Author: AffiliateMentor

Fancy learning CPA marketing from the experts? If you’re an affiliate marketer or have your own business, CPA marketing can help you grow your business exponentially. So what is CPA marketing? CPA stands for cost per action, or it can also mean cost per acquisition. With certain direct response marketing you only pay when someone clicks on your advert, or for a number of impressions shown to your audience.

This is very useful for marketers because they can control where their adverts show up. Ideally you only want your advert to show up for someone who is specifically targeted by you, according to your own specific criteria. This criteria will of course depend on your unique business, location and style of marketing.

For example, if you own a shoe shop in Greenwich, you might choose to only show your adverts to people who live in that specific town. People who live a long distance away, or even in another country are hardly likely to visit Greenwich just to buy shoes! So you’ll save money on your campaign by targeting those who are more likely to visit your shoe shop.

Learning CPA From The Experts

You might go another step too and target searches for “shoe shop” within your local area. You can do this through Google’s Adwords program or the formerly Bing ads (now Microsoft Advertising). CPA marketing goes beyond this too. Some CPA platforms can allow marketers to target their potential customers by:

1. Age
2. Sex
3. Location
4. Interests
5. Connections
6. Income
7. Online browsing activities
8. Online buying activities
9. and many other data points collected through online actions

Facebook, for example, gathers information on people through their likes, connections, interests, purchases, dislikes and posts. There’s huge amounts of data available through the platform dating back years. All this information can make advertisers jobs much easier. Used intelligently, this information can be harnessed through CPA marketing to find the perfect customers for your particular business or product.

Learning CPA From The Experts – Data Collection

Not only can online marketers control who sees their advertisements, but they can also collect their own data based on who clicks on their adverts and subsequently takes some action. An action could be signing up to an email list or making a purchase. When the marketer collects enough data on these kinds of actions over time, they are in a better position to determine what kinds of people are most likely to make a purchase, or opt-in to their email marketing list.

This is why tracking is such an important part of learning CPA. See also PPC affiliate marketing for beginners.

Many new businesses try CPA marketing on a platform such as Adwords, burn through some money and quit completely! They assume that their marketing efforts have failed. Or that perhaps the strategy doesn’t work. But this is a flawed view. They simply haven’t collected enough data yet or they made a mistake somewhere in their marketing campaign.

Starting Small & Collecting Data

When you start an advertising campaign using one of the many platforms, it’s advisable to start small if you don’t know what you’re doing. Doing so will ensure that your learning curve doesn’t involve massive losses and/or wasted impressions on your adverts to the wrong audience. It is likely to happen that you’ll make some mistakes.

If after a certain time your advertising isn’t generating any sales, you know to quit that particular campaign. This can be difficult in the first instance of learning CPA marketing; but think of it as a marathon rather than a sprint.

A good starting point is to use Google’s Adwords platform and create a specific keyword for your advert. The keyword you use will depend on your own particular business and service/product. Let’s use the previous example of owning a shoe shop in Greenwich.

Shoe Shop Example

Start out with Google’s free keyword planner tool and look for suitable keywords which relate to your shop and what you sell. Target only the country you are selling in, so as not to accidentally include other countries (and wasting money). If your business is global, you can of course ignore this and set location to all locations, removing any specific country.

“Shoe shop greenwich” is a suitable keyword for your store if this meets your criteria. It only gets 110 searches per month, but this is a suitable starting point. Next log in to your Adwords platform and build an advert which targets this specific keyword. Then, your advert should show up when someone targets your specified keyword.

Of course people in Greenwich probably won’t always type Greenwich along with their search. They will likely type in local shoe shop instead, or just “shoe shop”. Google, or their preferred search engine will give them local solutions automatically. But you can specify when creating your adverts to only show them within a certain radius of your shop. You can also create a radius targeting around your physical address, if you have one for your business.

Learning CPA marketing from the experts does take time and you need to experiment with a single platform until you become more familiar. Once you have run a few campaigns you can look at the data which should give you some insight into your perfect target market.

Look at the image below which shows some data on impressions of a campaign I’ve been running. As you can see, the higher age range shows a cheaper cost per lead. Hence, I’ve turned off the more expensive targeting and focused instead on the cheaper lead costs.

The more data you collect, the more you will see where your perfect customer “avatar” resides in terms of their demographics: age, location, marital status, etc.

The Customer Avatar – Your Perfect Customer

The customer avatar is the perfect customer who relates to your service or product the best. They are the people who will buy your products and become a lifetime fan! Defining your customer avatar can save you a huge amount of wasted effort when it comes to CPA because it will help you determine how to target your perfect audience in the best possible way.

Consider who your product/service serves the best. What are their problems, pains and frustrations which your product solves? As you get closer to understanding your perfect customer, you’ll be able to create your “customer avatar” and zone in on:

1. Their likes/dislikes
2. Where they live in the world
3. Whether they are married/single
4. Do they have a family/children?
5. How old is your typical customer?
6. Do they have a pet?
7. Do they own their own house?
8. What’s their income bracket?
9. And so on..

The more information you can gather on your customer avatar, the better able you will be to zone into them with your CPA marketing campaign.

Start Learning CPA Marketing & Build An Online Business

Whether you have your own business already, or want to build an online business from scratch, you can start learning marketing strategies through an online training and education platform and community.

You can start learning CPA marketing from the experts through an online business platform and training resource. Here’s me on a webinar masterminding with other marketers.

Learn how to market products and services through various online marketing strategies, including CPA, and join an online training and mentorship community.

Start learning CPA marketing from the experts. Access online digital training resource through this link.

You’ve probably encountered some affiliate marketing problems if you’ve been doing it for any length of time. When I started learning affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s, I encountered more than my fair share of them! I was originally trying to sell my own ebook and after struggling to make any sales. I realised that I wasn’t getting any traffic to my website. This, is a common problem for affiliates. No traffic = no sales!

So I put myself on one of those “earn money online” courses in an attempt to learn how to market my ebook. I quickly changed gear having found products which were far better than my ebook – and which would pay far more. This was just the beginning of my affiliate marketing problems!

Affiliate Marketing Problems

One of the first courses I took was by a guy called Peter Lexis. I promoted his online earning course after going though his training. You can read about some of the other courses I took over a period of a few years in my digital profit course review. It worked, and for the first time I thought I had “arrived” and was going to make it as an affiliate.

I ran an Adwords advert to a landing page where I used Peter’s video to promote his course. People signed up to an email list and entered into a series of emails which was about 10 emails long (1 per day).

I started making sales and was just about to increase my marketing budget when I got my Adwords account shut down! Back then it was pretty serious and I couldn’t get it back no matter how hard I tried. I was devastated; so I threw in the towel for a bit. But I knew that I had to keep going or I’d be stuck trading time for money forever!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Next Stop, Organic Traffic

After a while of working crappy jobs again, and getting the odd contract in TV and film, I started again. This time, since my Adwords account was shut down I choose another route; organic marketing. I joined a course called The Keyword Academy. They taught how to rank websites and make money through Google’s Adsense program.

The idea was to pick a niche and use a spreadsheet to determine the value of each click of your adverts within the niche. Then, according to the advertising value you can potentially obtain, and the relative competition of competing websites, you would make a decision to build a niche website. The Keyword Academy is no longer operating so don’t bother looking! Needless to say I spent a long time working on websites and got nowhere!

I did see some tiny revenue from my sites. But overall this was a dead loss. Google’s algorithm changes had a big effect on sites like these and most of my sites didn’t rank at all, much less make any money. I did spend several months on this strategy though. However, it’s difficult to maintain a strategy if you don’t fully believe in it. Support wasn’t a strong suit of courses back then. So once again I dropped off and had some time out!

George Brown – Google Sniper

George Brown’s Google Sniper 1.0 was one of the courses I bought and it was around $50 or so for access. I did learn a useful strategy here it has to be said. I went on to create several websites which ranked in the top of the search results for their main keywords.

Plus, I made some websites for people who benefitted from a high ranking. But these were mainly city based companies where the keywords contained the city name and main business keyword. Still, it’s a useful strategy which has benefitted me to this day.

I even built the website for my Kung Fu school using this tactic. Fortunately there’s little competition for a Kung Fu school in Bradford so it helped me pick up many students over the years.

But, I had hoped to rank a site and make affiliate commissions from Google Sniper. And since there was so much competition from Google, this was nearly impossible, or so I found anyway. I did make an affiliate sale from one of the sites I built called tedsheds.net – selling shed plans using a Clickbank affiliate product. However, I had no success like George seemed to have from his screenshots!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Support

Of of the main affiliate marketing problems is lack of support. What all these courses had in common was the level of support, or rather the lack of it. Despite attempting many strategies I was still pretty disappointed with my level of affiliate marketing success.

I had experience a lot of problems but had also made a lit of mistakes I wasn’t aware of in the beginning:

1. Lack of focus – jumping around from one strategy to another without any continuity
2. Being a busy fool – I would spend far too long on making websites look good rather than attracting traffic, for example. Or on the activities I enjoyed but weren’t profitable.
3. Shiny object syndrome – the next course always promised more than the last – so I was perpetually changing direction
4. Stuck in learning mode – I enjoyed watching videos and learning – but I was spending too little time on implementing the right strategies (lack of knowledge)
5. Lack of faith in what I was doing – because there was no support, I simply worked for months without getting any results and then lost faith in what I was doing.

See also 23 affiliate marketing mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.

Affiliate Marketing Mistakes – Getting Help

I had been at the affiliate marketing “business” for some time by this point, and in 2014 found another online course. By this time I was pretty burned out and very sceptical. This was to work against me too (being sceptical)! But I bit the bullet and bought another course. I was desperate and my working life was completely miserable as was my personal life. So I had a big reason to make it work!

I saw a video of the guy below, Stuart Ross and he struck a chord with what I was struggling with.

I joined The SFM Mentors in 2014 knowing near nothing about them. It was just on instinct and desperation. Despite being very sceptical, I knew I had to do something. Life had been getting me down and nothing seemed to work. I was juggling a number of jobs and attempting to build a career as a stunt performer. But I didn’t get enough work to meet the bills, whatever I seemed to do.

I got an invite to a meet up locally in the UK and was rather surprised to find real people at the event! I also went to a meeting organised by the founders Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek where I was able to meet the founders of the company Stuart and Jay.

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Support

The SFM Mentors offered something which most of the courses I took didn’t – support. I was able to connect with other affiliates and actually meet up in person for the first time ever. Plus, Stuart and Jay regularly hold webinars with their members offering support and advice.

What was most useful were some of the groups I was able to join through Facebook. Here’s a picture of one of the mastermind sessions where we discuss a number of affiliate marketing problems and can ask mentors for help.

Affiliate Marketing – Business Model

One of the biggest affiliate marketing problems I faced was choosing the wrong business model. I would use eBay and Amazon products which only paid out tiny commissions. Amazon’s commissions range from 3-11% for their affiliates. With digital products you can expect to earn 40%+ commissions on any products you sell.

My marketing method too was mostly blogging and writing articles. This strategy is incredibly time consuming and laborious. Having my Adwords account shut down led me to think I only had organic marketing left. But in fact there’s a few other marketing options I could have chosen.

The SFM Digital Business System has a number of advantages over most affiliate programs:

1. High ticket affiliate products mean you can earn more per sale, scale up more easily and access paid marketing platforms which are out of reach with low value products.
2. Recurring commission affiliate products let you earn ongoing commissions from previous sales.
3. A range of up-sells mean you can benefit from later sales purchased by your existing customers.
4. A built in sales team helps close sales on your behalf – even months or years after your initial referral
5. Multi-tier commissions let you earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.

Marketing Strategy

One of my biggest affiliate marketing problems was my marketing strategy. I wrote and wrote and wrote! But nothing happened, for years! That’s because my content wasn’t getting found. It was simply like throwing a business card into a well!

Blogging can work of course, but it’s definitely a slow strategy. Over time it compounds and the work you’ve done previously can add up to traffic, leads and sales. But you’ll usually only see slow progress unless you get a good link from a powerful influencer or site with a lot of traffic.

With a range of digital products though, there’s more advertising platforms available to you. Especially if you position yourself at the top tier of the business model and can benefit from high ticket commissions on the most expensive products.

Modelling Success – The End Of Your Affiliate Marketing Problems

Anyone can succeed at something given a proven roadmap and through taking the right steps and refusing to quit. Most people will quit affiliate marketing because they don’t get the results they want. See why affiliate marketing does not work. But in the early days, it’s all “feedback” and most feedback will be no sales. It just depends on how you take that feedback – as a challenge or a problem.

Only when you keep going through the difficulties will you see some results. Then, using pareto’s principle (the 80/20 rule), you can focus on what is working and drop the rest. At this stage you’re already well ahead, even with minimal results. When you have some positive feedback, you know what works. But until you get there it’s can be a hard uphill struggle.

To shortcut this process it’s a good idea to model success. To do this it’s worth investing in a mentor and a program which can help you learn and grow.

Access A Mentorship Program & Model Success

You can access a free video series to learn more about the SFM Mentors by clicking on the image below. You’ll meet one of my personal mentors Stuart Ross who will explain more about the digital business you can use to build an online income starting from scratch and with no prior experience.

In this affiliate marketing 101 pdf I’m going to share some of what (I consider to be) the most important aspects of affiliate marketing. Download this article on pdf format here.

Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and earn a commission based on the sales. There’s many ways for affiliates to do this. Some build websites, others spend money on advertising. Most affiliates have an email list and sell products through their list.

There’s many products which affiliates can choose from too. Some products are physical products, like you’d find on Amazon. Others are digital products which can be accessed from anywhere in the world from a laptop and given an internet connection. For the affiliate, choosing products and marketing strategies can seem simple. But that choice can result in success or failure. And your choices as an affiliate are pretty important and are built on your knowledge of the subject.

Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF – Building Foundations

Therefore knowledge is pretty important for the affiliate marketer. When I started out learning affiliate marketing I thought my enthusiasm would make up for my lack of knowledge! It didn’t sadly and I went through several years of struggling. I jumped from one course to another, never really getting anywhere. I was broke too which didn’t help and I avoided buying expensive courses and using paid marketing.

But the biggest thing going against the lonely affiliate is lack of knowledge – hands down. What you don’t know is always working against you, and as hard as you work, unless you’re following sound advice and a proven strategy, you can easily go down a rabbit hole and never get anywhere.

Think of your knowledge as an affiliate as your foundations. If you want to build a shed, or even a small cottage, you only need small foundations. But if you want to build a skyscraper, you wouldn’t use those same foundations. If you just want to place an affiliate banner on your website, and hope for the best, you might have a “shed”. But if you want to make a living from your affiliate business, you’ll need to put more work into building your foundations.

Affiliate Marketing 101 pdf – The Biggest Challenge

Anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing which is why the failure and drop out rate is so high. The barriers to entry are much lower than a traditional “bricks and mortar” type of business. You only really need your laptop and an internet connection to get started. I would also suggest purchasing an email autoresponder and getting training too as the bottom line of what you really need.

Once you’ve set up your sales funnel and have your products ready to sell with your affiliate links in place, you need to learn marketing. This is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even with a “done for you sales funnel“, marketing will be your biggest problem.

There’s many programs and courses which will give you all the tools and products you need. But it’s then your job to actually make it all work. And this means getting good at the marketing side of things. Your marketing strategy will depend on what you can afford to do and the time you have to do it. It will also depend on your aspirations for your affiliate business. So let’s have a look at what business models will allow you to do what kind of marketing.

Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF – Products

You can choose from thousands of products on the internet as an affiliate marketer. Some pay you only 1% commission! Others can offer up to 101%! Choose wisely! Physical products tend to pay out less in commissions. With a physical product you have manufacturing costs, postage and handling costs to consider.

With digital products, such as a video course, you’ve only got the costs such as website hosting. Delivery can be done digitally (over the internet). Manufacturing costs are minimal once the product is created and so costs for selling digital products are pretty negligible in comparison. As such, product owners can pass more of the profit to affiliates to encourage them to advertise those products and make sales.

What this means to you, the affiliate is that digital products pay more, a lot more. Certain digital products also offer other benefits too:

1. Recurring income – membership products and software products offer ongoing commissions if you choose recurring commission affiliate programs.
2. High ticket products pay up to 40% on products valued up to $20k+
3. If you choose a product range you benefit from ongoing sales to your existing customers
4. A built in sales team can close sales on your behalf.
5. Multi-tier commissions allow you to earn from sales made by your referrals

With a good sales funnel like this you can use pretty much any marketing strategy – according to the products you place in your “digital store”. At the highest level you can benefit from high ticket sales and multi-tier commissions. See SFM Digital Business System.

If, on the other hand your product range doesn’t include high value digital items, your choice of marketing strategies might be more limited.

Marketing Strategies

To drive qualified leads into your sales funnel you’ll need a marketing strategy. Blogging, paid marketing, social media marketing and video marketing are all forms of marketing. As an affiliate you’ll need to choose a strategy according to your own specific products or product range.

With low value products, like you’d find on Amazon, which only pay out 1-11% commissions; you’ll need a cheaper strategy. With a high ticket sales funnel (see below) you can use the more expensive advertising platforms such as YouTube for your marketing strategy.

Your Mindset

There’s a lot of things to navigate while learning affiliate marketing. There’ll be a lot of opportunity to doubt what you’re doing and of course quit too! When your friends and relatives are doubting you, and you’re doubting yourself, it’s easier to quit than carry on!

Ideally get yourself a mentor and surround yourself with other affiliates by joining a community and getting help. Other affiliates can help hold you accountable and keep you going when things get though, which they undoubtably will (get tough that is!).

Set goals to keep yourself moving forwards and celebrate the small wins. Don’t focus on things which frustrate you. Learn strategies which keep you buoyant and forward focused. Mental coping strategies are important for affiliates because they work by themselves for a lot of the time. It’s useful to set up positive habits which you can stick to even when you’re having a bad day.

For more help and advice and to join an online community and access an all in one business system click this link.

To download this affiliate marketing 101 pdf document click here.

Even the most lucrative affiliate programs won’t make you any money unless you sell the product. For beginner affiliates this can be especially hard. Struggling and not making sales is a common problem even with the best affiliate program you can find. But lets come back to the actual selling later. There’s a few strategies which the most lucrative affiliate programs share.

For starters look at the various commission structures which are paid to affiliates throughout the industry. Take a look at Amazon, for example. They pay only 1-11% commissions on their products. Most affiliates know this isn’t great. A low commission structure not only means a small payout, it also limits your marketing strategies.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – Digital

Digital products offer the most lucrative affiliate programs for a couple of reasons. They tend to pay out more than physical products – from 40%-100%. Digital products can do this because they’re not paying delivery or manufacturing costs. Once a product is made, it can be sold again and again. With physical products there’s more constraints: postage, handling, manufacturing etc.

But not all digital products are alike either. Some are “throwaway” courses which offer limited value. Clickbank is a favourite with many new affiliate marketers but Clickbank products often only lie in the $100 price range. Although this can be good with a high profit of 40%+, there’s other considerations with the most lucrative affiliate programs. Lifetime value of the product is one consideration.

If you’re only making a standard commission, that really doesn’t matter to you much. But if you can earn recurring commissions on subscriptions and membership products, it’s far more important.

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – Recurring Commissions

Recurring commissions are a huge key to making affiliate marketing pay. With only a few recurring commissions you can make far more than even with the highest value products (more on this later). Clickbank does offer products with recurring income. You’re better off choosing these kinds of products too. Why would you spend lots of time and energy only to make a single commission? Especially when a similar effort can make you a recurring income.

The best recurring income products to choose are those which offer huge value. Ideally choose products you would use yourself too and which offer a lifetime value to their customers. Online business tools are a good idea because successful businesses require software products which help them operate. Here’s a few online business tools which offer recurring income:

1. The Six Figure Mentors – Digital Online Business Mentorship Program.
2. Aweber – For email marketing
3. Leadpages- For custom landing pages
4. Get Response – Email marketing
5. Elegant Themes – WordPress website themes
6. Social Pilot – Social Media Tool
7. SEM Rush – SEO tool
8. Snip.ly – Conversion/opt-in tool
9. HostGator – Hosting provider
10. Shopify – Online Store Builder

Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs – High Ticket Products

High ticket products are obviously included in this list of most lucrative affiliate programs. A high ticket product is one with a large price tag – ideally over $500. With a $100 digital products you can earn $40 on a sale. But with a $1000 product you can earn $400 with the same level of commission. You might believe that it’s going to be much more difficult selling a high ticket products however. But remember that you have a global audience with digital products. The difference in work involved compared to profit will be minimal.

For the same profit, you would need to sell ten times that of the lower value product. It’s not ten times more difficult to sell a high ticket item online. Keeping in mind the earlier level of commissions comparing digital and physical products, it makes sense to also use digital products. However, there are physical products you can sell which are high ticket. Take a look at Hammacher Schlemmer. Some of their physical products value up to $190,000 and you can earn an 8% commission on that if you make the sale.

See also highest paying affiliate programs list.

Types Of Product & Market

But not everyone is in the market for a $190,000 flying hovercraft! I’d love one of them myself but sadly don’t have that kind of budget! The market for this kind of toy is smaller than for some other kinds of high ticket items. One of the biggest markets is for online business mentorship and training. There’s many more people who would pay to learn how to earn online and how to build a profitable business of their own.

If you consider the number of people hating their jobs and looking for an alternative, and compare this number with those looking for a flying hovercraft (or similar toy), there’s a huge difference. Online business mentorship is a growing industry too, which is why it can be one of the most lucrative niches online.

Multi-tier Sales

A multi-tier affiliate program offers to pay affiliates for the sales made by their referrals. This means as you bring people into a program, you can earn income based on their success. Multi-tier sales is another income stream you can benefit from once your online business is working well. See SFM Digital Business System.

The SFM Digital Business System has all of the benefits listed above: digital products, subscriptions products, high ticket products and also multi-tier sales. It offers one of the most lucrative business opportunities online. See SFM Mentors for more details.

Product Promotion & Marketing

Without a good promotion and marketing strategy, even the most lucrative affiliate program won’t make you any money. If cashflow is the “lifeblood” of an affiliate business, marketing is its “heartbeat”. Without a suitable marketing strategy, your business is doomed, even with the best most lucrative affiliate program there is!

How you decide to market your business will depend on your business system. With a low paying physical product from the likes of Amazon, for example, you’ll be severely limited to the marketing strategies you can employ. With a business system like that of The SFM Digital Business System, you’ll be able to use paid marketing more easily; especially if you invest in the top level products.

Take a look at the six figure (plus) funnel above. With a product range and high ticket items which payout up to 40% commission, you can use paid marketing strategies to drive leads into your funnel. When you can make an $8000 commission on a sale of a $20,000 product, you’re much more likely to be able to make a profit running paid advertising.

Compare this strategy to selling low value items from Amazon. A kitchen item worth $100/£100 would only make you around $8/£8.

Promotion Methods – Fast and Slow

To promote the product above from Amazon will be more difficult because you’ll struggle making a profit while running paid advertising. This means you’ll likely have to use other, cheaper or free strategies. This article, for example is a cheap marketing strategy. Blogging is also a slow process.

Paid marketing is much faster and much more scalable. So if you want an online business to be profitable quickly, expect to spent a lot of money initially. If, on the other hand you can’t afford the high value digital products, you may have to work a different strategy with your marketing.

Summary – Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs

To sum up the most lucrative affiliate programs offer one or all of the following:

1. Digital products – which pay more commission (Usually 40% compared to 3-11% for physical products)
2. Recurring income products – such as memberships, software and subscriptions. Recurring commissions may be small but they add up and give you an income rather than just a single “one-off” commission.
3. High ticket items – don’t go for cheap items because you’ll need to sell in hug quantities. Instead pick high value items and your efforts will go further in terms of income
4. Multi-tier sales – a multi-tier sale gives you a commission based on your referrals’ success promoting products from a range.

See SFM Digital Business System which contains all of the above and choose your membership commission level according to the level you can invest at.

How you market your product range is key. Without a good marketing strategy, even a highly lucrative business system like this one will fail to earn any money at all! Access a free video series to learn more about The SFM business, access a training and education platform and join an online community.