AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate

Yes I’m a Six Figure Mentors affiliate. I will earn commissions should you purchase something from my website. I started learning about affiliate marketing before stumbling across the SFM, though.

My main reason to learn how to earn from the internet was that my financial life was a complete mess! I was struggling building a career as a stunt performer and had to juggle a number of jobs around the work; which was very sporadic.

So I had multiple jobs including HGV driving, office work and several other low paid jobs. In my late 30’s I was still doing crummy jobs which paid next to nothing and often didn’t get stunt work for sometimes years at a time. I realised something had to change or I’d be stuck in this situation for the next ten years. That was unbearable to me so I looked online for courses about making money.

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate

I tried all kinds of strategies to earn online including Forex marketing, building an eBay business and even writing my own ebooks to sell. But I faced one problem after another. Jumping from course to course trying to learn how to sell my ebooks, I realised there was a better business model than selling my ebooks. It was called affiliate marketing. Here was a strategy which required no products of my own and I didn’t even need to directly speak to customers or handle products.

So I ploughed hours, weeks and months into learning affiliate marketing and trying to make money from it. I was still juggling HGV work and the stunt work at this time, so it was full tilt ahead.

After a lot of failure and some small successes I found a video of a guy on a pedalo. He claimed to have the knowledge I was searching for and despite having spent money already on a number of other such claims I knew I had to keep going. Otherwise I’d be right where I was and things would never change.

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate

I took the plunge and became a Six Figure Mentors affiliate in 2014. I was sceptical for sure and had already put loads of time and energy into affiliate marketing – with little in the way of results. But Stuart seemed genuine to me and I needed to make an online income work.

I was able to attend a local meet up at first in the North of England near where I lived. At the time, meeting anyone who made money from the internet was pretty impossible. The owners of the courses I had done previously were phantoms!

They were nowhere to be seen and I never actually met any of them in “real life”. But at one of the first meetings I attended in London with the SFM I was pleasantly surprised to find both the co-founders there together with a lot of other members – many of whom had made the SFM their sole source of income.

SFM affiliate — Me with Jay Kubassek in London at Momentum Day 2014

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate – A Genuine Business

So I figured by this point the business was genuine. However I was still sceptical and anyone I spoke to about the online business at the time was extremely scathing of it; despite them knowing less than me!

My sponsor ( the person who brought me in through their affiliate link) was running an advertising pool. This meant he ran advertising campaign on behalf of his members. We paid in to a cooperative and Oliver ran adverts on Facebook. Of course this took a massive amount of trust on my part.

But I didn’t know how to advertise myself, so trusted him with some advertising budget. He came through and I made my first high ticket sale; earning $1000 in commissions. It was a massive first for me to make this kind of money from the internet.

Fear & Uncertainty

The money I made went straight towards my debt, as was my usual habit. My fear and uncertainty kept me where I was for some time and I nearly dropped out too. My advertising strategy was just free (blogging) from here on for some time. I made a couple more high ticket sales from my articles and then ran some paid marketing to them; making a couple more.

There were some problems I encountered with Google’s Adwords at this time and I lost faith in what I was doing. I hadn’t realised but I had become pretty depressed at this time; having lost a long term relationship. Everything had become about money and work and I hadn’t got a life! Small negative emails or doubt from friends affected me greatly too – so I’d shut myself away as a protection strategy.

I looked at my outgoings for the online business fees and panic set in! Had I really spent all that money, I thought? I reached out to the customer service team and asked about closing my account. Luckily I was put in touch with the support of Frank and Jill who met me regularly in several online meetings one to one. Without their help and support I would likely have dropped out at this point. They gave me some resources to work through and set me back on track – putting me in touch with a mentor and I became a member of his group.

Bouncing Back – SFM Affiliate Marketing

I had been focused on blogging for much of this time in efforts to gaining free traffic from Google and the other search engines. However, this was a flawed strategy because it took so long and was incredibly difficult. Although I was getting some traffic, there were only a few leads and sales coming in; and sales were very sporadic.

But what I didn’t realise was it was my mindset which was all wrong! I was scared to spend money because my income was so sporadic. Other people in the groups and leaderboard were gaining traction with far less time within the business. That was because they used paid marketing! I was still juggling stunt work and I had also built a kung fu school up – a long term passion I decided to turn into a business. I used the marketing strategies I had learned through the SFM to market my school and this was giving me more of an income over time.

Playing chi sau with Grandmaster Ip Chun (Son of Ip Man – Famous for being Bruce Lee’s teacher)

Scarcity Mindset

Despite having done a huge amount of work on my blog, I was still carrying a scarcity mindset. I didn’t want to pay for marketing because I was afraid of losing money I didn’t have. My income was still low so I didn’t have much to put into paid marketing. However, the people who were succeeding were mostly using paid marketing – so I changed gear.

I upgraded to the top level of the business which took some courage! I had to get a loan to do this but it put me at a higher earning potential. (see below).

Once I recovered from the stress and shock of having made such a decision, I went to work modelling success. The most successful people in the business were all on the leaderboard in the back office. This showed who was making the most sales, had the most members and so on. I could find those people and model what they were doing.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that there’s many ways to succeed online using the SFM training. You don’t have to use the SFM to sell the SFM’s product range. Some Six Figure Mentors affiliate’s build their own digital marketing agencies. Others use just organic marketing and some decide to sell physical products and learn through their “Import Exports” training resource. I used the training to help me build my kung fu school.

After my school got shut down due to Covid-19 in March 2020, I had more time (and space) to concentrate on promoting and selling the SFM digital business system.

A Final Push

It’s worth sticking at some things and The SFM most definitely falls into this category. It’s not been as easy as I thought when I joined in 2014 – although I did made some fairly easy sales. But now looking back, I’m so glad I joined and became a Six Figure Mentor affiliate and stuck with it.

After spending many weeks plugged in to the recommended groups, I started doing video. I wasn’t keen and really wanted to hide behind my blog posts. But I realised that I was trying to work within my comfort zones and that this was holding back the growth of my business (and myself).

I did some soul searching and deep digging into the route causes of my thinking, with the help of the many mentors who I was able to reach for personal 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching. Many of these thinking patterns were rooted in fear and of old scars which didn’t serve me any more. Once I became more aware of my limiting beliefs, I was able to take bolder steps and I made my first DEA sale in June 2020. This has been a complete game changer! I’m super grateful for all the mentors who have worked with me and for this amazing community. Thanks Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek for building this awesome resource.

When I began this business in 2014, I would never have believed I could earn this kind of money in one month! Stick at it, ignore the naysayers, do the work and you can too. Access The SFM here to get started.

Affiliate Marketing Mentorship

I found a great affiliate marketing mentorship program after years of jumping from course to course. It offers personal coaching and mentoring, 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and support and a whole host of other resources.

One of the main problems with learning affiliate marketing alone is the huge variety of strategies you can employ to build your business. I tried to do everything on my own for several years and had a lot of problems. If you want to take affiliate marketing seriously, and build a long term sustainable business from it, it’s worth paying for the help.

Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – The SFM

The SFM (Six Figure Mentors) can sound a little off-putting if you’re a cynical UK based sceptic like I am! But since joining this community I’ve found it to be anything but. Founders Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek have created an online affiliate marketing mentorship community which offers a digital product range and business system and a community based support system for its members.

Here’s a picture of me at a local event organised by members of the community near me in Chester, (United Kingdom).

Here’s some members in Chester at a local meet-up – I’m in the red jacket!

Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – Why You Need Support

Affiliate marketing is a great business model. From anywhere in the world you can earn a full or part time income from your laptop using other people’s products. It’s great – in principle!

However the truth of affiliate marketing is that it’s much more difficult than many make it out to be. There’s literally thousands of products available online which you can promote. Just choosing the right product is a massive decision which will affect your affiliate business for a long time to come.

Then there’s promotion. How do you promote your affiliate products? For years I battled with this one; creating content which Google didn’t rank and getting advertising platforms closed down because I didn’t know what I was doing. Much of the stress and frustration of an affiliate business can be lessened if you get the help you need from the get-go! If I had found the community years ago it would have saved me a huge amount of stress and difficulty.

Affiliate Marketing – Technical Difficulties

The technical side of learning affiliate marketing has largely been removed. Most of the platforms affiliates now use are drag and drop platforms too. Even the business set-up is a simple step by step process with the SFM back office and business system set-up.

Of course there are still things to learn and the SFM provides all the training and support you will ever need to build a profitable online business from scratch and without any experience. From webinars and Q and A masterminds, to live events there’s a support system to suit everyone. Of course since Covid-19 the live events have been put on hold but several webinar events have been put on in their place.

Affiliate Marketing Mentorship – Product Range

The SFM’s product range offers a proven business model and has already allowed thousands of their affiliates to leave their jobs and become full time entrepreneurs. So what’s different to using standard affiliate products and why is your business model so important?

With some affiliate programs which are typically used by newbie affiliates, you’ll earn levels of commissions from 1-11% (typical on Amazon, for example). With digital products you can earn more like 40-50% and even 101% on the Mentors-All-In package – one of SFM’s best selling packages.

affiliate marketing mentorship — Amazon’s commissions are only 0-11% on their products

Recurring Commissions

Another good way to build a sustainable business online is by using recurring commission products. With SFM’s product range, you’ll benefit from not only the high levels of commissions which you get with digital products, but also through selling and promoting recurring income affiliate programs.

A recurring income product range means you can benefit from customer loyalty. With most affiliate products you only get paid once – when you sell the item. But with memberships and software products you earn ongoing commissions for customers who continue to subscribe to a service.

Even with small recurring commissions of say $10 a month, this can add up as you build your memberships. 100 members will give you a recurring monthly income of $1000. This is a far better strategy than selling “one-off” commission based products for 1-11% commission on Amazon, for example.

High Ticket Products

A “high ticket” product is one valued at over $1000, for example. With physical products you can sell high value products too but still only earn 10% commission. See highest paying affiliate programs list. So for example, selling a high valued physical product for $10,000 can make you $1000 as an affiliate (at 10% commission). For the same or similar effort you could also sell a book for $10 and earn $1. Which would you rather spend time on?

With high ticket digital products it’s possible to earn up to $8000 on a single sale with the SFM business model. This is because the products value into the tens of thousands of dollars/pounds. With digital products too, you can earn up to 35-40% commissions based on the sale according to where you are positioned within the business model. High ticket products used in conjunction with digital products and subscription based products give you a very powerful business model.

Multi-Tier Sales

The SFM offer a multi-tier sales model which lets affiliates (who are positioned at the top of the business model) earn from their members’ sales. This means by introducing members into the business, who then promote the affiliate products themselves, you can earn commissions based on how well your members do in their own businesses.

A multi-tier commission will be paid to you based on the sales your members make. So if they sell a membership, for example, you’ll receive a $10 monthly recurring commission for each membership product they sell. You’ll also receive 10% commission on the high ticket product range too!

Product Range

Having a product range is key to a successful online business too. Without a range of products which offer ways to meet customers needs in multiple ways, it’s more difficult to get traction with an online business. Many newbie affiliates choose to sell a single low cost product, thinking they will sell more of them because it is cheap!

However, with a product range you can sell low cost items and high cost items by offering both to existing customers. Meeting more customers needs at a price point which is suitable for them lets you offer more value to your customers. You can also benefit from later purchases from your existing customers.

With most affiliate products you can only sell a product once to a customer. You then lose that customer to the product vendor (owner); and have to constantly search for more new customers. With a product range, you can sell a product once and earn from the recurring revenue (and up-sells to that customer) for years to come.

Built-In Sales Team

The SFM has a built in marketing and follow up team which compliments your efforts as an affiliate. You only really need to refer the initial sale to the business system and the follow up team will do the rest. This makes your job as an affiliate far easier. All you need to do is promote the sales funnel once you’ve set it up!

Promoting a low cost product is fairly simple. Once you’ve done this, the sales team will promote other products to your customers as appropriate. You can even make a high ticket sale of products worth up to $20K simply by working the system and promoting the base level products. Your positioning in the business system will determine how much you can earn on such a sale – up to 40% on a $20K sale!

Marketing Your Affiliate Business

If cash flow is the “life-blood” of an affiliate business, marketing is its heartbeat. Without marketing, your business won’t survive. With a business system like the one described above, your chances of success are far higher than with a low commission setup or low value product.

With a product range, subscription products, high ticket items, multi-tier sales, recurring commissions and a built in sales team, your chances of success are far higher! But you still need marketing of course to make an online business successful. Without a good marketing strategy and consistent effort, your online business isn’t likely to succeed. But without proper help and advice, it’s far easier to drop out and quit too.

Marketing is one of the main sticking points for affiliates and there’s many ways to do it:

Content marketing – this article is an example of content marketing but it can also include things like YouTube videos, ebooks, digital downloads and many other content marketing strategies.
PPC – Pay Per Click direct response marketing is the fastest way to get people to your online business. However, it still isn’t without it’s problems. You can burn through a lot of cash with PPC without getting anywhere.

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing is the fastest way to build an online business when using a business system like the one described above. With multiple earning strategies, there’s a lot less to risk when using pay per click marketing.

With a lower value product range, it become more difficult and risky. You need to spend less than you can earn in order to be profitable. When you can get this right, you can slowly increase your budget and scale up to a larger audience quite quickly.

Ideally, use paid marketing to spend $1 and earn $2 or more. Once you get this relationship between spending and earning, you can scale up. This takes time of course and it’s worth getting help! The SFM offers several marketing groups and masterminds to help you build your affiliate business through paid marketing and free strategies too!

Free Marketing Strategies

Free marketing strategies typically take much longer to gain traction from as an affiliate marketer. A blog is a good example of a free marketing strategy. With a blog, (Web log), the affiliate creates content and hopes this will lead their potential customers into the sales funnel where they might purchase a product.

V’loggers also use free marketing strategies by creating multiple videos and building an audience. If you get your content right, you’ll be able to lead people into your sales funnel for free. A typical organic (free) marketing strategy might take 6 months to several years to generate the require amount of traffic, leads and sales. Whereas a paid marketing strategy can bring people directly to your sales funnel within a few hours.

Best Turnkey Affiliate Website Companies

Looking for the best turnkey affiliate website companies? There’s lots of companies out there who will give you an affiliate website. But without a strategy to generate traffic and sales, it’s just going to cost you money, and not make you any.

The whole point of an affiliate website is to make money, (for the affiliate of course). To do this, you need to find the right people for the products you sell. One of the main mistakes I made early on in my affiliate career was to look for the next shiny object which promised the biggest outcome for the smallest amount of effort.

Unfortunately, a turnkey website is only the start. You still need to build your traffic, in order to make it work for you.

Best TurnKey Affiliate Website Companies

The best turnkey affiliate website companies know this and offer training for your marketing too. Having a website which is full of your affiliate links is one thing, but it’s useless without a marketing campaign. Still, it’s worth using a company which lets you circumvent much of the technical set-up processes in building a website business, and cut straight to the chase. Checkout the video below (click the image) to see how this works.

Best Turnkey Affiliate Website Companies – Business Model

As you can see in the video, you can have a fully operational website, complete with your affiliate links set up in no time. Once it is, it’s your job to generate traffic. Without traffic your website is as useful as a chocolate tea pot!

There’s lots of ways to generate traffic to a website, and you can choose from a number of strategies according to your personal situation and preferences. The fastest and easiest way to generate sales from an affiliate website is to use paid marketing. However, what many affiliate companies won’t tell you is that to use paid marketing effectively, you’ll also need a good business model.

Many affiliate products are simply too cheap and/or offer such low commissions, that it’s nearly impossible to use paid marketing and come out with a profit. In which case you’ll need to focus on free marketing strategies which are time consuming and have no guarantees.

Take a look at Amazon’s commission setup for example below:

Even with the top level commission 10%, you’ll only make $10 on a $100 product. This makes it very difficult to use paid marketing because your profit margin is so low.

And so the best turnkey affiliate website companies offer a much better business model than this one. With physical products there’s a lot of cost involved in manufacture, processing and delivery. Digital products on the other hand are different. They can be accessed over the internet and delivered at a much lower cost. Because of this, digital product owners can afford to pay their affiliates much higher commissions – often 40% and above compared to 3-10% for physical products.

Best Turnkey Affiliate Website Companies – Turnkey Marketing

A good turnkey affiliate business is not the same as a turnkey affiliate website. Many turnkey websites do give you a ready made affiliate website with an affiliate product or products ready to go. However, they neglect to mention that you still need to spend months or years creating content in order to get the necessary traffic in order to sell your products. The affiliate products attached to them are too cheap (or offer too little in the way of commissions) to allow you to use paid marketing. So you have to build content, which is a very slow process.

The best turnkey affiliate website companies give you the ability to use paid marketing. With paid marketing you can shortcut the time consuming and difficult task of creating content in order to drive traffic. You can also scale up to a global audience much more quickly by using paid marketing.

A Turnkey Online Business

A good “turnkey” business model uses multiple strategies in order to generate revenue. With most affiliate products you get paid once. With a good company, you can generate income from repeat sales/recurring commissions, high value sales, up-sells and multi tier commissions. Let’s have a look what this means for your business.

Repeat Sales

Most affiliate products pay you once when you refer a sale. With recurring commissions, you refer customers to a product or service which offers recurring commissions. Recurring commissions let you earn again and again from each customer.

These kind of affiliate products are software and membership products which offer the customer huge value. Some products only pay you once which means you need to keep finding new customer. With repeat custom, you don’t need as many customers and your efforts are compounded as time goes on.

High Value Sales

Digital products offer commissions of around 40%+ compared to their physical counterparts as I’ve already mentioned. So just by having digital products your efforts will already be rewarded by larger commissions – often for the same effort. Some high ticket products though offer much larger commissions than standard products too. Having a larger value product range lets you use paid marketing and increase your advertising budget more easily and quickly by reinvesting your profits and scaling up.

Up-Sells

An up-sell in an affiliate marketing product range means that your referral is offered another product after purchasing one from a range. With a range of up-sells, you can earn from your initial referrals, even if your customer purchases another product much later. Most affiliate companies don’t offer their affiliates the ability to earn from up-sells. They take the customer and up-sell to them without giving the initial affiliate the credit. The best turnkey affiliate website companies offer a range of up-sells and even have built in sales teams closing sales on the affiliate’s behalf.

Multi-Tier Commissions

The best turnkey affiliate website companies offer multi-tier commissions. This means you can benefit from the sales generated by your referrals. When one of your referrals starts generating sales, you earn a percentage of their sales. With multi-tier commissions, high ticket products, up-sells, a built in sales team and recurring commissions, you have the best affiliate business model.

Once you start generating sales in such a model, your earning potential is far larger than by selling small value items from Amazon, for example.

Access a company which offers all of the above here.

Free Traffic Affiliate Marketing

Free traffic affiliate marketing is one route many affiliates take. It takes considerably longer than with using paid marketing strategies however. But there’s downsides to paid marketing too. You’ll need a good product range and high value recurring income products to be able to use the paid platforms; particularly the most expensive ones like YouTube and Facebook.

So free traffic affiliate marketing strategies ticks a lot of boxes for many affiliates. For me, it was the only option when I started out. I didn’t have a large value sales funnel, nor could I afford one. Neither could I afford to lose money on testing out paid marketing strategies.

There’s a downside of free traffic affiliate marketing too though. You can spend a lot of time and still get nowhere. Here’s a few of the strategies which have worked the best for me over the years.

Free Traffic Affiliate Marketing – Niche Websites

A niche website is a website which is specifically built around your major keywords. I started out with this strategy and had a lot of problems. But it is a strategy which can work if you go about it right.

The main concept is to find a good keyword which offers enough monthly traffic but less competition than most. Once you have found a low competition long tail keyword, or even a shorter phrase, you can build your site around it.

Although keyword targeted domain names aren’t as helpful as they used to be, you can still gain some advantage by using them.

Here’s an example of a site I built using this strategy and this article explains how it’s done.

Free Traffic Affiliate Marketing – Micro Niche Blogging

You can find micro niche blogging topics by using Google’s free keyword planner. You can also blog around a specific topic and use this idea with your niche website.

With a micro niche, you have less competition than with a larger niche. So you’ve more chance of getting free traffic from Google.

Starting with your main keyword domain, create content around this topic. Keep writing blogs using longer tail keywords which relate to your main “seed” keyword. Over time and with effort you can build up a resource which should get found for some of your content through a Google, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo.

It’s a long slow process this but worth it if you want a free traffic affiliate marketing income.

Free Traffic Affiliate Marketing – To Your Blog

Once you have set in motion activities on your blog to create content you’ll also need to share it. All the blogging in the world isn’t going to necessarily get eyes on your content. You also need to share it as much as possible. Don’t just sit back and rely on Google to rank your content as it may not do so!

To help you share content it’s worth getting some plugins on your site. Not only should you get a good SEO plugin to help you rank your content, but also get:

A social media autopost plugin – this automatically shares your content when you publish it.
Social media share icons – you can get a free plugin to do this.
Use postplanner.com too which will help you methodically post your older posts throughout your social media platforms

Back-linking To Your Content

There’s various methods to help you get eyes on your content:

Guest posting – on other blogs similar to your own
Writing on article marketing sites like Ezinearticles.com and Hubpages.com
Uploading videos to YouTube and linking back to your content
Dropping your article links on social media
Blog commenting
Taking part in discussion on forums and Social media groups and leading people back to your content
Inter-linking back to content in your newer posts
Deep link using the keyword/s you are targeting in your content
Q and A Websites such as Quora.com let you answer questions and post relevant content – while these are “no-follow” links they still help you get people to your content. “No-follow” means Google doesn’t count them as a ranking factor.

All these will help you get more people to your content and help you boost your SEO (search engine optimisation) score too.

Traffic Into Sales

While traffic is vital for an online business to operate, without sales it’s still going to be dead in the water! You need traffic first, leads second and sales third! Make sure your content is well targeted to attract the right buyers. All the traffic in the world is no use unless it’s well targeted traffic.

As an example, review websites are well targeted traffic. This is because when someone looks for a review, they usually already have a product in mind that they want to purchase. So a review is just a last step before someone makes a buying decision. So ask whether your content is bringing the right kind of visitors to your site before you start creating it.

Once on your site, a person will usually only have around 10 minutes before they are gone forever. If you can get them to subscribe to your email list, this time period can be dramatically extended. Also too, some “colder” traffic (as opposed to “hot” buyer traffic) can be “warmed up” and turned into customers.

So make sure you have the option to collect your visitors emails, and optimise your opt-in magnet to get the most from your traffic. See increase conversion rate on your e-commerce website.

Once on your list, your traffic is much more valuable to you. As a lead, you can deliver emails to your subscribers over months and even years. Once they leave your website without signing up to your offer, they are gone for good!

Retargeting

Retargeting is another way to get people who have already seen your website to come back for another look. This isn’t free but is a cheap strategy to help with your marketing campaign.

With a retargeting campaign, you can advertise to people who have already landing on your site. It’s worth learning about this once you have built up some free traffic over time through your content marketing efforts.

Free Traffic YouTube

YouTube can be used in a similar way to Google. Create videos and upload them to YouTube on a regular basis.

Target long tail keywords which are suitable for your target audience and products. One strategy to do this is to start writing your keywords into YouTube’s search bar. You should see other longer tail keywords appear beneath. These are the searches which are already being looked for.

By creating content around the less competitive keywords, you can gain some traction and get free visitors to your videos over the longer term. Again this is a long term strategy and takes some time and work.

Facebook For Free Traffic

You can also use Facebook for free traffic too. Make your profile picture showcase your main lead magnet. This is your “giveaway” product which you offer your website visitors in exchange for their email.

Here’s an example of what I’ve used on my Facebook page:

Once you’ve set up your profile to offer your giveaway “hook”, join some groups which are suitable places where your target audience might be hanging out.

You can join a number of groups and chat with other members. Don’t spam the groups with your affiliate links, just interact and offer value and connect. People will visit your profile and click on your link, bringing them to your opt-in offer or your website content. In some groups too you can even drop a link and share your content. Just make sure you abide by the rules or you can easily get kicked out!

Pre Made Affiliate Websites

It doesn’t matter how good your pre made affiliate websites look, there’s still going to be one factor that’s missing: traffic!

With pre made affiliate websites you get a lot of stuff done for you: ready made affiliate links in your copy, done for you banners and, with some, even a fully built email marketing follow up series. But one thing you will need to do is build traffic.

And building traffic to an affiliate website does take time. Depending on what your niche is, it can take a considerable time. But there’s a few considerations you should have before jumping in a buying pre made affiliate websites.

Pre-Made Affiliate Websites

The main considerations you should take stock of with pre made affiliate websites are:

Your niche
The business model
Can you create content in your niche?
The relative competition
Your marketing strategies

With a website there’s two main marketing strategies: free and paid. It doesn’t matter how good your products are or what your business model can give you, whether you are successful or not comes down to one thing: marketing.

Unless you get good at marketing your website, no-one will buy your affiliate products and you won’t make any sales. So let’s start at the bottom of this list with marketing!

Pre Made Affiliate Websites – Marketing

So you’ve got your shiny new website and it’s all set up with banners and affiliate links. Now we just wait for the sales to roll in right!? Wrong! No one will visit your site. Imagine you’ve just bought a garage in the middle of a dessert and you’ll be close to knowing how many people are going to roll up wanting their tank filled! It’s the same for a website. Only much worse! Your website is like a small store buried under millions of others just like it, hidden down an alleyway where nobody visits!

Paid Traffic

In order to get people to your affiliate links you’re going to need to do one, or both of two things: pay for marketing or build content. With a compliant site you can drive traffic to your “online store” within minutes. Set up a marketing strategy using Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook or YouTube. Then send targeted traffic to your site based on their search criteria, age, location and a number of other demographics which suit your target audience.

With targeted traffic you can test and measure your marketing strategy. After running a number of adverts over a long period of time, you’ll start to see which ones work and which don’t. Then you can focus in on the winning adverts and cut off the losing ones. Eventually, you’ll be able to determine which make a profit and scale up. This also depends on your business model too, of course. (More on this later).

“Free” Traffic

I say “free” in quotes because it takes a lot more effort and time to generate the same kind of traffic from free marketing than it does for paid marketing. Paid marketing is instant and scalable. You can easily determine what works and what doesn’t. With organic content creation, it’s much more time consuming, difficult to scale, and takes time before you see the results of your efforts. But it’s free!

You can generate free traffic to your website in a number of ways:

Blogging
YouTube’ing
Social Media platforms
Back linking
Article marketing
Email marketing

In short you create free traffic by creating content and getting eyes on it. A simple strategy is to look for all the possible questions your customers could ask about your products, and create content based around the answers.

One simple blogging strategy is to find long tail keywords which have a low SEO difficulty. This involves finding keywords which have less competition than most and building content around those keywords. They also need to be a good match for prospective customers too!

The Relative Competition – Pre Made Affiliate Websites

If you’re going into a competitive niche, such as money making online, health and fitness products, dating or wealth creation for example, you’re going to find both competition for free marketing strategies and paid marketing alike.

Paid marketing will be expensive because you are competing with other lucrative businesses. So you’ll be competing with them for expensive keywords and traffic. There’s also lots of content for similar businesses on the internet too, so getting your content found will be more difficult in these kinds of niches.

With less competitive niche topics, you’ll find paid marketing is cheaper and there’s less “noise” in the search engines too. So it’s something worth considering. With a pre made affiliate website which offers Forex marketing products, for example, it’s going to be very difficult to use paid marketing. Unless you have a very good business model behind you, which allows you to spend large amounts on advertising, it’ll be prohibitively expensive to use paid marketing.

Likewise if you look on Google for the organic results around this topic, it’ll be extremely competitive. Look at the image above which show both paid results at the top and a large number (17 million, 100 thousand) for competing websites just under the search bar.

So in this topic, even pre made affiliate websites which offer a great opportunity to make large value recurring sales, you’re still going to need to pay large amounts for advertising, or work incredibly hard creating content – without any guarantees!

Can You Create Content In Your Niche?

With a pre made affiliate website, you can either use paid marketing or create content. Let’s assume you’re going to create content rather than run paid advertising. If you go this route, be prepared for the long haul. In almost every niche now there is a good amount of competition. This is why it’s worth finding affiliate products in a sub-niche (or micro niche) so there’s less competing content for your specific products. See best micro niche for blogging.

If you’re choosing this route, it’s a good idea to know your subject too, or at least have a passion or interest in it. This way, you can endure the long term and not burn out. I made the mistake of blogging in a niche I had no knowledge in, or interest in! It was a long slow process of getting burned out and packing it in!

So before you buy pre made affiliate websites, it’s worth considering how you will market them. If you’re going the free route, choose a product which relates to some interest you have. This way you can endure a long term marketing strategy around creating useful content for your website visitors.

Pre Made Affiliate Websites – The Business Model

Many pre made affiliate websites will give you a cheap product which only pays you a small commission. This means you can’t afford to use paid marketing strategies to promote it. Amazon plugins, for example, let you quickly build an affiliate website which is full of affiliate products.

Unfortunately though, Amazon only pays its affiliates between 1-11% commissions on your sales. This means it’s pretty much impossible to pay for marketing and still come away with a profit. So you’ll need to get traffic some other way; and this can be tough.

Recurring Commission Products & High Ticket

Products which offer recurring commissions are far better because you can make much more from the same amount of work. For each sale of membership product, or a software product, you’ll continue to earn again and again. This makes much more sense for affiliates, particularly if they hope to use paid strategies for their marketing.

High ticket products too give the affiliate much more leverage when it comes to using paid marketing. With a high ticket product range and products which pay recurring commissions also, you can earn much more for each sale. Plus it gives you more opportunity to use paid marketing and scale up more quickly. Free marketing strategies are slow and difficult to scale up.

Multi-tier sales allow affiliates to benefit from other affiliates’ sales, who they have referred to a program. With a multi-tier program, you can build a team, help them succeed and benefit from their success.

Having a built in sales team and a range of digital products also is a massive advantage for an affiliate. With a range of products, you can benefit from products purchased later by your referrals. If you’ve referred a customer, a sales team will close these sales on your behalf.

Learn more about this business model and access a pre made affiliate website, a ready made sales funnel and choose a range of digital products to place in your “digital store”. Click here for a free video series and learn more. You’ll also be able to access a world class training resource and learn how to market your online presence through multiple avenues.

Stuart Ross And Jay Kubassek

Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek teamed up in 2010 to create the SFM – Six Figure Mentors. It’s a online business community and all in one business system and mentorship program which anyone can use to build an income from the internet. I joined the SFM in 2014 and met both Stuart and Jay within a few months of joining in London, UK for a momentum seminar.

Here’s a picture of me with Jay Kubassek from Momentum day. Seminars are held globally throughout the year. Although the lockdown has recently put pay to them, Stuart and Jay actually show up for their members in these trainings. They also hold regular live webinars and seminars throughout the year as do many of their members.

Stuart Ross And Jay Kubassek

Although there’s a few bad reviews I’ve found about the SFM, (many of them used to promote other affiliate products), I found both Stuart and Jay to be very genuine. They offer not just another “earn money online” course, but a community of like minded entrepreneurs who are actually there for each other to learn and grow their online businesses. Plus they are still around years later.

I didn’t know quite what was in stall for me going through the program though. As with probably many affiliate marketers, I expected an “easy ride” when I first started learning about affiliate marketing before having met Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek.

As time went on I realised that it’s not at all easy. I think this is what many get wrong when approaching any kind of business. Back when I first approached affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s there were lots of scammy programs around, many of which have since disappeared. See my digital profit course review article to read about them.

Stuart Ross And Jay Kubassek

I first found a video of Stuart Ross on Facebook and was at the time struggling with my affiliate business. I joined up, because I was desperate to escape the circumstances I was finding myself in – working jobs I hated and struggling to pay the rent.

I wasn’t sure what to expect and had already invested in a number of online courses. But Stuart didn’t lay claim to any high earnings which were easily obtained. I think this is what set him apart to all of the other sensationalist videos I had bought into before. I was also pleasantly surprised to find the community behind the founders. I was super-sceptical and expected my first meeting to be an empty garage!

The affiliate who had referred me created a co-op for marketing and I trusted him with some budget. This was a huge leap for me, but it paid off and I made my first high ticket sale within a few months of joining. The initial momentum I generated kept me involved but I think because it was a relatively “easy win” I hadn’t learned the skills myself to create the sale I made.

I later made a couple more high ticket sales from my blog posts and running an Adwords campaign to an article I had written. Despite the success of a few large value commissions, I found myself in full doubt mode later on and thought about dropping out.

Reaching Out

The previous courses I had taken online taught me to be self reliant. But with that I had also learned to avoid asking for help and do everything by myself! When I did finally reach out I was assigned two mentors who I met up with on live webinars on a weekly basis. Jill and Frank I’m super grateful you kept me going! The community and support is probably the best thing about The SFM. If you reach out, people are there. This was something I had never experienced in the previous online courses I had taken.
I’m sure there’s many others who drop out at this point but I’m so glad I didn’t. I kept going and changed my trajectory. I had been focused on free strategies but mostly had done blogging.

I was recommended a weekly webinar to join and started following another mentor – Dan! I’m super grateful Dan and always will be.

Since this I made a huge breakthrough and well, wow! The system does work but there’s a lot of work to be done initially. But once you do break through the doubt and fear, there’s an amazing strategy behind this business. With the automation and business model, you can earn in multiple ways:

Subscription products – pay you over and over
High ticket products – help you scale up and reinvest marketing budget
Multi-tier sales – I haven’t seen these commissions yet but it’s a way of earning from your referrals’ sales.
Up-sells – There’s a range of high value products which offer huge value
Built in sales team – A dedicated sales team closing sales on your behalf.

It’s A Business Not A Get Rich Quick Scheme

If you remember that it’s a business and not a get rich quick scheme, and you take full responsibility for all the results, you can’t go too far wrong. I expect that many do expect results without putting themselves as the cause though. Something like 3% of business owners actually break through and achieve success with a business of any kind. With online business it’s no different. There’s obstacles and things which stand in your way. Many of them are your own beliefs, judgements and limitations.

Sadly though most affiliates will drop out before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. With affiliate marketing being so accessible, this also means there’s a high drop out rate.

If you take it seriously and stick with it, it can be life changing. But if you think it’s going to be easy, you’ll be disappointed. So it’s maybe not for you!

For me though Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek are absolute heroes! Thanks Stuart, thanks Jay!

If you want to get started with The SFM, click here to access the workshop series of videos.

Digital Marketing Mentorship

A digital marketing mentorship can give you the tools to be able to:

Become free of your job, boss and commute
Build your existing business with new marketing skills
Create an online business using other people’s products
Learn how to import and export physical goods as a business
Work from anywhere from your laptop
Start a digital marketing agency of your own
Develop yourself as a business owner and entrepreneur

Now, (during the 2020 pandemic), it’s become more important than ever to up-skill and future proof yourself for an economic downturn. Are you’re looking for a new skill-set which can set you up for a more secure future and allow you to build an independent income? If so, a digital marketing mentorship might be the way to go.

Digital Marketing Mentorship – My Story

I started looking for a means to earn from the internet several years ago. At the time I was financially struggling and jumping from job to job attempting to support a dream career as a stuntman. At the age of 38 I knew I had to do something else. If I didn’t, I would be stuck in the same “loop” which had perpetuated for years – constantly living in fear and at the whim of someone else or events I couldn’t control.

I tried several strategies to earn online including buying and selling from eBay, Forex marketing, selling my own digital products and eventually finding affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing gave me one or two early successes so I decided it was the way to go for me.

Digital Marketing Mentorship – Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you can sell other people’s products over the internet. Despite some early successes, I still didn’t have the clarity I needed in this field and lacked the consistent success I needed to turn affiliate marketing into a full time viable living. This is where a digital marketing mentorship came in and I was lucky enough to find an online community which offered a range of services which could help:

Live webinars and seminars
Question and answer webinars to help with mindset and technical difficulties
1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching sessions.
Sessions with successful online business owners who have already succeeded in building multiple 6 and 7 figure businesses online
Community groups to offer support and advice

Help With An Online (And Offline) Business

Initially when I joined the community, I had just opened up a martial arts school and was struggling. One of the first things I learned was how to market my Kung Fu school using Facebook marketing. I was able to target my local area and build up my school.

Playing chi sau with Grandmaster Ip Chun (Son Of Ip Man) in the 1990’s

I also learned how to sell digital products and made my first high ticket sale within a few months of joining this online community. See also online business mentorship.

With an online business using affiliate marketing, anyone can use leverage and other people’s products to build an income which is completely portable and flexible. This is one the main things which attracted me to an online business; I was able to work around existing work in the film industry and building up my kung fu school. When the work came in I could drop the online work and pick it up again when it suited me.

Affiliate Marketing Struggles

When I first started learning affiliate marketing I struggled. I made a lot of mistakes such as:

Jumping from course to course and never settling on a direction and course of action.
Looking for the next “shiny object” course which would be “easier” than the last – (what they all promised)
Being a “busy fool” and working on the wrong activities or just filling up time with things I enjoyed doing rather than productive actions.
Getting stuck in “learning mode” – it’s good to always keep learning so long as you are applying your knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t give you results – actions do!

There’s lots of newbie affiliate marketing mistakes which you will avoid if you simply get the right help and follow the advise of successful people.

1 To 1 Coaching With Online Business

Getting 1 on 1 coaching with my online business has helped me tremendously. Without it, it would have taken much longer. A coach can help you overcome mindset issues, fears and conflicts which you would otherwise be unaware of. They can also hold you accountable to your actions which is an important part of building any business. Without accountability, it’s easy to go off-track and lose momentum.

For years prior to finding a digital marketing mentorship program I struggled for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons was lack of accountability. I also lost focus easily because I was juggling so many different jobs.

Local get togethers also helped to create a feeling of togetherness and community – something which can be hard to attain when working online on your own most of the time. Here’s a picture of me with a local group in Chester (UK).

Access A Mentorship Group

If you already have a business, want to build an online business from scratch or simply want to learn more about how to use the internet to create more time and financial freedom in your life, a mentorship group can help. Access an all in one mentors program which includes everything you’ll need to start and grow your own online business:

Tools, training, courses and support
Daily interactive live events
Community access – interact with groups and other online members
Website builder tools & plugins

Get started by clicking here or on the banner below.

Affiliate Success Blueprint

If I could sum up my “affiliate success blueprint” advise, it would be to follow those who are already successful; do what they do and model their success.

My affiliate journey began back in the early 2000’s and there wasn’t a lot of affiliate marketers around at the time. I certainly didn’t know any other people personally who were doing it. As such, there was a lot of scepticism around affiliate marketing.

I took a few courses to learn the basics but everyoneI knew who I talked to told me to stay away “it was a scam”! So I got quiet and learned to keep it to myself. The negativity affected my own belief, and I knew it was the future!

Affiliate Success Blueprint – Avoid The Pitfalls

Each course I took claimed to be the next “affiliate success blueprint“. I learned something from every course I did though, despite not getting the results which were claimed. There always seemed to be something missing from the courses I took. I wandered from one course to another and changed my strategy every 6 months or so if nothing seemed to be happening.

This, of course was part of the problem. Jumping from one strategy to the next meant that I didn’t get traction in any of them. It’s what’s known as “shiny object syndrome”.

Another common mistake affiliates make is to get caught up in learning mode. I fell for this one too; jumping from one strategy to another and constantly spending all my time watching videos and listening to “gurus”.

Affiliate Marketing Blueprint – Models

When I began I had no clue about affiliate marketing. I didn’t know which were the best products to promote, or what strategies worked best in promoting them. I had no money so I got most of my information for free from YouTube or through reading blog posts.

Amazon was one of the first affiliate partner programs I joined along with eBay’s partner program. Looking at Amazon’s commission rates now makes me wonder why I even bothered! I must have sent tonnes of people to Amazon through my website content over the years. And it all amounts to a very small amount of money. If only I had known better from the start. Here’s the breakdown of Amazon’s commission rates. (1-10% commissions).

Still you don’t know what you don’t know and as I gained information over the years I considered my many failures and shortcomings in affiliate marketing as learning tools: stepping stones if you will! Later I learned to use digital products instead which paid more in terms of commissions: 40-50% in many cases. Plus there’s recurring commission products and high ticket products which can make all the difference.

Amazon’s products are easy to sell though and as an affiliate starting out, ease is a factor. But it shouldn’t be. Ideally you should spend your first few months learning; gathering data.

Abraham Lincoln was quoted as saying “ Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax. ” An ax is a strength multiplier. You can be the strongest lumberjack in the world, but with a blunt axe, it’ll take you much longer and be much more difficult.

affiliate marketing meet up — Me at an affiliate event in Chester (UK)

As an affiliate marketer, your knowledge is your axe, so it’s worth investing in. The trouble is, everyone wants it now, now now, and they often rush in too soon without the preparation needed for long term success.

Affiliate Marketing – Get Help

The problem with affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s is that there was no help available. There were courses and training, yes, but no-one was at the end of the phone to help. The course providers were hiding!

That’s changed today. You can get more personal help and it’s well worth investing in if you want to make it a serious income. Since joining an online community I’ve been able to move my online business forwards in much greater leaps and bounds than I even could working on my own without the support I needed.

Joining websites, getting 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and taking part in live meetings does a lot for your confidence and belief in what you are doing.

Take It Seriously

Take your affiliate marketing business seriously and you can make some serious money from it. Treat it like a hobby, and your returns will be of like mind.

Anything is possible with affiliate marketing. With the right products, support and marketing strategy, you can change your life and the lives of others too. But don’t take my word for it. Join an online community who are learning and helping each other to become online business owners and entrepreneurs. Access a free video series to learn more or join the webinar by clicking on the banner below to meet my personal mentors Stuart:

Belief In Affiliate Marketing

Henry Ford said: “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.“

Many quit affiliate marketing saying “it doesn’t work”. But this means they only found a strategy which didn’t work or they didn’t keep learning and improving.

In the beginning affiliate marketing is tough because you have no personal evidence of success. This is why it’s important to follow and model those who are already successful. You can struggle struggle with affiliate marketing and because you don’t fully believe in it, your action steps are timid and uncertain. It’s a bit like driving with the brakes on.

But once you see results for yourself, and make progress, the brakes come off. Once you know for certain that what you are doing leads to the results you want, you can take the brakes off!

Working On Yourself And On Your Business

Many business owners and affiliate marketers make the mistake of working “in” their business and not on themselves. Their thinking stunts the growth of themselves and their business. They work as “technicians” in the business but don’t develop themselves beyond the same level of thinking they habitually bring to the table.

A business can never grow beyond the level of thinking which the business owner brings to the table. This is why it’s important to get the help of coaches and mentors to help you change your thinking processes and challenge your limiting beliefs around money, growth and personal development.

Access a community of online mentors, coaches and entrepreneurs who can help you take your life to the next level. Your affiliate success blueprint is waiting for you!
Access an all in one mentorship package by clicking the image below:

Sunk Cost Trap

Have you fallen for the sunk cost trap? The tendency to expend more energy in a certain direction, or in a certain activity, simply because you’ve already invested so much time in it? Even when a certain activity doesn’t meet your expectations; it becomes more difficult to stop and change direction, the more time and energy or investment you have given an action previously.

Sunk Cost Trap Examples – Cinema Ticket

Here’s some sunk cost trap, (also known as sunk cost fallacy) examples. A common example is that of paying for a cinema ticket and you aren’t enjoying the film. Rather than leave the cinema, you stay because, well you bought a ticket and it would be a waste of money if you left. But the choice is based on an assumption that you must stay because of the sunk cost of the ticket.

In actual fact, the lost time of sitting in a cinema watching a film you’re not enjoying may be actually costing you more in terms of lost time, which you’ll never get back! So for the cost of a cinema ticket you’ll waste 2 hours watching something you’re not enjoying!

Sunk Cost Fallacy Examples – A Restaurant

Another example is over eating at a restaurant. You’ve paid for the food but are full. So you cram the food in and eat every morsel, even though you’re no longer hungry. The thinking behind this decision is based on getting value for money from your food, which you’ve paid for. By leaving it, you assume you’re wasting money. But in reality, you’d be better off leaving the food left over once you’ve had enough. The food offers a diminishing value for every bite once you’re full!

Stuck In A Career/Job

A common experience for many people is to get trapped by a job or a career. Despite it not giving you the life and/or income you want, you continue doing something which makes you unhappy for decades. This is often because the diminishing returns of a career are not felt as they gradually come about. Over years in a career, you come to depend on your job and would lose income if you changed. So you stay because of the convenience. The longer you stay in a job, the harder it becomes to transition out of it.

Relationships

Relationships too can be good examples of the sunk cost trap too. The longer you are in a relationship for, the more difficult it is to get out. Even if people are unhappy in a relationship, they stay for convenience and because, well, “we’ve been together for years”. The fear of the unknown becomes part of the reasoning and the longer you sustain the status quo, the more invested in it you are – whether through an investment of time money or energy.

Sunk Cost & Your Self Image

You have invested your whole life in your own personal identity. But is it really you? Your self image is a massive part of how you interact with the world and what you believe about yourself. Is your self image serving you and are you a victim of the sunk cost trap in terms of investment you’ve made in to the “who” “you” think you are? Read more on this in Maxwell Matlz’s Psycho-cybernetics.

The Sunk Cost Trap & Me

I fell for the sunk cost trap too spending several years training to become a stunt performer. Although I enjoyed work when it happened most of the time I was struggling to make ends meet. I had to chase a number of jobs to fill in the many gaps between stunt contracts.

Despite this being a “dream job”, over the years it produced diminishing returns and I became disillusioned with the business. But being trapped by the “dream job” status and freedom which it afforded me, I struggled to either get more work or transition out of the career to something else offering the same kinds of benefits; freedom and passion.

I imagine this is the same for people within many careers. They can’t escape the “golden handcuffs” of their well paid career and they’ve no time to look for an alternative anyway. The longer their career lasts, the more they get paid and the more liabilities they acquire.

Even if they could find something, it would mean a massive loss of pay, change in status or a blow to the self image/self esteem. So instead of changing they become entrenched in their career all the more as time passes.

Sunk Cost Trap – Transitioning Into The Digital Economy

I juggled various jobs such as driving HGV’s and working in offices but dropped the work when the stunt jobs came in. This was massively exhausting and meant I never had much continuity in my income. I wanted something which I could pick up and drop and work at in my own time. So I looked into working online in some capacity. I initially started out with eBay and bought and sold from the site using a strategy I found in a ebook purchase.

But the Ebay business just tied me to my house and computer and I found myself getting more and more drawn in by it. I transitioned into affiliate marketing which is a business model which allows anyone to sell other people’s products online. Originally this was to use as a convenient business model to work around the stunt industry. But as I persevered, I realised it offered more potential to give me more time and financial freedom than the stunt work did!

Sunk Cost Trap – Online Business

If you think you’ve invested too much time in a certain direction and want to change things around, access a free video series and start learning how you can leverage the internet to create more choice and more freedom. Escape the sunk cost trap and make some new choices for a new life!

Learn more about building your own online business. Click on the image below to get started.

The Sunk Cost Trap And Affiliate Marketing

The sunk cost trap can also apply to affiliate marketing too. I definitely fell for the trap of doing too much of a particular strategy, trying to prove that it worked! Blogging, in particular can be a great strategy but takes a lot of time and effort to generate results. You don’t realise how much time it can take to actually break through what James Clear refers to as the valley of disappointment in his book Atomic Habits. This is the gap between what you think should happen and what actually happens. See image below.

If you’ve sunk a lot of time and energy into blogging, or consistently doing a certain activity online, it becomes more difficult to abandon that activity because of the sunk cost trap. But also, with an activity like blogging, you know that if you keep going, you’ll probably get some results from it. But you don’t know how long time might be for! Hence you can stay in this trap for a long period of time without acknowledging it and moving on to a better strategy!

I like blogging, and still write., hence this article. But I also acknowledged that others were doing better with other strategies. So I switched and now also am working on a YouTube paid marketing campaign alongside the blogging I do!

Affiliate Marketing Loophole

For years I looked for an affiliate marketing loophole; that one “trick” which would set me free! While I spent time looking for black hat affiliate marketing “secrets“, I got more and more lost down the rabbit hole of the affiliate marketing “shiny object syndrome” trap!

You know what I mean. Each “shiny object” course you buy promises more than the last one. Each one claims you can be rich by clicking buttons and checking out your cart! I bought these kinds of courses for years striving to make a living online. But mostly I was disappointed; which is what I expect the vast majority of newbie affiliate marketers find too.

Affiliate Marketing Loophole

The problem with the idea of an affiliate marketing loophole somehow suggests that affiliate marketing is easy; that it’s somehow easy to “trick” the system and earn easy money. I bought into this idea back in the early 2000’s and went from course to course. I had some small successes too, selling my first affiliate product through a free blogging strategy I had learned. See my article get paid for advertising without a website for the strategy.

But, I thought, maybe there is something to an affiliate marketing loophole? Perhaps there’s a legitimate ‘loophole’ I could capitalise on.

Before I found affiliate marketing I knew there had to be a better strategy than the one I was attempting at the time. I was buying and selling on eBay using a little strategy I had found from an eBook purchase I had made on the auction site itself. You can read about this strategy in my article “How To Start A Profitable Ebay Business“. Click the image below to read about it.

Affiliate Marketing Loophole

Despite working hard at my eBay buying and selling strategy for several months, I realised there was a limit to it. I was constantly on the computer, tied to my laptop and my house. I had a room full of stock and was spending hours searching for products, listing them and answering questions from people. Despite all this, I was only making a small amount of money. It was effectively a job that I owned and I didn’t have a proper business as it wasn’t scalable.

There had to be something different, I thought, something better which had more automation and which could be scalable globally. I thought back to my original purchase of the ebook I had bought in the first place. This struck me as a far better business model – selling a digital product online.

So I abandoned the eBay business and looked into creating my own ebooks – with a view to selling them online.

Affiliate Marketing Loophole – Finding Affiliate Marketing

When I first found affiliate marketing, it was in a bid to sell my own ebooks. I had spent some time writing my ebooks, creating covers and building a website around them in order to sell them. But I knew nothing of how to market a website. So I put myself on a marketing course and this led me to affiliate marketing. I knew then that I had wasted so much time in creating my own products.

There were far better products which already existed which I couldn’t compete with. So I started selling other people’s products using the affiliate marketing model.

I looked for the “affiliate marketing loophole” which would mean I could relax and sit back, watching the money pouring in! But time and again it all went wrong!

Free Marketing – Blogging

One strategy I started using was building niche websites and flouting them to the top of Google. This had a limited success back in the early 2000’s but is much more difficult now. Having a keyword targeted domain name can help you rank on Google for certain keywords. But mostly it’s a difficult strategy with very limited results, especially now with all the competition out there and with Google having updated its algorithm constantly to reduce the appearance of the “spammers” in the search results.

You can create a free website and earn money using the niche website strategy. But it’s a tough one and I had many more failures using this idea than successes. But it can work and give you free traffic.

Affiliate Marketing Loophole – PPC

I struggled with the niche website building strategy for a long time and after purchasing another course from a guy called Peter Lexis (see my digital profit course review), I changed direction.

He suggested using PPC – pay per click direct response marketing. See I set up a landing page and email marketing campaign and sent targeted visitors to it through Google’s Adwords program using specific keyword searches typed into Google.

It worked too and I started getting leads and sales every day. Trouble was, Google shut me down about a day later. Back then (around 15 years ago), if you got shut down you didn’t get your account back. So, when I finished crying, it was back to the drawing board.

Back To Organic

So, without my Adwords account I went back to organic marketing after purchasing yet another course from what was called The Keyword Academy. You are probably seeing a trend here – from course to course. This is the fatal affiliate marketing trap to be avoided. It’s called “shiny object syndrome”. It’s easy to get stuck in learning mode because it feels like progress. But it isn’t progress unless you apply what you learn and start getting somewhere.

So I spent another 6 months to a year churning out content and doing keyword research in a bid to rank content on Google and earn money through Google’s Adsense program. Adsense lets you place adverts on your content and earn small amounts of advertising revenue from the people who place the adverts. If you look for the keyword academy now, you won’t find them.

The trouble with using only Adsense is that you need a huge amount of traffic to make any money. I made tiny amounts from Adsense but looked back to my best online wins and it was through selling affiliate products. So I decided to focus on that.

Affiliate Marketing Loopholes

Up to this point I had done loads of work on various strategies but made little progress. I had earned tiny amounts from Google’s Adsense program and some larger amounts through affiliate marketing.

My best win was through paid marketing, so really I should have stuck with that and affiliate marketing. But I had lost my Adwords account and didn’t know how else to do it. In hindsight, I could have used Bing which is a similar platform. But you don’t know what you don’t know.

And this is what it boils down to – knowledge. But knowledge online was hard to grasp when I began online. There were lots of scams doing the rounds and it was difficult to know who to trust.

High Ticket Items

I later discovered high ticket affiliate programs and also recurring commission affiliate programs.

I wish I could’ve gone back and told my younger self about these. Promoting an affiliate product which is “geared” is a whole lot easier than trying loads of methods and strategies when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Before discovering high ticket items I was spending huge amounts of time doing the wrong activities. I also was promoting products from Amazon which paid only tiny commissions.

High ticket items and recurring income commissions were definitely the “affiliate marketing loophole” I had been looking for. I just needed to learn how to sell them, over and over again.

Invest In Your Knowledge

I never thought investing in my own knowledge was so important either. I was just looking for the quick ways to fortune online. The “affiliate marketing loopholes” which I could capitalise on easily and quickly. I suspect this is a mistake made by many affiliates.

But investing in your knowledge can serve you many times over because everything you do as an affiliate is based on your knowledge and understanding of it.

I’ll say that again. Everything you do, (every action you take) as an affiliate is based on your understanding of it.

So it makes sense to invest in your knowledge using this thinking.

So before you purchase another course or start down a particular line of activity, think about what outcome you want first. It should save you all the years I’ve spent!