your list as to the products and services which can help them the most. If you generate a sale from your affiliate recommendations, you earn a commission based on the sale.

Conclusion

There’s several ways to use the internet to generate a residual income. The most popular are:

Affiliate marketing – promoting other people’s products and services online
Advertising – Google’s Adsense program allows content creators to monetise their content and earn through visitor clicks.

To generate a passive income from these strategies involves building systems and using automation to generate sales or advertising clicks. For more information on this click the image below to access a free video series.

Is Clickbank Legit?

Is Clickbank legit? Yes Clickbank is a legitimate company which has been in business for over 20 years. It provides a service for product owners and marketers alike, and has built up a good reputation for doing so. Clickbank has many reputable products on its site which offer huge value.

Some of the products it offers however come across as trashy and spammy, which can make the site seem less than reputable. But don’t let these products put you off Clickbank. It’s is a great place if you have a product of your own which you want to promote, or if you want to promote a product as an affiliate marketer.

Is Clickbank Legit?

Many new affiliate marketers get their first taste of affiliate marketing through Clickbank. It’s a good place to start and Clickbank offers many courses to help newbie affiliates. I joined a few courses through Clickbank when starting out as an affiliate too.

One of the benefits of Clickbank products to affiliates is that they offer higher levels of commission than most physical products you’ll find online. Amazon is another typical starting point for new affiliate marketers. Although Amazon has a great inventory of products to offer affiliates, its levels of commissions are far lower than Clickbank. Typically Amazon offers 1-11% commission on its products whereas Clickbank offers between 20% and 40% as standard.

That’s great when you start making sales, but for beginners making sales is the toughest part of being an affiliate. No sales equals no commissions. So it doesn’t matter the affiliate commission rate if you’re not able to sell anything as an affiliate. This frustration is common among new affiliates and it can lead you to think that the platform you’re using is not legit.

Is Clickbank Legit? Digital Vs. Physical

Whether you choose to promote digital products via Clickbank or physical products will often come down to your marketing strategy. If you already have a website, for example, you’ll want to find something suitable to offer your target audience. The best product won’t sell to the wrong audience no matter how much you promote it, and there’s a lot involved in being a successful affiliate marketer.

Clickbank is a great option for those with existing websites who have an audience in mind. There’s a huge variety of products to choose from. But selling digital products can be a lot more tricky than selling their physical counterparts. Physical products for example are tangible. You know what you’re getting.

With a digital product, you don’t necessarily know the value of the product until you get it. With the many spammy products on Clickbank, you take your chances trying to sell something which isn’t proven, especially if you’re a new affiliate just finding your feet. So it’s a good idea to investigate your product choice before promoting it, and even purchase and use it yourself. Getting to know your target audience is also a valuable part of becoming successful as an affiliate marketer.

Struggling With Your Affiliate Business?

Many new affiliates will struggle whatever product or service they are promoting. This can lead them to wonder whether “is affiliate marketing legit?”. The challenge of selling a product online from a standing start is huge, and shouldn’t be underestimated. Whatever platform you’re using, (whether it’s Clickbank, Amazon, eBay, Click2sell or JVZoo etc.), it’s also your marketing strategy which stands in the way of your success, and of course your understanding of the affiliate marketing business model which you’re using.

With low value products like which you’d find on Amazon, for example, you’ll need to generate traffic through free or cheap marketing strategies. With high ticket affiliate products, it’s much easier to use paid marketing and turn a profit. Some Clickbank products offer recurring income and these kinds of products are good to use. Each sale of a recurring income product gives you an income and this compounds over time. This makes the use of paid marketing much more attainable. See Clickbank secrets pdf.

Is Clickbank Worth It?

So is Clickbank worth it? Clickbank offers a huge variety of valuable digital products for which you can earn good commissions. But you still need to sell the products in order to earn the commissions. If you’re a vendor (owner of a product), Clickbank can be a great place to get it out to affiliates who will promote it for you.

If you’re an affiliate, ideally find a good valuable product which you have some affinity with. Learn how to promote it using a strategy which you’re aligned with and which works for you.

To learn more about affiliate marketing and and access training and support, join a mentors program by clicking on the image below.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme? Nope! Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model in which “affiliates” refer customers to products on the internet. If someone purchases a product through someone’s unique affiliate link, they earn a commission for referring the sale. Affiliate marketing is therefore referral based marketing. Anyone can learn to become an affiliate to earn an income from the internet. You don’t need your own products or services to earn from affiliate marketing, which is what makes it attractive to so many people.

A pyramid scheme is something different. With a pyramid scheme, there is usually an incentive to recruit more people with the promise of income, often without a product or service involved. MLM or multi-level marketing businesses are often confused with pyramid schemes too, even though many are legitimate. With multi-level marketing, you can build a team of sales people within your organisation and earn income from the sales they make.

Affiliate marketing though isn’t a pyramid scheme or MLM (multi-level marketing) either. With affiliate marketing you only get paid when you successfully refer a sale online. So for the business or product owner, it’s a useful business model in which performance related pay works extremely well. It’s far cheaper than advertising in many cases for the business owner. For affiliates it’s a good business model too when the affiliate starts earning. It means they can work from anywhere and build profitable businesses without any products or services of their own to sell.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

With affiliate marketing you only get paid when you make a sale. Unless you manage this, you don’t earn a thing! Many affiliates struggle to make it work for them and therefore consider it a “scam”. For this reason it’s a good idea to get the right training and help if you’re considering building an affiliate business. The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high with over 90% of new affiliates giving up.

For the business owners (who own the products) it’s a great deal. Rather than pay continually for expensive advertising and marketing, they can pay the affiliate only when a sale is made! For this reason affiliate marketing will always be worth doing for some. For the affiliates themselves it can be a challenge to make any money. But for the few who refuse to give up there are great rewards.

Affiliate marketers who are successful can work from anywhere and earn a potentially unlimited income. By using websites and automated systems, sales can be generated worldwide on complete autopilot. This outcome is often touted by online guru’s trying to make sales of their courses! The ease of entry and promise of ease of earnings means many can become affiliates without huge investment. This, in part, can explain the high drop out rate of new affiliates trying to earn money online.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?

In order to become successful as an affiliate, you need to have a strong desire to succeed. Affiliate marketing is not like a job where you earn a wage for showing up. Your income as an affiliate is performance related. At first, all affiliates start from earning nothing! Many quit when they don’t see any results. Those who persevere often have a strong reason for doing so and refuse to quit. If you’re not committed to the journey of continual learning and improvement within your affiliate business, it can be easier to drop out.

Affiliate marketing is definitely not easy. But once you start to earn with affiliate marketing, you can create a passive income. This can be done through automation and recurring income from subscription affiliate programs. Before this can happen though there’s usually a period of doubt, fear procrastination and uncertainty. Learning anything new can be daunting, and affiliate marketing is no exception. It can be useful to remind yourself of your long term goals for your affiliate business and your “why?” for building an affiliate business.

Ultimately an affiliate business can replace an existing income and this is many people’s reason for learning affiliate marketing. But this doesn’t happen overnight and successful affiliates have usually worked for many months or sometimes even years before they can be free of their jobs.

Affiliate Marketing Fast Track

The fast track route to earn with affiliate marketing is through using a high value product range and paid marketing. With paid marketing you can build a list of subscribers very quickly. Then, you can offer products and services to your subscribers. As your list grows in numbers, you’ll see more and more sales coming through if you do it right.

This requires investment of both time and money. To recoup your advertising expenditure, you’ll need a number of high ticket affiliate products to sell. Not all affiliate products pay out equally. Physical products for example usually pay between 1% and 11% commission. Digital products can pay a lot more – even up to 100% commission in some cases but more often between 30% and 40%. See affiliate marketing commission rates.

Affiliate Marketing Longer (But Cheaper) Route

The fast track route isn’t right for every affiliate marketer. It’s the best option for someone who wants to quickly escape a career and can afford to spend on product ranges and paid advertising. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing though. Some affiliates will choose a longer path which is slower but suits them better. Blogging and content creation is another option for affiliates. This can take a lot longer but is far cheaper. Bloggers create content (like this article) and build up an audience over time. From their websites they offer products and services and often they also build an email list too.

Over time and with consistent effort, content creators build a vast resource of online content. This acts as a “digital footprint” which brings in leads and sales from a website or landing page which they own. Although this is a much longer term strategy than building an email list with paid marketing, it suits many affiliates to go this route because they have the time but not necessarily the money to use paid marketing.

Is Affiliate Marketing A Pyramid Scheme?

A pyramid scheme often doesn’t have a legitimate product or service to offer. But rather it uses the idea of large amounts of income to entice people to join and promote a scheme which offers little value outside of this earning potential. So one way to spot a potential pyramid scheme is to ask about the product or service being offered. If the product is vague and little is offered outside of the promise of wealth, it’s a bit of a red flag!

Don’t confuse pyramid schemes with MLM either. MLM’s or multi level marketing businesses are often legitimate. With an MLM, your earning potential is increased by the ability to expand your influence through a team of other sales people. When your team make sales, you can earn a percentage of these sales because you have introduced the sales people.

There are many legitimate MLM businesses which aren’t pyramid schemes. Affiliate marketing though is different to MLM in that an affiliate usually works alone and promotes products online for a share of profit.

Some affiliate companies have successfully combined MLM with affiliate marketing. See SFM Digital Business system for more on this. See also is SFM a scam.

Micro Niche Website

A micro niche website is a website built around a specific topic. Most niches or topics are well saturated. This means there’s a tonne of other competing websites which get all the traffic. So a new website in a competitive topic/niche won’t get much traffic. But in a micro niche, there’s less competing traffic because the niche is not as saturated.

For example, the “money making online” niche is a hugely competitive one. If you built a website around this keyword, you would have little hope of gaining any organic visitors from the search engines. However, a niche within this niche is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a more specific way to make money money online. A micro niche goes further still. Affiliate marketing is still very competitive. This site has been built on a micro niche topic “affiliate marketing mentors“. That’s so it can compete on Google (and other search engines) for organic traffic.

Micro Niche Website – How To Choose Your Micro Niche

Even in a micro niche you can still face lots of competition. The days of throwing up a 3 page website and getting it to rank on the top of Google are long gone. You still have to provide value to your visitors or Google won’t give you any traffic. Of course you can still get traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo.com and other search engines. But Google has the majority of traffic so it’s the one to aim for.

It’s worth putting in some time before you choose your niche. A niche should be something you have an affinity for because you’ll be creating content on your website for some time. A good way to choose your niche is to look at what you are interested in. If you can’t see yourself creating content for several months in your topic, it’s probably not the niche for you.

Ideally find a topic you have a passion for and then use Google’s keyword planner to look for related keywords. Build a site around a good keyword to give your micro niche website the best possible chance.

Google’s Keyword Planner

Use Google’s free keyword planner tool to find keywords within your niche. Then compare the relative competition with a Google search. More on this in the article how to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

You can start with a major keyword within your general topic. Then look for longer tail keywords which fit your sub-niche. A good micro-niche website will rank for your main keywords. In order for this to happen, you need to build your site around those keywords. This means you’ll need to find a domain name which has your keywords within it. This can give it a helping hand when it comes to getting a ranking. But there’s other factors involved too:

Your content is probably the most important element in whether you get a good ranking from Google
SEO – use an SEO plugin to help you create content
Use Google’s keyword planner to find other long tail keywords within your niche
Interaction on your site shows Google how compelling your content is
Back links show its authority

Monetising A Micro Niche Website

You can monetise a micro niche website in several ways:

With your own products/service
Through advertising (e.g. Adsense adverts)
Using affiliate products
With drop shipping

One of the best things you can do to monetise your micro niche website is to use affiliate products which offer recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs tend to offer training or software. With this kind of product on offer, you can earn ongoing income from each sale.

You can also use high ticket affiliate products too, which pay much more than the typical affiliate products will. See also affiliate marketing business models. One of the best ways to generate a good income from a micro niche website is through using email marketing. With email marketing, you capture your visitors email address and can market to them for an extended period of time. On a website a visitor only has a few minutes to make a purchase. But once on your email list this time is dramatically extended. See the power of email marketing.

Blogging For Profit On A Micro Niche Website

A good way to increase the value of a micro niche website is through blogging. You can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty and write content around those topics. One way to find these keywords is to use your main “seed” keyword in the keyword planner. Then look for longer tail derivatives which have lower competition than most. Create good content and use an SEO plugin to help you write search engine friendly content. See also best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Over time if you make a habit out of this, you should find some free traffic from the search engines. Again, it’s useful to choose a topic you have an interest or passion for because even in a micro niche, there’s still likely to be a lot of competition.

Summary

Not all micro niche websites will find a good placement in the search engines. The key is to keep building them until you have some success. Then learn from your “failures” and your successes alike. If you align your interests with your niche, you’re much more likely to be able to sustain the necessary motivation and enthusiasm to create content over the longer term, which is what is generally needed.

Choosing your micro niche keywords is also pretty important. In a very competitive niche, you’re more likely to struggle in getting your website a good ranking. In a less competitive niche, you have a greater chance of getting free traffic. Content is pretty important too and you need to consider the powerful algorithm which the Google uses. If your visitors bounce from your site quickly, this shows Google that it’s not well received. Likewise good content doesn’t go out of style, so create quality content with a view of the longer term.

Making Money From A Website

Making money from a website can be one of the best ways to make money. Your website does the work and you make sales automatically 24 hours a day! Well, that’s the dream anyway. But before this can happen you need to put the hours in on your website. There’s two basic ways to generate income from a website; from advertising or from referral marketing. If you have your own products or business you can promote it from your website too, of course. But without your own products or service to offer, the best ways are through referral marketing and advertising.

Referral marketing lets you earn money from referring customers to other people’s products and services. Affiliate marketing and drop shipping are two examples of this. Or you can place advertising on your website and earn from clicks made by your visitors. Google’s Adsense program is the most popular program to offer this service.

With advertising through clickable adverts, you only make tiny amounts for each click. So you’ll need to build traffic to your site organically. This takes a lot of work and time. Alternatively you can use affiliate marketing and promote products and services from your website. This can work much quicker, especially if you use high ticket affiliate products and recurring income affiliate programs. But let’s start by looking at traffic which is the number one roadblock for anyone looking to making money from a website.

Making Money From A Website – Traffic Generation

To make money from a website you need people to visit your site. Without regular visitors to your website you’ll never make any money from it. If you choose to go the affiliate marketing route, your visitors will need to be engaged with your content and you’ll need to offer products or services which are well aligned with your content. Otherwise visitors won’t be interested in buying from you. With advertising placements you can write about pretty much anything. Adverts will reflect your content and show according to your visitors searches and the content you provide.

The two main types of attaining website traffic are paid and free. With paid traffic you can turn it on much like a tap. But you’ll need to monetise your website with products. You can’t earn from advertising revenue while paying for advertising because you simply won’t earn enough to make it work. So if you’re thinking of using paid marketing, you’ll need to use products which pay well. See affiliate marketing business models. With a good recurring income from affiliate products, and a range of high value offerings, it’s much easier to use paid marketing and make a profit from your site, especially when using paid marketing to promote it.

With lower value affiliate products, or if you use only advertising to monetise, it can be more difficult because paid traffic is more out of reach.

Making Money From A Website – Email Marketing

One of the best strategies when making money from a website is to use email marketing. With email marketing, you can obtain your website visitors email address in exchange for something you give away on your site. This gives you a number of advantages:

You can extend the time period with which a website visitor might make a purchasing decision
You can build trust and offer value to your email subscribers
It gives you control over your traffic – once you build a list you can contact your list without paying for the traffic.

On a website, someone only has a small “window” of opportunity to make a buying decision. When they leave they are gone forever! But once on an email list, this is extended to days, weeks and even months and years. See also the power of email marketing.

A Google Compliant Website vs. a blog

A Google compliant website is one which has been approved for use with paid marketing. If you go down the organic route and become a blogger, this isn’t so important. But if you decide to use paid marketing platforms: YouTube, Facebook, Adwords etc., you’ll need a compliant site. Each advertising platform has it’s own rules and regulations regarding compliance. In general, you’ll need to show your site is authentic and you comply to the GDPR, data protection and privacy rules. This generally means using a privacy policy, GDPR pop up and stating your disclaimer on your website. Check with the platform you’re going to be using for the full terms and conditions.

If you get this wrong it can mean an advertising platform will suspend your account and you won’t be able to advertise with them. So it’s worth crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s!

With a blog website, compliance isn’t so important although it will still have an effect. On a blog website, your traffic comes organically from Google and other search engines. SEO – search engine optimisation is more important if your traffic is coming from the search engines for free. Site speed is also an important factor in either case but particularly with an organic blog. Slow site speed will considerable impact your SEO. You can get plugins to help with site speed and other aspects of helping with organic traffic. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.

Fast Vs. Slow

To make money from a website is a great achievement. It can mean time and financial freedom. But there are fast ways of doing this and much slower ways. As you would expect, the fastest route is much more expensive. See fastest legit way to make money online. With this route you would use a high ticket sales funnel and paid marketing to run traffic directly to a landing page. From there you collect subscriber’s information and promote products through your email list.

This technique requires some testing and measuring but once you are at a positive return, you can scale up by increasing your advertising budget. With a global reach and digital products, the sky is the limit! But make sure you’re profitable before increasing your advertising budget. Once a $100 advertising spend produces $200, you’re in a great position to increase your budget and double your money each time. You’ll also need to invest in a high value product range in order to maximise your revenue potential. See SFM digital business system to learn more.

A slower route might involve a different method. If a high ticket product range is out of reach, you can build up your traffic more slowly by using organic traffic methods which are much cheaper or free. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. Free marketing strategies typically take much longer to take effect than paid traffic. Plus they are often less scalable. But over time, if you put the effort in, you can build a digital footprint of content which keeps generating you sales for years to come.

If you choose your affiliate products wisely, and use subscription affiliate programs, you’ll keep getting paid even years after making the sale!

Get Started

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