The best recurring affiliate programs are those which offer a lifetime value to the customer. These are often products such as software products and memberships. If you refer the right people you’ll earn an income for life from your sales. Of course some people will drop off over time and attrition is a natural by-product of doing business.
But if you choose products and services which offer lifetime value, and find customers who will value this, you can earn lifetime commissions from your efforts. That’s far more worthwhile than selling one-off items where you only get paid once!
Best Recurring Affiliate Programs
The best recurring affiliate programs I’ve found are ones which offer huge value to the user and are important for business growth. With a business, online or offline, if a software or membership product can help its growth, the owner will continue using that service; potentially for life!
Aweber – an email autoresponder service for online businesses. Aweber provides software for online and offline business owners wanting to build a list of email subscribers and automate messages to build relationships over the long term. Earn 30 percent commission throughout the life of every Aweber order made through your affiliate link.
The SFM/Mentors – A membership program for starting an online business from scratch. SFM also offers multiple earning strategies including high ticket commissions, multi-tier commissions, recurring membership commissions and has a built in sales funnel (and sales team) anyone can use. Earn up to 40% commissions on a range of high ticket products valued up to $20,000, plus recurring commissions on memberships.
Convertri – Convertri pays 30% commissions every month for membership subscriptions you have referred. Convertri offers super fast landing pages and split testing software for online business owners and marketers
Leadpages – Similar to Convertri, Leadpages offers landing page software and split testing software which is useful for online businesses. Earn up to 50% recurring commissions for as long as your referral remains a Leadpages customer.
SEMRush – Offers multiple software and features for businesses to help improve website traffic – from SEO, competitor analysis, rank tracking, social media management, content optimisation etc. You can also earn 40% recurring commissions promoting the SEMRush affiliate program.
Promoting Affiliate Programs – Training
So that is my list of best recurring affiliate programs. With any program though you still need to actually make the sale in order to make the recurring commissions. If you’re a new affiliate, I would suggest getting training and support in order to so do. If that’s the case, I recommend joining the SFM/Mentors program for a number of reasons:
The SFM Mentors is my pick of the best recurring affiliate programs because it offers much more than most of these other softwares and membership do. SFM Mentors is a coaching and training program which also offers recurring commissions on top of everything else.
Since you’re here, you probably already know that recurring programs are the best ones to promote as an affiliate. With standard products, you only earn once per sale. Many such programs will benefit from your advertising for years to come – all without rewarding you properly!
In many such cases, a software or membership program will pay affiliates only $20 for customers who will bring in thousands in membership fees over the coming years. It’s far cheaper for these companies to have such an affiliate program than to advertise themselves!
Amazon of course uses physical products not digital. But it’s wise to arm yourself with the knowledge of which companies pay well and for life, and those which take advantage of affiliates and don’t value their input. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
A good product/company will continue paying for the lifetime of the customeryou have referred. With some companies, you also benefit from any other sales purchased from your referral throughout the lifetime of their custom. See SFM digital business system.
Recurring Commissions & Compounding
Recurring commissions compound over time and although $20 a month doesn’t sound like much, with 100 members it becomes $2000 a month. With 1000 members it becomes $20,000 a month. Although these figures are hard to believe when you start out as an affiliate marketer, they are attainable. In the first instance of being an affiliate, this seems like an impossible dream.
However hard you work, it can seem as though you are not getting anywhere! But if you stick with it, your work has a compounding effect too. At first, you struggle. Nothing seems to work. As you make the odd sale, you’re encouraged and persevere. Once sales start coming in more frequently, you focus on the work which generates the most effect (Pareto’s principle 80/20 rule).
When you get to this stage, small effort product larger results. Your income soars. But initially it seems like nothing is ever going to happen! In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he mentions this and represents it in this graph.
We expect results to be linear but instead there’s a long time of not much happening. If we stick with it, results can take off exponentially as in the picture above.
Referral marketing automation is one way to generate greater financial independence. Rather than cold calling or doing door to door sales, digital marketers use automation and online selling processes. Anyone can learn to do this too, even without any products of their own.
With referral marketing, you can sell other people’s products and services over the internet. This is also known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates align themselves with products and services they believe in. They create automated selling systems which bring customers to their products and services. When someone makes a purchase, the affiliate (or referrer), makes a commission on the sale.
There’s all kinds of products and services you can refer people to online. The processes are much the same, whatever product you decide to sell.
Referral Marketing Automation – Selling Systems
Online selling systems can take many forms. You can sell products online using many different strategies. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. But to automate the process in the fastest possible time, it’s wise to use paid marketing platforms and large value products. Without the right products and services, and the best commissions, it’s much harder to use these platforms and still make a profit. See affiliate marketing business models.
You can still use referral marketing automation without using paid marketing platforms of course. This article is an example of content marketing. If someone reads this article and purchases a product from this website (or they click on an advert), I’ll make a commission. But once created, content can bring in sales for years to come. This is another form of automation – using content to automate sales over the internet.
One of the main strategies used by referral marketers is email marketing. The power of email marketing is pretty awesome for online marketers. They can reach tens or hundreds of thousands of people with a single email through using an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a tool used by marketers to collect subscribers information, build trust and offer value. When a marketer has built up a huge list of subscribers, and built trust through delivering value, a single email can encourage thousands of purchases through their affiliate link to a product or service.
With the right product/s that email could be worth tens of thousands of dollars/pounds worth of income.
Marketing Platforms
Marketing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Adwords (to name just three) are hugely powerful too. With a marketing platform, you can reach a global audience. Referral marketers can sell almost any product globally, without even dealing with a customer or touching a product personally. So long as a product or service has an affiliate program, anyone can sell it for a commission based on the sale.
With marketing platforms like these, you can also target people very specifically based on what they are like, where they live, how old they are and a number of other demographics. This can be hugely powerful if you have a product to sell. By learning which audience is likely to buy your referral products, you can create a globally scalable business which can run completely on autopilot!
From a marketing platform, people are sent to a landing page where some information is exchanged for their name and email. Once they have entered their details, they are entered into a database of subscribers who are sent automated email messages. If the marketing is right, and the emails are valuable to the subscriber, they will be. likely to trust the marketer and purchase products and services which are recommended through automated email messages.
Referral Marketing Automation – Digital Products
Although there are many physical products you can refer as an affiliate, digital products offer one of the best opportunities. With digital products the costs are far lower than for physical products.
There’s no postage, handling or storage costs and manufacturing costs are considerably less than with physical products. Digital product owners therefore can afford to pay much larger commissions. Some digital products also offer memberships and software products which carry ongoing subscriptions.
This is great for the referrers of these products when they can earn ongoing, passive income from sales they have generated. Digital products too have less boundaries globally, unlike with drop shipping (physical products).
Some digital products offer high ticket commissions and ongoing recurring commissions (memberships and software products). Physical products can’t compete with this and commission structures are vastly different between the two. Physical product typically carry commissions of 1%-12%, while digital products can pay out from 30%-60% commissions on a sale. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
An Automated Sales Funnel
Referral marketing automation is done through an automated sales funnel; with a powerful marketing “engine” at one end, and valuable products and services at the other. Anyone can benefit from such as system without any prior skills or experience.
An automated sales funnel is effectively a system of products and software which generates income for the owner. It takes time to set up a system like this but ultimately it should run on autopilot once everything is set up and working properly.
Effectively, this can give you a money “system” which when you put in $100 at one end, you get $200 out the other end! The testing and measuring of this system is the basic process which any new affiliate marketer must master to make this a reality.
Learn how to market a referral marketing automation system: access here.
If only I had found the best way to do affiliate marketing 10 years ago! I wouldn’t have wasted so much time and effort! But of course surely the “best” way to do anything is purely subjective, right? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and if you’re doing it the wrong way, you should expect a long and difficult journey.
Some affiliate marketing strategies take months and others take years. You can also make a lot of mistakes on the journey. See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. According to your own personal circumstances of course, one route may be more suitable than another. But if you’re stuck in a career you’re desperate to escape from, there’s a faster way to do things. Would you rather take months or years to escape your job?
Some people are more risk averse than others too and according to your ability to invest, take risk and learn new skills, you might prefer one route over another. In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the many routes you can take as an affiliate marketer. Of course there’s many I haven’t even tried and the very nature of affiliate marketing means it’s constantly evolving. But if you want to know the best way to do affiliate marketing, skip to the last section of this article.
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
I started learning about affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. I wanted to sell my own ebook and couldn’t get anyone to my website. So I put myself on one of those “earn money online” courses to learn. Instead of selling my own ebook I realised there was a better way to earn online – selling other people’s products.
With my ebook on sale for $10, I could make $10 for each sale. But with someone else’s video course selling for $100, I could make $40! So it was a no brainer to abandon my ebook idea and start selling other people’s products instead. If I was going to spend the same amount of time and effort on both, the affiliate marketing model was going to pay more – even though with my own product I earned 100% profit!
So I set about learning how to market products from a simple website. In the process I learned the worst ways to do affiliate marketing – those which don’t work! As a new affiliate marketer, you’re going to experience some set backs. Some of what you do simply won’t work. Actually MOST of what you don’t won’t work.
Pareto’s principle states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of the effects. This is worth bearing in mind as an affiliate. Throw some mud at a wall and some will fall off. Affiliates need to learn from the mud that sticks! Once some mud sticks (you make progress), you need to know which actions created those outcomes.
Slow Strategies Vs. Fast Strategies
A slow strategy such as blogging might take 12 months of work before you start to see some activity and progress. At first, you won’t see very much happening. But if you stick at it, and keep creating content, over time you’ll see some traffic – visitors on your website. Keep your attention on these small “wins” and keep doing those things which produce those results.
It’s easy to become demoralised if you pick a slow strategy. Small amounts of work won’t produce large results. Writing a blog post every week won’t give you a scalable income. More likely, you’ll get the odd visitor on your website who takes no action.
Only about 1% of visitors will sign up to your website. Then, only about 1% of your subscribers will purchase a product from you. So it’s a numbers game. With blogging, or organic marketing, it’s a long, slow process of continuing to create content. Within 6 months to a year of doing so, you should have a nice organic amount of traffic. Of course you can still make mistakes. You can create content which is miss-matched to your products. You can write content without promoting it. You can expect Google and other search engines to do your job for you (big mistake).
But with organic marketing you should expect to work, work, work without much to show for it in the first 6 months. If you do everything right, you should see a few sales here and there. Keep going and you’ll see a few more. This grows over time and is really quite exciting when it finally happens. But it’s a long barren desert before you see the oasis!
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
So organic traffic is a slow strategy and takes time. You can speed up your progress of course by using an email list, subscription products and high ticket products. But getting traffic will be slow if you go the long route of generating traffic organically.
Once you reach a certain level of success too, this isn’t scalable. And although you can rinse and repeat your best performing content (and of course share it more), you’re still stuck in a model which requires a lot of work for slow progress forwards. Over time however, your body of work which you’ve created acts as a resource to give you free traffic, leads and sale. So this compounds over time and you should see free sales coming in if you stick with it long enough.
Paid Marketing
But if you’re not prepared for all this work, and want your affiliate business to move more quickly to escape a job, for example, there’s a far better way. Taking that affiliate marketing is a numbers game, your fastest way to reach a large number of people is through using paid marketing.
Paid marketing, unlike content marketing is much faster and more scalable. It does however cost money. At first you’ll spend money learning how to run campaigns. This is the point where many affiliates quit. They run a few campaigns, lose money and quit. But those who stick it out are in a very good position indeed once they start gaining traction. They will have created a profitable business which is automated and scalable if they achieve that.
Paid marketing is out of the reach of many affiliates because they haven’t got products which cover the cost of learning how to run paid campaigns. So they burn their capital running campaigns which don’t work. Then they give up because they assume that it just doesn’t work.
The High Ticket Sales Funnel
A high ticket sales funnel consists of multiple high value digital products which pay the affiliate the largest possible commissions you’ll find online.
With such a funnel, you can expect to earn a much larger amount than you would from standard affiliate products. Amazon and eBay typically pay from 1-12% commissions to their affiliates. This is a narrow margin which doesn’t give you much scope for using paid marketing. But digital products typically pay much more (around 40%). Combined with high value products and you can make $1000+ on a single sale for some items.
When you make a $1000 commission (and above) on a sale, you can afford to test and measure paid marketing campaigns much more easily. When you only make $12 on a sale, it’s almost impossible to use paid marketing at all.
Paid marketing is the best way to do affiliate marketing because you can reach a much larger audience much more quickly. But you need to use the right business model. See affiliate marketing business models.
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
Of course the “best” way to do affiliate marketing is entirely subjective. Many will want a cheap strategy they can implement over time without risking capital. But some can use an affiliate marketing business to replace their existing income very quickly. For those people, the best strategy is to use paid marketing and a high ticket business model – see SFM Digital Business System.
With recurring membership commissions, multi-tier commissions and high ticket product sales, you can build a profitable business online quite quickly using paid marketing. It will still take time of course and you’ll need to invest heavily in a sales funnel and of course your marketing.
With a low valued affiliate product, like you might find on Amazon, you can only make a small commission (12% maximum). But with high ticket digital products you can make 40% commissions on products valued at $2500 – $20,000. A single sale can give you a commission of $8000!
Once you’ve set up your sales funnel, start here, you should turn your attention to a paid marketing platform such as YouTube. (The platform you choose will depend on your commission structure). See affiliate marketing business models.
Test and measure your marketing until you find a campaign which gives you a profitable cost per lead. Then increase your budget and scale up. Compared with organic traffic this can be a far faster and more scalable route. However, the downside is that it requires a large investment to attain the top commission structure and you’ll need to spend a lot on advertising before you find a profitable campaign.
Summary
The best way to do affiliate marketing is entirely subjective however. For some this will be way out of their reach due to finances. If you’re time rich but don’t have the budget for this strategy, organic marketing might be a better route to take, depending your circumstances. If you’re in a corporate job and don’t have any time, you can use the automation of an online business to build an income using the above strategy and gain traction very quickly.
There is of course a middle ground too. You can use recurring commission products and high ticket productswith organic strategies. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide which strategy suits you best, and which strategy you would be happy using according to your finances, patience, risk aversion and ability to create content and/or find a passion project you can monetise.
For a breakdown of the various online earning strategies you can access a free workshop video series here which explains a few different ideas.
What are the best lifestyle businesses? Surely the best lifestyle businesses are those which can be run from anywhere. They can allow you to create any lifestyle you see fit? If you want to spend more time with family, a lifestyle business should be able to accommodate. If you’re a surfer, or a traveller, your lifestyle business should allow you to do it.
Me working on Bad Education the Movie, doubling Jack Whitehall
So what we’re talking about is a flexible business which lets you live your live in your way. If you’re financially independent without a job or a boss, you can do anything, with who you choose, any time you choose!
I was on a search for the best lifestyle business, although I didn’t know it! In my 20’s I met a stuntman and thought this was the best lifestyle business! I imagined travelling the world working on movies. But in my 30’s I wanted more control over my life and the work was making me miserable! I was waiting for the phone to ring and juggling other jobs to support myself. So I looked for something I could work at from my laptop!
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Forex Marketing
I tried Forex marketing and studied it for a couple of years. Even with automated software though, you need a large trading bank for Forex. You should only trade with 1-2% of your bank on any one given trade. Added to that, you’ll need to spend a considerable amount of time learning how to do it.
Some automated software can allow more flexibility with Forex, but I found myself tied to the computer, stressing over trades. You need to have a huge amount of patience too as a Forex trader. One trader I followed only traded on the monthly charts.
That meant months would pass without entering a trade. And even that trade could be a loser! I needed money now – not later and couldn’t afford to wait. Nor could I afford to spend more than a few hundred pounds on each trade. Despite the huge potential of trading on the markets, I found I didn’t have the capital required for it to work for me. So, I abandoned my trading and looked elsewhere, thinking I would return when I was better off!
For some though, learning how to day trade can be a great lifestyle business which lets them earn their own money from a laptop. You can travel and earn from anywhere! But it’s a skill to learn and this takes time. 2 years is the general consensus as the required learning time to become consistently profitable as a trader.
Best Lifestyle Businesses – eBay
I abandoned the Forex marketing and looked to eBay instead. With eBay, you can buy and sell items and make money on the difference. I found an ebook which explained the strategy I used for several months. It involved finding badly listed items and re-selling them again with a better listing.
For the strategy see eBay side hustle for more on this strategy. This wasn’t one of the best lifestyle businesses I found because it was a time heavy model. I was stuck on my laptop searching for items to buy. Then, I was dealing with customers and queuing at the post office waiting to weigh items to post off to customers. Eventually I realised I had found a “job that I owned”! It gave some spending money but for all the work I put it, it wasn’t paying nearly enough!
I abandoned the idea and looked for something more automated. I knew there had to be something better and I’d remembered purchasing an ebook from eBay which taught me the strategy. Perhaps, I thought, the ebook was a much better business model.
It offered a means to automate sales and delivery of a digital item. This “lightbulb” moment was to lead me eventually to a much better lifestyle business model. After several months of spending time creating my own ebooks, and failing at selling them, I put myself on one of those “earn money online courses”, hoping to learn how to get more traffic to my ebooks. Instead it led me to another business idea. One which was in the category of “best lifestyle businesses”.
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Affiliate Marketing
The course I bought taught affiliate marketing and I was able to make a sale fairly quickly. I promoted a course by a guy called Peter Lexis. The business model of affiliate marketing lets anyone promote other people’s products and services on the internet. When you make a sale through your unique affiliate link, you are credited with the sale and paid a commission.
There’s a variety of affiliate products you can promote online ranging from physical products from places like Amazon and eBay to digital products like you’d find on JVZoo and Clickbank.com.
The reason affiliate marketing makes for one of the best lifestyle businesses is its versatility. You can work on an affiliate business from anywhere and there’s many ways to do it. You can sell products globally without having to handle products yourself or even speak to (or deal with) any customers. The affiliate model is also massively scalable for this reason too.
Affiliate marketers promote products in many ways:
By creating content – written, video or graphics etc.
Using paid advertising – (Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube etc.)
On social media channels
Through question and answer websites
Blogging & creating digital products of your own
etc.
Affiliate Marketing – Problems
There’s a few problems with affiliate marketing though and despite this looking good “on paper”, it’s not as easy as it sounds! I found that I came across a lot of problems while learning affiliate marketing and it certainly wasn’t giving me the “life of Riley”!
At first I struggled and jumped from course to course looking for the magic bullet! I saw lots of videos promising me an “easy ride”. Far from it, affiliate marketing was tough and I struggled even to make a sale, much less a passive income as I was promised!
But I saw the potential of affiliate marketing to be the best lifestyle business. I knew it I could make it work, eventually I’d be able to automate the whole process of selling other people’s products online.
There’s several different affiliate marketing business models which I didn’t know about when I started out. As a beginner, I spent time on slow marketing strategies which would take months and years to come to fruition. Of course, I didn’t know this so gave up because I didn’t see the results straight away! Instead of persevering, I jumped ship from one strategy, looking for a quicker “system”. This is known as “shiny object syndrome”.
Best Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle Model
After a couple of years of struggling trying to make affiliate marketing work, I eventually found an online business community. After joining I realised where I had been going wrong. I had been promoting low value products from Amazon for 3-12% commissions. The best lifestyle businesses used digital business systems and digital products which paid:
Larger commissions – 40% and upwards
Recurring commissions – on memberships and software products
High ticket products – valued from $2500 to $20,000, and which offered 40% commissions
Multi-tier commissions – paid you recurring commissions based on sales made by your referrals.
By using this business model, I was able to set up a paid marketing campaign and run an online business on complete autopilot. With recurring commissions and high ticket commissions, I was able to recoup advertising budget much more quickly (and scale up), than with other affiliate models.
This is though using the six figure sales funnel shown below.
The six figure + digital business model – the best lifestyle business model I found online
Best Lifestyle Businesses – Summary
After trying various online business models, I eventually found the one described above which uses the affiliate marketing model in conjunction with several advantages over the basic affiliate product:
Recurring income – from membership commissions
High value digital products – pay much more per sale and allow the use of paid marketing much more easily
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
A scalable business system
With paid marketing, this system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With no postage costs or handling of products, it’s also one of the most environmentally friendly businesses around, not to mention the most scalable. The automation allows you to make sales from anywhere, and choose your own working hours and marketing strategy.
Access this digital business system and community here.
Are you looking for an affiliate marketing side hustle? Affiliate marketing makes the perfect side hustle for a number of reasons:
You can build it around existing work, working in a flexible way
It’s a scalable business model which can replace any income over time
You don’t need your own products or services
Anyone can start no matter their age or experience
You can work in a way which suits your own personal circumstances
Affiliate marketing isn’t a magic pill which will make you riches over night, of course, unlike many “guru’s” proclaim. But it can make you a sustainable income if you stick at it long enough and take the right steps. See how long does affiliate marketing take.
Depending on how you build your affiliate business, it can take between several months and several years to replace an existing income. But not everyone is looking to escape their corporate job. Some just want an “affiliate marketing side hustle“.
Affiliate Marketing Side Hustle – Marketing Strategies
Before delving into the different business models within affiliate marketing, it’s worth looking at some of the ways you can promote affiliate products. Not everyone has the time to create content on a daily basis. Likewise, not everyone will have the financial incentive to make tens of thousands every month either! But, there’s many people looking to make affiliate marketing their side hustle. This can be done in two main ways:
By creating content – content can be grown over time and can be seen as a “digital asset”. As your back catalogue of content grows, your ability to make money does too. Over time your income will compound as old content continues to generate traction in your affiliate business, and new content does the same.
By running paid advertising campaigns – if you’re looking for a faster way to build an affiliate business, paid marketing is it. But you’ll need a good business model to do it. See affiliate marketing business models. (more on this later).
Types Of Products To Consider
If you’re time rich, content marketing might be the way to go. If you can monetise your content with recurring commission affiliate programs and high ticket affiliate products, so much the better. Since content marketing is a pretty slow tactic, you’ll gain faster traction by using products which pay the most.
You don’t of course have to pay to promote affiliate products. Most affiliate programs are free to join. But it’s worth noting than many physical products only pay tiny commissions. Amazon, for example, pays from 3% to 12% commissions to its affiliates. Compare this to digital products which pay from 40% and above, and you can see there’s a big difference. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
Paid affiliate programs often pay larger amounts in commissions and you’ll struggle to earn high ticket commissions on digital products without investing in a program. See best affiliate commissions. So, if you’re considering investing in an affiliate marketing course anyway, it’s worth choosing one which offers high ticket commissions and recurring commission products. Access free videos here to learn more.
Affiliate Marketing Side Hustle – My Story
I started affiliate marketing around 2010 and only intended for it to support a career as a stuntman. At the time I was juggling multiple jobs and waiting for the stunt phone call. Then I was off down to Pinewood studios, or somewhere to work on a film or TV show. So I only really wanted an affiliate marketing side hustle – not a full time affiliate business.
Working on Bad Education
At first I jumped from course to course looking for the quick way to make money online, which of course eluded me because I believed it! Only after finding a good course and spending considerable time and effort in one direction did things start to come together.
In 2020 of course there was the pandemic and the stunt industry pretty much closed down. I had a kung fu school too which also closed down. Fortunately I had been working on and off with the affiliate business too, which meant I had something to fall back on. Initially though, my affiliate business grew very slowly because I stuck mostly to content marketing. I blogged and created videos which I uploaded to YouTube.
I had an email list of subscribers numbering into the thousands which at the start of the pandemic I was able to use to generate income from through selling affiliate products. Anyone can do this and I highly recommend building an email list, whatever products or marketing strategies you decide to use. In fact, I would say that list building is key to creating a sustainable income from affiliate marketing. Combined with subscription products and high ticket products and it’s incredibly powerful.
Making Affiliate Marketing Your Side Hustle
Affiliate marketing does take time though. When I became an affiliate, I thought I would be suddenly making hundreds of sales almost immediately. This can happen but it’s more likely with paid marketing and a large marketing budget. With content marketing, you’ll need your content to go viral to see this kind of dramatic increase in sales.
No, at first it’s slow. But if you stick at it, you start to see sales coming in. If these are recurring income sales, you’ll be able to build a much more sustainable business more quickly. With low value products like physical products, you’ll need to work much harder for less.
If you’re serious about building an affiliate marketing side hustle, invest in your knowledge and it’ll pay off later. I didn’t do this and rushed in. I wasted a lot of time on the wrong activities and used the wrong products. When I made a sale, the commission was inconsequential! Only later did I get the right knowledge and make it count! If you’re going down this route and are determined to succeed, make it a priority to get the right knowledge and use the right marketing and products from the get-go!
Access a free video series and learn more about creating an affiliate marketing side hustle which works!
Looking for affiliate marketing motivation? After watching that Tony Robbins video, or attending a motivational seminar, have you noticed how things just go back to normal? Your motivation wanes, and you fall back to your previous state? So you watch another video and try and pick yourself up!
But motivation is finite. It’s a hard thing to maintain. Since motivation is finite, it’s a much better idea to use your motivation to create habits. Habits are what matter, because they are the things you do, even when you don’t feel like it. Motivation is fleeting. One day you’re up and the next day you’re down. If your actions are always based on your motivation levels, you’re in trouble when you’re not having a good day!
Instead of trying to be perpetually motivated, which is impossible, use your motivation to create mini habits which support your longer term goals.
Affiliate Marketing Motivation – Mini Habits
As an affiliate marketer, you often need to maintain consistent actions for a long period of time; even without reward. This can be very difficult, especially if you never know when or if your actions will even pay off! Blogging is a good example of this. You need to have a belief in what you’re doing which is strong enough to maintain long term activity.
Picking a strategy you enjoy, and believe in is a good way to maintain this kind of focus. If you absolutely hate what you’re doing, it’s very difficult to maintain it for any length of time! The time needed to make affiliate marketing work for you will vary from person to person, and depend on your strategy. (See how long does affiliate marketing take).
Your affiliate marketing motivation will depend on your outlook, which will change from day to day. One day you might be very motivated and the next you’re in a pit of despair. Using your motivation to create mini habits, which you can maintain over the longer term is a good strategy to employ. On a bad day, your mini habits carry you through. Mini habits are a great way to align your daily actions with your longer term goals.
In Stephen Guise’s book Mini Habits, he suggests using tiny micro habits which can grow over time. This is a great strategy. Rather than heaping a tonne of actions steps on your “to-do” list, and overwhelming yourself, (which often leads to inaction), Guise suggests forming micro habits which you can do even on a bad day.
On a bad day, your mini habit is so easy you can still do it. It should be ridiculously easy.
Why Mini Habits?
Mini habits work because you start by creating action steps towards your goals which are super small. Most people create a mountain (in their minds) and give up before they even get started. For example, you decide you’re going to get in shape, so you join a gym. All goes well and for the first month you’re turning up regularly, maybe even going 5 times a week.
You then hit a psychological wall, or get injured. A week goes by, and you’ve not been to the gym. I’ll go next week, you tell yourself. Before you know it, you’re paying your gym membership but your motivation somehow got lost! Months pass and eventually you cancel your membership. But it all could have been avoided if you only knew about mini habits.
With a mini habit, all you need to do is turn up to the gym and swipe your membership card. Once you’ve done it, you’re off the hook! But since the hardest thing to do is often getting in the car, and driving over there, you’ve already overcome that resistance; even if you only swipe your gym card. (Putting aside the irony of driving your car to run on the spot)!
Affiliate Motivation & Blogging
Another example for affiliate marketing motivation is blogging. When you start, you think you need thousands of visitors to your website in order to make any sales. Before you start, you’ve already overwhelmed yourself for having such a long journey to make!
But if you only gave yourself the simple task of writing 500 words, or even 50 words, or reading a blog, you’ve started the wheels turning. Once those wheels are spinning, it’s easier to maintain movement. A rolling stone gathers no moss!
If you only wrote a single blog post each day for a year, you’ll have 365 blog posts within that year. Once you have started, it’s easier to maintain a habit than to constantly need help with your motivation. The habit supports you and keeps you on track.
Mini Habits Grow
Mini habits grow into bigger and stronger actions over time. A single press up doesn’t seem worth bothering with. But once you’re in the press up position, you’ll probably do more than one. Once you’ve done a single press up every day for 10 days straight, it’s much more difficult not to do it!
This is the genius of mini habits because they become part of who you are. You start identifying yourself with your habits and this is really powerful. A good book on self image is Maxwell Maltz’s psycho cybernetics. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who realised many of his patients still had mental issues after facial surgery. By altering the way they saw themselves (identity), they no longer wanted or needed facial surgery.
Accountability
Finding other people who will hold you accountable is another massive key to maintaining focus in any given direction. Finding affiliate marketing motivation can be tough because so many affiliates are going it alone. Add to the mix some well meaning friends and relatives who are set against you and you’re in for a tough ride!
When your motivation wanes, and people around you are desperate for you to quit, it’s all the more difficult to keep going. But if you have others holding you accountable and helping and encouraging you, it’s far easier to keep going. Most successful people don’t go it alone. They have others who help them.
You can join an online community of affiliate marketers through this link. Learn more about The SFM community and starting your own online business from scratch here.
Your “why” List
Having a list of “why’s” is important for affiliates too. Your “why?” has to be bigger than the problems you’ll encounter on the affiliate journey. If your reason to become successful as an affiliate is just a little extra money, it may not be strong enough to overcome the difficulties you’ll encounter. Particularly if your life is generally ok otherwise.
But if you’re desperate to escape a corporate career, or free yourself from a very difficult circumstance in life, you’ll work incredibly hard to make it happen. Write down your main “why’s” and remember them when things get tough. Being financially independent and not needing an employer, a job or having to commute were just a few of my reasons to become an affiliate. If you’re successful as an affiliate it can give you huge freedom and choice.
Affiliate Marketing Motivation – Summary
I hope this affiliate marketing motivation article has been helpful? Affiliate marketing is tough but it’s worth the effort for the outcome you want. Keep your “why’s” in your mind, use mini habits to maintain momentum and surround yourself with like minded people who can hold you accountable and encourage you to keep going.
Always keep a focus on the outcome you want to achieve and keep your belief alive by connecting with other people on the same journey. If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it!
Looking for online business mentorship? In 2014 I stumbled upon an online business mentorship community. Before I found them, I was a struggling trying to make money online. I had tried Forex marketing, eBay – buying and selling, and even had a go at selling my own ebooks. Then I found a business model called affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing, you get paid for referring people to products and services over the internet. With the right kinds of products, you can even earn a passive, ongoing income; from sales you’ve already made.
With recurring commission affiliate products and services, you keep earning from your earlier sales. These are products such as memberships and software products. Think of the memberships you might have yourself already: Netflix, mobile phone connectivity, Wifi, Sky TV? There’s products like these which online business owners use to make an income online. When you refer someone to a membership product, their subscriptions come in month after month, and you get a percentage of it.
Online Business Mentorship
But before this can happen you’ll need to learn how to set up systems and generate interest in the products you want to refer people to. This can take some time and getting used to. With an online business mentorship program, I’ve learned how to do this. You can too.
Online Business Mentorship – Access Training & Community
With Stuart and Jay’s community, you can access a digital business system which can allow you to earn commissions from existing products and services.
You’ll work your way through the basic modules and set up your online selling system – website, email autoresponder and email follow ups.
Once setup, you’ll have a system to sell digital products online and earn commissions.
You’ll then need to learn how to generate website traffic and drive targeted visitors towards your products and services. This is why an online business mentorship is so powerful. With a mentorship program, you can access trainings and webinars to help you with your marketing strategies, your mindset, and to overcome mental and technical barriers to online success.
Join a variety of online business owner and mentors. Start here.
Learn Online Marketing Techniques
With the SFM Digital Business system, you can earn commissions of up to 100% by promoting a range of products. Once set up, you’ll need to learn how to promote your landing pages and drive targeted traffic towards them. This can be done through paid marketing or content marketing. There’s various ways to promote affiliate products. You can either buy traffic or build content or do a combination of the two. Many online marketers also use social media platforms to build their online presence.
The affiliate model you invest in will determine your commission structure. With the SFM’s product range, you can earn up to 40% commissions on digital products valued from $99 to $20,000.
Why You Need Mentorship
Building an online business isn’t easy. It takes time to learn the strategies you need to become successful. One of the main marketing strategies for online business is email marketing. With a single email to the right audience, you can sell a number of digital products. When your email list is numbering into the thousands, even a small percentage of purchases can earn you thousands in commissions.
But this too takes time to learn. You’ll need to build your email list in the first place. Many affiliate marketers get frustrated and quit before they even reach 1000 email subscribers. Considering that top entrepreneurs in the online business space have lists numbering into the hundreds of thousands, you can see what is required to make an online business work. You need to be persistent and serious in your efforts.
There’s many psychological barriers to building an online business too. Traditional thinking and beliefs can stand in your way, rather than help you; especially if you have learned to trade time for money in an employment. Being an entrepreneur is very different.
Looking for an affiliate marketing seminar? Join Stuart Ross on this affiliate marketing seminar by clicking on the image below. You’ll learn some of the key factors needed to build a sustainable online affiliate business from scratch. You’ll also learn why your mindset is so important to changing the way you work.
In Stuart’s seminar/webinar, he talks about how you can learn a simple skill set which can allow you to earn money without trading your time for it. So block out 90 minutes, turn off your phone and tune in to this affiliate marketing seminar.
Affiliate Marketing Seminar – Generate Income Online
Stuart Ross is an 8 figure online entrepreneur who was previously in a career in as a mortgage broker. In this seminar he discusses his previous career, cold calling, franchise companies and mortgage broking. He quickly realised he had joined a career which didn’t suit his personality. Despite a self sabotaging run, he turned things around and found an online business opportunity back in the early 2000’s.
This and a drive to change his situation turn things around quite dramatically within a very short time period. With a different mindset and by taking full responsibility for his life, he was able to build an online business and make a full time living within a year of starting.
Affiliate Marketing Seminar- Topics
This seminar is broken down into three lessons:
Three lessons that made Stuart a millionaire
The greatest opportunity online right NOW
How YOU can turn a crisis into an opportunity
Affiliate Marketing Seminar – Don’t Trade Time For Money
With most jobs you get paid for turning up and completing a few hours of work. With this model, you can always only earn a limited amount of income. Your income is always capped by the amount of available time you have to give. Even in a well paid job, if you stop working, you stop getting paid.
In today’s world, you can only escape this trap by trading products, not time. So don’t trade time, trade products. With products you can generate income from selling something. So your income isn’t capped or tied to your time.
Lesson 2
Traditional sales doesn’t work today. There’s so much more access to information. People don’t respond to aggressive sales calls anymore because they can do research themselves and make more educated decisions about what to buy.
Why cold call when you can make automation do the work for you? Instead of spending hours on the phone, or selling things personally; use automation instead. Online marketing systems not only do the selling for you, but automate the process. This means you can scale up to a global audience once everything is in place.
Lesson 3 – Choose Upward Trending Industries
Not all industries are booming. In current circumstances though, some are doing far better than others simply because they offer solutions which dying industries don’t. If you position yourself in a booming industry, you can take advantage of the upward trend by selling products which people want and need.
You don’t need to have a business model or products of your own either. You can use other people’s products and services to earn online.
Coaching is the second fastest industry in the world. E-learning, coaching and teaching online are all part of the “wisdom selling” internet boom. If you’re not pivoting into the online world you could be left behind in the emerging digital economy.
By using knowledge, or aligning yourself with e-learning online communities, anyone can pivot to the online world to generate an income.
Coaching & Mentoring Skills
Coaching and mentoring skills to help people move into the online world are hugely valuable today. As old industries are crumbling, their digital counterparts are thriving. Many traditional industry employees will need to re-skill over the coming decades and will be seeking online education products.
These kinds of products understandably pay the most. But you can also align yourself with these kinds of products as an affiliate marketer.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate (you), can refer customers to someone else’s products and services online. In some cases, you can even earn 100% commission of a product’s cost.
Affiliate marketing is a simple business model. Simply refer customers to products online. However, you still need to learn this skill. You need to build marketing platforms, learn how to generate website traffic and these things take time to learn.
Affiliates can create interest in their affiliate products by either creating content (like this article), or running adverts using paid marketing. Typically an advert will send someone to a landing page where the affiliate collects a visitors email address. They then follow up with email marketing campaigns and help their subscribers in some way.
Many affiliates make the mistake of simply building their email list. But the money isn’t in the list – it’s in the relationship you build with your subscribers.
How Email Marketing Is Like “Push Button” Money!
Email marketing is powerful when done correctly – (see the power of email marketing). Once you build an audience (see how to build an audience for affiliate marketing), and give them value, you can promote any affiliate offer which is suitable to help them. With certain products in particular, such as high ticket offers and training courses, you can earn thousands from a single sale.
When you build an email list of tens of thousands of subscribers, and build a good relationship with them, they get to know, like and trust you. When this happens, even if only a small percentage of your subscribers make a purchase, you can still earn a lot in commissions.
Open Rates & Commissions
With high value training products and large commissions to earn, even a small open rate can earn you thousands in commissions. If you build trust and give value in your emails, you’ll stand out online among the spammers and sales people who are not giving value and just want your cash!
This, of course is a skill, but one which is well worth learning!
Why Digital Products Pay More
Digital products pay much more typically than physical products because there’s larger commissions paid to affiliates. Physical products incur more fees in terms of manufacture, handling, storage and delivery. Whereas digital products don’t have these so they can pass the savings on to affiliates.
A digital business also incurs less costs because there’s no physical premises to rent, or staff to employ.
Access An Online Business System and Training Community
If you’re serious about starting an online business from scratch. The SFM offers a tried and tested training community and digital product range anyone can promote as an affiliate.
Access here through the Mentors All in product for $99 and then $97 a month.
Here’s my list of 22 ways to promote affiliate products. There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and you need to choose a strategy based on your own personal circumstances. With low value products, it’s difficult to use paid marketing to promote products and still turn a profit. (See affiliate marketing commission rates). So you’ll need to use cheaper or free strategies. With high ticket affiliate marketing, you can more easily use more paid strategies because you’ll recover your advertising expenses more easily – and ideally make a profit!
So, if you’re wanting to escape a corporate career, for example, and you have money but no time, paid marketing is the fastest strategy. If you have time but less disposable income, free marketing might be a better fit.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Fastest and Most Scalable
With paid marketing you risk losing capital while you’re learning what adverts work and which ones don’t. So you shouldn’t spend money you’re not prepared to lose. Over time as you get better, your adverts should give you a good return on investment. But in the early days, you should expect to lose some money while learning. Ideally, test adverts with a small amount of daily budget. Scale up those which bring a profit and cut off those which don’t!
Once of the best marketing strategies for a high ticket program is using YouTube paid marketing through Adwords. Run a YouTube campaign and drive targeted traffic towards a landing page. Collect your subscriber’s information by giving them something they want. Follow up with an email campaign. Here’s a video I’m currently testing on YouTube.
When someone clicks on the link in my video they land on my website where they can enter their details. They then get offered affiliate products through an automated email marketing campaign.
This took some time to learn and YouTube is expensive. So don’t consider it unless you have a high ticket products range to promote.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Adwords Search Marketing
Adwords is a great marketing platform which lets you target specific keywords relevant to your business. You only pay when someone clicks on your adverts, so if you’re wise with your targeting, you should only get interested “buyer” traffic clicking on your adverts. Plus, you can also limit your daily budget to amounts you’re comfortable with as you’re learning.
Adwords is particularly good if you have a specific product to offer which is already being searched for. You can use Google keyword planner to find the keywords which are being searched for in your particular niche. Sign up for an Adwords account here to get started. Adwords can be used in a similar way to YouTube to send people to a landing page, or send people directly to your website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Bing/Microsoft
Bing, (now Microsoft), has a similar platform to Adwords and it’s a good place to start out if you’ve never used an advertising platform. You can also connect your account from Adwords to your Bing account and transport your data across.
Bing tends to be a little cheaper and less strict with their terms and conditions than Google. So for affiliate marketing Bing can be a good starting place. Again, like Adwords, Bing uses search traffic so you can specify which keywords you want to use on the platform to trigger your adverts.
With all paid marketing you should expect to test and measure your advertising for some time before you find the winning advert/s.
There’s many other social media sites which let you run paid advertising too. Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest etc. Take your pick. Choose one platform to start out with and learn one strategy first before moving on to another one. That way you don’t spread yourself too thin.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Shorten Your Affiliate Link
If you’re new to affiliate marketing and have just got your first affiliate link, perhaps you’re looking for some cheaper ways to promote it on the internet? A long, messy affiliate link doesn’t look very good for a passer by! One way to make your affiliate links look more pleasing is to shorten them. There’s various link shortening websites you can use to do this:
shorturl.at
Bitly.com
Cutt.ly
tiny.cc
tinyurl.com
A long affiliate link looks like this: https://longcode32362764789247892643789.hop.website.net/123242
The shortened link looks like this: tinyurl.com/qdncoh62
Link shortening helps to make your affiliate links look less messy. This is particularly important if you’re going to use your link on social media to promote products. It’s much better to make your links less messy and can give you more character space for sites like Twitter for example.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products
Link cloaking is a similar thing but while you also shorten your affiliate link you can also brand it with your domain name or website name. This gives your link a more authoritative look while simultaneously hiding potentially sensitive information.
Malware can be used to change affiliate links in order to steal your affiliate commissions too. Cloaking or shortening your links can help to prevent this from happening.
One simple way of doing this is to download a plugin called “page links to“. Then create a page on your website and point the url to your affiliate link.
Domain Name Forwarding
Another quick way to make your messy affiliate links look more professional is to use domain name forwarding.
Look! Myspammylinkhere.com is free! I wouldn’t recommend this domain but you get the idea!
Purchase a domain name which is a good match for your affiliate products. The less words the better. Try and find a domain name which summarises your product. For example one I used was affiliate-marketing-mentorship.com which I forwarded to a pre-made landing page.
If you’re going to promote your affiliate link on social media accounts, for example, what looks better, a messy long link which means nothing, or a specific domain name which encapsulates the product in a couple of words? Of course you still have to promote your domain name, but more on this later.
Once you’ve purchased a cheap domain name, you can go to your dashboard in namecheap.com and click on manage domain. Then you can use the domain forwarding feature to forward the domain name to your affiliate link.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – A Niche Website
Many new affiliates look for ways to avoid building their own website. But this is a massive mistake. A website is a fundamental building block in your online presence. Why waste such a great opportunity to build an audience and generate free traffic?
One of my favourite tactics is niche website building. See how to build a niche website and get free traffic. Start by using Google’s free keyword planner to find a keyword in your particular niche. Purchase a domain name with your chosen keyword in it. Look for something (keywords) which has traffic already but less competition than most keywords.
Once you have a website, create content to attract the right audience for your products and services. See also how to rank an affiliate website.
22 Ways To Promote Affiliate Products – Blogging
Blogging is one of my favourite ways to promote affiliate products. With a blog post, you can create content around your products, (or lead magnets) in order to draw your audience from: social media, your email list, search engines, other websites and many other areas.
Once you have some content, you can use that content and share it around as much as possible. If that content is well targeted to vibe with your target audience, they are more likely to sign up to your email list and become a long term fan! Once on your email list, you can build a relationship through your emails and promote your affiliate products.
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Email Marketing
Yes of course this list wouldn’t be complete without a mention of one of the most (if not THE most) powerful marketing tactics available – email marketing. The power of email marketing should never be underestimated if you’re an affiliate. With a blog, or a website, a visitor has only a few minutes to purchase your product. But once on your list, this time period is extended by weeks, months and even years and decades.
The key to email marketing is to build trust and offer value. When your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are more likely to open your emails and purchase your recommended products and services.
There’s load of information available on getting better at email marketing. Over time with practice you’ll get better if you keep working at it. Here’s a tool I found recently which helps increase your email open rates: sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester
22 Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategies
Here’s one of my favourite techniques but it requires you to have already built a blog and created a few posts.
You can then use software to churn out your posts on all your social media accounts. Post planner and Revive Old Posts are two I use. With both, you can connect your blogs to your social media accounts. Post planner has a number of plans according to your needs and Revive Old Posts has a free version with the ability to upgrade for more functionality.
Social Media Share Plugin
If you have a blog or a website, it’s also worth getting a social media share plugin to make sharing of your posts easier for your visitors. There’s many of these plugins available for a WordPress website. Just click on “Add Plugin” in your dashboard and look for social media share buttons.
It’s a one time job to do and will help grow your online presence organically once you’ve done it.
Ways To Promote Your Affiliate Products – Free Marketing Strategy On Facebook
Here’s a great little strategy I found using your Facebook profile. Start by cleaning up your profile and posts. You want to create a clean platform look which attracts people to your online brand. Change your profile picture to a professional looking one of you and link to your domain name in your bio.
You can also use a profile to link to your websites, ebooks, landing pages etc.
Once you’ve done this, your profile should have a clear call to action in it which lets people quickly see what you are offering. Here’s my profile:
I know it could be a little more professional looking! But you see my link in the bio?
Once you’ve done this you need to connect with people who you think are suitable for your affiliate product.
If your product is in the health and fitness niche, look for groups to join where these people hang out. Join those groups and start connecting and chatting with those people. Don’t spam your links, but genuinely connect with people and build relationships. As they come to your profile to check you out, they’ll see your link and what you’re about.
This takes a little patience and persistence. But if you dedicate some time to it each day over several weeks and months, you should see people coming to your profile and clicking on your affiliate link.
Using Quora For Traffic
Once you’ve built a blog and have some content, Quora is a great resource for generating traffic. With Quora, you can’t directly link to affiliate products. You’re likely to get your answers collapsed if you go spamming on the site. So instead, you need to give value first and Quora will reward you by allowing you to link to resources which help answer the questions – that is, your content!
Make sure you make a big effort to answer questions on the site and give real value. A short line answer with a link will get you flagged eventually. This is a long term strategy and one single link isn’t going to make your affiliate business. But if you make a daily habit out of answering questions which are relevant to your affiliate niche, and linking to your website content, you’ll see people clicking to your website. See also affiliate marketing on Quora.
Snip.ly – Social Media “Sniping”
Snip.ly is an awesome free tool which lets you take content and drop your link onto it. You can then share hot buzzing content (which isn’t your own) on social media. If you pick the right topics which both resonate with your customer avatar/perfect audience, you’ll get other people sharing your content – and your link!
I use Sniply to get people to my website or a landing page. It can be used in combination with trending articles or even videos. Pick a viral article or video which relates closely to your niche. I use sites like TheOnion.com, Dailymash.com and ThePoke.com – they are news satire websites. But I’ve also use other sites such as Buzzsumo.com to find trending articles within my niche.
Drop your link in it and share away! As more people share it, you get more people to link to your site. Of course the lick rate is often quite low, but if you stick with this strategy and become a master of it, you’ll see some business growth over time.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation deserves a mention here too. If you’re a blogger, you should optimise your content as you write it. You can do this by using an SEO plugin which helps you write content with your keyword in mind. It will help you get the keyword in your titles, image alt tags and throughout your content.
If you pick long tail keywords which have far lower competition than the others, you also have more chance of ranking your content. (See find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty). I use a plugin called Yoast SEO which helps me write seo friendly content. There’s many ranking factors used by Google and other search engines (Google being the market leader):
Content – without great content you won’t get links, shares and attention organically, so it’s the most important factor
Backlinks. -you can build backlinks through guest posting, social media marketing, blog commenting, forum posting and many other strategies. Backlinks are important for SEO and where they come from is as important as how many you have. One strong back link is better than many spammy ones.
Create more content and link to it using deep linking – deep links tell search engines what to rank your content for and come from your own content.
Visitor interactions on your content – Google sees how people interact with your content. So make it with your visitor in mind, not just the search “bots”
But if you don’t have a ready made lead magnet, you might want to create your own. Ebooks are probably one of the best ways to build your email list. Start by defining who your perfect customer is, keeping your affiliate product in mind.
Your ebook should be a good match for them, and lead them nicely towards your affiliate product. For example, I have a few ebooks. Some of them work better for making sales than others because they are more aligned with the products I promote.
Niche Blogging For Profit, doesn’t do as well for sales as Affiliate Marketing For Beginners. The reason is that the latter is more aligned with the needs of my target audience. Of course I found this out much later after having created both books! Save yourself some time and spend some time learning who your perfect customer is. Then create an awesome ebook to offer as a lead magnet.
Link Building – For SEO
Link building has always been my nemesis! It’s a boring and mundane task and I hate it! But links are a massive SEO factor and the more quality links you have, the more likely Google is to rank your site for your main keywords.
I’ve done some link building but not everything I should have done! Link building can be done through creating content on free article posting sites like ezinearticles.com, hubpages.com and Blogger.com etc. Link to existing content to build authority and traffic. Reach out to other bloggers in your niche area and offer to write guest posts in exchange for back links. You can also post blog comments. This does give you back links although the authority of these links is under some debate.
One strategy for link building I found is to use BuzzSumo.com to find influencers in your field. Contact them with content similar to what they already share and try to connect. I’ve recently bought a link building service from a company called thehoth.com which comes highly recommended. They have a variety of packages which are affordable for most affiliates.
Webinars
Webinars are a great way to promote affiliate products. Offer a free webinar to your email list and promote your affiliate products at the end for a discount to your attendees. Again, some affiliate programs offer webinars you can use as an affiliate. Or create your own webinars and advertise it through your email list or via one of the other methods listed here. Here’s a free webinar from Stuart, one of my personal mentors. (Click image to register).
PDF’s – Create PDF files and put them on your website
Pdf’s can be a good way to generate free traffic to a website or blog. I’ve created quite a few pdfs over the years and some of them are still bringing me free traffic and leads. You can use pdf’s as a traffic generation strategy, and try and get people to opt into your email list once they land on your site.
Here’s an example pdf I’ve created which still generates traffic even years later:
Obviously you also want to find pdf’s which are a good match for your target audience. Here’s a simple way to find what’s already being searched for to your niche. Just type in “your niche pdf” into Google and you’ll see some results.
Using YouTube
YouTube has already had a mention here. But YouTube can also be used to generate traffic organically, link to your blog and target specific keywords in your niche. The more obscure the keyword, the more likelihood of you ranking for that particular keyword.
Go to YouTube and type in search terms into the search bar. You should see search suggestions linked to your “seed” keyword. Find keywords which relate to your niche and create videos for them. Link back to blog content for extra traffic and an SEO link. Here’s an old video I created sharing the Snipl.y strategy I shared above. I still get leads from this even years after having put it on YouTube.
Watch the video by clicking on the image below.
YouTube Commenting
Yes YouTube commenting! One mentor who’s course I purchased years ago taught me this strategy. Create a YouTube account and link it to your affiliate product somehow. Ideally use the domain name forwarding strategy at least, if you don’t use your own website. Build your channel out with your link somewhere easy to see.
Take some time to make it look professional and use images which relate to your product or your own picture to make it personal. Then find videos which are hugely popular and have over a million views. Comment on the videos and join the discussion. Make a habit out of this and over time people will click on your name (in the comment) and this takes them through to your channel. Here, they see your link and can click through to see what you’re promoting.
This is similar to the Facebook and Snip.ly strategies in that it is something which requires persistence. Make a habit out of it and over time you’ll reap the rewards. Get involved in the discussion and contribute rather than just saying something generic and innocuous. Aim at 20 comments a day for a couple of months at least to give it a chance.
Google Places / Google My Business
Google My Business is a free listing for locally placed businesses. It’s really meant for physical businesses. However, if you are in a particular niche and you can add a locally placed business to your home address, you can potentially make some sales here!
Create a service, attach it to your address and build a niche website around it. This is a useful strategy if you already have an existing business too. You can attach affiliate products to your website. Then promote your website locally with Google My Business. It’s worth spending some time using Google’s keywords planner if you’re going to try this strategy. Have a look and see if you can tie your affiliate business to a local search in your area.
Do this by putting your local city or town into the location option in the keyword planner. Then search for your main keywords in the keyword planner. Build a fictional business around your main keywords, and link your free listing to an affiliate website!
This isn’t a scalable strategy but it only takes an hour to set up and then you should get free traffic for life!
Summary
There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing as you can see. If you want more time and less hassle, choose a high ticket program and learn paid marketing. If you can’t afford this option, make habits out of doing the cheaper strategies. Build them into your daily routine and keep going. Focus on the activity and not the results. Ideally you should use recurring commission affiliate products in your product inventory. With recurring commissions, your income will build up more quickly and your efforts will compound over time.
Have you any more strategies which I’ve missed? ! Please comment below with your ideas and add to this article. I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface with the endless social media possibilities. Still, it’s better to get good at one thing than to be a master of none! Don’t spread yourself too thin! Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it!
A sustainable affiliate program doesn’t just mean one which is eco friendly! While eco friendly affiliate programs lay claim to being environmentally friendly, a sustainable affiliate program should be financially sustainable. So what does this mean?
Aren’t all affiliate programs sustainable? Well, no they aren’t! Many well known affiliate programs offer little in the way of commission. Take Amazon for example, and eBay. Both programs offer from 1% to 10% commissions on products you refer and despite some benefits of cookies and bonuses, this is still really low.
You can get lucky if you refer someone to a product on Amazon if they fill their cart the same day and go on a spending spree. But mostly you’ll get small commissions for your efforts. This means you have to deal in bulk and unless you’re way ahead in your affiliate journey, and able to come up with free traffic, this is unsustainable for many affiliates. They simply can’t make a living with this model, let alone a scalable income.
Sustainable Affiliate Program – Recurring Commissions
Of course it all comes down to the affiliate’s marketing strategy too. Unless you can find a strategy which works, your business won’t be sustainable whatever you do. But that aside, there are some affiliate marketing business models which are far more sustainable than others. With an affiliate commission structure which offers recurring commissions, for example, you’re in a far better place than with single commissions of only 3%!
If your product only offers you 3% on every sale, and is priced at or below $100, that’s $3 or less you’ll make on a sale! Unless you’re making hundreds of these on a regular basis, you’ll struggle to make affiliate marketing pay. However, with a product which offers recurring commissions, on a membership or software product, your income will grow for each sale you make. So, even if you’re making a loss in the first instance, a recurring income will help you recover more quickly.
Recurring commission affiliate products are a major key to sustainability with an online business. With recurring commissions you efforts compound over time. With single point of sale products, you always need to keep selling to keep earning.
Sustainable Affiliate Program – High Ticket
With low value physical products you can expect smaller commissions. But with high value digital products, it’s far easier to build a sustainable income. Digital products on the whole give you far larger commissions than physical. With a digital product you’re looking at 40% commission typically compared to 1-10% with physical. That’s a huge disparity. Sell just 10 products at $1000 commission and you’ll make the same as selling 1000 products which pay you only $10 commission.
You might say that digital products are more difficult to sell than physical ones. And perhaps that’s true. Physical products are more tangible and require less convincing to sell. But if you compare the work you’ll need to do to make $10,000 with physical products compared to digital ones and the answer should be obvious. You’ll need to sell 100 times as many products with the physical product example above. It’s not going to be 100 times more difficult to sell a digital product.
What Makes An Affiliate Program Sustainable – Support
With affiliate marketing it’s very easy too to reach burn out point and give up. What can make a more sustainable affiliate program is one which offers help and support to its members. By joining a community as an affiliate, you can benefit from the experience of others who have already become full time entrepreneurs.
On your own, it’s difficult to sustain the necessary effort to make your business consistently profitable. But with help and support, it can be easier to overcome the barriers to success.
During an affiliate training conference
By following a step by step procedure and listening to other market leaders and coaches, your affiliate journey should be a smoother one.
Learn more about a training and mentorship program and how to access a high ticket affiliate product “suite” here.
A High Ticket Product Range
I mentioned high ticket products earlier, but it’s also worth looking at a high ticket product range if you want a sustainable affiliate program. With a product range, you can refer someone to a single product and benefit from a number of “up-sells”, closed automatically by a built in sales team. This means you don’t need to do the selling personally and helps massively with a digital business system.
Simply refer people to your entry level product through a sales funnel using email marketing. Most affiliate products don’t offer this. With most affiliate products, once you have referred a sale you lose your customer to the product owner. They get a customer, potentially for life, and you get a single commission! The more sustainable affiliate programs reward you for life, with recurring commission products and a product range from which you can continue earning. See lifetime commission affiliate programs.
With a high ticket program, higher value products offer more value to the customer. For each subsequent sale closed in-house (by a built in sales team), you earn commissions of up to 40% (depending on your commission structure).
Having a product range is another way to make your affiliate business more sustainable over the longer term. See SFM Digital Business System for one.
More Sustainability Through Muli-Tier Commissions
A multi tier affiliate program offers commissions based on sales made by your referrals. So as you grow the number of member sales through promoting recurring commission products, you can also benefit from their success through using a multi-tier program. The SFM Digital Business system offers a muti-tier commission structure to those at the top tier of the business system.
Selling the below products can earn you up to 40% commissions at the top tier. You can also benefit from 10% commissions based on the sales made by your members.
Before finding this business model, I struggled for a long time with affiliate marketing. I sold products from Amazon and eBay by creating blogs and attempting to get traffic for free. But this business model has becoming less and less sustainable because the affiliate commissions are so low, and not everyone can have the top rankings for their content on Google.
There’s many other organic strategies you can implement with affiliate marketing, but free traffic is much more difficult to obtain and those low valued products don’t pay nearly enough to make it worth your while.
Paid marketing on the other hand is much more sustainable as a source of marketing (and it’s scalable). But you need a business model which can support it. With high ticket digital products, a product range, recurring commissions and a multi-tier affiliate program, you have a much more sustainable affiliate business than with the various other strategies you could employ.
Access a free video series to learn more about the SFM digital business system here. Or, get started and access Mentors All In here.
