AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How To Rank An Affiliate Website

Wondering how to rank an affiliate website? Whether you can rank an affiliate site or not will depend on a couple of main things:

The search competition for the keyword or phrase you’re targeting
How much time and effort you’re prepared to put in

Before going after a keyword domain name and building your site around it, it’s worth doing your research first. Will your site even have a chance of ranking at the top of Google? If not, it’s really not worth putting in months of effort just to see it fail. Of course Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo are also search engines too! Don’t they get a say? Most of the search traffic comes from Google, but yes you will get some traffic from other search engines too. And often with a lot less effort than with Google!

It’s worth mentioning that a keyword targeted domain name isn’t the be-all, end-all of building a niche site that ranks. But it can help to give you site a slight advantage.

How To Rank An Affiliate Website – Research

Before building an affiliate website it’s worth doing some research. (See keyword research for niche sites). You’ll want your topic to have enough monthly searches to make it worth your while. Ideally, choose a topic which is close to your heart. That way, you’ll be able to build a lot of content around your niche.

Choose something which you at least have an interest in. There’s nothing worse than building a site around a topic you have zero affection for. Remember you’ll be spending a lot of time creating content to rank your affiliate site. So you better make it enjoyable. See also highest paying affiliate niches for viable topics which are more likely to money.

I made the mistake of building a site around a topic I had no interest in. I was determined to rank a site and earn affiliate commissions from it. So I chose the topic of garlic harvesting after a fellow affiliate told me he had some success from a potato themed site! I got creative with my keyword research and came up with Whentoharvestgarlic.com.

I did rank my site after spending several months on it, but it was hard to monetise and I had to research every article I wrote, which wasn’t fun. After a few months I was burned out and didn’t want to work on it any more. It quickly fell off the search rankings and disappeared!

How To Rank An Affiliate Website – Competition

Choosing a topic is the hardest thing when it comes to ranking an affiliate website. With a competitive topic, such as affiliate marketing, you’ll have your work cut out. It’s tough in a competitive niche.

Expect a long road if you choose a topic which is competitive. On the other hand, less competitive niches (such as mushroom harvesting) are harder to monetise and aren’t evergreen. An evergreen niche will have traffic all year round. Whereas a topic like garlic harvesting is seasonal. So half the year you won’t even get any traffic!

Once you have chosen a topic to build a site around, use Google’s keyword planner to choose a keyword which is suitable. You can pick a domain name with your keyword in it. I have had some success with this strategy although it’s not entirely necessary. Google uses multiple data points to decide where to rank a site; a keyword in the domain name is just one of them. As to how much weight they put on it is anyone’s guess. I’m guessing very little but it can make a difference.

Ideally you want a keyword which gets traffic (use Google’s keyword planner) and has fewer competing websites/pages than most.

Purchase Your Domain Name & Hosting

Once you’ve picked out a suitable keyword, buy your domain name (with keyword in it) and build your site. I use WordPress to build my niche sites. Get an SEO plugin (I use Yoast SEO) and start creating content.

To find keyword ideas for your content go to your original “seed” keyword which you used to build your site. Type your keyword into the planner and you should see a bunch of other related keywords. Write content for each of these keywords in turn. Ideally, pick out those keywords which offer the least competition first. To find which these are, look at them on a normal Google search and under a phrase match for the same keywords (see image above and below).

The number you see below your search bar should give you some idea of the relative competition for these keywords. You’ll also be able to scroll down and see the kinds of websites and content which rank for these terms. As you do more of this, you’ll get a better feel for what works and what doesn’t. But it’s not an exact science and sometimes it’s just a little trial and error.

Ideally concentrate on writing great content. Try an outdo other content which is ranking highly. Google likes good content. If you spam your site full of affiliate links, don’t expect Google to look kindly on you. Ideally, leave your affiliate links off until you start generating some traction. Focus on providing value rather than selling your affiliate products.

Back linking To Your Content

Google uses a large number of data points to determine whether or not to rank a site. By choosing your keyword carefully before you start out, you’re giving yourself the best possible chance based on lower levels of competition. But this isn’t a fool proof strategy and you’ll still need to create some good content and build your site out.

If you concentrate on building good content, you’re also giving your site a better chance. Don’t rush content because it’s the next most important thing after your chosen topic/keywords. Use an SEO plugin to help you write content which is SEO friendly.

Build backlinks to your content from other satellite websites, article submission sites and through posting links on social media. You can also use Postplanner to automate submissions on social media. Nextscripts is another cool plugin which automatically shares your content throughout your social media sites when you post a new piece of content on your site.

It’s also worth using a social media share plugin, so people can easily share your content when they find it.

Keep Building

Depending on your chosen keyword, the relative competition and how hard and long you work at this strategy for, you can get some traffic developing within a few months. Don’t expect miracles though and expect to keep working for the longer term if you want to generate a healthy stream of traffic.

Work on link building and on content marketing every day for several months. Over time you should see some traffic. Turn traffic into leads with a good benefit driven lead magnet and then turn your leads into customers with a good email marketing strategy.

Think long term and keep going. That’s how to rank an affiliate website!

Alternatives To Amazon Affiliate Program

Alternatives to Amazon: affiliate program. There are many. Clickbank is an online digital product emporium. JVZoo offers multiple products you can sell as an affiliate and Click2Sell.com is another online affiliate platform which anyone can use. Amazon doesn’t offer the best commission rates either, as many affiliates are aware. They pay their affiliates between 3% and 11% commission. This is much less than many other programs which offer digital product commissions at 40% and above.

Of course Amazon’s program covers millions of products and Amazon is a household name. As such it’s got a lot of buyer confidence. It’s a good place to start for affiliates because it offers so much variety. I use Amazon’s affiliate program too, but I don’t earn much from it.

Digital products can be harder to sell for affiliates, even though they typically pay larger commissions. With Amazon, you know what you’re getting. But for the affiliate, Amazon’s not the best. Not really.

Alternatives To Amazon’s Affiliate Program

One of the main problems with Amazon’s affiliate program is the low value of the products and the low commission structure. With low payouts, it can be difficult to generate any traction with your affiliate links. You have to rely on cheap or free marketing strategies which generate traffic. The margin for profit is just far too low to use paid marketing unless you’re some kind of marketing genius!

So this limits you to building content and attempting to rank a website, or building video content and going for a ranking YouTube video. This can take a really long time too. So if you’re not happy to build content for months on end with no financial reward, you’re probably looking for another strategy besides Amazon.

Using paid marketing is the best strategy to generate traction online. You’ll need a high ticket sales funnel in order to make this a viable option. Without high commissions or high valued products, or both, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and still be profitable. See highest paying affiliate programs list for programs to use with paid marketing.

Alternative To Amazon Affiliate Program – Recurring Commission

One of the best ways to build an affiliate marketing business online is through the use of recurring commission affiliate programs. With a recurring program you can benefit from ongoing commissions from previous sales you have made. Examples of recurring commissions programs are membership products, training and education tools and software products.

Even with a $10 recurring monthly commission, you can build a substantial income from only a few sales. With 50 sales that’s $500 a month. 100 sales would give you $1000 a month from work you’ve already done. Compare this to the Amazon affiliate model. With Amazon, you’re not rewarded for ongoing sales through your affiliate links. You only get paid once, and then Amazon gets to keep the customer, for life.

But if you choose a program which rewards you for members on a recurring commission basis, you can earn a lot more for a similar amount of effort. Recurring commission programs offer one of the best alternatives to Amazon affiliate program. Amazon simply can’t compete since physical products can’t offer recurring commissions!

The SFM Digital Business System

The SFM digital business system offers multiple alternatives to Amazon affiliate program. From a product range you can position yourself to earn commissions on a range of digital products and earn a variety of different commission levels.

At the basic membership level (Mentors All In), you can earn 101% commission on sales of the Mentors All In Package as a reseller. You can also earn commissions based on other sales within the product range. (See chart below)

You can earn commissions in a number of ways according to your level of investment in the program:

Subscription products – earn recurring commissions based on members you have referred ($20 per month for each basic member)
Multi-tier commissions are available at partner level and you’ll earn $10 monthly on member sales made by your referrals, plus 10% commissions on the high ticket items your members sell
A product range and built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
High ticket items – high ticket products valued at $2500+ which also pay out 40% (according to your positioning).

At DEA (Digital Experts Academy) you can also earn the following commissions levels:

There’s also a number of trainings and products available to equip you with the skills needed to become an expert digital marketer along the way.

Why Digital Products Are Better

Digital products are far better than Amazon’s physical products for a number of reasons. Firstly, digital products offer far higher levels of commissions. Typically they will pay affiliates 40%+ on sales made compared to 3-11% through selling an Amazon product. Physical products carry more costs with them because they need to be manufactured and posted out. The manufacturer needs to make a profit as does the distributor (Amazon). So that leaves little left for the marketer/affiliate.

As already mentioned too, digital products can offer multiple payment strategies which physical products can’t. With certain recurring income affiliate programs, you still get paid months and years after making the original sale. Physical products simply can’t compete with this.

The best digital products to sell offer the greatest value. Mentorship programs and training and educational tools are often some of the priciest products on the internet. But they also offer the highest level of value. Wouldn’t you pay a high price to learn how to replace your income for the rest of your life? So would a lot of other people.

Learn more about how to build a profitable online business from anywhere. Access the free video series here.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives

If you’re struggling making money from Adsense, you may be looking for the best Google Adsense alternatives. When I started looking for way to earn online, I started out with Google’s Adsense program. The main problem I had was I just didn’t get enough traffic to make my efforts worthwhile.

Back in the early 2000’s I jumped from course to course learning various strategies to earn online. One of the courses I took was called The Keyword Academy which taught a Google Adsense strategy involving building content on a blog.

The strategy involved doing keyword research to find topics which were worth building content for. Some topics are hardly worth blogging for, since they don’t pay enough to make it worth your while. But other topics which pay more per click, are incredibly competitive.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives

So you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to earning revenue from Adsense! For example, clicks for “currency trading” are worth £11 in the UK on Adwords as per the Google’s keyword planner. As an Adsense user, you’ll get 51% or 68% revenue share of your advertising clicks. According to this article you’ll get 68% for content revenue share and 51% for search.

So, if you have a currency trading blog which is getting traffic (and that’s a challenge if you’re thinking of attempting it), you’ll earn £5.61 per click on search or £7.48 per click on content you own.

But that’s a site which is going to be really, really hard to get any traffic on because of the massive competition. With less competitive content, you’ll likely only earn cents/pennies on clicks, so again it’s often not worth the effort if you’re starting from scratch.

Just look at all the adverts for currency trading after a simple Google search for it too.

Not only is there massive competition for organic traffic (see the number at the top), but there’s also a huge number of advertisers bidding at the top of the page.

Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Less Competition

Going for less competition seems like a suitable alternative strategy. But when you do you’ll find your clicks are worth much less. Let’s choose a pretty low competition keyword such as “collage making”. A quick Google search shows that there’s no paid adverts running and much less competition than with the currency trading, which is to be expected.

So, with a long tail keyword, you could perhaps get some free traffic in this niche. But the problem then arises that you’ll only make a tiny amount for each advert click you receive. Even if you get your content ranking on Google, you’ll only make 68% of £0.77pence here in the UK. (See below). That’s £0.52 pence per click for content, £0.39 pence for search. So you’ll need a lot of traffic to make a living from such a site!

Best Google Adsense Alternatives – Affiliate Marketing

You’ve probably figured out that I’m not a massive fan of Google Adsense for generating income online. I did make some Adsense earnings after building hundreds of sites when I started out online several years ago. But I found another business model which seemed to work much better for me from the start. It’s called affiliate marketing and you’ve probably already heard of it.

An Adsense website can also be used for affiliate marketing too. Many Adsense users also use affiliate marketing for monetisation purposes. Affiliate marketing is better, in my opinion because you can earn a lot more and through using easier, better strategies.

Adsense is great if you’ve got a lot of traffic. But it majorly sucks if you don’t. And it’s really not working for the tiny income you’ll make from Adsense earnings; especially when Adsense can easily shut you down whenever it wants to as it did with a good friend of mine!

The other thing which affiliate marketing has over Adsense earnings is that there’s really only one way to earn from Adsense – through organic traffic. You obviously can’t pay for traffic because you won’t earn enough to cover your advertising. So you must earn traffic through building content and back links. This is incredibly difficult whether you’re using YouTube or Google to rank your content. You’ll need to be incredibly passionate about creating content over months and years to make any headway.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is A Better Alternative

Affiliate marketing offers a much better alternative to Adsense for a number of reasons. Firstly you can choose products and services which pay out much larger amounts that Adsense does. Ideally choose affiliate products which offer the following benefits:

Recurring commissions – why sell a product which only pays you once when there’s many which will give you the lifetime value of a customer?
High ticket commissions – With high value digital products you’ll make the most of your efforts with your online marketing strategies.
Multi-tier commissions – you can earn commissions based on sales made by other people you have referred to a company.
Lifetime value of a customer – affiliate companies like Amazon don’t offer you ongoing commissions from previously referred customers. But some companies do and also offer a product range. If your referral buys a product, even years after you’ve referred them, you get the credit.
A built in sales team – can help close sales on your behalf so you only need look after the front end marketing strategy you use.

See SFM Digital Business System for more on this.

Another reason this is a better alternative to Google Adsense is because you can also use a paid marketing strategy with a business model like this.

Scaling Of Affiliate Marketing Vs Scaling Adsense Model

With a business model like the one described above, it’s far easier to scale up your business to make more profit. Using a paid marketing strategy, you only need for your business to be profitable in order to start increasing your marketing budget and scaling up.

With the Adsense business model, of building more and more content, you can’t scale aggressively and you’re at the whim of Google’s organic results. However hard you work, your results will always be determined by whether Google ranks your content, and if they allow you to continue using their program!

Affiliate Marketing – Control

So with Adsense you’re kind of at the mercy of the big “G” in two ways:

They own the platform which pays you
They choose whether to rank you

You might even argue that Google’s interests may be contrary to yours, as an Adsense user.

You could say, their decisions determine whether, or how much you get paid too. And they can drop you whenever they what. With affiliate marketing though, you decide which products and services you want to market. You’re less obliged to a particular company or product with affiliate marketing.

Access Training & Resources

Anyone with a website can use affiliate marketing to monetise their blog. If you already have a lot of traffic, you should look for affiliate products and services which “marry” up with your content. Ideally look for products which would suit your website visitors. Build an email list from your website and promote your products and services through your list.

For more information about affiliate marketing, and for access to a digital product suite and an online training and education platform, click on the image below to access a free video series.

How To Make Money Online Internationally

Are you wondering how to make money online internationally? One of the most popular ways of making money over the internet is through affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products or service because you’ll use other people’s products.

By referring people to products and services on the internet, you can make money based on the things you sell. Affiliate marketers promote and sell products through a variety of strategies:

Creating content. Much like this article and leading website visitors to products and services they might find helpful.
Through email marketing. Building a list of email subscribers and promoting products to their subscribers.
Using paid marketing strategies to send people to products. (Directly or through an email marketing campaign).
Video marketing – YouTube’ers create and upload videos to YouTube to attract an audience and sell products/services
Social media platforms can also be used by affiliate marketers to build an audience and promote products.

How To Make Money Online Internationally – Affiliate Marketing

Are there other ways to make money online internationally? Yes there are of course. But affiliate marketing offers one of the most popular and best strategies for good reason. It works. The growth of digital shopping internationally far surpasses the traditional marketplace; which is declining as a result. Forecasts project e-commerce sales are expected to overtake in-store sales by 2024.

This offers affiliate marketers a growing opportunity to place themselves between a product and a customer. Anyone can now learn how to leverage the power of the internet to generate an income.

Because the internet is international, anyone can use their laptop to sell affiliate products from anywhere globally. It doesn’t matter where you live. Provided that you have a laptop and internet connection, you can become an affiliate marketer.

How To Make Money Online Internationally – Selling Products Online

Affiliate marketers sell all kinds of products in many different ways. Some affiliates sell products from Amazon. Others sell courses and software to help people build online businesses. Not all affiliate products are alike so choosing an affiliate product to sell is something to consider carefully.

For example, Amazon pays affiliates between 3-11% commissions on products they sell. Digital products, on the other hand pay much more; often between 40-60%. Then, there’s the commission structure to consider when becoming an affiliate too. With certain affiliate products you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales. These are products such as memberships and software products. See recurring income affiliate programs.

If you think affiliate marketing is oversaturated, you’d be wrong, simply because there’s so many avenues you can take as an affiliate.

Some of the best affiliate products offer multiple payout structures such as:

Recurring income – from memberships and software type products. (Often these kinds of products are used by business owners to help them run their businesses)
High commission affiliate products – (earn more per sale with high value digital trainings and mentorship programs). See high ticket affiliate marketing.
Multi-tier commissions – with multi tier commissions you can earn income from sales made by your referrals.
A built in sales team and range of digital products – Digital products typically pay much more to affiliates. Using one with a built in sales team means you can focus on front-end marketing rather than “selling”.

A product range and multiple earning strategies can give you a higher earning potential than a physical product which only pays you once. Amazon doesn’t offer affiliates the option to benefit from the lifetime value of a customer. The SFM Digital Business System, for example, does exactly that.

Making Money Through Automation

Automation is a big part of affiliate marketing. With countless products to choose from and multiple marketing strategies to use, there’s huge scope to make an online business an automated profit generating “machine”.

Selling other people’s products means you don’t have to personally handle products yourself. You also don’t need to even talk to customers. Affiliates can therefore concentrate their efforts on only the front end marketing strategies. They simply drive customers towards the relevant product/s for that particular customer.

With automated marketing strategies, an online business can grow well into six and seven figure incomes, given the right products and methods. Using paid marketing strategies, once you’re profitable using a sales funnel, you can increase your marketing budget and make more sales.

With content marketing strategies (e.g. this article), you’re leaving a digital “footprint” with each piece of content you create. This strategy takes longer to generate traction with than paid marketing. But over time and given the effort, you’ll start to see sales coming in. Your digital footprint should lead potential customers to the products they want and need. When you get this right, you’ll see automated sales coming in, from the work you’ve done previously.

Training & Support

Building an online business using the affiliate marketing model is not easy. It does take time and effort just like with a traditional business model. However, an online business model can run on autopilot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It uses no business premises and you don’t need any staff. As such, you can start an online business for much less than you would need to start a traditional business.

One of the best things you can invest in, with an online affiliate business is your knowledge. Like any skill, you get out what you put in. If you’re serious about investing in your future and getting the right tools, training and knowledge to learn affiliate marketing properly, access a free video series through this link.

Learning CPA Marketing From The Experts

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:

Age
Sex
Location
Interests
Connections
Income
Online browsing activities
Online buying activities
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:

Their likes/dislikes
Where they live in the world
Whether they are married/single
Do they have a family/children?
How old is your typical customer?
Do they have a pet?
Do they own their own house?
What’s their income bracket?
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.

Affiliate Marketing Gurus

Don’t believe the affiliate marketing gurus who say how easy it is to make money online – all you need do is buy their course right?!

It’s definitely not an easy thing to do. The “gurus” who “made it” often did so after many years of struggle, or even not at all, (if they’re liars)! I’m no guru, although I wanted to be one at one point. I followed many affiliate marketing gurus for years and took many courses. Checkout my digital profit course review which details some of the courses I took.

You’re likely to find many affiliate marketing guru’s on YouTube offering you great riches, often just for signing up! But the truth is there’s a lot of work involved in becoming successful as an affiliate marketer; which presumably is why you’re here? I mean to become successful, not for the “lots of work” part!

Affiliate Marketing Guru’s – Real Or Fake?

Finding a mentor, or “guru” isn’t easy. You need to find someone who will genuinely help you or at least point you in the right direction. The problem with YouTube, or anywhere online for that matter (as a source for guru’s), is that everyone is selling you something; even if it’s themselves.

Is someone genuinely offering help, or just trying to sell you something? Can you access help for free, and is cheap help good help? I’ve taken a lot of online courses which offered “get rich quick schemes”. You know the ones. The guru shows you how much they earn and tells you how you could be doing this too, right!

What they fail to show you is their advertising accounts which may show a massive investment of advertising dollars too! Their income may very well be a small fraction of their sales reports!

Affiliate Marketing Guru’s – Google Sniper

I bought George Browns’s Google Sniper 1.0 many years ago. This was a fairly cheap course (around $50 as I recall) which taught how to get your websites ranking on the search engines.

Of course along came Google updates Penguin and Panda and everything changed for affiliates. I’m not knocking this course, it did teach me some valuable strategies, but my sales on Clickbank didn’t look anything like George’s, even after months of hard work!

The main problem with courses like this one was lack of support. I wanted to make a living from the internet and back in the early 2000’s this was the only type of course I could find on earning online.

Pat Flynn is another affiliate marketing guru who I learned a similar strategy through. Pat has a huge following and I followed his niche website contest for some time; building niche websites attempting to rank them on Google. I think it was called niche site duel, or something like that. (Yep that’s it!)

The Keyword Academy – 11 Years Ago

A couple of online entrepreneurs called Mark and Court built the keyword academy several years ago. They taught how to use keyword research to find niche website ideas which could be monetised through Google’s Adsense program. Again, the strategy was to rank a site highly on Google’s search engines and place adverts on the content to make money.

I stuck at this for about a year before throwing it in! I think the company disappeared eventually. This thread in the Warrior Forum was all I could find that resembled the original keyword academy.

If anyone had any success with this strategy I’d love to hear from them. I know I didn’t and I created many websites using their system. Perhaps it took longer than I had expected. Anyway the fact that they’re no longer around probably answers that question!

The course had a monthly fee attached to it and I think I was a member for about a year. But I never made any money, perhaps a few pennies (cents) here and there but Adsense didn’t really work for me. You really need a lot of traffic to make it work and Google probably geared their algorithm away from content which was only geared to make money for the website owner.

Affiliate Marketing Gurus

Having followed many affiliate marketing gurus for several years I was becoming rather dismayed. I considered that maybe the only way to make money online was to build your own course and become the “guru” yourself.

After all, I’d spent a lot on these courses overall, but still wasn’t making any money online. Perhaps the gurus were fakers and knew their ideas didn’t work. They were just taking advantage of poor saps like me! Such were my levels of my scepticism!

A few years into my affiliate marketing journey, and after going through several courses and following their instructions, this guy popped up on my news feed while browsing Facebook.

I’d kind of had enough of “gurus” by this point but knew I had to keep going or I’d be stuck working crappy jobs forever. At the time I was a struggling stuntman and juggling multiple jobs in between stunt contracts. See my about me page.

But Stuart seemed genuine and so I signed up and bought his course.

The SFM Mentors

The SFM Mentors offers an education platform and online business community for budding entrepreneurs. It’s led by it’s two founders (affiliate marketing gurus you could say) Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek.

What’s different about The SFM Mentors is their dedication to their members and the levels of support offered through their program.

I was able to use an existing business model which is offered through their program. This strategy showed me some of the shortcomings of previous strategies I had relied on for years such as:

Relying on Google rankings and organic traffic to make affiliate sales
Building content relentlessly in the hope that “one day” it would get traction
Choosing low value affiliate products from programs like Amazon and eBay had huge limitations – both in earning potential and in marketing opportunities.

The SFM business model uses multiple earning strategies which can be used to generate income through an affiliate product range:

High ticket digital products – pay out the most (40%+ compared to 3-11% commissions for physical products)
Recurring commission affiliate products – keep paying for sales you made previously.
A range of products – not just a single product means you can earn for sales closed even years after your initial referral
Multi-tier commissions – earn commissions from sales made by your referrals (at higher levels of membership)
A built in sales team – closes sales on your behalf meaning you can focus on marketing rather than selling.

With a sales funnel like this one it opens up the possibilities to use paid marketing and scale up more quickly than with the painful organic strategies I had struggled at for years!

Affiliate Marketing Support

Affiliate marketing gurus Stuart and Jay have also built a huge global community where affiliates meet up and help each other learn affiliate marketing. One of the huge benefits of their community is the support which is in place for its members.

On an SFM meetup in Chester, UK with other members

Pre-pandemic, Stuart and Jay were organising live meetings around the world with their members. Here’s me and Jay Kubassek

Live Webinars And Q & A Seminars

With regular live webinars and online meetings, The SFM offers ongoing training and even 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and mentoring to its members.

During a live Q & A session with other mentors and entrepreneurs

Affiliate Marketing Gurus

If you’re looking for affiliate marketing gurus to follow, I would recommend Stuart and Jay if you’re serious about learning affiliate marketing. But don’t expect them to tell you it’s an easy thing to do!

It definitely isn’t easy and it does take time and effort to get any results with affiliate marketing. It took a long time for me to generate any traction online, even with affiliate marketing mentors to help.

If you’re interested in learning more about The SFM, you can access a free video series here or join their Mentors All In program to get started straight away.

Thanks for reading. Read more about me and my journey in my about me page

Affiliate Marketing Problems

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.

Google Sniper - George Brown — I wished my screenshots were like this after taking this course!

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:

Lack of focus – jumping around from one strategy to another without any continuity
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.
Shiny object syndrome – the next course always promised more than the last – so I was perpetually changing direction
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)
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.

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.

Affiliate help groups — At an SFM event in Chester in 2019

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.

me and Jay Kubassek — Me and Jay Kubassek at a London meeting in 2014

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.

During an affiliate marketing problem solving group

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:

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.
Recurring commission affiliate products let you earn ongoing commissions from previous sales.
A range of up-sells mean you can benefit from later sales purchased by your existing customers.
A built in sales team helps close sales on your behalf – even months or years after your initial referral
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!

niche blogging - affiliate marketing strategies

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.

Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF

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:

Recurring income – membership products and software products offer ongoing commissions if you choose recurring commission affiliate programs.
High ticket products pay up to 40% on products valued up to $20k+
If you choose a product range you benefit from ongoing sales to your existing customers
A built in sales team can close sales on your behalf.
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.

Affiliate Marketing PDF

In this affiliate marketing pdf, I’m going to share some of the main keys to affiliate marketing success. You can download this document here.

Affiliate marketing sounds simple, and really it should be: “Share other people’s products online and earn a commission based on the sale”.

But sadly affiliate marketing isn’t all that easy. In fact you can easily get lost down countless rabbit holes when learning affiliate marketing. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing too, and countless affiliate products you can choose from. So this little guide is a roadmap to hopefully help avoid some of the main problems I encountered during my affiliate journey of several years.

Affiliate Marketing PDF – Overwhelm

One of the main problems when you come to learn affiliate marketing is the sheer overwhelm of information. Countless affiliates will be trying to “help” you by selling you their products. When you start researching affiliate marketing your email inbox will be full of emails about various products and services available.

You must remember that these helpful affiliates are also on a commission. They’ll earn commissions from selling you their suggested products and services (as will I). So take your time, there’s really no countdown timer on those products and the price hasn’t really been slashed by 70%! Those “one time” offers will usually still be there if you don’t take them straight away!

Shiny object syndrome will also have you jumping from course to course. I did this too since each course offered an “easier” outcome at a better price. But once you find a course you like stick to it and keep going. Ideally join an online community where you can get 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and training.

Join A Community & Get Training

I struggled for years before finding an online community who could help me. A community of people who are ahead of you on the affiliate journey is worth its weight in gold. Going it alone is too hard, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing – which as a beginner you most definitely don’t!

Consider any other profession. You simply wouldn’t consider walking into a court room to defend a client without a huge amount of study as a lawyer (and passing your bar exam). Or performing surgery on a patient without first qualifying after 5 years of medical school. But unfortunately in affiliate marketing, there’s an assumption that anyone can throw up a website and suddenly start making heaps of cash for very little work!

Therefore it is your training which is the most valuable thing in your affiliate marketing career. Consider it the foundations of your “skyscraper”. If you’re only building a small shed, you won’t need such strong foundations. But if you are wanting to build a substantial income from your affiliate business, it’s worth getting your foundations right from the start.

Choosing Products To Sell

Not all affiliate products offer the same kinds of commissions to affiliate marketers. Amazon products for example pay affiliates 3-11% on a sale. Digital products pay 40-60% on average. So you can see there’s a huge difference here. There are also products which offer ongoing commissions too.

Subscription products and software type products offer affiliates the possibility to earn recurring commissions from each and every sale. High value products sell for over $1000 and many of these types of products are also digital so offer 40% commissions and above. See highest paying affiliate products list.

Some products offer a range of up-sells. This means if you refer a customer initially to the entry level products, you can benefit from sales made even years later to your existing customer. There’s also multi-tier affiliate products which reward affiliates for sales made by their referrals.

Given all this knowledge, would you still want to earn only 3-11% on a low cost physical product? Or would you look for digital products which paid more and offered other benefits such as recurring commissions, multi-tier commissions and high ticket commissions?

Affiliate Marketing PDF – The Sales Funnel

Once you have a sales funnel with your chosen products in it (start here), you can focus on promoting your funnel. There’s many ways to promote your products as an affiliate marketer. With a funnel, you send people to a landing page where you collect their email details. You then follow up with a number of automated emails promoting your affiliate products and building a relationship.

There’s other ways too of course. You can promote products directly through advertising and from a website. However, it’s far better to collect emails because this allows you to build a relationship and keep in touch with your subscribers.

From a website, you only have a small window of opportunity to make a sale. But once someone is on your email list, you can follow up with them over months and even years and decades. Someone can purchase from you years after they have signed up to your email list.

Promotion

Depending on your sales funnel you can promote your products in a number of different ways: blogging, video blogging, paid advertising, social media platforms and on an on. Ideally choose a strategy you can stick to depending on your own personal circumstances and the average value of a customer.

For example, if you can only make $100 per customer, it’s going to be much more difficult to monetise your business with paid marketing. The room for profit is quite tight. But with a high ticket sales funnel which contains large value items and recurring income products, it’s much easier to do so. Your personal circumstances will also dictate your marketing strategy to some extent too. If you’re very busy in a career, it’s going to be better to use paid marketing and use a high ticket sales funnel.

If you’re more time rich but purchasing such a funnel is out of your reach, free marketing strategies might be a better option.

Time Management Self Management & Despair

At some point you’re going to get pretty pissed off with your affiliate business! Things take time to get moving with affiliate marketing and results don’t show immediately. Usually there’s going to be a lot of work you’ll need to do before you start seeing the results you’re looking for. With free marketing strategies such as blogging this is all the more so.

You either spend time or money or both and often the light doesn’t appear (at the end of the tunnel) until you’re thoroughly hacked off. This is why you need to create good time management skills and develop a mindset of “whatever it takes”. If you start out looking for results before doing the work you can get disappointed and quit. Instead, create a positive feedback loop quickly by rewarding yourself for work done and even the smallest of successes.

Create habits on a daily basis which feed into your longer term goals. Take regular breaks and avoid burnout by paying attention to your mental state and looking after yourself.

You can download this affiliate marketing pdf here.

For further training and to join an all in one affiliate business system and community click here.

Clickbank Secrets PDF

The reason many affiliates are looking for Clickbank secrets pdf is not because they’re interested in the history of Clickbank. But I’m going to share anyway! ClickBank was founded in 1998 by Tim and Eileen Barber.

It has more than six-million clients worldwide and has become the 87th largest Internet retailer in North America. The company is a subsidiary of Keynetics Inc., one of Idaho’s largest privately held technology companies. For more on the history of Clickbank have a look at what Wikipedia has to say about it.

But you’re not here for the history of Clickbank. You want to know how to make money from Clickbank, don’t you?!

Clickbank Secrets PDF – Making Money

Clickbank is one of the main “go-to” affiliate banks for affiliate marketers, and for good reason. It has thousands of digital products and is one of the leading global retailers for digital products. There’s JVZoo and Click2Sell too, plus many others, but Clickbank is one of the first names you’ll hear as an affiliate. Just look at the categories you can choose from as a Clickbank affiliate. There’s thousands of products too so which one/s do you choose to promote as an affiliate marketer?

This is an important question because it will to some extent determine your success or failure in making money. Not all products are alike. Some offer more than others in terms of commissions and some simply won’t sell as well as others.

Let’s have a look at a product and some of the criteria for choosing products which sell the best.

Clickbank Secrets PDF – Using Gravity To Determine A Product’s Viability

Using the health and fitness niche, and sorting the results by gravity in the drop down box at the top, we see the following:

At the bottom of the listing you’ll see the figure for Gravity (or Grav: 523.94). Gravity refers to the number of active affiliates who are making sales of the listed product. Clickbank’s definition of Gravity is as follows:

Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by promoting the vendor’s products during the past 12 weeks. This is not an actual number of affiliates. For each affiliate an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 is added to the result, depending on when his/her last transaction occurred. More recent transactions are given a higher value.

However, just because a product has a high gravity figure doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth promoting. In general terms here’s the rule of thumb:

Don’t promote products with a gravity of less than 5 – these products may have a sales problem or too few affiliates have tried to sell them.
5-20 gravity – look at the activation date. A new product might become popular soon.
A “20” score for gravity shows a good product sales page
20-100 are the best products for you to promote
100+ don’t promote unless you’re ready to use PPC and spend heaps testing your adverts or have a huge following already.

CBEngine

One way to find products which are best sellers, offer recurring commissions or seem to be doing well is to use CBengine.com.

CBEgine is loaded with features which can help you choose a suitable product to sell. One feature which is useful is the recurring income products. With a recurring income affiliate program, you get paid over and over again. This is far better than earning only single commissions.

Clickbank Marketing – Selling Your Products

There’s a few ways you can sell Clickbank products as an affiliate marketer. You can create your own reviews of the products, build bonus features and write articles about the products. Some affiliates use PPC and spend huge amounts testing and measuring adverts to see what works.

This can get costly though so unless you’re a seasoned affiliate, it’s only worth doing this with proven products or a high value sales funnel. Expect to spend money while learning this, especially with lower valued products. Ideally use a recurring income product and high ticket items so you can more easily recoup your marketing budget.

Clickbank Secrets PDF – Free Marketing Strategies

With low value products from Clickbank it can be difficult to make a profit and use PPC (pay per click) marketing. So you can write product reviews or find other long tail keywords which are suitable for creating content around.

To do this, use Google’s keyword planner and type in your product name, or main keywords. You should find some long tail keywords which offer less competition than most on Google (or YouTube). Use these keywords to create your content.