Looking for PPC affiliate marketing for beginners? PPC, or “pay per click” refers to how marketers use paid marketing platforms. PPC is also known as direct response marketing. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their advert. PPC can be used in conjunction with affiliate marketing products to send targeted traffic (visitors) to affiliate products. When you make a sale you earn a commission on the product. Using PPC as an affiliate should be done with some caution because you can spend a lot of money very quickly, and potentially without recouping it in sales.
You can also use PPC programs on your website content to make money from advertisers. When someone clicks on an advert on your content, you earn a portion of the advertising cost. Google Adsense offers an advertising program which lets blog owners or YouTubers place adverts on their content. Google Adwords is the program used by marketers who want to run adverts themselves. You can also use other platforms which offer PPC advertising such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Bing etc.
PPC Commissions
Some affiliate programs offer to pay affiliates for clicks, rather than (or as well as) sales. So this is another way affiliates can earn money through placing banner ads on their content and hoping their visitors will click on them.
PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
If you want to use PPC marketing as an affiliate, it means you’ll be sending website traffic to a landing page or a website with the intention of selling affiliate products to make a profit.
PPC affiliate marketing for beginners can be a tough nut to crack. For starters pay per click platforms can be expensive and complicated. Ideally start out with a cheaper platform such as Bing, where you’ll learn the basics. Depending on your products, you may even not be able to afford the more expensive platforms such as YouTube.
With PPC, you need to know the value of a customer, your average return on investmentper lead/sale and other metrics. When you know your numbers, you’re prepared before hand and know what you can reasonably expect to spend. Many new PPC business owners get frustrated and quit because they don’t know their numbers and expect to start making money straight away. But there’s a bit more to it.
PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
Many business owners set up an advert using a PPC advertising platform, get no results and quit. But you need to understand the longer term implications of understanding how PPC works. Initially you shouldn’t expect too much from a single advert; especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. The people who succeed online have tested and measured many adverts before they find a profitable one. Plus, many of their adverts don’t work first time!
They spend money learning which adverts work and which don’t. By tracking all of their results and starting out with a low, manageable budget which they can afford, they learn how to run profitable adverts.
Once they find an advert which regularly brings back a profit, they can just leave it running and move on to the next one. They can also increase their budget and scale up very easily once they’ve hit on a profitable campaign. So it’s worth persevering and being careful with your budget in the first instance.
Affiliate Marketing Product Range
For many affiliate marketing business models, PPC is out of the reach of affiliates because of the competition. Advertisers bid for their adverts to be found by people typing in certain search queries on YouTube, or Google. Or the advertiser targets a certain type of person from a certain area for example.
Depending on the topic and general search relevancy, there might be a lot of other competing advertisers who also want to get found by those same people. If those marketers can afford to spend much more than you can, you’ll lose the placing and be priced out of the market.
Unless your business model allows it, you won’t be able to run adverts on certain platforms and still make a profit. The cost of advertising may be too high for you to recoup your advertising spend and make a return on your investment (ROI) which is greater than your expenditure. And no-one wants to run adverts just to lose money.
Many new affiliates will choose low value affiliate products to start out with, as I did. The problem here is that if you only have a product valued at $100, for example, you’ll only receive a $40- $50 commission at the most for the sale as an affiliate. This means that if you want to use PPC to sell your product, you’ll need to spend less than $40 or $50 to sell it. This is very limiting and it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed.
Just testing adverts in likely to cost you more than this and it can be easy to just lose money while you find this out.
With a high value product range, you’re ROI is much higher. If you have a number of high value digital products, subscriptions products (or recurring income affiliate products), and can earn multi-tier commissions, for example, you’ll have a greater chance of making a profit from running your adverts.
With a sales funnel like this you can earn a larger average return per customer. This in turn means you’re better able to run profitable campaigns than by only using low value items.
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Looking for an affiliate marketing mentor near me, or you?! I was in the same boat several years ago; looking for someone to help and advise me with my affiliate business. I wanted an affiliate marketing mentor near me; someone real who wasn’t hiding behind their computer!
It took me several years of searching to find someone real, but eventually I managed to find a business community of like minded entrepreneurs who helped me earn online through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Mentor Near Me
I might not be an affiliate marketing mentor near you, but I can help you. I can also suggest the same online community which has helped me. Over several years I took many courses in the search to find a way to legitimately earn from my laptop. Before stumbling onto affiliate marketing I tried Forex Marketing, eBay – buying and selling and even created my own ebooks. Here’s a short video explaining my story.
The main problem I found with learning from the internet was trust. I just didn’t know who to trust and I found myself jumping from one online course to another. Each one promised an easier path that the last!
When I found the community I now am a part of, I took another leap of faith. I was pretty desperate, in heaps of debt and trying to build a career as a stunt performer. But it wasn’t working and mostly I was out of work and filling in with whatever jobs I could get hold of.
After attempting affiliate marketing for several years without much success, I joined Stuart and Jay’s community in the SFM (Six Figure Mentors). Despite my initial scepticism, I was able to meet other affiliates in the UK, where I live. This was unusual since most companies I’d previously found were in the US. I was also able to meet people in person and I joined a number of seminars and get togethers.
Affiliate Marketing Mentor Near Me – Where Are You?
The SFM Mentors run workshops globally, so yes, there is an affiliate marketing mentor near you. The community has been growing since 2012 too so there will be people near you who you can meet up with, wherever you are in the world. I’m based in the UK and recently met up with other affiliates in Chester. Here’s a picture of the meet up.
Heres me at the Chester meet-up in the UK in the red jacket
Why Meet-Ups?
For me the get togethers are of real value because they make an internet business seem real. Working on your own online is hard and its difficult to really commit to a path online when there are so many to choose from. When I started researching online businesses, my inbox became full very quickly with one scheme and then another.
I jumped from one course to another – shiny object syndrome and months passed before I found a suitable strategy and plan. It’s easy to lose hope or direction with an online business too. Other people who you can trust and rely on can help you and hold you accountable. This just wasn’t something I got from many of the previous courses I had taken.
Interactive webinars have been a massive support too. With question and answer webinars you can gain support in all aspects of your affiliate business.
Mentors Near You
Mentorship is about trust. Without trust it’s very difficult to maintain a path for very long. Another problem I had with my affiliate marketing was in choosing a strategy which was right for me. No one can tell you that, people can only advise. Paid marketing is great, if you have the money. Blogging is good, if you have the patience. But ultimately it’s up to you which direction you take with your affiliate marketing business. It’s your responsibility.
With affiliate marketing too there are no guarantees. “Do this and that will happen” doesn’t always translate because everyone is different. Everyone has a different approach, different knowledge and a different work ethic. Unless you take full responsibility for the results in your affiliate business you’re putting the outcome onto someone else.
Making someone else responsible for your outcomes is a bad idea. It lets you off the hook but also disempowers you.
Affiliate Marketing And Mindset
I always thought mindset in affiliate marketing was a little bit of a red herring. But I was soo wrong! When I first started out learning affiliate marketing, I just wanted a formula – do this and make money. But what I didn’t realise is there’s lots of mistakes to make along the journey. Mistakes which either cost money or time. Here’s a few of the affiliate marketing mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.
But once you’ve been through all of that, the other side is worth the struggle. You’ll know exactly which actions generate the best results for you. But most quit on that journey because they don’t see the bigger picture. They fail a couple of times and throw it all away. The affiliates who succeed realise this and use each failure as a stepping stone to success.
Dart Board Analogy
Let’s look at a simple analogy. You have a dart board which has a prize for hitting the bulls eye. The prize is $1000. Each dart costs you $200 to throw. The darts represent your advertising campaign and the prize represents an affiliate sale. You miss the first 10 times but then you hit the bulls eye! It costs you $2200 and you only make $1000. Most would consider this a complete failure. But if you take a longer term view, it’s actually a success. You now know which dart to throw (which advert to run) to make $1000 and only spend $200.
You can use the same analogy for any affiliate strategy providing you track all your sales. Pareto’s principle states that around 80% of your results will come from only 20% of your activities. So initially as an affiliate you’ll spend time on many things which amount to nothing. At this point most will quit. If you understand the graph below though it may give you some hope.
James Clear’s Book Atomic Habits
The “valley of disappointment” is where most affiliates quit! It’s where they try and try to no avail. They decide that “affiliate marketing just doesn’t work”. But they don’t ask themselves why affiliate marketing does not work. It’s because they haven’t yet hit upon a strategy they can rinse and repeat to generate a profit. Once they do, they are free! So it’s worth enduring the difficulties for the end goal.
By far the best choice you can make as an affiliate marketer is to use recurring commission affiliate programs. With referring commission programs you get paid over and over again for each sale you refer.
Most affiliate programs don’t offer recurring commissions. So once you’ve made a sale, you lose that customer to the product owner. The product owner gets a customer – potentially for life and only pays you (the affiliate) once for them!
But recurring commission affiliate programs are different. Once you’ve referred a customer once, you can continue to earn commissions month after month, year after year. With some products too you can benefit from a range of products too.
This means you only need to refer customers to the lowest value product in a range, and a built in sales team will “up-sell” your customer, making sales on your behalf. You still earn a commission and on a higher ticket item, but you’ve only referred a low value sale.
Recurring Commission Affiliate Programs – Some Examples
A good recurring commission affiliate program can pay you far more than a “one-off” offer can, over time. With “one-off” sales, you can earn only one commission. So a sale of a $100 product, for example, will pay you $40 assuming a 40% commission.
But even a low value recurring product will quickly catch up and overtakea one-off sale commission. A recurring commission affiliate program which offers $10 a month might not seem like a lot. For each sale you make you’ll make $10 a month. Doesn’t sound like a lot does it?
But, if you sold 100 of your single products for $100 each you’ll make $4000. If you sold a 100 of your recurring income products (at $10 a month) you’ll make $1000 per month. For a one-off sale, you might have a couple of quiet months where you don’t sell anything. So eventually your recurring income will beat your one-off sale income.
Some Recurring Commission Programs
Recurring commission programs are often membership programs, training programs and software products. Here’s a few examples:
SFM Mentors– Offer training and support for affiliates, a range of high ticket products and an online business community.
Aweber – offers an automated collection and delivery email marketing software (for online marketers and business owners)
Hostgator – Offers online website hosting for website owners and online businesses
SEM Rush – Offers online visibility support, data collection, performance metrics, SEO help and advice etc. for online businesses.
Best Affiliate Products To Promote
Did you notice anything about these products? They all offer a lifetime value to those in need of them. When I started out with affiliate marketing, I found products from Clickbank and threw up content in an attempt to sell them. But the products were cheap one-off sale type products which sold for $100 and made $40 commissions. They were courses, ebooks or downloadable material but only offered $100 worth of value.
They didn’t offer a lifetime value to the customer. With the right products, and if you find the right customers for them, you’ll continue to make commissions long after your referral sale goes through. That’s because people really need these products. An online business can’t be built without the use of websites (hosting) and email marketing software (Aweber). So, even if you sell these low value items, you’ll need to sell them over and over again just to make a reasonable living.
With high value recurring income products, you only need to find people who need them in order to make a recurring income – potentially for a lifetime.
Other Considerations
There’s a few other considerations to think about too when approaching which affiliate products you should promote. Ideally choose affiliate programs which give you recurring commissions to maximise the income you can generate from your efforts. But you can also leverage your online business more cleverly if you also use:
A product range – a product range lets you earn from products your referrals purchase later on, even years after they initially purchase.
Up-sells – up-sells are part of a product range and give you larger potential earnings from the product you initially promote
Multi-tier sales – With 2 tier sales you can earn commissions based on the sales generated by your referrals
Digital products – offer the best value for affiliates not just because you can earn ongoing monthly commissions but also because your rate of commission is usually much higher than that of physical products.
A built in sales team – Having a team of sales people working on your behalf is worth it’s weight in gold to an affiliate. You don’t have to personally sell high ticket items yourself if you choose a product range which includes them.
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Thinking entrepreneurially doesn’t come naturally to most people. Entrepreneurs must challenge their thinking processes in order to grow and attain the results they want to create.
The level of thinking you bring to any business will affect the ceiling limit of how much that business will grow. This is what many business owners get wrong – the work hard in their business, being “busy”, but neglect to work hard on themselves, growing their thinking. What psychological factors limit the growth of a business?
A business will never outgrow the level of thinking through which it is created and developed. So wise entrepreneurs spend time and invest in being around others who have reached higher levels of success than they have.
Thinking Entrepreneurially – Cause and Effect
There’s a cause and effect relationship between what you do (behaviour) and the results you enjoy in your life. Behaviour is affected by your beliefs and attitudes which are effected by your consistent thinking processes.
AUTOSUGGESTION is the agency of control through which an individual may voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of a creative nature, or, by neglect, permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into this rich garden of the mind. – Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
The chapter on autosuggestion (in Think and Grow Rich) is an important one and talks into our thinking processes as being the cause of our subconscious beliefs. So it is our thinking we should aim to improve if we are to become better entrepreneurs and create better results in our lives.
Thinking Entrepreneurially – Unconscious Beliefs
An unconscious belief might stem from childhood, where everything was absorbed without a conscious filter (the conscious mind) deciding which attitudes and ideas to absorb.
What makes children such awesome learners who can pick up language, learn to walk and talk within such a short time, is the ability to absorb without conscious reasoning. In the early stage of a child’s life, information is taken in without critical thinking and although this makes us amazing learners, we also collect information which isn’t useful.
Some of the obstacles which entrepreneurs will encounter relate to unconscious beliefs which are hidden in the subconscious mind.
What You Believe About Yourself
How you see yourself has a huge amount to do with your unconscious programming you received as a child too. Your unconscious mind controls a lot of what you believe about life, yourself, how much money you can make, your earning potential and how to live your life.
Without an awareness of this vast storage of all the information of your life, you’ll continue to repeat patterns and behaviours which don’t serve you or your highest potential. Once you get clearer about what it is you want, and what is holding you back, you’ll be able to take more steps towards the purpose driven life you’re really wanting to live into.
Unconscious Success Blockers
Here’s an example. Lets say Sam wants to earn more money and is attempting to build an online business. However, he keeps hitting a brick wall and doesn’t seem to be able to earn beyond a certain point. He keeps taking action but it’s like there’s an invisible wall holding him back. What is it?
There could be many reasons for this. Perhaps he just hasn’t done the required work, or he’s lazy or inept. Maybe he’s too entitled and believes it’s easier than it actually is. These assumptions aside, lets assume he is holding himself back due to an unconscious reason he’s currently unaware of.
Perhaps, he received many unconscious ideas as a child about money and how bad it is. Or about self worth and doesn’t believe he is worth it. Perhaps a sibling is struggling with money and he can’t accept being much more successful than his brother/sister. What relationships or meanings could you attribute your lack of success to?
Limiting Beliefs
Some people unconsciously hold themselves apart from success due to a relationship they had with their parents. They don’t see themselves as successful, or they attribute a negative connotation with monetary success.
Think about some of the following beliefs/ideas:
Money is the route of all evil
Monetary success is only for greedy people
I’m not worthy of success, more than I need
You should only want “enough” and no more
Life is a struggle
I don’t deserve it
Rich people are greedy
I can’t outgrow my parents in terms of financial success
Money brings more problems with it
Which statements chimed with you most? What areas of your past are holding you in your current situation and stunting your growth?
Until your make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you’ll call it fate. – Carl Jung
Clear Goals Aligned With Action Steps
You can’t train your mind to focus on something if you don’t give your mind a target. If you’re unclear in your thinking about what it is you want, you’re unlikely to achieve it.
Entrepreneurial thinking therefore demands a certain clarity. With confusion, you create chaos. With clarity you can attain an plan and take daily action steps towards your target.
Most people are unclear about what it is they want. So they create something in-between their idea of success and what they believe they are capable of or willing to do.
To gain clarity over what you want to accomplish, you must set specific measurable goals. Then you can train your unconscious mind to flag up your target so that it continually thinks about it and plans for its execution.
Stuart Lichman’s book on Cybernetic Transposition is the best resource I have found on this topic. In it, he uses what he calls the Cybernetic transposition three step process to specify your most attractive goal and create a “meta-story” around it to flag it up to your unconscious mind.
Thinking entrepreneurially means more than just thinking on a surface level. It means to look within at the unconscious ideas which are blocking your success through limiting thinking too.
To learn more about becoming a conscious entrepreneur, join this entrepreneurial community and build an online business from scratch. Or if you already have a business and want to develop yourself as an entrepreneur, access a training and educational tool here.
Setting small goals to achieve big ones is the key to self mastery. Some even go so far as to say don’t set goals at all; instead create processes which lead naturally to where you want to go.
A goal projects into the future the person you want to be, the lifestyle you want to live and so on and so on. It carries with it the idea that you’re not enough right now, in this moment. So be careful with goals because once you achieve one, you’re on to the next. Where do your goals lead you?
If you’re carrying the feeling of never being enough, having enough or doing enough, you may be very goal oriented. But will achieving your goals make you happy, or will you need more goals to really feel fulfilled, happy and content?
So start out with being enough, feeling like you are enough and being happy right now, in this moment.
Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals
In my 20’s I met a stuntman and knew this was what I wanted to pursue. I had a big goal ahead of me – to become a stuntman. To me, a stuntman represented something I thought I wanted: self employed, self assured, confident, purposeful, and so on. It just felt right in every way.
I had a number of tasks to complete which can be summed up briefly as:
30 weeks work under an Equity contract
6 instructor skills in various activities
I choose to do martial arts, trampolining, SCUBA diving, fencing, swimming and rock climbing. It took me 3-4 years to complete everything. I did it and joined the British Stunt Register in 2002 because I was setting small goals to achieve big ones.
If I had looked at the mountain of things in front of me to do, I would have felt overwhelmed and never even tried. But instead I wrote everything down and made large steps into small achievable goals. Getting a qualification in fencing for example, became “find a fencing school and contact them”. Then turning up for my first lesson. Getting 30 weeks’ work under Equity became finding my first TV extras job – which meant finding an Extras agency. Each large goal was broken down into many small achievable steps.
Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals – Overwhelm
There will be times when you feel overwhelm, whatever you’re attempting. Learn to rest but not to quit. Some days you’ll struggle and others you’ll be flying! But large goals take time so you need to be patient with yourself.
Later on when the stunt work became more of a burden than a joy, I looked to the internet as a means to earn an income. This was another mountain I found to climb! The internet offers a means to earn an income to whoever pursues it for long enough and with enough dedication.
My own personal journey online has had many ups and downs. I’m still on the journey but have learned to celebrate the small wins. When I look to other entrepreneurs who have achieved huge financial success online, I ofter get demoralised because I compare myself to them!
This, I have learned is a mistake. I become disempowered and disillusioned. Thoughts like “I’ll never get to where they are”, “Why bother it never seems to work” and other self defeating expressions surface in my mind. But these kinds of thoughts seldom lead to any inspirational activities!
Small Thoughts Lead To Big Thoughts Too
From a demoralised state of mind to productive and inspirational action is a huge leap. It’s pretty much impossible. So a small step towards a more productive and happy state of mind is always a good thing.
As an affiliate marketer, I sell and promote other people’s products on the internet. I joined an online community who have helped me to earn an income from the internet. But one of the biggest hurdles I’ve found with building my online business is keeping focused on the small actions which I can control and not focusing on the things I don’t have yet!
You can get excited about the first hit you get on your website, for example. You can focus on your first lead. But when your mind is looking for results before you have done the work, you’re creating a mindset of entitlement. Entitlement is wanting things to be different to what they actually are. You want results before you do the work. Here’s a few examples of the mindsets which can work against you with an online business:
“I should be there by now I’ve been doing this for ages” – Where is “there” and what have you specifically been doing for “ages” – and for how long exactly? Maybe try another strategy?
“I’ll wait to see if it works first before I commit to it”– another counterproductive mentality which expects results to show without belief and hard work.
“I can’t in good conscience promote something as a successful model, when I haven’t achieved that success yet.” – I definitely experienced this mind trap. But without promoting something as an affiliate, you can’t make money from it! Belief must be there for success to happen.
Blogging And Big Goals
I started out online thinking I could write a few blog posts and make hundreds of millions from them! While it’s true that a blog post can go viral, and this can lead to many sales, my expectations weren’t a good match for reality. But also, because I expected so much from such little work, I was always disappointed!
As I stuck with it and over time, I realised how my expectations were based on many of the “get rich quick” schemes I had seen over the years. They promised loads of easy money but never delivered. I nearly quit many times just because of the continual disappointments that I had online.
But slowly and surely things got better as I kept going.
Big goals don’t come true without processes which are followed day after day. Unless you put the effort in with an online business, you’ll never see any results. With blogging, results are hard won. It’s far easier and quicker to use paid marketing. However, when I started out online I didn’t have the funds to use paid marketing. So I blogged.
What happens with blogging is nothing for a very long time. Eventually you see your traffic rise steadily and then boom! – If you get to the “boom” stage, you’ve probably been blogging for a very long time. It’s where your traffic goes from a trickle, to a stream to a flood. All of a sudden, you’re making sales and it’s like Christmas! Your sales come in whether you work or not! That’s always been my goal. The hard part is keeping going through the desert when nothing seems to happen.
Daily Processes Instead Of Goals
When your long term goals/desires line up with your daily habits, you know you are on track. Everything feels right and you know you can just keep going, following your daily habits and things will eventually transpire the way you want them to.
Having a set of daily processes you can follow almost without thinking, is key. To get to this point you need to clearly identify your long term plan. Write down what you want you life to look like in every area 10 years from now. Then ask yourself whether your daily actions will take you there. If the answer is no, you need to create some new daily habits and actions steps which will lead you to a better future.
When you align your values, goals and daily action steps, you get to work in a way which is conducive to your daily happiness and your long term goals.
Although a blog post won’t make my online business by itself, as I build more and more content online, my leads and sales come in at a greater pace over time; simply due to the volume of content I have out there in the online world.
Setting Small Goals To Achieve Big Goals – Aligning Who You Are
Have you ever given up on a goal mid way through? Or have you achieved something only to find out that it didn’t give you lasting happiness and fulfilment. Are you chasing goals because there’s a void in your life and you never quite feel fulling aligned with your purpose or reason for being? That’s why it’s a good idea to ask yourself to start with “why”?
Your reason for doing something can often be the reason why you give up, re-direct or stay the course. Once you know your “why”, you can determine whether your path is aligned with your highest values. Knowing your values will save you heaps of time and wasted energy too. Your “why” is the reason you decide on a particular path or journey.
It’s easy to forget that we can achieve pretty much anything we set out minds to. Instead though, most of us get caught up in repeating patterns and habits which don’t lead us to our ideal lives.
Can you really learn entrepreneurship online? Back in 1995 I began my online journey when eBay opened its doors. I sold a few things from around the house but years later started using the platform to buy and sell. Originally I found the strategy from an ebook I bought from the site.
I considered the ebook purchase for some time. Despite being able to make a profit using the strategy in the ebook, I thought the ebook was a better strategy. The idea wouldn’t go out of my mind that this simple transaction was automated. I wanted to get on the other side of the digital download business, and make money on autopilot. I started to learn entrepreneurship online, although I never really considered that was what I was doing.
Learn Entrepreneurship Online
I began to create my own ebooks. At the time I was working as a stunt performer in the UK and thought it a good idea to write a short “how to” book about it. I also did one about becoming a TV extra too and attempted to sell them. Unfortunately I was lost and hadn’t a clue about selling anything online back then. I thought I could just put up a website and people would come.
But little did I know back then, I may as well have put up a restaurant in the middle of the dessert. Nobody saw my website and I never made any sales. So I bought a few online courses which claimed to teach me how to make money on the internet. See my digital profit course review for some of the courses I took.
Learn Entrepreneurship Online
The courses I took led me down several paths and I tried many strategies of making money online. The two main ones I attempted were using Google Adsense and affiliate marketing. With Adsense you get paid when people click on your adverts and encourage people to visit your website/YouTube channel by creating lots of content.
I did made some small trickles with this strategy but nothing really substantial. To make a lot of money with this strategy you need a lot of content. Plus, Google can pull the plug any time they want and did for many who had worked really hard towards building a living like this.
My first real success was selling a digital product from a review I had written of it. I used the site Hubpages and didn’t even have my own website. You can read about this strategy in my article “get paid for advertising online without a website“.
Struggling Affiliate
I became a “struggling” affiliate and despite making a huge number of mistakes with affiliate marketing I kept going. This, perhaps is the key to success – simply never quit! Jumping from strategy to strategy and course to course for a number of years, eventually I found mentors – an online business “all in one” training resource and community of entrepreneurs.
Before finding the community I didn’t even realise that I needed an affiliate marketing mentor. The previous courses I took only offers recordings and no actual personal help. This is the key to learning how to earn online. It’s simply too difficult to do it alone. You can find yourself chasing your tail for years, without ever getting anywhere.
Finding Help
I joined with the same mentality I brought to previous courses. I had scepticism and doubt and this held me back for sure. It wasn’t that I was lazy, just not very directed. So I spent months and eventually years focused on either learning continually (and never applying), or working on the wrong actions which didn’t move things forwards.
Money was a problem when I started out and so I focused on the free strategies. This is far harder than using paid marketing. With paid marketing you can build an online business very quickly. But without it, you need traffic and free traffic is usually hard-won traffic.
The invisible enemy to making money from the internet is yourself. An online business can’t grow beyond the thinking you bring to it.
How Your Thinking Needs To Shift
As an employee you are trained to work a set shift and work in a certain way. You’re not taught to think and you’re basically a “technician” working a role in a wider company. Bring this same mindset to an entrepreneurial role and you’re likely to get nowhere, like I did for several years.
Afraid of spending money, I worked really hard at the things which didn’t matter. I spent far too long in the wrong activities and didn’t get the help I needed. Once my thinking changed, so did my success online. Getting the help I needed was the best money I could have spent. But before I took that step, nothing changed.
What is the best micro niche for blogging? Well this is completely objective of course. What might work well for one person, won’t necessarily work for someone else. A good micro niche site should attract some free traffic from Google and the other search engines. But it doesn’t necessarily “deserve” free traffic! You have to build a good resource and it has to out-rank other content to get found on Google.
But how do you do this? How can you rank a site and get free traffic? Micro niche sites usually capitalise on un-tapped keywords within a certain area. If you’re a blogger and love writing, chances are you’ll write better about subject you’re passionate about, or at least interested in. Write about something you don’t give a hoot about, and your content will reflect your lack of interest. Chances are good that it’ll bomb, or someone will overtake you because their interest in the topic is more genuine.
Best Micro Niche For Blogging – Start With “Why”
If you’re building a blog website to eventually monetise and earn from, you’re going to have your work cut out. There’s no two ways about it! Blogging is tough and it takes a long time before you’ll see the fruits of your labour. One of the biggest mistakes I made, although I like to think of it as a lesson, was building a niche blog site I had no interest in.
I was passionate about the process of course, but naive about what to expect. I thought, just by having a site rank on Google, I’d be in the money. Oh dear, how wrong I was. I researched a number of keywords and was keen to get started building a niche website. I found a keyword which appeared pretty un-tapped on Google and had a number of monthly searches. The keyword? “When To Harvest Garlic”.
Yep! That was one of my earliest niche website which I built! Not very exciting is it? Well for some people, that would be their passion. But not me. I just wanted the end result. The main problem with aiming a blog starting with the “end result” is a lack of purpose. I didn’t care about mushroom harvesting. I just wanted a site to work and make money.
So I built a lot of content around this keyword. For each article I wrote, I had to do tonnes of research because I knew nothing about the topic. It took a long time and eventually I ranked the site. But over time, other more passionate people took first place on Google, because they were genuinely passionate about their topic.
An Un-Tapped Niche
Finding an untapped niche for blogging is tough these days. There’s a lot of competition in most areas. Your best bet is to find a keyword which is somehow linked to your passion and which you’re able to rank for. This might be a challenge and you’ll need to work hard at creating content for it.But you can give yourself a head start by doing your research first, before you start out.
Finding your topic should be your primary concern. Once you decide what you would most like to write and create content on, you can start doing some keyword research. There’s lots of keyword tools available online and some of them are free. You can use Google’s free keyword planner as a start if you don’t want to pay. Type in your main keywords, in the area you are thinking of.
You should get a bunch of keyword come up in the planner. Then compare the monthly searches for the keywords agains their competition on Google. See micro niche blog ideas for a breakdown of how this is done. Ideally, you want to find a keyword which has monthly searches and low competition on Googles search results.
Best Micro Niche For Blogging – Ikigai
Ikigai is a Japanese term which means “reason for being”. If you can find the areas of your life which you’re passionate about, and which also you can earn from, it’s likely to be your “ikigai”. The best micro niche for blogging should relate to your own personal ikigai.
Many people segregate their lives into earning money, to do what they enjoy and they jump between the two. But if you find your ikigai, you can do both simultaneously.
A blog should represent your ikigai in some way. If you blog just for the money, eventually you’ll come up against a conflict. If you blog just for the passion, you’ll eventually have to go back to another unfulfilling job. Finding a happy medium between the two means you’ll be able to write about what you love, and make a living from your blog too!
Balancing Your Why With Making Money From Your Micro Niche Site
Blogging is definitely a slow method of generating traffic and sales online. So if you’re going to start a blog, it’s well worth laying down the foundations which will help you rank a site. This means building a site on some good keywords. Building a niche site to get traffic is only part of the process of course too. You also need to “convert” your traffic into leads and make sales to monetise.
This means you need to carefully balance your ikigai (passion and purpose) with a topic which reflects your products and/or service. The content I create links to affiliate marketing mentors, online business tools and various related products and services.
If my blog was about mushroom harvesting, I probably wouldn’t sell any products and so would soon have to go back to working in a job! So the best micro niche site for blogging isn’t simply one which gets traffic, or one which you love writing on; it’s both! For that reason, nobody can tell you which is the best micro niche for blogging.
Take a look at micro niche blog ideas for a basic keyword targeting strategy which I’ve used to build a number of micro niche sites.
There are many problems with affiliate marketing, and making money from it is not as easy as it can sound. One of the main problems is that those who wish to sell you courses, can offer a biased view of it, and how “easy” it is! That’s because even if an affiliate is being honest and genuine in their copy, they still really want a sale!
Google, of course is on to this. There’s been huge changes in Google algorithms which reflect their distain for many affiliates who spam the internet with their links, without giving any actual value in their copy. Algorithms are much cleverer now than they were in the past. Google can see many factors which relate to content, and rank or demote it accordingly.
This of course causes untold problems for affiliate marketers who are attempting to get traffic the old-fashioned way – free! Free traffic is a huge problem for affiliate marketers.
Getting Traffic To Your Affiliate Offers
Getting traffic to your affiliate offers is perhaps the biggest problem for affiliates. Either you pay for traffic and risk capital, or you work hard at getting traffic from the organic searches. Either way, it’s a risk you take and there’s no reward for trying! As an affiliate marketer you only get paid for sales. So you can work for a long time without any results.
Getting traffic from the organic search engines is something many affiliates start out with as a strategy. It’s free after all, right? But there’s another cost in using this strategy and it’s time and frustration! You can work hard for months and years and still get it wrong. Even with traffic to your blog or website, you still have to convert that traffic into sales; which brings more problems with affiliate marketing. Get the wrong kind of traffic and you could have wasted your time. Traffic needs to be well targeted to your buyer audience, or you won’t make sales. See why targeted traffic is important.
Of course the long term goal is financial freedom. This is something affiliate marketing can deliver. But in many cases, affiliates will give up long before they have figured out a strategy which can deliver this. Organic traffic too is slow. It will take considerably long to build a good stream of traffic and sales from organics than from paid marketing. You can’t scale up organic traffic in the same way either; so if you hit upon a good strategy, it’s difficult to scale.
Problems With Affiliate Marketing – Not All Doom And Gloom
But it’s not all doom and gloom. If you never give up with affiliate marketing, and keep going no matter what, your chances of succeeding rise dramatically! But that’s quite difficult if you’re giving up your precious time every day and are also holding down a job and bringing up a family.
When I started out doing affiliate marketing, I took many courses and tried many strategies. Checkout my article digital profit course review where I share some of my experiences. I was tempted to throw my laptop through the window on more than one occasion. Affiliate marketing can be very frustrating. There’s lots to learn and if you’re desperate for success, this can make it all the more difficult to keep your head and be patient. See 23 affiliate mistakes newbies should avoid.
Yes there’s many problems with affiliate marketing. If you’ve tried and failed as an affiliate, you’re probably aware of many of them. The main problem I see with affiliate marketing is that it’s performance based pay. But, this is also the main benefit too!
Problems With Affiliate Marketing – Performance Related Pay
Performance related pay means you don’t get paid unless you start making progress and actually sell affiliate products. But this is a massive plus when you discover how to make sales, and start to see a good return on investment. If you are making sales through organic traffic, you don’t even pay for advertising, bar the cost of a website and hosting. Or better still you use a free social media account such as Facebook or YouTube. If that’s the case, you get 100% profit and there’s very few costs involved.
Paid marketing is much faster than working away at an organic strategy. Plus you can scale up quickly with paid strategies. But you can still fail over and over again before you succeed. Failing is indeed what is needed as an affiliate. “Failing forwards” is a term I heard in the community I am now a member of (see video series on this website).
It’s hard to fail forwards when you’ve no money for paid adverts, or time for organic content. But the main job of affiliate marketers is to test strategies, fail, and keep trying out new stuff. Keep going long enough, and eventually you’ll find a strategy which works. Once you you do, you can rinse and repeat. The long term benefit of this is free money, or an easily scalable income and a completely free and flexible lifestyle.
What stands between an affiliate and this goal is the journey they take, their own particular mindset and mental baggage and any other obstacles which can be physical, financial or mental. See also what psychological factors limit the growth of a business.
Why Do Many Affiliates Fail?
Affiliate marketing is a business model which is in demand. Anyone with a laptop and internet connection can learn how to become an affiliate. Anyone with a website, can join an affiliate program, grab a banner and put it on their website. Hey presto – they’re an affiliate marketer! It’s an massively accessible business model which has super low barriers to entry. A normal business wouldn’t attract so many people because there are far too many costs involved.
However, this also means there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. Only around 3% of affiliates who attempt to build an online business will see it through and become successful. Why is this such a small figure? Partly this is because many who attempt it aren’t prepared for what is ahead. They see it as an “easy win”. Once they are confronted with the truth, they quit rather than stick it out.
There’s also a lot of conflicting information on the internet. Who do you trust when you’re sitting in your pyjamas by the telly? It’s almost impossible to know the difference between the charlatans and the real mentors in the online world. When you get burned a few times, you lose interest in trying. You become risk averse and you decide affiliate marketing is not for you!
Rabbit Holes In Affiliate Marketing
Yes there’s many rabbit holes with affiliate marketing. I’ve fallen into quite a few! In the early days of affiliate marketing, I was convinced I would rank around 20 websites for their keywords – just by throwing them up! I followed an organic strategy I had learned on a course. None of my websites worked, bar one, and I spent months on them. The one site which did work was called tedssheds.net and I sold a digital product (shed plans from Clickbank) from it. It was exciting but the success was limited to one sale. I eventually let the site go, since it proved unprofitable over a few years.
Each little success such as ranking a website, making a single sale, kept me going though. Even through the difficult times, I was certain I didn’t want the jobs which I was doing; HGV driving, office jobs, and basically employment alternatives. I kept building sites which made little or no money, and I wrote thousands of articles which got lost in the black hole of the internet and produced little or no results. I gave up more than once!
But, little by little things started working. I took something from every little victory, and each “failure”. If I had been working at a strategy for over 6 months with very little results, I would consider changing tactics. But the key is to never quit! Ultimately it took finding the help of affiliate marketing mentors to turn my affiliate career around. I would recommend doing the same! Good luck on your affiliate journey and remember it’s up to you!
You can join an online community through this website. Just sign up to the free video series on the side (or below) of this article.
What psychological factors limit the growth of a business? For a while now I’ve been contemplating an article on the psychology of business growth and factors which stand in its way. I’ve been involved in online business for a while now and have had a fair share of struggle too. Plus, I’ve always had an interest in self development for a number of years, and of psychology.
So it seemed a good idea to combine two of my favourite topics: affiliate marketing (online business) and psychology. So what psychological factors limit the growth of a business? Here’s a few of the things which I have personally discovered regarding my own personal journey.
What Psychological Factors Limit The Growth Of A Business? Needing To Be “Right”
You’ve probably seen the TV program which is hosted by Gordon Ramsey “Hotel Hell”. If not, it’s a very telling overview of this topic. Gordon comes into a hotel or restaurant establishment where the person in charge is ‘stuck in their ways’. They have become so stubborn and ‘set’ that they refuse to see the light even when a top chef and hotelier is telling them as it is. Swearing and abuse aside, it’s a very good watch, or maybe that’s because of the swearing!
Wanting to be “right” is definitely something I’ve personally experienced in my online business journey too. In fact, I have become so stuck in doing things “my way” that I suffered for it for several years. In my defence, I was attempting to build an online business by blogging which I knew was a long term strategy. But when I was able to let go of “being right” about my strategy, I was able to apply other, more effective strategies and get faster results.
However, nothing is guaranteed in the online world. It is after all a business and not a hobby. Which leads nicely to another subject – mindset. Knowing when you have lost your way is a good thing, even if it hurts your pride. And taking advise it tough for entrepreneurs who want to be “the boss”. However, if your need to be right outweighs your desire to succeed, you have a problem, especially when you don’t recognise it.
What Psychological Factors Limit The Growth Of A Business? How You “See” Your Business
Whether you think of your business as a job, hobby or passion will have an effect on its outcome. Do you see yourself as “playing” in your business to keep yourself entertained? Or are you serious about using it as a tool for financial and time freedom? What does your business mean to you, really? If you’re using it to keep busy and “buoy up” your self image to “show off” or big up your ego to your friends, you’re probably seeing the results on your bottom line as a reflection of this.
A business owner must have a long term view of their business and be able to see a ‘vision’ of where it is going. If they don’t, they will likely get caught up in low impact actions which don’t drive their business forwards. Often this might be things they enjoy rather than are really needed. I’ve definitely fallen into this trap. This happens especially if someone is transitioning from an employment into a business. In employment, you’re paid the same amount however productive you are. In business this isn’t the case. So habits you take from a job don’t necessarily apply to an online business for instance.
Dwell in the long term outcome you want from your business and then use the outcome to inspire a daily plan which is aligned with that goal. If you haven’t set a goal for your business, it’s likely you won’t hit it!
Psychology And Your Business – Self Image
Yes self image is massive in your business growth. Unless you’re growing, chances are good that your business isn’t either. Your business can’t outgrow the thinking you are bringing to it. So you will always be the glass ceiling of a business you own and run.
Are you putting yourself in the company of other more successful business owners? Or are you struggling on alone amidst the complainers and moaners who secretly want you to quit (more on this later). How do you see yourself, honestly? Are you secretly quitting in your mind, or do you see yourself as a success? What tired thoughts dominate your mind when you are feeling up against it? Do they outnumber the positive encouraging ones?
How do you feel in groups of people and how do you talk about yourself when meeting new people? All of these interactions can say something about how you perceive yourself, which in turn is going to, in some way, determine your results in life.
See Psycho-Cybernetics for a good resource on developing the self image.
Psychology In Business – You And Your Peer Group
Peer groups are another useful indicator for your business. Ideally, you would surround yourself with a number of positive people who are doing much better than you are in business. They would be encouraging and helpful and give you something to aspire to. But in reality, we often have a mix of people around us who offer differing levels of help and support.
There’s a common thread which says you can tell how much someone earns by the average income of their closest circle of friends. “Birds of a feather, flock together”.
Your group of friends is therefore pretty important to the success, or lack of, of your business. If you are surrounded with others who don’t want you to succeed, your journey will be that much harder. Why don’t your friends and family want you to succeed? For a few reasons. Often your success will change the status quo and your status among your friendship group. This will be felt by those around you not as something to celebrate, but as a sign they are falling backwards! So even if on the surface they are with you, secretly they can be trying to undermine your efforts and get you to quit. That way, it’s much easier for them.
Ideally, find a group of people who want the same as you and hang around them; not the doubters and haters who want you to quit. If you’re worried about losing friends if your business succeeds, consider what kind of friends they actually are if they don’t continue to support you!
Childhood And Your “Money Blueprint”
A list of limiting factors in creating more abundance and wealth wouldn’t be complete without a mention of your childhood and “money blueprint”. Everyone has a past which isn’t necessarily supportive of their new goals. Particularly if someone has never had much success before, it can be difficult to overcome the many internal conversations which don’t support your new outlook towards money, income and wealth.
Just think back to the many discussions, arguments or conflicts which you may have been privy to as a child. What did your parents think about money, spending and saving, for example? How did they talk to you about money? Did they agree about money issues or was there a conflict between them? It’s possible your life is a result of attempting to resolve your parents’ conflicts around money, particularly if you’re struggling yourself in this regard.
It’s also possible to take unhelpful behaviour patterns from childhood which once worked to gain attention from a parent, but which no longer work as an adult in business. One example of this is a “poor me” control drama which works as a child but as an adult it stifles your growth. You’ll actively create problems and limitation to give more weight to your “oh dear poor me” persona. Look for ways you relate to others and how much you complain to notice this trait.
Unconscious Beliefs Around Success
As a child, you don’t get to stand up for what you believe in. All that information just goes straight in to your subconscious mind and this becomes your money “blueprint”. So if your parents had beliefs about money and income which were not very supportive, this could have affected your subconscious beliefs about money and income.
For example, many people pick up beliefs such as:
Money doesn’t grow on trees
Rich people are greedy
You just need ‘enough’ to get buy
Money isn’t important
Work for love and not money
If a parent has “installed” an idea in your mind about money, it’s very difficult to get past it if you don’t want to be judged (in their mind) as “greedy”, for example. Trying to please a parent might just be the barrier to your business growth if this is going on.
What Psychological Factors Limit The Growth Of A Business? – Fear Of Success
Fear of success is a big factor in curbing your own business unconsciously. Perhaps you’re worried about a large tax bill? More money equals more worries? Or maybe you’re thinking about all the responsibilities you’re projecting into the future if you start doing really well? I was definitely worried about tax implications until I started learning about tax laws and caught up with by book keeping.
If you’re anything like I was, the thought of more tax dealings and keeping up with added book-keeping was a huge factor which kept me from moving forwards with my online business. I got some good advice from the online community I am part of and also spoke to my accountant who gave me some great advice. Just having some more information gave me the confidence to overcome a lot of fears around this subject. (You can join an online business community by signing up on this site for the free video series. See affiliate marketing mentors for more info.)
Internal Conflicts Around Money And Success
Here’s another very subtle key to why your business might not be growing at the rate you truly desire. If you in any way are envious or disparaging towards those with money, or wealth, you could be sabotaging your own success.
If you’ve never had money or success, you can carry some negative ideas about those who have had and particularly those who display their success. The first time I owned a BMW car I noticed quite a lot of anger and resentment coming my way. It was harder getting out of junctions and I received some unpleasant attention. I had only bought the thing second hand and it soon dawned on me how expensive it was to run! But it was a glimpse into some people’s attitude towards those with money. I have to say I’ve had my moments of envying those who have done well too.
But by carrying resentment towards success, you set up a blockage towards your own success. How can you strive towards attaining something you despise?
General Outlook on Life
What’s your general outlook on life and the world? Do you have an optimistic outlook? Or do you see the world as doomed to self destruction. This is something I recently uncovered about my own personality. I had a fatalist personality in that, I pretty much expected bad things to happen not good. This trait isn’t great for a business because you can’t fail to include your overall outlook in the workings of your mind. And if you mind is somehow involved in your business (which it is), you’ll create what you expect.
Two attractive forces which are mentioned in several books on the law of attraction (see law of attraction pdf for a few of my favourite books on this subject) are that which we expect and that which we desire. If these two forces aren’t aligned, and if we really want to succeed, but really expect to fail, we’ll work against our best efforts to prove our deep seated view and model of the world.
Old 9 To 5 Mentality
Many would-be entrepreneurs look to building an online business as a means to escape 9 to 5 life. Unfortunately many of them bring their 9 to 5 mentality with them. With a regular job you get paid for just turning up. A 9 to 5 can teach you a number of bad habits. For example, on the tough days in a 9 to 5 job you can avoid work as much as possible. You still get paid even for a sloppy job. So long as you don’t get caught slacking off it’s no big deal. This can train you to be unproductive and take your pay check for granted. An online business requires a different approach.
With an online business your earnings are in your hands. You must take full responsibility for your income or lack of it. If you don’t accomplish much your pay reflects this. So check your mindset when it comes to working. You’ve got to be far more productive in an online business or you won’t get paid at all. Make sure you are focused on money producing activities and not being a busy fool: working on actions which you prefer rather than those which pay.
Did I Miss Anything?
I hope this article has given you a few insights to what psychological factors limit the growth of a business? Please leave a comment or share the post. If you’re interested in learning how to start an online business from scratch, please sign up for the free video series on this website.
What is six figure mentors? The Six Figure Mentors is a company built by Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek which helps people learn the skills to build online businesses, even without any experience.
Stuart and Jay have created an online community of mentors who help others learn the digital skills to build either an online digital business, or use those skills to build other businesses.
What Is Six Figure Mentors? My Story
When I joined the Six Figure Mentors, I had my own business and I wanted some help with my marketing. I also was intrigued by the online business system which is offered through the SFM.
The Six Figure Mentors offers a range of digital business services, software and training, including one to one tuition and mentorship at the higher levels of membership.
At the basic level membership, you can earn commissions from promoting The SFM itself, or benefit from the online community and support network that Stuart and Jay have built. This can be useful for business owners and budding entrepreneurs. For me, it helped me understand and build my fledgling martial arts school with various online marketing techniques.
Since then, I’ve also been able to make a number of high ticket sales through promoting The SFM program itself, something which I was unable to do for a number of years attempting affiliate marketing with low value products.
What Is The Six Figure Mentors? The Community
Online training and support for entrepreneurs
Unlike the many other affiliate courses I had taken previously, The Six Figure Mentors are actually a real company and run real live seminars throughout the world.
I met Stuart and Jay on a training event in London and they’re real people!
Here’s a picture of me with Jay:
Who Are The Six Figure Mentors For?
The Six Figure Mentors are definitely not for those who want to ‘give it a go’! If you think you’re in this camp, this company is most definitely not for you. More than 90% of business owners fail and quit within the first year of their online business. Only something like 3% actually make it through and build a successful online business.
The Six Figure Mentors offer the software, training and support to make this a real opportunity for those who have no idea how to start an online business, but want to escape their current lives through earning online.
Even with no technical experience, or business experience, anyone can be successful online if they have the desire to succeed and the right mental attitude. Previously, building an online business has been out of the remit of most people. 20 years ago you needed more technical experience and know-how for it to be even a possibility.
Stuart and Jay have done a lot of the work for you in this respect. Take a look at the video below (click on image) to see how the software can make things much easier for building a website, for example.
Who’s A Member Of The SFM?
The SFM has thousands of members worldwide who are building successful online businesses.
From teachers and engineers to HGV drivers and office workers, The SFM offers the ability to work from anywhere in the world, and build a business using many different online marketing strategies.
One of the main things that attracted me to The SFM was the ability to work under my own steam and in my own way. An online business gives you the ability to work in many different ways, and operate your business from anywhere, while working around current commitments.
You can also build your business around existing employment too, which makes it an attractive proposition to those who are unhappy in their work or worried about retirement.
You can access a free video series by signing up on this website (below or by the side of this article). You’ll get a video each day directly to your inbox from Stuart and Jay! Feel free to email me back with any questions and I’ll get back to you.
