AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How Can I Earn From Digital Marketing?

“How can I earn from digital marketing?”, you might ask! There’s many ways to earn from digital marketing.

If you already have digital marketing skills, you can sell your time (in a job), you can build a digital marketing agency (your own business), or you can use those skills to promote affiliate products, or other people’s businesses.

Digital marketing skills are fast becoming the most lucrative skills around today. Nearly every business wants to learn how to promote themselves better online. As a digital marketer, there’s many avenues you can take.

If you don’t yet have digital marketing skills, you can learn them and use them to build an online business using other people’s products and services (affiliate marketing). Start here.

How Can I Earn From Digital Marketing?

So, how can I earn from digital marketing? Here’s a break down of the most common ways:

Sell your time – in a job as a digital marketing “expert”
Build a business of your own selling yours and/or other people’s marketing skills – a digital marketing agency.
Use your skills to sell other people’s products and services online – affiliate marketing.
Approach businesses directly and offer to help them with their marketing.

Digital marketers use a number of strategies to sell products or services online. Here’s a few of the methods they use:

Paid marketing platforms – pay per click marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc. let you run adverts and send traffic (visitors) to websites.
Organic marketing methods & SEO (search engine optimisation) – blogging, social media marketing and other organic methods use content generation to build an online presence. See how to increase organic traffic to your blog.
Building a following online through social media – some digital marketers use Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms to drive traffic and make sales. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Don’t Know How To Market Online?

Perhaps, like many people you don’t have any digital marketing skills? If this is the case you can learn. The best way to learn digital marketing skills is through joining an affiliate program which offers training and has products for you to sell. This way you can earn while you learn and you don’t have to think about products.

In the SFM Digital Business system you can access over 10,000 courses and a business system which does the selling. You can also access a community of online entrepreneur and get the help you need to become successful online. Click on the image below for more information.

Digital Marketing & Affiliate Marketing

Digital marketing refers to any kind of online marketing or advertising. Affiliate marketing on the other hand is referral marketing. With affiliate marketing you get paid for referring people to other people’s products and services online. If you’re successful at this, and refer people to products which sell, you get paid on a performance basis.

This is one of the most accessible ways to earn through using digital marketing. You can even do it without any services or products of your own. Affiliates are everywhere online. You’ve probably bought something through someone’s affiliate link already, especially if you shop online a lot.

An affiliate basically recommends products and services through their own advertising strategies. Affiliates use content marketing (e.g. blogging and v’logging), email marketing and paid advertising.

They might also use a number of other strategies to get their message in front of an audience and lead them to an affiliate product. Since affiliates only get paid when something sells, it’s a very economical way for product owners to promote their products online. Since they don’t have to pay anyone unless they make a sale!

How To Earn From Digital Marketing – Summary

There’s many ways to earn from digital marketing and the value of digital marketing skill is rapidly growing. Here’s a few of the strategies you can use if you already have some marketing skills:

Sell your time in a job – SEO (search engine optimisation) skills, PPC (pay per click and other marketing skills are in demand.
Build a marketing agency – use other skilled people and/or your own skill base to build a business which helps businesses grow their online presence
Approach businesses directly and offer to help them promote their products/services using your skill set
Use affiliate products – promote other people’s products and services using online marketing strategies.

If you want to learn how to sell products and services online, access a free video series here which explains the various business models available, even if you have no previous experience.

Online Business During The Pandemic

Are you thinking of starting an online business during the pandemic? An online business is the best kind of business right now. Many physical businesses are being closed down due to social distancing measures being enforced all over the world. What does this mean for you if your business depends on a healthy flow of customers?

Perhaps you’re an employee of a business which is being curtailed? The future for many people is definitely uncertain. But there’s one thing you can do to future proof yourself from this ongoing threat to financial certainty; get educated in the skills needed for earning an income online. Start here or click on the image below.

Online Business During The Pandemic

An online business during the pandemic isn’t an instant answer for immediate income. It takes time to build an income online and it doesn’t happen overnight. But what is certain is that more people than ever are turning to the internet as a means to make a living. Throughout lockdown, people have had their lives turned upside down and the most precarious thing for many is their source of income. By learning the skills you need to generate an independent income online, you can ensure your future is not as uncertain as it might currently be.

So what’s involved in building an online business from scratch? Can anyone do it? Do you need technical skills and are you too old? The good news is that anyone can learn the skills required to earn online. You don’t need to be technical because online software has come a long way over the last 10 years. Drag and drop software makes website building easier than it’s ever been.

From a website you can promote other people’s products to earn an income. You don’t need any of your own products or even to deal with customers. Here’s a free video series which will explain the different models (click on image below).

Online Business During The Pandemic – How Long Will It Take?

The time take to start generating an income online depends on a number of factors. It’s different for everyone according to their own working preferences and how much time and energy they can give their online business. Here’s a few of the factors involved:

How much time each day you devote to building your online business
The activities you pursue – some take long than others
What you are able to invest – both in terms of affiliate business model and advertising budget
Your ability to learn and implement new skills
Your work ethic and motivation levels

See also how long does affiliate marketing take? In general, you shouldn’t expect an income from an online business before putting in consistent effort for several months. 6 months is likely to be the shortest time for many affiliates to start generating a steady income from being an affiliate. For some it takes much longer. See also fastest legit way to make money online.

Do I Need To Be Tech Savvy?

If you’re thinking of starting an online business you may be wondering whether you need to be tech savvy. But if you have an email address and are able to send and receive them, you can build an online business.

Most of the technical stuff has been done for you if you use the latest software and technology. Have a look at this video in which Stuart explains his software for building websites (Click image below).

So as you can see, anyone can use this software to build a website and do much of what’s involved in building an online business. Get started here and follow the step by step training.

Summary

So if you’re thinking about starting an online business during the pandemic, you can get started here. You’ll be able to build your own digital sales funnel, with a range of products to sell directly online to a global audience. You’ll also get access to training and development to help you learn the skills to market your products online.

An online business does take some time to generate income from, and you shouldn’t do this if you’re not prepared to work at it, or if you expect “easy money”. So it’s definitely not for everyone. Access the Mentors All In Package which has everything you’ll need to begin this journey including:

Products to sell
A step by step set up process
coaching and mentoring
training and support.

Plus there’s a full 30 day money back guarantee with this training and education program. So you can even try it out at zero risk! Click on the image below for access.

How To Sell Other Companies Products On My Website

Are you wondering: “how to sell other companies products on my website?” There’s a clever business model known as affiliate marketing which lets you do exactly this. Simply find a company which is a good fit for your audience, join their affiliate program and put a banner on your site! Hey presto, you’re now an affiliate marketer!

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn an income online. If you already have a website, you can join any affiliate program and promote a variety of products from it. One of the best ways to find an affiliate program which suits your particular niche/topic is to do a search online. Type in “{your niche} affiliate program”. {Your niche} being the main keywords people would use to find your website. Look for a suitable program and apply to join.

How To Sell Other Companies Products On My Website

So that’s it? Isn’t there more to it than this? Well, yes of course there is. But that’s the basic starting point. Before you can successfully sell other people’s products, you’ll need to have a fair amount of website traffic. Unless you have traffic, joining an affiliate program will only give you the ability to promote products and services online. It doesn’t get you traffic!

If you already have a website which gets traffic, you need to carefully choose products which align with the interests of your audience. It’s no good joining a company who promotes kitchenware when your website deals with musical instruments, for example. Your website needs to be a good match for the products you’ll be promoting from it. Otherwise, nobody who visits your website will be interested and you won’t make any sales. This is what’s known as your “customer avatar” or target audience. See how to know your target market.

If you already have a tonne of website visitors, you’re in a good place. Most websites don’t get much traffic, particularly brand new websites which have just been built. In order to get traffic to a website you can either pay for it, or build content on it. See how to get traffic to your website free.

How To Sell Other Companies Products On My Website – Product Choice

Once you find a suitable affiliate program which meets your needs, you’ll need to apply to join the program. This isn’t always straight forward and depending on the program, you may have to show your website, or prove that you can drive enough traffic to make sales consistently. Many affiliate programs are quite happy for new affiliates to join them though, even without a proven record of traffic generation.

Google search for affiliate programs in your area — Amazon is one of the most well known affiliate programs and pretty much anyone can join it.

Once you find a company which sells products suitable for your audience, look on their website for their affiliate program. If you can’t immediately see an affiliate section of a company, you can approach them by email and ask if they run one.

Once you have joined an affiliate program, you’ll usually have access to banners, links and various sales pages which have already been built. You can promote the products/service through a variety of ways on your website:

Banners and images – (see below)
Links embedded in your text – (example: here’s a link to a free affiliate training webinar).
Through an email marketing campaign – sending emails to subscribers

Here’s an example of a banner advertisement for a webinar I promote, as an affiliate:

Email Marketing From Your Website

Email marketing is another technique which website owners can use to sell other people’s products from their site. On a website, it’s much more difficult to sell something because most visitors only stay a short amount of time; usually less than 10 minutes. But once you get them to subscribe to your email list, you can automate a long list of follow up emails which promote products over months, years and even decades!

To get people to opt in to your email list, you can offer something of value for free on your website. I offer ebooks, webinars and downloadable files to my subscribers. Once on my list, I follow up with useful information about the topics discussed on this site. I also promote products and services which I think would be of interest.

an email marketing form — Many websites will have a form like this one so you can sign up to the owners email list.

The power of email marketing is huge because you can eventually build a huge list of subscribers who are interested in your products/service. When this number grows, you’ll be making more sales simply by working the numbers! To do email marketing from your website, you’ll need to purchase an autoresponder which can allow you to collect information from a form on your site. Here’s the one I use! It offers a free trial period so you can try it out.

How To Sell From Your Website – Summary

Your website is unique and your messaging will be unique too. This is why it’s important to choose companies and products carefully. You will need to choose products and services which align with the topic of your website and the interests of your visitors.

So if your website sells kitchenware, you’ll want to find a kitchenware related affiliate program you can join and promote their products. You won’t have much luck selling protein shakes from a website which sells kitchen ware because your visitors didn’t come for that!

Once you find your topic, search online using Google (or one of the other search engines), and type in your main keyword which relates to your website; ({Your niche} affiliate programs).

Once you find a suitable program you like, join it and login to your affiliate area which is usually somewhere on their website. Get banners and affiliate links from the affiliate area.

You can also purchase an email marketing service (autoresponder) which lets you collect your visitors emails and promote products through an email marketing campaign.

Once set up, you’ll want to turn attention to building traffic to your site, to generate an ever growing number of sales. This can be done in several ways including using paid advertising or content creation. See Best free traffic sources for affiliate marketing for more on this.

For more training on affiliate marketing access this free videos series.

Best Business In Lockdown

The best business in lockdown has to work completely online. How can you run a physical business with new rules changing all the time; when you can’t even control your ability to offer your services? Sooner or later, customers are going to lose confidence in your service, if they can’t access them when they want.

Even companies offering physical products are losing out due to postage, handling and transportation delays. So what’s the answer? How can you operate and thrive in this strange new environment?

The answer is online services; which have been booming since the beginning of this strange new world in March 2020.

Best Business In Lockdown – Affiliate Marketing

But most people don’t know anything about operating a business online. Perhaps you’re thinking, “How does that help me?”. “I have no experience of the online world and nothing to offer”.

But you’d be dead wrong. The online world has changed and so has the opportunity to work online for everyday people. 20 years ago you would have needed technical skills just to build a website. But today, anyone can use drag and drop software which can allow you to create an online presence of your own.

“But I’ve nothing to sell, I wouldn’t know where to start”! Anyone can monetise an online presence through the use of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone promote and sell products online – even when they don’t personally own the products themselves. It’s one of the most popular strategies which ordinary people use to earn an income online.

Product fulfilment and customer service is the responsibility of the product owners, not the referring partners. As an affiliate, you’re a referring partner and you get paid for referring a product to someone online.

You can think of it as a recommendation to a friend. When you recommend a nice restaurant to someone you know, they might make a trip there – if post pandemic rules allow of course! With affiliate marketing, you receive a payment if someone purchases something from your recommendation online.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Business In Lockdown

An affiliate marketing business makes money from referring sales online. You don’t need to personally own products or services yourself, and anyone can learn how to do this.

An affiliate business can be built around other commitments and you can choose your working hours to suit you. There’s also many ways you can work with an affiliate business. Choose a strategy and working pattern which suits you.

Why is affiliate marketing the best business in lockdown? During a lockdown, normal businesses have been forced to close their doors. But an online business hasn’t. In fact more people than ever are taking to the internet to purchase things, learn new skills and get educated on various topics. The internet connects the entire planet and it doesn’t matter where you live, anyone can learn how to generate an income online using any of the affiliate marketing business models.

How Long Does It Take To Be Profitable Online?

Although an affiliate business can give you the ability to earn online, it will take some time and commitment to build an online business that earns you an income. Usually you should expect to work on your affiliate business for at least 6 months before you see an income from it. Depending on how you approach your business, it can take longer than this.

How long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing? With a high ticket business model, and through using paid marketing, you can build an income in the shortest amount of time. See fastest legit way to make money online. This requires more investment of course. But there’s many ways you can approach affiliate marketing, and even some very cheap and free strategies.

For a free video series explaining the various affiliate models available, click here.

Why An Affiliate Business Is The Best Business In Lockdown – Summary

Almost everyone has access to a laptop and internet connection. If you have too, and are concerned about your financial future, this is the best time to start learning about how to turn your laptop into another income stream. The digital economy is booming and more so because of the pandemic. Physical shops and services are either closed permanently or hampered in their business in some way.

One way to future proof your income is to learn skills which can enable you to earn from your laptop and become financially independent.

Access the free video series to learn more. Click on the image below to get started.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset

Your affiliate marketing mindset is either your biggest asset or your biggest liability, when building an affiliate business. Not everyone will succeed with affiliate marketing. Those who do, and turn it into their main source of income, are in a minority. Around 97% of people who “try” affiliate marketing will quit – see affiliate marketing failure rate.

But that’s partly because so many can “give it a go”, without much investment of time or money. But to succeed, you can’t have a “give it a go” mentality, you’ll need a “whatever it takes” attitude instead.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset – Your “Why?”

As an employee, you do the work and you get paid regularly for showing up; you trade your time for money. Affiliate marketing is different in that you don’t get paid unless you make a sale. The goal of affiliate marketing is to learn how to get paid on autopilot for the work you have done previously.

But before you can reach this stage, there’s a whole host of roadblocks and hurdles standing in your way. As a beginner, you’ll doubt whether it even works at all. In this state, it’s very hard to work towards something in a meaningful way.

The early days are the easiest to give up because you have no (personal) evidence that your work will be fruitful. You watch training videos and read blog posts. You may even make a start and join a program. This is all costing time and energy. If you’re also juggling family life, a full time job, a commute etc., it can be difficult to maintain the necessary motivation and enthusiasm to continue down this path – especially when you’re making no money from it.

You’ll need a strong reason to keep going. Otherwise, you’ll probably quit! A good reason is always something which makes you keep going no matter what. For many, this is the possibility of becoming financially independent and leaving their job.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset – Your “Why?”

Knowing your “why?” is a useful motivational support when things aren’t going as expected. If you have a burning hatred of your boss or job, or of simply feeling financially powerless, you’ll overcome a lot more adversity in affiliate marketing than if you are fairly happy in your life and in what you’re currently doing. If life is generally “ok” and you don’t have a strong desire to change your circumstances, you’ll probably have less drive to become successful as an affiliate.

You’ll likely come across plenty of adversity as a beginner while you’re learning about affiliate marketing. How you handle this is what’s important. Those who consider setbacks as important learning exercises will use it to further their knowledge, and move forwards. But some will look upon setbacks as failures, and use them as a reason to quit.

Entrepreneur Thinking Vs. Employee Thinking

The mindset of an entrepreneur is different to that of most employees. As an employee, you know you’ll get paid for performing a certain set of activities. But as an entrepreneur, which is effectively what an affiliate is, you’ll need to set goals and have a long term vision. The mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur is an important one if you’re to succeed as an affiliate. If you bring an “employee mindset” with you to your affiliate business, it can block you from realising the dream of becoming self employed and financially independent. But why is this?

An employee knows they can get away with as little as possible. Granted not every employee has this belief, but many know this to be true. With affiliate marketing, you only get paid for sales you make. So you’ll need a different approach to succeed online. With an online business you’ll need to work much harder for far less, at least in the beginning. But what you’re working for as an affiliate is freedom, rather than a steady pay package! If you keep this in mind, it can help motivate you beyond the initial startup phase, into actually making money as an affiliate.

Employees trade their time for money, and income is therefore finite. Affiliates see things differently; they know that by selling products online, there’s a point in time, (if they keep going long enough), where their systems will generate income automatically. They won’t have to work anymore, and they will still generate an income.

If you understand this deeply, and want this outcome badly enough, you’ll do pretty much whatever it takes as an affiliate to achieve it. You’ll have a “whatever it takes” attitude. This is the affiliate marketing mindset you need to make a success of it!

What You Need To Succeed As An Affiliate

In the free video below, Stuart explains what you’ll need to become successful as an affiliate. If you bring a “give it a go” attitude towards your affiliate business, your results will reflect this attitude.

If you bring a “whatever it takes” approach, likewise you can expect something more fitting. Like with life, you get out of something what you put in. If you’re just “dabbling” in affiliate marketing without taking it seriously, you can make some pocket change. But if you take affiliate marketing seriously, you can replace your income and become financially and geographically independent.

Not everyone has the same motivations of course. Some people want only a secondary income from affiliate marketing. But the benefit of learning affiliate marketing is the ability to work from anywhere and generate an income from your laptop. During the current times, this is a pretty good reason to learn, whatever your motivations are.

For more articles on mindset on this site visit this link.

Free Affiliate Traffic System

Looking for a free affiliate traffic system? Traffic is pretty important as an affiliate marketer. Without it you’re toast! So here’s an article to share some of the free affiliate marketing traffic strategies I’ve found over a number of years.

One of my favourite free affiliate traffic systems is blogging. So I’ll start with that!

Free Affiliate Traffic System #1- Blogging

Blogging can be a great way to get free traffic from many sources:

Social media
Other websites
Forums
Q & A websites – such as Quora
and of course the search engines

Blogging is a long term strategy of course but it’s a cheap option. It takes time to build up a blog but if you put in the effort it can reward you for a long time afterwards with a passive stream of traffic.

Here’s my ebook on blogging which I wrote some time ago now. But the strategy I write about is still the same as the one I use today! It works, but only if you do! It’s basically about finding long tail keywords in your niche and finding those with low SEO difficulty.

Some of your content will rank on the search engines, some of it will not! But it’s a numbers game. Just don’t rely entirely on the search engines indexing your content and make sure you share your posts through other channels too. Over time, and with effort, you can build a nice trickle of free traffic which comes in continuously.

See find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty for more on this.

Free Affiliate Traffic System #2- Niche Website

A niche website can be built around certain keywords to indicate to the search engines (and visitors) what your site is about. It also helps you build authority in that niche and gives your website a specific area of expertise. This website, for example, is a niche website. I chose the domain name after some careful keyword research using Google’s keyword planner.

You can use the same method described in the blogging section of this article to find keywords which have less competition than most. Then purchase a domain name with those keywords in it and start building content.

The keyword affiliate marketing mentors seemed like a good choice so I built the site around it.

You can do this in any niche and by choosing a good domain name you can gain favour with Google and other search engines, and rank your site more easily. It’s by no means a definitive strategy, and you’ll need to create content on the site too to build your authority. But if you look at pretty much any keyword on Google, you’ll see that keyword domain websites do get listed, especially in less competitive niches.

For more on this topic see how to build a niche website and get free traffic.

#3- Snip.ly

Snip.ly is a free software which can help you create pop ups leading people to your content. By finding appropriate content to share on social media, you can generate traffic to your website.

I use Snip.ly in conjunction with Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo.com shows you the most shared content which currently trends on the various social media platforms. If you find content which has a good connection to your own website/content, you can leverage already trending content which can go viral. Snip.ly lets you embed your own customisable pop up on the shared article.

Buzzsumo.com shows you viral content which trends on social media

As people share the content, (using your Snip.ly link), your pop up gets shared too. This is another strategy which can work to great effect. However, you need to persevere with it and make a regular habit out of sharing good content which will attract the right kind of audience to your website. Choose content which is related to your website, or which would attract the right kind of targeted audience to your site.

Traffic System #4 – Facebook

Facebook is a great place to find free traffic for your affiliate offers. In this strategy you’ll be using your Facebook profile and joining a number of groups in your particular niche. Here’s a snapshot of my Facebook profile which is set up to showcase my particular niche – online business startup.

Ignore the comedic picture for a moment (which should be more professional really)! The main thing is that people should immediately be able to see what you are offering and understand in a moment where you are coming from.

Your tag line should immediately show someone what you do, and how you can help them, should they be interested in your service/s. A clickable link is also a good idea too, so they can view your website/landing page. If you have an ebook, free giveaway, or lead magnet you can also showcase it on your Facebook profile.

Once you have set up your profile to look how you want your “shop front” to look like, you can move on to the next stage of this strategy. It’s worth browsing through the various profiles on Facebook to see what others have done here. You should see some people doing the same – showcasing their business and offerings directly from their personal Facebook page.

Facebook Strategy Part 2

Next you’re going to look for groups you can join. There’s various groups on Facebook which accept Facebook users providing they stick to the terms and conditions of the group. Click on the “groups” icon at the top of your Facebook platform once logged in.

Then use the search bar at the top of the page to search for groups which relate to your particular niche/topic. So if your website is promoting home made bread makers, you would pick a group in a niche which relates to this somehow.

Choosing the groups you join should be done once you understand your customer avatar and have learned more about your target audience. Once a group allows you to join, you can post in the group chat and interact with people.

Don’t spam the group with your links as this is usually going to get you banned! Just interact and offer value, connect with people and see what’s going on! Over time, if you make a habit out of this practice, you will get people looking through to your profile and seeing what you offer.

Some people will click through your link and join your email list (assuming you have one). See the power of email marketing for more on list building. You need to be doing some activity using this strategy regularly, in order to generate any traction. But if you find the right groups and approach them in the right way, you should see some activity on your Facebook profile, leading people to your content/website/email list or affiliate products.

For more free strategies see get traffic to your website free, and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

#5 – YouTube

YouTube can also be a great resource for getting free traffic. It’s competitive but less so than Google search. So if you’re good at coming up with ideas for content, YouTube could be the way to go. Type your keyword into the YouTube search bar and you’ll see a number of suggestions will come up.

Choose a keyword combination which is a good match for your video content. Upload your videos and tag them with the relevant keywords for title, description and tags. If you upload videos regularly, over time this can compound to generate natural links to your website.

Using YouTube search bar for keyword ideas.

You’ll need to create a lot of content for this to work and this can take time. But if you want a free strategy you’ll need to work at it over the longer term. Otherwise choose a paid marketing strategy instead.

Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation

There’s many ways to approach affiliate marketing traffic generation. You can use paid marketing or look at the cheaper options such as blogging. Whatever you do, you’ll need to match your strategy with the time and money you have available. Your choice of products also matters in your strategy for generating traffic. See affiliate marketing business models for the different affiliate models available and affiliate marketing commission rates for types of products and what they pay.

Physical products, for example, typically pay much less than digital products. But product cost also has a bearing. A submarine, for example, although a physical product, carries a large commission if you can sell one!

Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – Paid Or Free?

According to your finances, available time and your product choices, you’ll need to choose an affiliate marketing strategy. All affiliates need traffic in order to get their affiliate products in front of potential customers. Without traffic, you won’t be in business for very long!

If you’re working long hours and making regular income, it might be worth using a high ticket affiliate program and concentrating on paid advertising. But if you have less money and more time, it’s probably worth looking at the cheaper marketing strategies which are more time intensive.

Affiliate marketing through blogging
Unpaid social media marketing
Finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty
Marketing on YouTube, or any other social media platform
Niche website building
See also get traffic to your website FREE

Paid traffic can be bought in a few ways too including:

Adwords – find search traffic through keywords typed into Google
YouTube – pay to have your YouTube video put in front of a targeted audience
Facebook – use video advertising or standard ads with images
Bing/Microsoft – offers a similar platform to Adwords
Solo ads – Solo ads are advertisements on other people’s email lists
Banners – advertise on someone else’s website through banners

Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – The Difference Between Paid & Free

So what’s the difference between paid advertising and free advertising. Well quite a lot actually! The free marketing strategies you can implement will likely take a lot longer in order to gain traction with an affiliate business. Content marketing means building a lot of content and getting that content to work for you building your affiliate sales. In the beginning, it will seem like a lot of work for little reward. But over time, content marketing can have a dramatic impact on your commissions, if you stick at it long enough.

One blog post, for example, isn’t going to make your business. But one post a day for several years will have a much larger impact.

Paid marketing is much faster. You can run a paid campaign and immediately see whether it works or not. This means you can find a winning advert much quicker than using a content marketing strategy. With paid marketing too, you can scale up once this happens simply by increasing your daily budget. This is much harder to do with content marketing.

So if you’re starting out with an affiliate business, it’s a good idea to get clear on how much time you can give, what your expectations are and your marketing budget, if any. With free and cheap marketing, you can expect a longer journey. With paid marketing you can get there more quickly, but you’ll need help to get there. A good business model is important too. With low value products, you won’t be able to learn paid marketing and still make profit, or at least it will be harder.

An Email Marketing List

Pretty much all affiliate marketers use an email list of subscribers. A list is key to success with affiliate marketing, whatever your marketing strategy is. With an email list you control your traffic. Paid marketing is expensive and organic marketing takes time and effort. But with a list, you can leverage both methods to get the most out of them.

An email list of subscribers is a list of people who opt in to whatever you are offering on a website, or landing page. Most affiliates have some offer to entice visitors to opt in to their email list. This is often called a lead magnet. I use an ebook lead magnet as one of my offerings to give to my subscribers. Ideally choose something of value which is aligned with your affiliate products.

Building a list takes time, but over time it will compound. At first, affiliate marketing seems tough because a small email list doesn’t produce much in the way of sales. But as your list grows, more people will follow you and buy products and services you recommend.

Affiliate Marketing Traffic Generation – Summary

So according to your affiliate marketing business model, and your affiliate commission rates, you should choose wisely depending on what works for you! You’ll also want to consider your available time and your finances. If you are time poor, but money rich, you should look into high ticket affiliate programs and using paid marketing. This will let you put in the least amount of time and build a business more quickly through scaling.

If you’re more time rich, but money is more scarce, you’re much better off choosing a cheap or free marketing strategy in which you can use your available time to grow content in your chosen area. See get traffic to your website free, and 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Either way you should get an autoresponder and build an email list. This will help you leverage your efforts by compounding it over time through collecting interested subscribers. You can also choose subscription based affiliate products to maximise your efforts. With subscription affiliate programs you can earn ongoing income from each sale you make. This compounds over time and so your efforts are multiplied.

Access a free video series to learn more about the various options for affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing And Time Management

Affiliate marketing and time management go hand in hand. In fact, without good time management skills, you’re less likely to succeed as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing pays you only when you make sales. So if you spend time in the wrong areas as an affiliate, or waste time, you can spend years working for zero reward!

As a beginner I fell into the many affiliate traps too; such as spending heaps of time making a website logo look pretty – only to have zero traffic! Or building spammy websites hoping they would immediately rank and get free traffic!

It’s also easy to become a “busy fool” as an affiliate marketer – thinking you’ve “made it” because you’re working from home. But actually you’re not making any money. Instead you’re spending all day browsing social media! Or even getting stuck in “learning mode”; thinking you’re progressing but actually only watching endless training videos and not implementing what you’re learned.

You can get addicted to learning; watching videos thinking knowledge alone is progress. But you need to keep an eye on moving your income forward too.

Affiliate Marketing And Time Management

It’s easy to fall into many of these traps which suck your time and don’t move your affiliate business forwards. To make sure you’re not wasting time as an affiliate, you should write down your goals and have a daily plan to work towards them. Zoom out of the moment to look at the longer term picture. Then zoom back into the moment to work a step at a time at the main thing which will move your business forward. Make goals for 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, 6 months and 3 months. Look at your daily schedule. Do your daily steps match with your longer term goals?

Overwhelm, procrastination and hesitation are your enemies as an affiliate. You can get locked into inactivity when you haven’t chosen your direction. Or you can get lost in juggling too many things and still not move forward. Initially you’ll be learning, probably from watching videos.

Think of your use of time as spending 80% of time learning, and 20% of your time implementing what you have learned. Don’t confuse learning with action. Learning is more important in the early phase of building your affiliate business. But over time the balance should move towards 80% implementing and 20% learning, once you choose a direction and get started.

This can be a tricky phase and you may procrastinate here. But far better to fail forwards, learning from mistakes and problems, than to stand still in inaction and procrastination.

Affiliate Marketing And Time Management – Mindset

Goal setting is vital to keep you focused on what you want from your affiliate business and how you intend to achieve it. If you’re struggling with your mindset, you should get Stuart Lichtman’s ebook on Cybernetic Transposition. This book has helped me immensely with my affiliate business and was recommended by the affiliate marketing mentors I found several years ago.

Stuart’s strategy (Cybernetic transposition), allows you to transpose an area of success in your life to a new goal. It’s the best book I’ve found on goal setting. Most books don’t delve deep enough into what you really want. Stuart’s book lets you test your real intentions and align all parts of the brain for the outcome you most desire, all things considered.

The main problem for many people setting goals (me included), is they don’t follow through because there are conflicting intentions which show up in life. “I want to lose weight, but I like pizza and beer too much”, for example is a typical conflicting statement. In Stuart’s book, he addresses these kinds of conflicts so that they can be resolved to determine the things you really want and how to get them.

Operate A “Won’t Do” List & Prioritise

Most people have a “to do” list which they tick off as they complete each task. But have you thought that maybe since you’re in charge, your list is biased towards the things you like to do, rather than those things which will move your affiliate business forwards?

Ask yourself whether each task on your list is important in terms of moving your affiliate business forwards. If you don’t do something (on your list), will it make much difference? If the answer is “no” the task should be moved to your “won’t do” list. This simple switch can save you heaps of time and energy which is wasted on doing things which are either irrelevant, or suit someone else’s agenda rather than your own!

Prioritise your list in order of importance and do the most important tasks first, when your energy is high. Don’t do the easy jobs which you like first. Do the important ones which will lift up your affiliate business and move you forwards more quickly.

Schedule Your Week & Blocking

Jumping from task to task drains energy and makes them more difficult. This is why many entrepreneurs use a “blocking” strategy to block tasks together. So, for example, if you plan on building your email follow up series and shooting a video, block out time for each task individually, rather than jumping back and forth.

If you divide your day up into many individual tasks, it’s much more difficult to focus with clarity and do a good job. If you plan on writing a bunch of blog posts, shooting videos and editing, don’t jump from one to another. Instead, block out time for your video shooting in one sitting. Otherwise you will lose time in the transition as well as focus. See also timeboxing.

Regular Breaks

Evidence suggests that we work much better and more efficiently with regular breaks. When you’re working on a passion project such as affiliate marketing, it can be easy to over work and burnout. Once you hit burnout stage, you lack energy and focus to do anything. A week of fatigue can set you back dramatically so it’s far better to work consistently while looking after your mental and physical health.

The Pomodoro technique suggests working in 25 minute bursts to maximise efficiency. You can use the technique in variations to suit your working style. But it’s also a good way of breaking down large tasks into smaller tasks.

Decide on the task to be done.
Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes).
Work on the task.
End work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.
If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3–5 minutes) and then return to step 2; otherwise continue to step 6.
After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.

Affiliate Marketing Without Investment

It is possible to do affiliate marketing without investment, although it will likely take a lot longer. With investment you can buy traffic and invest in high ticket affiliate programs, which pay larger commissions. You can also purchase training and support if you’re prepared to invest.

However, if you’re running an affiliate business on a shoestring budget, or on no money at all, there’s a few strategies you can use. Here’s an overview of some of the strategies you can use which are either cheap or cost only your time. If you have nothing to invest, you’ll need to invest more time. If you can invest a small amount, you can give yourself an advantage. This article aims to cover the cheaper and free options of doing affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Without Investment

I started affiliate marketing without much investment. I bought a few courses which were cheap, and followed the advice I was given. If you have anything to invest, I would suggest investing in your education. It’s the one thing no one can take away from you and has the largest rewards over time. Access a free video training series here which explains the various affiliate business models you can use.

Without investing in anything, you can generate content on platforms like these:

YouTube – upload videos to YouTube and link to affiliate products which relate to your content
Hubpages.com – Hubpages.com is where I started out. It’s a free platform which lets you create content and link to affiliate products.
WordPress.com – is another free blogging platform which lets you create written content and link out to affiliate offers.
Social media platforms – you probably already use Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram or another social media platform. Get to know the methods of unpaid social media marketing, and leverage your platform of choice to promote affiliate products.

Affiliate Marketing Without Investment – Traffic

The main problem for affiliates is getting traffic to their affiliate offers. See get traffic to your website free. You’ll need to be inventive and use a strategy you can work on over a long period of time. Blogging is a simple strategy I use to generate traffic to my websites. You can use the free blog sites like Hubpages, WordPress or even create a free website with Weebly.com, or one of the many other sites which offers that service:

But just having a website is no guarantee of traffic. You’ll need to create content to get traffic and the freebie sites aren’t those which the search engines trust the most. A worthwhile investment is to get your own website and hosting provider. That way you have more freedom to create affiliate links you choose without restrictions from the free website providers. Some of them will limit the kind of affiliate links you can use.

Free website providers won’t rank as highly as those which are purchased. Google will therefore limit your traffic and you’re likely to need to work a lot longer building content on them. For more information on building your own site and getting a domain name, see this article.

Affiliate Marketing Without Investment – Groundwork

Before even starting your website, it’s a good idea to know what subject you are going to be creating content around; or what marketing tactic you’ll be using. Without this understanding, you can spend a lot of time getting things wrong.

Most affiliates quit far too early because they don’t have a long term strategy and/or the belief and confidence in it over the long term. With a “no investment” affiliate business, you’ll need to have a good long term strategy and be able to sustain the work over a long enough period to break through.

Your marketing strategy will depend on your natural leanings and your ability to create content or connect with people online. Some people use social media marketing and others create content. If you’re more comfortable on video, you could upload videos to YouTube regularly to build a following.

For more ideas of free and cheap marketing strategies see my post 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Choosing Your Affiliate Products

Ideally, choose affiliate products which you are aligned with; those products which you yourself have purchased, or would want to purchase. If you align with a product, the chances are much greater that people you attract through your content will also find them desirable. Plus, if you get to know a product, you’ll have some ideas to create content around them.

A high ticket affiliate product (a submarine!) being showcased in the free video workshops.

If you have some ideas about the content you want to provide, look for affiliate products which relate to your content. You can easily find affiliate programs which relate to most topics and interests. Simply do an internet search for “{your niche} affiliate programs/products”.

So if you’re a keen gardener, you can look for”gardening affiliate programs”. Choose a program which is most suited to you, your interests and the content you are going to create.

A Review Website

A good idea for affiliate marketing without investment is a review website. Reviews can even be written on free blogging sites such as Hubpages.com. One of my very first affiliate sales came from a review I put up on Hubpages.com about a software program I have bought called Xsitepro. The software is obsolete now since WordPress came along (and the many other website builders). But at the time it worked for me and I built a few nice looking websites using it.

The key about review websites is they attract buyer traffic. There’s a huge difference between attracting a website visitor who wants to buy and one who wants something for free. A review brings in someone looking specifically at a product or products they want to buy, or are thinking of buying. If you can get your review website to get found, you can earn commissions from your visitors quite quickly. But again it comes down to your ability to get free traffic to your website.

A Niche Website

A niche website is what this site is. It’s a website built specifically to cover a very niche topic. This one is built around the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. Although not entirely free, it’s a very cheap way to build an affiliate business though blogging.

Most niches are pretty competitive today so it can be difficult attracting traffic, particularly when you start out. But if you stick at it long enough, you can get the attention of the search engines and build free traffic to your site. If you link well to affiliate products which are well targeted towards your audience, you can start generating sales from your blogs. See also how to know your target market.

It’s also a good idea to define a niche within a niche, also known as micro niche. With a niche such as affiliate marketing, it’s very competitive. But if you target affiliate marketing for seniors, for example, you’ll find less competition. So if your topic is gardening, you might choose a specific type of gardening to limit your potential competition. See also best micro niche for blogging.

Blogging Strategy

I use a blogging strategy which is low cost. The main cost is my time, which for many is more valuable than money – depending on how much they have of either! If you have time, but not much to invest, this can be a good strategy to implement. My blogging strategy involves finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

There’s a great free tool called the Google Keyword Planner. This tool can show you the keywords people search for online in your particular niche. Find the keywords which offer the least competition and write long, quality articles around those keywords. Use an SEO tool, I use Yoast SEO , to help you write the posts. Share posts on social media (I use a plugin called Revive Old Posts – which is free).

YouTube – Free Strategy

A YouTube video I created to promote an affiliate product

YouTube is a great platform to gain exposure and promote affiliate products. Anyone can join and upload their videos to build out their YouTube channel. If you’re going to use YouTube organically (without paying), you should expect to make a daily habit out of uploading videos covering your chosen affiliate topic for several months before you start gaining traction.

For any content marketing, YouTube included, you’re looking to create a back catalogue of content which can create free traffic over time to your affiliate offers. A small amount of content will only have a tiny impact, or none at all. But over time, if you are consistent, you can build a nice automatic trickle income from your affiliate products.

For more on free marketing ideas and strategies see get traffic to your website free.

Online Business Startup Costs

Most new affiliates will want to know their online business startup costs. But there really isn’t a hard and fast rule here. There’s lots of ways to do affiliate marketing on a shoestring budget.

However, it will generally take a lot longer to achieve success with affiliate marketing/online business if you take the free route. I started out affiliate marketing doing everything for free. It was huge struggle. The best thing I did for my affiliate business was to get help and support and access an affiliate marketing mentor.

The free route means you’ll need to create content and leverage social media channels in order to get traffic. See how to get traffic to your website free. But at the least you should build a website and get an autoresponder. Otherwise you’re in for a very difficult time. Free blog platforms do allow affiliate links and can be used. But it can take a long time to gain traction and you’ll likely be doing a lot of work for nothing.

A website domain name can be purchased for less than $10 and hosting costs less than $10 a month. An autoresponder is around $10 a month but this one offers a free first month. Then it will cost $10 a month, rising as you get more subscribers on your email list. But more emails means more sales if you’re doing things right, so your affiliate business should bear this cost as you progress.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – A System For Selling + Help & Support

One of the best investments I made was in training, support and the purchase of a ready made business system. The Mentors All In program covers all aspects of building an online affiliate business:

Training and support – mentors and coaches
live webinars,
recordings,
setup your sales funnel,
step by step modules
A range of products you can sell

An online business can be built in several different ways too. You can use other people’s products and services and work as an affiliate. There’s direct selling where you act as a third party and forward products to customers you have found. You can also sell your own skill with a marketing agency, work for yourself online in some respect or use more than one strategy.

See this series of training videos which will explain the different models available for online businesses.

The Mentors All In program costs $99 and then is $99 a month. It includes a range of products you can sell and a step by step setting up system to help you build your funnel.

Online Business Startup Costs – High Ticket Products

Once you’ve accessed the business system you’ll have a range of products to sell online. But you can also add more products to your digital “shop front” if you purchase them. High ticket products can allow you to earn more per sale and depending on your investment level, you can earn up to 30% on products ranging from $100 to $20,000.

With a greater investment you can access the larger commissions. This in turn can give you more options in terms of marketing your online business. There’s many ways to market your sales funnel, once you’ve built it. Paid marketing is the fastest method however. With a high ticket sales funnel, you can more easily recoup your marketing spend and become profitable. With lower value products to sell, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing because the commissions are so much lower.

Have a look at the different affiliate marketing commission rates. For example, Amazon typically pays affiliates between 1%-11% commissions on sales you make. So you’ll need to sell in bulk in order to make it profitable. With a high ticket sales funnel, you can still sell in large amounts, but you don’t need as many customers in order to be profitable.

Investing In Yourself & Your Business Online

If you’re serious about building a long term business online, you can invest at much higher levels. This will give you more access to fast track training, mentors and coaching. You’ll also maximise the potential of your sales funnel by getting the largest commission structures available through an affiliate business. Here’s the run down of the commission structure and the cost of the training for the Ultimate Startup Bundle Platinum.

To access the program simple join Mentors through the Mentors All In package and upgrade through your dashboard once you get access.

As you can see, in tier 1 you can earn a $4000 commission by selling the Ultimate startup bundle. Tier 2 means you can earn commissions from sales made by your referrals. See multi tier affiliate program for details.