AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? The answer is an emphatic yes – you can! Many people are already making affiliate marketing their main income source and using the internet to escape their regular jobs. But affiliate marketing isn’t easy. It can be difficult to get traction as an affiliate, especially early on. See how difficult is affiliate marketing.

There’s a few affiliate strategies which work better than others too. So it’s well worth investing in your education so you know the best ways to go about it. In this article, I’ll share some of the best strategies which have worked for me, over my years as an affiliate.

Can you make a living from affiliate marketing? Yes you can. But in order to do so, you need to navigate affiliate marketing in the right way. Otherwise you can spend a lot of time and get nowhere!

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular business strategies on the internet today. It’s a simple strategy where anyone can refer customers to affiliate products through their own unique affiliate link. When a customer purchases something through your link, you earn commissions based on sales you have referred.

There’s many ways to refer customers through your own affiliate link. You can start a blogging website (like this one), build an email list of subscribers, or even use paid advertising to generate traffic to your website (or to build your email list). You can even send people directly to affiliate products from your marketing too. Depending on the products you promote, your budget, and particular circumstances, you may choose one or all of those tactics.

Your strategy, choice of products and determination, all play a factor in determining how well you do as an affiliate marketer.

Can You Make A Living From Affiliate Marketing?

For a long time I struggled as an affiliate marketer. I don’t believe my journey is unique either! Affiliate marketing is hard, especially in the beginning. When you start out, you don’t know what you’re doing. Your belief is low, you’re sceptical, and you can easily spend a lot of time on the wrong activities.

You might have high expectations of what you can earn with little work too; which goes against you. And many affiliates will quit in their first year without having made any sales at all! But don’t let that put you off! The fact that many affiliates quit leaves less competition for those who persevere. Plus, I’m going to share some important strategies which can make a massive difference to your affiliate journey.

You really can earn a good living from affiliate marketing; if you stick at it, refuse to quit, and take the right action steps!

Using The Right Products – Recurring Commissions & High Ticket Items

When I began doing affiliate marketing, I joined Amazon’s and eBay’s partner networks. At the time, they were all I knew. But both these platforms pay very low levels of commission to their affiliates. Amazon pays between 3% and 11% commissions to affiliates who refer customers to their products. eBay is similar, although they pay a percentage of the fees they receive from auctions and sales. Both eBay and Amazon has recently cut affiliate rates and you’re better off not using them if you want to earn a living as an affiliate.

See https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

and https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2020/05/31/ebay-changes-affiliate-rates-a-second-time-this-month/

As eBay and Amazon have become more popular, they’re less in need of referral traffic, and are cutting their commission rates. So affiliates who spent years promoting items from these sites are losing out.

Instead, you should concentrate your affiliate efforts on programs which do reward affiliates appropriately. Items such as these are far better to promote for affiliates:

Digital products – pay larger commissions (40% and above)
Software products used by online businesses pay a recurring income to affiliates
Membership products which pay affiliates recurring commissions.
High ticket digital products – pay larger commissions on larger value items.
Multi-tier commissions – let you earn money through sales made by your referrals.
Product ranges – instead of promoting a single product (which only pays you once), you can promote a product range to earn more commissions from later purchases by existing customers
Use a product range with a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.

Ideally, use a product range which offers all of the above such as the SFM Digital Business System.

Advantages Of High Value, Recurring & Digital Products

High ticket, recurring commission (digital) affiliate products have a few advantages which low value physical products cannot give you. Even high value physical products will only pay out lower rates of commission. Given manufacturing costs, postage and handling, physical products simply can’t compete with digital products in terms of rewards for affiliate marketers. See also highest paying affiliate programs list.

With digital products you can not only earn recurring commissions, which physical sales can’t give, but you can also earn 40% and above commissions. Some digital products even pay 100% commissions on sales you refer. (See All In Package commission rates below).

Commission structure as an essential member of The SFM

With high ticket commissions, there’s another advantage besides the obvious monetary one. With a high ticket sales funnel it’s far easier to use paid marketing methods in your advertising and still make a profit. For low value physical affiliate products, it can be very difficult, or impossible to run paid marketing campaigns and still make a profit.

But with a high ticket sales funnel, it’s much easier to come out with a profit and still use paid marketing. Paid marketing is far quicker, and more scalable, than other affiliate marketing methods you need to use with low value products.

Commission structure as a DEA Partner Member of The SFM

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Anyone can start doing affiliate marketing from anywhere with very little investment. All you really need to get started is a laptop and internet connection. There’s many cheap methods of marketing products such as content marketing: blogging, video marketing and by using the various social media platforms.

But if you want to make affiliate marketing your income, there’s many roadblocks too. Getting traffic is a major one which can be more quickly overcome with paid marketing. But having low value products can limit your ability to use paid marketing. So, it’s worth at least using recurring income products whatever you do.

You should also get your own website and build an email list too. An email list, a website and recurring income products should be the very least you do if you want to take affiliate marketing seriously.

You can access everything you need including training, products and support through the SFM digital product suite. Click on the image below to learn more and access a free video series, or join Mentors All In to get started.

Businesses That Run Themselves

Online stores are businesses that run themselves. Online businesses use websites, email marketing, sales funnels and other people’s products so that they can run completely on autopilot.

Anyone can build businesses which run themselves by pointing online traffic to affiliate products. This can be done through the building of websites or landing pages and/or the use of paid marketing or content marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a clever business model where referral sales earn commissions. Anyone can become an affiliate and sell other people’s products online.

There’s various strategies which affiliate marketers can use to build businesses that run themselves. The key principle though is driving customers to products online. Learning how to automate this can take some time, though.

Businesses That Run Themselves – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers use several strategies to drive online traffic to affiliate products:

Email marketing – can be automated and used to build thousands of subscribers
Building websites and blogging – websites run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Using paid marketing – which can be scaled up and run automatically
Finding traffic from social media platforms
Building back links to content, driving traffic to affiliate products

Once affiliates start generating sales from any given strategy, they “zone” on that particular strategy and do more of it. Over time, any strategy can give you automation in your online business. Some strategies however, can offer faster automation than others.

Businesses That Run Themselves – Fastest Strategy

Some affiliates use slow strategies such as blogging, or organic marketing methods. This can take months or even years before these strategies start bearing fruit. A much faster strategy to build an automated business is through the use of a good business model, list building and paid marketing.

Physical affiliate products tend to pay much lower commissions than digital ones. With a physical product you have product storage, handling and delivery costs attached. But with digital products, items can be delivered automatically over the internet.

Savings are passed to affiliates who can earn 40% of a product’s sale value. Compared to the commission of 3-11% commission on a physical product, that’s a massive difference.

If you also choose to sell affiliate products which offer recurring commissions, high value, have a built in sales team and offer multi-tier commissions, your return on investment is much higher. So you can therefore more easily use paid marketing which is much more scalable than cheaper methods using content creation. See SFM Digital Business System for more on this business model.

Affiliate Marketing Other Methods

There’s literally millions of products you can use as an affiliate marketer to build a largely automated business. Even a website offers the opportunity to build an automated business using the affiliate marketing model. The fastest method is to use a high ticket program and invest in paid marketing. But it’s not the only way to build an online business.

You can also build a profitable business online through blogging. Blogging is a slower strategy than using paid marketing. It’s also less scalable. But not everyone needs a massive income from their online business. Some people want a cheaper method to make money online.

Blogging satisfies this need.

You should expect to create a lot of content, and actively share it, for a good few months or years. If you’re consistent, and manage to make it work, your blog can be a source of free traffic, and sales for years to come. Initially though, not much happens. This is the hardest part of being a blogger, overcoming the “valley of disappointment”.

The “valley of disappointment” is the difference between what you expect to happen and what actually happens. With blogging, if you choose a topic you love, you’ll be able to keep going. If your only reason for blogging is the outcome, it’s much more difficult to overcome this barrier.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a great way to build businesses that run themselves. If you choose the right path for you, and use a good business model, you can earn commissions from recurring commissions, high ticket products, multi-tier sales and through using a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf. Once you’ve made a few sales, you’ll be earning a recurring income from them.

If you automate the lead generation strategy, and use email marketing, you’ve got a means to earn an income which is completely automated and scalable.

Admittedly, it takes time and effort to get everything up and running. You need to test and measure your marketing strategies. Depending on your marketing strategy, it can take months or years to generate traction. But once you do, you can generate ongoing income from work you’re already done.

It’s much better than working a job, trading your time for money for the rest of your life!

If you want to get started with your own online business, checkout this online business package and get started. It comes with a full money back guarantee for 30 days. Click on the image below to learn more.

How To Know Your Target Market

When selling anything online, it’s important to know your target market. With online marketing, you effectively have a global audience to target your products or service to. So, it will be much more efficient and effective if you know who to put your marketing message in front of.

If you use the scatter gun approach, you just run advertising to everyone and hope for the best. This isn’t the best approach, because you’ll be running paid advertising to many groups of people who aren’t at all interested in your product.

While the scatter gun approach can give you data, it’s an expensive way to gather it and there will be a lot of wasted marketing budget. If you get clear on who your “perfect” customers are, you can be more like a sniper with your marketing; and less like a battlefront soldier. It will save you a lot of money on your marketing campaigns, if you get this right.

How To Know Your Target Market

Depending on your particular product or service, a target market can be fairly broad. Coca-Cola, for example, sell to a wide range of people. People of all ages and backgrounds buy the drink. But still, there will be a sector of the market which most of their advertising is aimed at, in order to advertise more efficiently. For Coca-Cola, his is mostly younger people who are 12 years old and older. This can often be determined through looking at the bulk of the existing customers.

If you don’t already have customers, look at your product and who it’s the best fit for. A home furnishing store will have a different customer “persona” to Coca-Cola. You would expect the average customer to be in a couple and over 20 years old, for example. See this home decorating retail market plan.

So one of the best ways to determine who your target audience is, is to look closely at the criteria that makes up your existing customers:

Age range
Location geographically
Interests
pains and problems
Family situation
Salary
Etc.

How To Know Your Target Market – The Buyer “Persona”

A company’s target market can be made up of a large section of people. One way of defining your target market more specifically is through a buyer persona. A buyer persona is also called a customer avatar. It’s a fictional character which represents one of your ideal customers.

How to know your target audience – identify your perfect customer persona or “avatar”

If you’re generating a marketing campaign for an online business, it can be a good idea to target a customer avatar. Spending some time getting to know your customer avatar is a good use of your time. It can help you to speak directly to that individual, with your marketing message, through the pains and problems which your product helps them with.

If you try and sell to everyone in your marketing message, it can have the opposite effect. This is because it doesn’t speak directly to the pains and problems which your unique product helps to solve.

Your Products/Service

What pains and problems do your products solve? And who is most likely to benefit from them? Once you know this you should have already narrowed down your target audience. Consider which sub-section of your potential customers are the most likely to need and want your product. Who is it most important to and why.

What assumptions have you made about your target audience, and are these true? Have you tested these assumptions with real marketing and got the data to prove it?

Until you actually run a marketing campaign, and get the feedback to prove or disprove your assumptions, you could be barking up the wrong tree. So, one way to know your target audience is to run campaigns and gather data. You can run paid marketing campaigns to a website or a landing page. Collect data as you start making sales through an email marketing campaign. This is done through tracking and measuring your advertising and sales.

But before you run a campaign, it’s worth considering who your idea customer is, where they live, can they afford your products and what are their pains and problems which you can help to solve.

Get To Know Your Existing Customers

Your existing customers are already putting their money where there mouth is! They already purchased from you. Getting to know why they bought from you is a simple and cheap way of gathering data on your perfect customer and target audience.

Conduct market research with your customers and get to know more about them. As you do, this will tell you more about their pains and problems which your product or business helps them with.

How old are they? What are their interests and passions? How did they find your company? The more you know about your existing customers, and the larger your customer based grows, the more you will understand them and how to find more like them.

Try Different Marketing Strategies

Adwords is a popular marketing strategy for online businesses which lets the marketer target people by their search queries. If you own a hardware store in Lincoln, it’s pretty obvious that you’re a good fit for someone typing “hardware store”, who lives locally to you!

Use Google’s keyword planner to find other keywords which are a good fit for your business.

Facebook and YouTube are great platforms too, which let you target people by a number of criteria:

Age
Location
Interests
Income
Sex
Groups and connections
and so on

By targeting certain criteria which are relevant to your business, you can zone in on the type of people who are most suited to your business. Not everyone you advertise to will purchase something from you. If you’re on a budget with your advertising, you’ll want to make it go further by making it more efficient.

At first, as you’re learning marketing, you will tend to spend more because your marketing will be to a larger group of people. As you gather data, and start making sales, you can use this information to learn who is the most likely type of person to buy from you.

How To Know Your Target Market – Summary

The best way how to know your target market is through testing and measuring of your advertising campaigns. Those adverts which don’t generate sales, cut them! Those ones which work the best, keep them running. Learn from your data and test and measure advertising continually.

But before you run any advertising campaign, it’s a good idea to get to know existing customers, if you have any. The better you get to know them, the more you’ll know who to target in your marketing campaigns and this will significantly reduce your cost. You’ll be able to target these kinds of people more specifically with your marketing – saving you a lot of money.

You can also define your target audience through looking closely at your products. What problems and pains do they solve? Who is this mostly likely to impact if they choose to become a customer?

Question your assumptions about your target market. How old are they? Where do they live? Identify your buyer persona, or customer avatar and talk to this fictional character in their language when you create a marketing campaign.

Is SFM A Scam?

A common question I’ve had from my email subscribers is “is SFM a scam?”. As a Six Figure Mentors affiliate, of course you would expect me to say “no”.

Having taken many dubious courses over several years, I found SFM back in 1014 and had the same doubts. The first meet up I went on, I was highly dubious and so sceptical that I didn’t believe anyone would show up!

To my surprise I met several other affiliates who had joined the company. I was able to go to my first event organised by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek in 2014 too, in London. There were hundreds of people there, some of which had joined the company when it began in 2010 and made their full time living through SFM.

Is SFM A Scam?

Jay and Stuart regularly turn up for their members in person. This was something I never had experienced on the many other courses I took before finding them.

Pre-pandemic, they hosted events regularly throughout the year, all over the globe. Since 2020, they have had to alter their training curriculum to make the many events available digitally over zoom conference calls.

I’ve been with The SFM for over 6 years now and building an online business hasn’t been plain sailing. You can read more about my experience in my article Six Figure Mentors Affiliate.

But the SFM doesn’t claim to be a “magic bullet” or a “get rich quick scheme”. This is what sets them apart from some of the more shady courses which promise the moon! The SFM offers training and education for people who want to build digital businesses. It’s not a get rich quick scheme!

That being said, the SFM has turned out some very successful affiliates. But results are not typical and are never guaranteed.

If you think you can use SFM for quick riches, without putting in the work, you’re in the wrong place and it’s probably not for you.

IS SFM A Scam? – SFM Collaborations

Microsoft Lynda (Under the Linkedin umbrella of companies) recently partnered with SFM as a way to offer their own 6,500 training courses as part of the SFM curriculum.

DigitalMarketer (The world’s longest standing and most highly respected B2B and B2C marketing training company) also partnered with SFM and now offer their own training as part of the SFM curriculum.

Do you think these companies would partner with any organisation that wasn’t providing huge value and wasn’t 100% above board?

You can also access a wealth of training an information through the SFM Mentors All in package for only $100 and then $97 a month, (training worth well over $2000). Click on the image below for details.

Will You Be Successful Using SFM?

This is another question similar to the “is SFM a scam?” question. If SFM isn’t a scam, will you therefore be successful if you follow the training? The answer to this will depend on a number of factors. Many businesses fail in their first 3 years and an online business is no different.

In fact, 60% of new businesses will fail in their first 3 years. Here’s why. Those who persevere, decide never to quit and continue no matter what are the ones who succeed. No one can guarantee you will be successful.

A good analogy is the gym. If you join a gym how long will it take to get six pack abs? Some will never achieve it and some will do it in a matter of months. The SFM offers all the tools and training and even support for someone to build an online business from scratch. But ultimately it’s up to the individual to immerse themselves in the training and community, and put in the necessary work. Not everyone will be determined enough to do what is required, and many will quit before they see any results at all.

Earnings Through The SFM

My earnings varied dramatically through selling the SFM product range. As soon as I could, I upgraded my account so I could earn from the high ticket products. At a basic member level, you can still earn commissions based on the entire product range offered by The SFM. But your commissions are more limited, so you can’t earn as much from each sale. Once you purchase the higher level products, you can also earn larger commissions.

sfm earnings — SFM Basic Membership commission structure

I started making sales within a few months through the SFM and had even made a high ticket sale in my first year. But I struggled to use paid marketing because my earnings were so sporadic.

This was because I didn’t have a full time income source. So instead of focusing on paid marketing, I used content generation. This is notoriously slow! I’ve seen many members fly past me far quicker when they had a bigger reason (and a regular income). They used paid marketing to build their businesses quickly, and positioned at the top (invested heavily).

Investment and Potential

You can invest in the top level training and product range and this places you as a partner member. This means you can access personal 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching, and more personal and in-depth training and support. It also means you can access the higher level commissions and earn more.

This in turn lets you use the more expensive marketing platforms for your advertising. Without the higher level commissions and high ticket products in your sales funnel, it’s difficult to use paid marketing techniques.

DEA commission structure — DEA Partner commission structure

So according to your “buy-in” level, you may need to adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Before I invested in the top tier products and commission levels, I used blogging for my marketing strategy. It’s a free strategy but it does take much longer and requires a commitment of months or years before you see any traction.

With paid marketing, you can can have a profitable business inside a year if you do well, although this is still a challenge. Of course you will spend money on advertising while learning what works. So it’s advisable not to risk capital you can’t afford to lose while doing this.

Is SFM A Scam? Summary

So, is SFM a scam? No, it’s an education and training program for people who want to become entrepreneurs. The SFM also offers their own digital business system which members can choose to promote if they wish. But you can also use SFM training resources to help in any entrepreneurial endeavour.

When I first started with the SFM back in 2014, I was able to use the training to help me build up a failing kung fu school in Bradford, UK. Later, I was able to make a 5 figure commission through the SFM using it’s own digital business system. Read more about my SFM journey in Six Figure Mentors Affiliate.

If you’re serious about earning an income online, The SFM can help you. But it’s not a “magic bullet” or “get rich quick scheme”! The SFM offers everything you need to transition to earning online through many strategies. But you need to be serious and committed to putting in the work if you want to succeed online. As with any business, there’s risk involved and it takes a huge commitment to build a profitable online business starting from scratch. It’s definitely not for everyone.

If you want to get started online you can access the SFM Mentors program here. There’s a 30 day month back guarantee so you can claim a full refund if it’s not for you.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs

Affiliate marketing startup costs can be very low. Anyone can get started in affiliate marketing for very little. You can buy and domain name for less than $5 and hosting package for under $10 a month. With your own website you can start promoting affiliate products from anywhere; you just need to generate traffic to your site. You can even get traffic to your website free, if you work hard enough generating content.

You should also purchase an email autoresponder too, which you can do for around $10 a month to start. Get one here. An autoresponder collects emails and sends out email marketing messages automatically.

But a lot of affiliates don’t get the traction they really want, and give up before they get anywhere. Even if you create your own website to promote affiliate products from, and join a free affiliate program, you can get lost down the many rabbit holes there are in affiliate marketing.

You can of course do affiliate marketing completely for free too! Using a free blog platform (Hubpages.com), I made one of my first sales online after writing a product review. But I wouldn’t recommend this if you want to build a serious income, as it can be very difficult.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Training & Support

It’s worth investing in your education if you’re going to take your affiliate business seriously. It can take much longer, and it can be more difficult, if you go it alone. Jumping from free video to free video, learning from many different strategies can be hard. Especially if you have no-one to turn to when things get tough.

Joining an online community and plugging yourself into a group of like minded people, can be the best money you will spend. You can access the Mentors All In program for $99 and $97 a month. This program gives you website hosting and a website builder, training and products to sell, a simple modular step by step process and basically everything you need to learn how to sell products online.

You can access a free video series here to learn more about this program.

Within this program you can access multiple training courses and also a product range from which you can earn up to 101% commissions on.

Here’s the commission structure on the digital product range you can access as an affiliate for the SFM Mentors. The more you invest, the higher levels of commission you can earn, and the more support you can access.

Affiliate Marketing Startup Costs – Commission Structure

Many affiliate programs can be joined completely free. However, they don’t offer support and training. You’ll just have to figure out how to sell products by yourself. So it’s worth joining a program which helps you with this. Free to join programs also often have a criteria for joining, such as owning your own website or having a required number of subscribers on your list.

Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs which anyone can join for free. However, you will have to have your partner program approved and the terms and conditions for approval often change over time. Before you can get approved by Amazon’s affiliate program, you’ll need to have your own website with a number of quality articles on it. Have a look at this article for more on this.

But Amazon isn’t the best program to join either because it’s commission rate is so low. Promoting products from Amazon will only earn affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions. This is pretty low when you consider that many digital products will pay out 40% and above in commissions to affiliates.

High Value Digital Products

You can spend more on affiliate marketing startup costs if you want a better business model. Using high ticket affiliate programs can give you a massive advantage when starting out as an affiliate.

If you choose to sell physical products you can earn 3-11% commissions. Digital products will pay 40%+ commissions. But with high ticket products, you can earn 40% commissions on products valued up to $10,000 and above.

These kinds of products are those such as mentorships and coaching products – giving you more access to top affiliates who have spent years learning the best methods of building online businesses. 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring for affiliates is well worth the investment if you’re serious about building a full time income online, and can afford it.

To access the high ticket products as a re-seller affiliate, and qualify for the larger commissions, you’ll need to invest in the products themselves. You can choose your level of investment through the SFM Digital Business System which includes mentorship and coaching items worth up to $20, 000. Selling a product like this can earn you a very nice commission, according to your positioning in the business model.

Marketing Your Products

Affiliate marketing startup costs also involve marketing costs too. If you’re going to use paid advertising to sell your products, you’ll need to factor this in. Paid marketing is more suitable when you have a high ticket product range in your “digital store”. A good product range includes:

One or many high ticket products
Recurring commission products
A product range
A built in sales team
Multi-tier sales

Without a range of products, and earning strategies like this, it can be more difficult to use paid marketing to sell affiliate products and still come out with a profit. Look again at Amazon products which typically pay between 3% and 11% commission.

To use paid marketing to sell these kinds of products will be very tricky! If you sell a book from Amazon at $10 and only make $3% commission, that’s only $0.30 cents commission! To sell this product using paid marketing (and come out with a profit) is near impossible! But if you have a sales funnel with multiple earning strategies, it’s much more realistic.

How Committed Are You?

There’s a variety of affiliate marketing startup costs, so you can choose a level of financial commitment which suits your budget. Generally speaking the more you invest, the more committed you will be and the more help you’ll get. If you just want to “give it a go”, you can do it for free.

But if you’re serious about turning affiliate marketing into a serious income, and becoming financially free, it will take a lot of commitment and sacrifice.

On a scale of 10, how badly do you need affiliate marketing to get you out of your current circumstances? It’s often your “why?” which will determine your success in affiliate marketing. Remember there’s a huge drop out rate for affiliates too. Most quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. Those with a big enough “why?” make it happen because they have to!

Summary

So if you’re wondering about affiliate marketing startup costs, as you can see, you can invest heavily for mentorship, training and support, and for high ticket sales funnels, or you can go it alone and join an affiliate program for free!

I started out doing everything for free and found it incredibly difficult. See how difficult is affiliate marketing. I created niche websites and used free blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger.com and Hubpages.com. Ideally, at least purchase your own website and hosting, since this is a better way of generating traffic. It also positions you as more of an authority, than by using free blogging platforms.

Some affiliates become bloggers and this is a cheap way to get started. Others upload videos to YouTube to get traffic. Getting traffic and knowing where to promote your affiliate link are the biggest challenges for affiliates, so it’s worth getting help and training before you start out, if you don’t know what you’re doing!

You can access a free video series to learn more about The SFM through this link.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers

The highest earning affiliate marketers have been at it for years; affiliate marketing is more than just a job to them. Many affiliates quit before getting anywhere, but the top affiliates kept going.

Two of the highest earning affiliates are the co-founders of The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) Jay Kubassek and Stuart Ross. They created an online community for others to learn how to become digital entrepreneurs back in 2010. Before this they were both affiliate marketers who became successful promoting other people’s products as affiliates themselves. Stuart and Jay’s community has also produced many top earning affiliates over the years too. Join through this link.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers – Neil Patel

Neil Patel is also one of the highest earning affiliate marketers. He’s also pretty prevalent on Google too. If you’ve ever Googled anything to do with affiliate marketing, Neil will undoubtedly pop up somewhere near the top! He’s the co-founder of NP Digital and Subscribers.

The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies.

Neil’s a New York Times bestselling author. He’s also been recognised as a top 100 entrepreneur by President Obama and the United Nations.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers – Martin Lewis

Martin Lewis is the founder of moneysavingexpert.com and despite him being an English journalist and television presenter, the website he founded also makes him an affiliate marketer.

The site gives help and advice in all money saving matters and makes revenue from affiliate marketing.

So how does MSE generate revenue?

Companies cannot pay to appear on the site. The intention of the site is to help people save money, before profit. Finding affiliate links to the products is secondary to this intention. See how MSE makes money.

Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn was one of my mentors and I found his site years ago. He created a niche website competition, which I joined. It was a site based around the topic of security guard training. Sadly, my site didn’t take off but I learned a lot from doing it. Read about building a niche website here.

Through keyword research he found the security guard topic which had little competition. He created the website smartpassiveincome.com. He also created hundreds of podcasts to help out other aspiring affiliates and digital entrepreneurs. Read about Pat here.

John Chow

John Chow is one of the highest earning affiliate marketers and runs one of the biggest money making blogs in the world!

He has been featured in

The Vancouver Sun,
the Globe and
Mail,
the New York Times,
Entrepreneur Magazine,
Ming Pao Magazine and
BC Business Magazine.

Highest Earning Affiliate Marketers

So from this list above you can see that the highest earning affiliate marketers are also entrepreneurs, authors, broadcasters and presenters. So, do you need to become an author or a presenter to be a top earning affiliate? Not at all. In fact one of the best things about affiliate marketing is you can have a fairly low profile and still do very well.

Many affiliate mentors who have helped me through this program are pretty normal! Unless you’re an affiliate marketer, or see them on YouTube, they fly below the radar. Of course it can help affiliates to write books or appear on television shows. It raises their profile and positions them as the “expert”.

But anyone can create an ebook and use it on a website to create some authority! Here’s one I made. If I can do it so can you!

What’s The Fastest Way To Become A High Earning Affiliate?

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing. Some of the top earning affiliates discovered high ticket products and recurring income affiliate products. Struggling affiliates often struggle because they use the wrong products and marketing strategies. With high value sales funnels and paid marketing, anyone can get traction much more quickly than by using low value products and organic marketing. See fastest way to make money with affiliate marketing.

If your sales funnel looks like the one above, it’s much easier to get traction and use paid marketing strategies. If you’re just linking your website to a couple of physical products on Amazon, you’re not going to get the traction you really need to make it work.

Access a free video series to learn more and get started here.

The Power Of Email Marketing

One way to understand the power of email marketing is through the numbers. Imagine having a list of 100 subscribers and just 1% of your list makes a purchase from you. Not that great; only 1 customer! But with a list of 100,000 subscribers a 1% conversion means you’ll be making 1000 new customers! Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or own your own business, the power of email marketing cannot be denied.

Affiliate marketers should definitely build an email list of subscribers. An email list can massively improve your sales figures. If you’re a blogger, a list can help you turn your visitors into sales. Or, you can build a list through using paid marketing strategies and sending people directly to your landing page.

The Power Of Email Marketing

Anyone can build an email list from a website using an email autoresponder. An autoresponder lets you collect subscriber’s information on a website and send out automated messages as often as you wish. Aweber is a good autoresponder to purchase for affiliates.

By sending out messages which offer to help, inspire and educate, you can build a relationship with your subscribers. Over time, you can turn “cold” subscribers into “warm” subscribers, who are more likely to make a purchase from you.

To encourage people to subscribe to your email list, you can offer a legitimate “bribe”! This is usually something desirable which is useful for your visitors. I use ebooks on my website and also offer a free video series for people considering building their own online business. You can access the video series through this link. Here’s a ebook lead magnet I created – “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners”.

The Power Of Email Marketing – Why Build A List?

It is of course possible to make money from affiliate marketing without a list. Affiliates sell products online through banners and links on blog posts, through YouTube videos and social media. Why would you need a list? Although it’s possible to do affiliate marketing without one, a list can massively multiple your success as an affiliate. Take blogging as an example of an activity an affiliate might do.

With blogging, you create content, much like this article, and share it around the internet. Over time, more people should come and visit your blog as your “digital footprint” of content grows in size. Then, you make sales based on the affiliate links on your blog. With a blog though, most visitors won’t purchase anything. 99% of your blog visitors will have a look around and leave without taking any purchasing action.

They are typically on your site for less than 10 minutes. So they only have a 10 minute window to get excited about what you’re selling and make a purchase!
If, however, you get them to sign on to your list, you can build a relationship with this person over months, years and even decades. People on a list can make a purchase years after signing up to it!

Since you can automate your email messages and send out live emails whenever you like, it’s a no brainer to get a list if you’re serious about building an online business.

The Power Of Email Marketing – Compounding With A List

A list compounds your efforts as an affiliate marketer. Many affiliate marketers quit before even reaching 1000 subscribers on their email list. This is a massive mistake. At first, there may be little or no results from having an email list; especially when you have less than 100 subscribers. But as your list grows, your results will compound over time.

If you are getting only 0.5% of subscribers making a purchase, you might not see a sale until your list grows beyond 100 subscribers. But with 1000 subscribers you should see 5 sales. at 10,000, you’ll see 50, at 100,000 you’ll see 500, and so on. There’s no upper limit with building a list.

If you’re not getting this kind of percentage, you might have a problem with your lead quality or your list messaging. You can access a pre built sales funnel with pre written emails through this online business platform and training program.

Marketing For List Building

To build an email list, you need to get an autoresponder and set up a new campaign. Once you’ve done this, place your form code on a website or landing page. You will see I have a form on this website, where you can enter your name and email address. If you sign up to it, you’ll start receiving emails from my automated email follow up series.

To get people on your email list, you can do a few things:

Pay for traffic
Create content (like this article) and share it.
Post content around the internet – social media platforms etc.
Upload videos to YouTube and link back to your website

Content creation is much slower than paid marketing. To get traction from blogging, and creating videos does take some time. See how long does it take to make money blogging.

With paid marketing, it’s different. You can have traffic flowing to your landing page very quickly if you use paid marketing. You should use a landing page if you’re going down the paid route, not a website. The reason for this is because on a website, your visitors are less likely to sign up – since there’s much more for them to do. On a website, they can look around and browse your content. On a landing page, they only have two options: sign up or leave. Here’s the landing page for one of my ebooks. As you can see, it’s just one web page and there’s not much you can do except sign up or leave the page.

Targeting Your Subscribers

Before you start building your list it’s important to know what kind of people you want on it. Unless your lead magnet is aligned with your product, (or range of products), you’ll get people who want your freebie giveaway, but don’t want your emails or products. The quality of your list is pretty important because with a poor quality of subscriber, you won’t make any sales. To qualify your subscribers, you should make it clear what they are signing up for. That way, people who don’t want your emails won’t sign up!

But you need to make an enticing offer which attracts the right kind of people for your products. So choose a lead magnet which works well and draws in the kind of people who will also be interested in the products you’re promoting.

If you’re using paid marketing, you’ll be spending money getting visitors to your landing page. So you don’t want to spend it on the wrong kind of visitors. Getting this right is an art, and it takes practice. But it all starts with knowing who you want on your list; your customer “Avatar”.

Customer Avatar

Your customer avatar is the “perfect customer”. They are the person who signs up to your list and your “offering” (product) is exactly what they desperately need, and want.

You should be able to accurately describe who your customer avatar is before setting up your marketing, or creating content. That way, everything you create, and for every advert you run, you’ll be focusing on bringing in the right person to your email list.

Things to know about your customer avatar are:

Where they live
How old are they?
What is their family circumstances?
Do they have children?
Do they own a house or rent ?
What are their interests?
etc.

Of course the details you need to know about will depend on what you are selling through your list. But ultimately, the more you know about your customer avatar, the better. There’s several marketing platforms you can use to drive targeted traffic to your landing page:

Bing
Yahoo
Adwords
Facebook
YouTube
etc.

Some platforms let you target search keywords with your advertising, others use different types of targeting. Choose these carefully to avoid wastage and track everything so you know which adverts bring in your best customers. Over time, and by collecting data, you’ll get better at knowing which adverts produce the most profitable customers.

Customer Journey

It’s also important to keep an eye on the customer journey when building an email list and follow up emails. Remember why someone joined your list. If you offered an ebook about blogging, stay on topic with your emails. Being congruent in your email messages will keep people on your list more engaged with you.

If you offer something as your lead magnet, your emails should reflect the reason they signed up in the first place. If they don’t you’ll find more of your subscribers are less engaged, don’t open your emails or unsubscribe.

Think about they types of emails you really want to open. They are usually covering topics you’re really interested in, and coming from people you like and respect. So try and offer a similar kind of message with your marketing.

If you want to start your own online business, you can access a product range to earn from, and ready made email templates, access through this online business community.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links?

You’ve just started affiliate marketing and wondering where to promote affiliate links? Those long, ugly links don’t look that attractive either do they!? So why would anyone want to click on them, right? A good place to start here is to ask this question: why would someone want to click on my link?

There’s millions of places you can put your link, but you want to put it somewhere where someone will actually click, and buy something, don’t you? Otherwise, you could spend months or even years pasting your link around the internet for nothing!

The key to knowing where to promote affiliate links is answering this question: why would someone click my link, and is their intention to purchase?

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Link Shortening & Cloaking

If you’ve just joined an affiliate program, chances are good that you have a long ugly link that looks something like this: https://3fb99fgcr-jtfr9qs8fjsbr33z.hop.clickbank.net/

However you dress it up, it’s not tempting to click on a link like this. So one thing you can do is shorten your links with a link shortening tool. Here’s some link shortener websites:

TinyURL
ShortURL
Cutt.ly
Bitly
Ow.ly
Buff.ly

Many internet users are reluctant to clink on long links. According to a study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, short links attract over twice as many clicks as long links. It’s also harder to remember long, messy links, so people are less inclined to share them.

Link cloaking can help you track your sales too, and prevent other affiliates from hijacking your affiliate commissions.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Buyer Intent

Now that you’ve got your affiliate links nice and pretty, you’ll want to know where to promote affiliate links! Affiliate links can be promoted in a number of ways: through social media, via paid advertising, from an email list, on a blog, on YouTube videos.

You can even go through your social media profiles and paste your link into each profile. But what you really want is to put your link somewhere where people will click and purchase your products. You don’t want inquisitive “tyre kickers” either, you want hungry buyers!

An affiliate link on a social media profile doesn’t attract a log of buyer traffic. Firstly not many people will see it, and even if they do, why would someone click on your link anyway? Especially if it tells them nothing about what that link leads them to.

Having an affiliate link in your Facebook bio doesn’t guarantee this result. You need to drive targeted buyer traffic towards your affiliate link. There’s several ways to do this and you’ll need to choose a strategy which is right for you, your products and your style of working.

Where To Promote Affiliate Links – Hungry Buyers

Where do hungry buyers hang out? If you want to buy someone, where do you go? To the shop right? But before you go to the checkout and physically make that purchase, you might want to learn a little more about your product first. You’ll want to check your product is the right one, and that you’re not missing out on anything which might be better, or cheaper. Where can you find this kind of information? A product review website!

A review website is a good place to put your affiliate links. But in order to do this you’ll need to create the website. One of my first online sales came from a review article I wrote on a free blogging site called hubpages.com. You can also blog for free on WordPress or Blogger.com.

Free blog sites are a good place to start out and learn about blogging, but they can limit what you can do. Building your own blog website is a better idea if you want to take your affiliate marketing business seriously. Free sites are free, but they do limit you in terms of the links you’re allowed to post and from the traffic you can attract. Search engines don’t tend to rank content on free blog platforms as well as they do for owned websites.

Building Your Own Blog Site

Building your own blog website is a cheap method of attracting buyers for your affiliate products. By creating lots of content, which attract the right kind of buyer traffic, you can lead people to your products through your content. Blogging does take some time though, see how long does it take to make money blogging. But it’s a solid strategy to build a steady stream of traffic to your affiliate links.

If you just paste your links on social media accounts, there’s really no incentive for people to click on them because there’s no context for “passers by” to purchase something. But if you create a resource which is specifically for your target audience, you can collect a “showroom” for interested buyers. See why target market is important.

Once built, you can keep adding content to your website which is relevant for people who are interested in your product or service. Once you have this content, you can share it on social media platforms and link to it in your social media bios and other online profiles. This is much more relevant for “passers by”on your profiles because it offers them some information, rather than a ambiguous and messy link.

Where To Place Your Affiliate Link – Domain Forwarding

If you’re a super lazy affiliate and don’t want to build a blog, another strategy is to use domain forwarding. Find a product you want to promote and grab your affiliate link. I’ll use this product from Clickbank as an example. This is a text to speech artificial intelligence voice over product for video marketers.

This is what my affiliate link looks like having just created it on Clickbank: https://0fa6b9kms0bzlw9cwas7n2ud75.hop.clickbank.net/.

It’s a bit messy and unattractive, and I could use on of the link shorteners to make it look more pretty! But that wouldn’t give it any context. To tidy the link and give it context you can purchase a domain name which is suitable and simply forward your domain to the affiliate link. Hey presto, you now have a domain name you can share on your profiles around the internet. It’s much more attractive than the messy link, and there’s an instant context for your link.

To find a suitable domain name, I’ll look on Google’s keyword planner first to see what people are already looking for when it comes to AI voiceovers.

A good domain name which is used for forwarding to an affiliate link should sum up the purpose of the product in a few of words. This one might be suitable and is only £6.66 per year.

Once you’ve purchased your chosen domain name simple access your domain management system and forward the new domain name to your affiliate link.

Once you have your new domain name, you can share it in your emails, paste in throughout your social media profiles and it gives context and looks pretty!

Using Your Email Signature For Links

Here’s a clever strategy I use to share links to my website (which contains many affiliate links). If you build a website, it’s much more likely that someone will visit it than if you only link to a single affiliate product. Here’s an article sharing how to get traffic to your website free, once you’ve built one.

But if you have cloaked you link, or forwarded a domain name to a link, here’s a simple hassle free way to share it. Go in to your email account and under the settings tab find the email signature which you can add to every outgoing email you send.

Then simply add your name, and your link to your signature. Make sure you make the link clickable too. In Gmail, it looks like this:

using email signature to promote affiliate links

It’s well worth doing a domain name forwarding option if you’re going to do this. It adds more relevancy to your link and people will know what it’s about.

Use An Active Profile

You can as mentioned post your links on your account profiles wherever you spend time online. Inactive profiles won’t get the same number of people visiting them as your active ones.

When I first became an affiliate, I used eBay quite a bit as I used to buy and sell on the site. You can update your profiles on eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and whichever social media platform you are connected to to link to your affiliate products. Just don’t expect too much if you’re not actively building an audience or a following on them.

Here’s my eBay profile with a link to one of my articles on another website:

Building An Email List + Driving Traffic

Don’t expect to make a fortune by just posting your affiliate links and then sitting back! Sadly, that doesn’t really work very well. In order to make money through affiliate marketing, you need to drive traffic. The best ways to drive traffic are using paid advertising and by building an email list of subscribers. Top affiliates work hard at driving traffic to a landing page where they build a list of email subscribers.

Once you start getting subscribers on your list, you can create email messages to help them and build a long term relationship with them. As you build trust, and your list grows, you should find you can promote products to them if your focus is to help them and offer them the right products for them.

Paying for advertising can get expensive though so if you’re just starting out as an affiliate, it’s a good idea to learn the cheaper strategies for building traffic to your website.

You can still build an email list through blogging, but it will take much longer than by using paid marketing. You can start building an email list once you purchase an email autoresponder and learn how to drive traffic.

Once you have built a blog/website, you can attract people to sign up to your list by creating ebooks or using a “hook” provided through your affiliate product owner. Here’s a bit using selling ebooks as lead magnets.

Paid Marketing And Affiliate Links

Using paid marketing with your affiliate links is very difficult due to advertising regulations. Google Adwords would seem to be the perfect solution for affiliates since it is for targeted advertising. However, since you can’t control the website where you’re sending traffic, and it’s a third party site, Google doesn’t approve! To get round this problem, you can create a Google compliant website and collect subscribers information on your site.

Then, market your affiliate products through an email list.

If you drop affiliate links on your site, this can be a reason for an advert disapproval. Google considers these links as bridging, and may ban your advert from running. There’s a long list of requirements from advertisers – read Google advertising policies here.

However, if you’re using organic marketing on your website, this isn’t an issue, although affiliate links can affect your SEO (search engine optimisation). Here’s another reason for organic marketing although it’s much slower than using paid marketing.

Access Training And Get Support

I started out as an affiliate several years ago and it’s can be tough, especially if you go it alone. It’s well worth paying for training and support if you’re serious about earning an income as an affiliate marketer.

Access a free webinar for some key tips from Stuart Ross, who has been an affiliate and 8 figure entrepreneur in the online space for many years:

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE!

Wondering how to get traffic to your website free? There’s a number of strategies you can use to get free traffic to your website. Free traffic strategies are notoriously slow however, but over time the work you put in compounds to make a big impact. If you work steadily on a number of free strategies, you might not see the impact immediately. You’ll be tempted to stop what you’re doing, and look elsewhere. But resist this temptation and keep going.

To get traffic to your website free does take some time and effort. But once you start seeing the traffic, leads and sales coming in, you’ll want more! Free traffic isn’t as fast or scalable as paid traffic. But once you find a strategy that works for you, you can add it to your daily habits to help build your business.

Get Traffic To Your Website Free – Blogging

The first strategy I’m going to share is blogging. Blogging is a good strategy because it’s free! If you can find something you’re passionate about, and love to write about, so much the better. But don’t wait for the inspiration to hit before you start blogging. Start writing to get the wheels in motion. Once you start and make it habitual, it’s much easier to maintain the momentum needed to get traffic to your website free.

Keyword Research

To find blog titles, you can use Google’s free keyword planner. Look for keywords within your niche and which have traffic already. Then, look on Google to see the relative competition for these keywords. As you can see in the image below, typing in a “seed” keyword brings up other keywords which are being searched for on Google.

Choose a long tail keyword which doesn’t have so much competition. You can get a general overview of your competition for keywords by looking on Google doing a simple search on a desktop computer or laptop. Try the search with and without quotes, i.e. “affiliate marketing tips for beginners” and affiliate marketing tips for beginners.

I wouldn’t recommend using this keyword actually since there’s a huge amount of competition judging by the number appearing under the search query. Lets try something else which is less competitive in the same niche. Here’s another long tail keyword with considerably less competition on Google:

Of course affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive niche, so you may find another niche less competitive. Through trial and error you’ll find long tail keywords which you can get some free traffic from, if you keep at this strategy for some time.

Remember too, that other search engines can give you traffic as well. If each article only brought in a couple of searches a month, but you write 1000 articles, you’ll get 2000 hits every month for free! This adds up the more you do it, but at first can feel like it’s getting you nowhere. So keep you eye on the long term with this strategy.

Make sure you use an SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin as you write your articles too. Checkout this article for more on this strategy.

Get Traffic To Your Website Free – Niche Website Building & Keyword Domain

Another strategy you can use to get traffic to your website free is niche website building. This is a similar concept to the one described above, but you’re going to be building a website from scratch.

Once you have settled on the topic of your blog, use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords in your niche. Decide on a keyword which encompasses the idea of your blog in a keyword or phrase. If you look at this site, it’s called affiliate marketing mentors online.

This keyword has been carefully chosen because I wanted to target the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors” with my website. Have a look at the monthly traffic for this keyword:

And have a look at the relative competition on Google.

Now have a look at the phrase match competition for this keyword:

Even if I get only a fraction of the monthly traffic for the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors”, it’s still free traffic. Plus, if you use the previous strategy I mentioned to build out your blog you can target other relevant keywords based on your main theme.

Having the keywords in the domain name can have an impact on your site. Just don’t rely on this doing the work for you; you must create some awesome content too! Have a look at the article “Create Free Website and Earn Money, which talks about this concept in more detail.

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE – Snip.ly

Snip.ly is a great tool to get traffic to your website free! With Snip.ly you can create “snips”, or pop up adverts for your own content on popular articles and content online.

There’s a few ways you can use Snip.ly to get traffic to your website free. One strategy is to use it in combination with Buzzsumo.com. Buzzsumo is a website which shows you the trending articles and content on social media websites. You can type any keyword into Buzzsumo, and it will give you the top performing articles, or videos which are being shared and going viral.

You can then pick the article which is relevant to your particular niche, use Snip.ly to “snip” your advert onto it, and then share your new url “Snip” on social media. Each time someone shares your snip, they’ll be passing on your advert too.

Here’s an article which is particularly relevant to the current times which I’ve added my Snip.ly “snip” to and shared on Facebook:

To find this article, I searched for “fitness motivation” on Buzzsumo.com and the article came up as one of the most shared articles on social media. Snip.ly links can be shared all over social media.

Make A Habit Of Sharing “Snips”

Of course most visitors won’t click on your advert. But if you choose relevant content for your target audience, they are more likely to do so. Plus, if you choose articles which are going viral, or being shared a lot, your chances of getting free traffic to your website, and even leads to your email list are greatly increased.

Again, this is a strategy which can be used as a daily habit. Once you get used to doing this it doesn’t take very long to create a “snip” and share it. If you already spend time on social media, it can be worth “snipping” everything you would normally share anyway, if you regularly post and share on a platform.

Get Traffic To Your Website FREE! Quora

Quora is another great platform to get free traffic to your website. With Quora, you can answer questions which are relevant to your website niche. You can use the search bar on the top of the Quora platform to type in your relevant keywords.

Once you find relevant questions, you can’t just post links to your website. Quora will probably delete your answers if you only attempt to get your links placed without adding any value to the site.

Quora doesn’t allow direct affiliate links either, so if you’re an affiliate you can’t link directly to your products through Quora. But if you answer questions and give some value, you are allowed to link to relevant resources. Those resources can be your website – providing it adds to the answer and that you’re not obviously spamming the site for free traffic! See also affiliate marketing on Quora.

Quora’s links are no-follow which means your links don’t count towards SEO (search engines optimisation). Google doesn’t therefore recognise your backlinks as a ranking signal. However, Quora can be a great place to add value, and drop links back to your content, where appropriate. It’s another tool for your free traffic “box”. Make a habit out of dropping links as you answer questions on Quora. Be careful not to be a spammer and make sure you give some real value in your answers first though. Otherwise your efforts will be for nothing (if Quora deletes your answers)!

Free Traffic From YouTube !

YouTube is yet another platform where you can find traffic for free to send back to your website. I have videos which are years old and they still give me traffic even though I haven’t focused on (organic) YouTube as a marketing strategy very seriously, or for very long.

With YouTube, you want to create great content which will help your potential customers in some way. You can use YouTube in a similar way as the blogging strategy mentioned above. To find keywords which are already being searched for on YouTube you can type in your main “seed” keywords into the search bar. The drop down menu will show popular searches relating to your main keyword.

Identify a keyword you want to create a video for, and once you’ve recorded it, upload it to the site. Tag your video with the keywords you want to to show up for and add as much content as possible to your description under the videos you upload.

Here’s one of my videos I uploaded several years ago, showing up under the keyword I targeted:

Of course there’s thousands of videos on YouTube already so it’s a good idea to find the long tail keywords which offer less competition than most.

Here’s the video, in which I’m talking about the previous (Snip.ly) strategy I mention above:

“How To” videos are a great place to start if you are wondering what content to create.

Get Free Traffic From Facebook

Facebook is another great platform where you can get traffic to your website free. To use Facebook for free traffic, you can offer an enticing image on your Facebook profile which shows the main reason why someone would want to visit your website. I have an image of an ebook on my Facebook profile which visitors can access if they click on my profile link. Here’s what it looks like:

You can also change your profile background to something which is relevant to your website niche and place links to your website in your profile.

To find people who are relevant for your particular business, you can join the various Facebook groups. Ideally write down a few ideas of the kinds of people you would want to attract.

This is your customer “avatar” – someone with the ideal traits and characteristics of your perfect customer. Once you know what kind of person this is, where they live, how old they are and so on, you can look for them by joining the groups on Facebook where they are likely to hang out.

Use the group search tool on Facebook to find relevant groups and join them. Once in, you can interact with other members and develop conversations and relationships.

Don’t shove yourself at people and spam them though, as it’s a massive turn off for most people. Just get to know people, join in and genuinely help and interact. Over time, you’ll build relationships and add new friends. As you do so, people will see your profile and your links. Those who are genuinely curious will click on your link and visit your website.

Getting Free Traffic Using Postplanner

Postplanner is a social media tool which lets you post your content on social media channels automatically. Although not completely free, it’s well worth joining at the minimum rate of $3 a month if you’re going to use it. At the higher plan costs you can syndicate content out to 30 social media accounts, and automate the process.

But if you just want to use the tool for a single social media account, you can still get almost free traffic to your website using it.

I use postplanner to syndicate older content which I’ve created. You can even queue up your content to post automatically for months if you have enough of it. You can even use the cheaper plan, and copy your posts across manually to your other social media accounts, if you have the time.

Auto-posting Your Content Across Social Media

While we are on the subject of auto-posting content on social media, there’s a great little plugin offered by Nextscripts.com (SNAP), which allows you to post your content throughout your social media platforms automatically as you publish them. SNAP stands for Social Networks Autoposter For WordPress. It’s a great plugin and although there’s some setup involved to connect it to your social media platforms, once you’ve set it up, it’s done forever!

Whenever you post something on your website and publish it, SNAP syndicates it automatically across your social media. It’s a huge time saver if you’re doing your sharing manually.

Mindset For Your Free Traffic Strategies

Hopefully now you have some ideas to get traffic to your website free! There’s a few here but there’s many others. The key is to pick a few strategies which work for you and keep doing them for the long term. Small amounts of activity simply won’t have a massive impact when you’re using free strategies. You need to keep up the work and maintain several weeks or months of consistent effort before you can reap the rewards.

Keep a diary of your activities each day and don’t look for results too early. Otherwise you can become discouraged and doubt what you’re doing will work.

Reward yourself for the small wins such as hits on your website and leads. Make sure you collect your visitor’s emails and build an email list. Building a list is the best way to make the most out of your website visitors. Once on your list, you can follow up with your visitors via email. This allows you to keep in contact with someone who would otherwise have only have spent 10 minutes on your website, and then left.

Remember free traffic is a long term strategy. You need to keep putting the work in and create habits out of the strategies. Initially, you’ll only see small effects. Over time, you should learn which strategies you’re leaning towards and those that have the most impact. Remember Pareto’s principle which states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of their causes.

As you learn from your data, and track your website visitors to know where they came from, you should be able to determine which actions have the greatest impact for you. Then, you can focus your efforts on those particular actions which you are getting good at and which work best for you.

For more help and training, access a number of online marketing trainings and resources and a group of online business owners. Click the image below for more info.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?

How long does affiliate marketing take? To make money with affiliate marketing does take some time. You should expect to work hard at affiliate marketing for at least 6 months before you’ll see any tangible results financially. But there’s a few things to consider too.

You can’t really put a timescale on it because there’s so many variables. It’s a little like joining a gym and asking how long it will take to get six pack abs! It depends on your current body shape, diet and levels of discipline.

Just joining a gym won’t get you six pack abs. You’ll need to apply yourself to a training program and a diet which supports that training. What other habits will stand in the way? Perhaps you like a few drinks on the weekend? Or you have an ice cream addiction.

In this case, you could be slowing down your six pack progress without knowing! How important are six pack abs to you? Would it be “nice” or are you doing it for an important acting role? Everyone’s motivation is very different and your mindset has a huge bearing. I’m certainly not fussed about putting in the work for six pack abs! But building an online business and making money from affiliate marketing massively motivates me!

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?

With an exercise program you can break down the variables in much the same way as you can in building an affiliate marketing business:

How motivated are you to get six pack abs/ make money with affiliate marketing?
What current habits are likely to slow you down or compete with your new habits?
Who around you is supporting you and cheering you on?
Which friends or family members would rather talk you out of it?
What competing activities/habits will be likely to slow down your progress?
How much time every week will you commit to your long term goal?
Which actions will you do on a daily basis no matter what you feel like?

Affiliate Marketing Fast Or Slow Lane?

Affiliate marketing is not all that cut and dry either! It’s not like a gym where you can see all the exercise equipment and pick your time slot. Affiliate marketing is a big industry and there’s many different avenues you can go down to create an income with affiliate marketing.

Some products will pay only 3% commission should you make a sale. Others will pay you 40% or even 100% in some cases. Which products would you choose based on this knowledge?

The value of products is another consideration too. Would you rather promote a $10 product and earn 3% commission, or a $2500 product for a 40% commission? Assuming all other things are equal, and the same work is involved, you would surely choose the higher ticket product.

Marking your products can be done differently too. Would you rather spend 10 years building content or 6 months running advertising campaigns? If both actions led to a regular income online, all other things being equal, which would you choose? But what if running advertising campaigns involved more risk and investment?

Would you rather sell products which gave you a recurring income, or products which only paid once? For the same amount of effort, of course the answer is the recurring income product which pays recurring affiliate commissions.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take – Knowledge

Looking at the questions above should give you an idea of how you want to do affiliate marketing. Which direction you choose to work in, and the products you use will have a bearing on the time it takes to make money with affiliate marketing. Your knowledge will also have an impact. Ideally, you could download the knowledge from top affiliates straight into your head – like how Neo learns Kung Fu on the film The Matrix!

How Long Does if take to make money with Affiliate Marketing

But unfortunately it takes a little longer to do this in reality! If you surround yourself with affiliates who are on the journey and more importantly, ahead of you in affiliate marketing, you will learn much faster. Go it alone, and you could have a long, difficult journey ahead of you!

Much of the early actions you’ll be taking on your affiliate journey are based on what you know, or think you know. So you can see how important your knowledge really is, when you consider that it is the foundation of everything you do as an affiliate. Another analogy: a rocket heading to the moon can veer off route by hundreds thousands of miles with if only 1 degree off course.

As an affiliate, you want to continually correct your course, as a rocket does. If you set off in high hopes all by yourself, it’s much easier to veer off route and get lost!

Marketing Strategies – Fast & Slow

Your marketing strategy will also have a massive bearing on your journey time with affiliate marketing. With paid marketing, you can get your business running quite quickly, although it will cost you more in marketing budget, and product investment.

With blogging, you can save money by not paying for advertising. However, your journey time will be considerably longer than if you were to use paid marketing. You can of course use a combination of the two, according to your circumstances and budget.

One of the fastest strategies, for those with money to invest, is to use a high ticket product range which includes multiple earning strategies:

High ticket digital products which pay 40% commissions on sales you make
Recurring commission affiliate products – earn ongoing commissions for each sale you make
Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals.
A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
A range of products – earn commissions from products bought by your existing customers

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this model.

With a model like this, you can more easily afford to use paid marketing strategies and still earn a profit. For smaller products, which carry lower levels of commissions, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and come out with a profit. Paid marketing is fast and you can scale it up when you have a profitable campaign. Just turn up the budget to make more sales!

With cheaper marketing strategies like blogging, for example, it’s not possible to scale in the same way. You need to create more content which takes time. If a blog post works well, however, you can run paid advertising to it, to generate more sales.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Warning: another analogy! If you plant a Chinese Bamboo shoot, you might be forgiven in thinking that it’s dead, and give up! In fact, the Chinese Bamboo tree does nothing for four years. So you can water it and fertilise it, and nothing will show – for four whole years!

But in a six week period the Chinese Bamboo tree grows to be 90 feet tall! It has also been measured to grow 48 inches in a 24 hour period!

I’m not saying your affiliate business will take five years, but it could do depending on the marketing strategy and products you choose to promote. Some affiliates get their businesses to phenomenal levels within 6 months – given the budget, investment and mindset. Others can take years if they have a different reason, or aren’t prepared to make the financial investment.

I like blogging, which very much is similar to the Chinese Bamboo Analogy.

How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take – Your “Why?”

Your “why” has a lot to do with how fast you can build a profitable affiliate business too. In the community I’m in, I know members who have built their businesses inside of a year and left their jobs. Their “why?” was to get the hell out of a job they hated! It was a burning desire they were reminded of every day! So they had a huge motivation to make their affiliate businesses work as quickly as possible.

They also were employed too, which meant they could invest in building their business model quickly, alongside their jobs. My situation was a little different and I had a couple of part time jobs, but little income. So I focused on using my spare time for blogging instead of investing in paid marketing – which is notoriously slower. A longer route but more suited to my circumstances.

Get Started

If you’re ready to start your affiliate marketing journey today, you can access a free video series by clicking on the image below.