AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Online Business Mentor

Are you looking for an online business mentor? An online business mentor can help you build a long term, sustainable business from the internet. Ultimately though it comes down to you doing the work. A mentor can help you by giving you the tools and direction, and helping you uncover your own mental and psychological blocks to success.

In this article, I’m going to share some of my own journey to building an online business; and the insights I learned through finding an online business mentor of my own!

Online Business Mentor – Finding A Path

It took me a long time to find a path for a legitimate online business. I started out looking at Forex marketing and spent 2 years studying it.

Eventually I abandoned this and found an eBay business strategy which involved finding low cost items and selling them for profit. After a while of this I realised that it wasn’t going anywhere. I was spending a lot of time stuck to the computer and I decided there must be a better solution for an online business.

I turned back to the eBay business idea which I had found through purchasing an eBook from eBay. After writing a couple of my own ebooks I learned how to list an ebook on my own website but struggled selling any. So I looked for a marketing course and found affiliate marketing.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone earn commissions selling other people’s products online. I jumped from course to course with affiliate marketing looking for the easiest path. What I didn’t realise was that affiliate marketing isn’t easy! I needed an online business mentor, but instead got sucked into the frenzy there was over easy online cash back in the early 2000’s.

I spent a lot of time finding a path because there were so many. So many courses promised the world and didn’t deliver. But I was so busy jumping from one course to another, there was never any consistency in my actions.

It was nearly 5 years later when I actually found an online business mentor who gave me 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching.

Different Routes For Affiliate Marketing/Online Business

There’s many paths for online business. You can build a Shopify store, become an affiliate for Amazon or a million other affiliate programs. There’s plenty of ways to promote affiliate products too. You can become a blogger, create videos for YouTube or become a social media “influencer”.

Each course I bought into taught a different strategy and this was part of the problem.

Eventually I found a company called SFM mentors which is a company founded by affiliate marketers Jay Kubassek and Stuart Ross. Their company was different because I could actually meet the founders Stuart and Jay and met many of their members too. Previous companies and courses I took were not so accessible.

Digital Business System

The SFM Mentors offers a different business model than what most online business courses offer. The SFM digital business system has multiple earning strategies for their members:

Subscription commissions – continue to earn from ongoing subscriptions from each of your referrals
A range of products not just one – Having a number of products in a range and a built in sales team means you’ll be able to earn from the lifetime value of your referrals – both recurring membership commissions and “up-sells” – later purchases made by your existing referrals/customers.
High value commissions – with digital products within the SFM digital product range you can benefit from high levels of commissions – up to 101% commission on the All-In-One at the time of writing.
High ticket digital products – high value products give you multiple advantages over low value items.
Multi-tier sales – allow you to earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.

Online Business Mentor – Why You Need One

Despite having access to the digital business system listed above, I still had doubts and fears which held back my growth and that of my online business. Ultimately you are the vision and driver for your online business. Once you get stuck, it can be hard to overcome your own mental, emotional and psychological barriers to success. What psychological factors limit the growth of your business? And more importantly how can you overcome them?

A business can never outgrow the level of thinking a business owner brings to it. therefore if you have limiting beliefs about yourself or your business, it will undoubtably surface in some form within your business growth, or lack of it; or even in your personal life.

An online business mentor can help you become more aware of your limiting beliefs and psychological makeup which prevents you from moving forwards.

Here’s a few of my limiting ideas around this online business which stopped me from growing and growing my business:

What if it’s a scam – I would be promoting a scam?
Do I really want more money? – more money brings more problems
I’m comfortable being broke, maybe wealth isn’t for me?
I don’t want to put myself out there and be vulnerable for criticism
What if my work colleagues see me/my video?
What if the business folds after all my hard work?
Maybe I should focus on something else instead..
An on an on…

Once you can identify your limiting ideas, a good question to ask yourself is whether they are helping you build a profitable business or not. If the answer is no, you can be pretty sure that they are the main reason you’re not taking the right actions to move your business forward and become profitable. As you become more aware of your self talk, you’re in a better position to choose more empowering beliefs and thoughts and cast aside those which aren’t serving you or are sabotaging your success.

What A Mentor Can Help With

An online business mentor can help you see your own limitations and push you to grow both personally and professionally. one of the main problems with an online business is that it can be incredibly lonely. You’re mostly working alone and many well meaning friends and relatives would rather see you “safely” in a job which tortures your soul!

Your risk makes them feel uncomfortable and so they’ll try and bring you back into their safe version of the world. An online mentor knows what you’re striving for and why. They’ve already been through what you need to go through in order to grow and succeed.

Learn more about this online business system and mentorship program by meeting the founders. Click on the image below:

Stuart Ross Affiliate Marketing

If you’re looking for Stuart Ross affiliate marketing, I met Stuart Ross back in 2014 after joining his affiliate program. Back then I was a struggling affiliate marketer and found Stuart’s video while scrolling on Facebook. Here’s Stuart on the island of Mauritius shooting a video.

Stuart and co-founder Jay Kubassek created an affiliate marketing mentorship program known as The SFM or Six Figure Mentors. The program offers an all in one business system and training community. Anyone can access The SFM to learn more about affiliate marketing and earning an income online.

What is unique about The SFM is its community. Before joining the SFM I had gone through a number of other training programs to learn affiliate marketing. What was missing in them all was the community which the Stuart Ross affiliate marketing program (SFM) has developed over a number of years.

Stuart Ross’s Affiliate Marketing Community

stuart ross affiliate marketing — At an SFM meeting in Chester, UK

In the early 2000’s when I became interested in learning about affiliate marketing, there was little in the way of help available. After joining the SFM back in 2014 I was able to join a number of get together’s and meetings in the UK. I met another affiliate marketers for the very first time in the flesh! This gave me much more confidence in affiliate marketing and of course in the SFM business too. It made it more socially acceptable and real for me.

The SFM Business System

The SFM digital business system contains a number of earning strategies which any affiliate who joins the program can benefit from. The affiliate business model can be used in a number of ways and contains:

Membership products from which affiliates can earn residual (recurring) commissions
High ticket items which pay out upwards of $1000 per sale
A built in sales team – closing sales on the affiliate’s behalf
Multi-tier sales – commissions based on the sales made by your referrals are available at the top tier of the business structure
A product range also means you can benefit from purchases made later on in your own personal customers journey. As long as you referred a customer once, you can benefit from a lifetime of commissions based on their purchases.

Before I understood the power of this business strategy, I was struggling selling low value items from Amazon and eBay as an affiliate. As an example, Amazon typically pays affiliate’s 3-11% commissions based on their product sales. Digital products on the other hand pay much more: up to 101% in some cases.

Stuart Ross’s affiliate marketing company the SFM currently pays affiliate’s 101% commission on the entry level product of the Mentors All In product.

This is only possible to do because of the business system and range of digital products within the sales funnel offer through The SFM Mentors.

As an affiliate with The SFM you can also earn commissions on sales ranging up to $20,000. An essential member can earn the following levels of commissions having purchased the Mentors All In Package.

commission structure for essential membership — Commission structure for an essential membership

Regular Webinars & Seminars

Throughout my journey with The SFM over several years now I’ve had some ups and downs! It’s no easy feat building an online business – especially if you’re starting from scratch. But what The SFM gives you is the training, tools and community of support to help you should you choose this path. You’ll need to bring some stubborn determination and hard work to the table to make it work for you.

What’s most helpful about Stuart Ross’s community is the community which has built up to include many online webinars and seminars, and multiple Facebook groups which help members in all sorts of ways.

Should you decide to go “all in” as I have done, you’ll also be able to access personal mentors who offer 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching. This coaching has helped me most to see my own inner limitations and beliefs which have held me back on this journey.

These one to one sessions are also run by experts who have succeeded with their own 6 and even 7 figure businesses online. You’re learning from people who have already succeeded online. Jay and Stuart also show up for their members personally and have done for the last several years.

See also Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Program for more on this.

E Commerce Mentorship

E Commerce mentorship was something I needed back in early 2000’s, although I didn’t know it. I knew I wanted to be able to earn from the internet and be self employed; I just didn’t know how to go about it. After a couple of years learning Forex marketing and then running an eBay business for a while, I decided there had to be a better way.

I had bought an eBay business idea in an ebook format from eBay and thought back to this purchase. It was so simple: an automated downloadable product and checkout process. So I decided to create my own ebooks and sell them over the internet. After spending a lot of time creating my own ebooks I later realised I knew nothing about selling them online! D’oh!

E Commerce Mentorship

So I put myself on a few courses, an “e commerce mentorship” if you will! I jumped from one course to another looking for the “magic bullet” of internet success and wasted a huge amount of time. You can read about the various courses I took in my digital profit course review.

Most of the courses I took are now redundant and no longer operational. Some of them taught how to sell e commerce products and other taught other monetisation methods. Over a couple of years I had tried many different online earning strategies. The one which shone out the most was a business model called affiliate marketing.

E Commerce Mentorship – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an online business model which lets anyone sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. In my early days of learning affiliate marketing, I didn’t know which products to sell or how to sell them.

So I tried many different strategies and failed many times before something actually worked. Then I did more of what worked and abandoned the other activities which produced less of a desirable outcome.

The point of an e commerce mentorship is to shorten this learning curve so that you can get up and running with a profitable online business in a much shorter time. There’s many things which can go wrong with an affiliate business. I made a huge amount of mistakes and learned the hard way.

But most people don’t have years to waste learning the ropes with an online business. They want results fast so they can leave corporate careers, spend more time with their families or go travelling.

Affiliate Marketing Mentorship

By the time I found an affiliate marketing mentorship program, I was well into my affiliate journey. But the results were a long time in coming. I was still juggling multiple jobs and struggling with my affiliate business.

Despite my initial scepticism I decided I had no choice but to move forwards and take action on joining yet another program! If I didn’t, I knew I wasn’t going to change my life and the next 10 years would be the same as the last.

So I took the plunge and decided to start again from the beginning. Besides, what I thought I knew wasn’t getting me anywhere and I was still broke and desperate for success online. I started again with a company called SFM/ Mentors.

I was able to hook up with local groups near where I lived in the UK and they had a global community.

At an SFM meet up in Chester, UK (I’m in the red jacket)

E Commerce Mentorship

There’s a few reasons why it’s worth investing in an e commerce mentorship. Firstly it’s a tough business to crack on your own. As I learned it’s way too difficult without help. Secondly, there’s many routes to the outcome of having a profitable online business. The route you take will be specific to your own specific situation and circumstance. So there’s simply not a “one rule fits all” situation.

A mentor can help you decide which route is the best one for you. For example, if you’re a burned out executive, you’ll want to create an income as fast as possible to escape your corporate job. You won’t have time to invest but you will have a steady income from your corporate job. This situation is far different from someone who is stuck at home furloughed and looking for another stream of income, for example. Or someone who is working part time and wanting to build a low cost income from home.

Every situation is different and so you’ll need a different strategy according to your own needs. Investing $20k in a business just isn’t viable for everyone. But for some this can give them the best solution to their problems.

Business Models

Not all affiliate business models are alike. Some offer to pay you 3% commission and others will pay you 50% commissions. Certain products offer to pay recurring commissions for the lifetime of your customer. So you can see that choosing the right business model will have a huge impact on how successful you can become as an e commerce business owner.

In addition to this there’s also many ways to market an online business. Some affiliate marketers build content (like this article) and others run paid advertising. According to your individual circumstance you’ll need to choose a marketing strategy which is suitable for you.

The SFM business model offers multiple earning strategies for their affiliates:

Recurring income commissions from membership commissions
High ticket affiliate products paying 40%+ commissions on sales you make
A range of products with a built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf.
Multi-tier commissions let you earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals.
Training and mentorship including 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching (according to your level of investment)

Access Training

To learn more access a free video series by clicking on the image below.

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

I first found the Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition technique after joining a group of affiliate marketing mentors. Stuart’s book was called How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast! As a cynical Northerner (based in the UK) this seemed a little cheesy but it was a course requirement so I bought it.

I soon realised that this was the real deal! Stuart Lichtman had spent over 25 years developing a strategy to help people achieve the seemingly impossible. He had studied at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organisation development and cross cultural business.

After developing what Stuart Lichtman called his cybernetic transposition technique, he tested in on a group of 50,000 people. 81% achieved a seeming impossible goal on their first attempt. A bold claim?

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

So how does the Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition technique work then? Through his book you will encounter a number of exercises which Stuart calls the three step process. Firstly, you will focus in on what you really, really want to achieve. One of the main problems with goal setting is that you seldom know exactly what you really want. As time moves on, other goals take a more important role. Or competing parts of your mind get in the way of your achieving it; or unconscious habits.

Or perhaps you didn’t really want your goal badly enough to overcome all the things you’ll have to do to achieve it? This is often why people fail with goal setting. Either they don’t want something badly enough, or they don’t believe they can achieve something. Therefore they set a goal which is more easily achievable, but less desirable. So they don’t follow through because the goal isn’t that important to them anyway.

Stuart Lichtman’s three step process allows you to investigate what you really want and it does this by getting you to repeat your goal over and over. As you sound out and write out your goal, you’ll “tweak” it so that it’s more aligned with your inner values. It also needs to be a goal which is a 10/10 on desirability and a 10/10 on believability. If you don’t believe you can achieve something, you won’t fully commit to the process. Similarly, if you don’t really want it, you won’t follow through either.

Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition

Cybernetic – the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.

Transposition – transferring one thing to another

The Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition technique refers to transferring an old memory or achievement to one which is the desirable outcome. Old memories are hard wired into the brain and the unconscious mind. As you think of an old memory or something you have achieved, you can remind yourself of the sounds, sights, smells, emotions and feelings which accompanied all of those memories.

These are useful because they are the communications of the unconscious mind. Think about a dream you had. Dreams are usually in pictures, feelings, sounds and emotions. They aren’t in words! So using words as a means to communicate something important to the subconscious mind won’t be very powerful. You need to use feelings, smells, emotions and sounds to communicate an idea to the subconscious mind and for it to focus on that idea.

The Problem With Old Memories

Old memories aren’t always things you want to remember! So with the cybernetic transposition technique, Stuart Lichtman gets you to re-write your old memories so that they are more desirable.

Memories aren’t always 100% perfect and we often remember things how we want to rather than how they actually were. If you ask a number of people to describe a particular time or event, you’ll likely get a number of different and even conflicting responses.

So with the transposition technique you get to rewrite your history in a way which is much more desirable. Then, you use these already implanted images, emotions and sounds etc. into your new meta story.

What’s A Meta-Story

Your meta story then becomes your future goal or desirable outcome. By rewriting and rewriting over and over, you’ll get clearer on an outcome which is a 10/10 in desirability and a 10/10 in believability also. You’ll then use your old memory to implant the emotions which went along with your past achievement or event.

This, when repeated over and over, will tell your subconscious mind what to focus on. As your subconscious mind focuses on the outcome you want to achieve, it will come up with ways to do so which you may never have thought of.

For most people, me included, we are hardwired with negative repetitions from our childhoods. We tell ourselves old stories over and over which limit our lives. “I’m not good enough”, “Life’s a struggle”, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and so on.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could interrupt these old, negative stories of limitations and replace them instead with stories which hardwired us for abundance. Well we can! Stuart Lichtman’s Cybernetic Transposition does exactly that. You just need to do the work.

Creating A “Red Flag” For The Unconscious Mind

Have you noticed that when you buy a particular brand of car, you start seeing them everywhere. But before, you never even noticed them. This is an example of your mind focusing in on a particular thing. The same can be done with your unconscious mind through repetition of a meta story.

A meta story, as mentioned, is a rewritten scenario from your past, which is edited to be more aligned with the outcome you want – your goal. By re-rehearsing your meta story again and again, you are effectively creating a very specific target for your mind to focus on. So even when you’re not thinking about it (consciously), your subconscious mind is.

Most people will write their goals out and few times and then forget about them. This doesn’t work because your unconscious behaviours override your desire for your perfect outcome (the goal). With a meta story, you clearly communicate the desired outcome to the subconscious mind in pictures, smells, feelings and emotions.

When you do this enough, and continue to do it, the goal becomes your overriding target which sits in the background slowly but surely attracting you to it. It’s far more powerful than what most of us do with our goals: planning, struggling, working and doing things only on the outside of the equation. While you also need to do these things to achieve a particularly difficult goal or achievement, using the meta story and doing the invisible work in your mind is paramount to a successful outcome that you really want.

Access Stuart Lichtman’s book here.

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Program

I’m a member of the Six Figure Mentors affiliate program and joined the SFM in 2015. The SFM offer an all-in-one business system and training program for people who are serious about building an online business from scratch.

Before finding the Six Figure Mentors affiliate program I was already an affiliate marketer. However, I was struggling making a living online and came across a video of Stuart Ross while on Facebook. He seemed genuine to me so I clicked through and joined the community.

I was of course very sceptical of anything online. I had already purchased a number of online courses which taught me various strategies. See digital profit course review for the highlights. Despite this I still struggled online and was juggling a number of jobs to keep the money coming in.

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Program

Within a few months I had already made my first high ticket sale and this was largely due to my sponsor (the person who introduced me), creating an advertising co-op and helping me with the marketing.

I was also able to meet Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek at a meeting in London too. This had been impossible in all the courses I previously purchased. There just wasn’t the kind of help available back when I first started out. I realised that The SFM was something real as I’d never actually met company founders from the many courses I’d purchased previously.

I was also able to attend various local events and meet other members of the community. These events are held all over the world but for me, I was able to meet up with people near the north of England in Chester, Birmingham and also in London.

six figure mentors affilaite program — six figure mentors affiliate program – on a trip to Chester with the local community

Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Program

The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program offers a number of business systems which you can use to promote to generate an online income. Depending on your financial commitment, you can choose to use a range of products which pay out commissions from 40% to even 100% commission.

At the top tier of the program you can even benefit from 40% commission on products valued at $20,000. However, you’ll need to invest heavily in order to qualify for the largest levels of commission.

The product range offers a number of earning possibilities:

Subscription products – earn recurring income on membership products. Membership products are a game changer when earning online because you can earn residual commissions from each sale you make. This makes your efforts more sustainable.
A number of products in a range – having a product range gives you the potential to earn from your referrals even years after you introduce them. A built in sales team and system closes sales on your behalf, you only need to refer the original sale and you can benefit from lifetime commissions from your referrals, including any products they subsequently purchase at a later date.
Multi-tier sales – although this is only offered at partner level it means you’ll be able to earn from sales generated by your members.
High value digital products. Before finding the Mentors I was promoting small value products and hence why I struggled to earn online. With high value digital products you can earn 40% commission on products valued at $1000 to $20,000. This gives you much more scope for using various marketing strategies which are out of reach for cheaper, physical products.

The Community

What sets The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program apart from others is its community of members and carefully thought out mentorship program. After a bit of a struggle maintaining my sales through the SFM business, I became a little dismayed. I lost trust in the program and became sceptical of it. Negative comments about it being a scam from my email list knocked my confidence and because I hadn’t found my feet by then, it made me doubt the company.

This of course had a knock on effect in my actions and resulted in lack of sales. I almost quit and reached out to the community. I was put in touch with two community members who met up with me through online calls. They restored my faith and direction and I was pointed to Facebook group calls which I joined each week.

I’m sure I would have quit if it wasn’t for the community. Building an online business is tough. It’s not for the faint hearted and certainly not what I used to believe an online business was.

My view of an online business when I began online was that it was be an easy path to riches! I thought I could throw up a website and sit back while the money came in. But this definitely isn’t the case. Don’t join The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program on a whim. It takes some serious commitment if you’re going to make it work for you. But you can achieve some amazing results if you’re prepared to work hard and keep at it.

Recurring Income & High Ticket Sales

What many miss about an online business is the financial freedom it can offer you. I always had my eye on this prize! I just didn’t know what I needed to do until I joined the community and learned from the other members. There’s a lot of encouragement from members who have already achieved this result. This is what is needed for someone who is starting out.

It took me a long time to get traction with The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program but that was because of the actions I was (and wasn’t) taking. In the early days I was struggling because I was using only free marketing strategies. Many others were taking off much more quickly because they were using paid marketing and following community leaders. I had a few too many ideas of my own and this held me back.

Once I learned to let go of what I thought I knew and do the things I needed to do, things began to change for me. I started earning sales and residual commissions which came in every month. In 2020 I made a DEA sale and this gave me a huge boost in belief. Up to then I was still carrying scepticism and the smallest negative email would knock me back in terms of belief.

But this was a long path for me. I was determined to do things “my” way for a long time. But also my circumstances didn’t allow huge investment at first, so I stuck to organic marketing, which is much slower than paid strategies.

Who Is The SFM For?

The SFM offers a range of digital products anyone can use to build a recurring income online which can, over time, replace any existing income. But it’s not easy to build a business online. There’s lots of competition and it takes some hard work and determination to make it happen.

If you have a big enough “why”, you can make it work for you with persistence, if you stick at it and decide to never quit. But if you expect it to be an easy ride, don’t bother, it’s probably not for you!

If you’re interested in finding out more about The Six Figure Mentors affiliate program, you can access a free video series and meet my personal mentors Stuart and Jay by clicking the image below. Let me know if you sign up and I’ll be there to point you in the right direction!

Legit Online Business That Pays

I looked for a long time for a legit online business that pays out. After several years of jumping from one course to another, I eventually found an online community of entrepreneurs who helped me make a living online. Before that happened I tried many online strategies including an eBay business, Forex marketing, and even created my own ebooks to sell online.

But I didn’t have the money to trade with using Forex, the eBay business wasn’t going anywhere and I couldn’t sell my ebooks! I put myself on a marketing course which led me to another business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you get paid for recommending and selling other people’s products over the internet. Despite affiliate marketing being a legit online business that pays, for me it didn’t work at first. I tried all kinds of strategies but had problem after problem.

Legit Online Business That Pays

Affiliate marketing is the best business model I found. But there’s different ways of using affiliate marketing and many ways to do it. Amazon for example is an online shop which many are comfortable buying from. Did you know anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and recommend products from the site for a share of the profit?

Many affiliates start out by promoting products from the likes of Amazon – as I did. Unfortunately Amazon products aren’t the best for affiliates. Amazon pays its affiliates between 1% an 11% commission depending on the product sold. In comparison, many digital products like you’d find on Clickbank pay much more – between 40% and 60% commissions.

So obviously it’s better to promote the higher commission products. For what can amount to the same amount of work, you’ll get up to 60% commission on certain products compared to 1-11% on others. Why work hard making only smaller commissions? The answer is often a lack of knowledge. I spent years working away online promoting low value items and making very little. I could have spent that same time promoting larger value products which offered bigger commissions.

This is why knowledge is valuable in affiliate marketing.

Legit Online Business That Pays – Other Kinds Of Products

There’s other considerations too. With digital products you earn larger commissions because there’s less costs involved in manufacture and delivery. Digital products can be accessed over the internet with zero postage or handling costs. This makes them the perfect products for affiliate marketers.

Recurring income affiliate products are another game changer for affiliates. It took me a long time before I learned this valuable insight. Before I started promoting recurring income affiliate programs I would only get paid once for a sale. A recurring income program is something which offers a membership or some kind of software. Software products work well for affiliates if they make a single sale and keep earning for a lifetime from each customer they refer to a product.

Of course advertising is a consideration for affiliates. Many beginner affiliates quit because they don’t get any results in their affiliate businesses. They work at the wrong activities and don’t manage to make any sales. They assume that affiliate marketing does not work and so quit before they make any sales.

Marketing Your Affiliate Business

Marketing is one of the biggest obstacles for affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business. Unless you make sales, you don’t get paid at all! So marketing is an important skill which every affiliate will need to learn. There’s a couple of main ways to advertise your affiliate products and they can be divided into two main categories:

Running paid advertising – PPC pay per click/direct response marketing
Content marketing – like this article which is a “free” source of advertising, but takes time and effort to create.

For low cost items like a book on Amazon, for example, you can make a few cents/pence profit. This means that paid marketing is out. You can’t run a paid advertising campaign to a $10 product, make $0.10 in commissions and turn a profit. However, if you have a business model which gives you 40% commissions on products valued at over $1000, there’s much more scope for using paid advertising. With products which pay out $8000+ commission in your digital “shop”, you can even afford to make some mistakes while you’re learning! See SFM digital business system.

The SFM – Six Figure Mentors

I eventually found an online business system and community which helped me to build an income from the internet. In 2015 I saw a video on Facebook and signed up for a free video series. This led me to join the community which is known as SFM – The Six Figure Mentors, or “Mentors”.

The Mentors is an online training program and community which helps people from all walks of life learn the skills to build online businesses from scratch.

With affiliate marketing there is a lot to learn and it’s not an easy “get rich quick scheme”. It takes time to learn the skills to promote products over the internet. But with the right training and software, anyone can learn.

If you’re committed to the path of building an online business and don’t quit, getting the right help and advice, and the right product range can mean the difference between success and failure.

Here’s a picture of one of the online mentorship webinars I’ve attended during my SFM journey.

And here’s a picture of me with co-founder Jay Kubassek at a London event shortly after joining this community.

Learn more by accessing a free video series here.

Free Ebook Affiliate Marketing

You can download my free ebook affiliate marketing guide by clicking on the image below.

Affiliate marketing is a popular business model and can allow you to earn commissions by selling other people’s products over the internet.

After struggling with selling my own ebooks on a website, I decided to learn marketing and joined a course. This led me to affiliate marketing and I realised that selling my own ebooks wasn’t the best way to earn a living on the internet.

Free Ebook Affiliate Marketing

Although I like the autopilot ebook strategy, I learned that certain affiliate products would give me much more income from a sale than a single ebook sale ever could. One of the major keys to doing affiliate marketing well is to learn how to work smart, not just hard! In the early days I spent a lot of time on all the wrong actions. It got me nowhere!

In this article I’m going to share some of the main things which allowed me to turn affiliate marketing into a passive income. But in the early days I had a lot of problems. Here’s a quick run down of the main problems to avoid with affiliate marketing which I faced for years:

Shiny Object Syndrome – Looking for the “magic bullet” of affiliate marketing sorcery – jumping from course to course. (I did this for years)
Being a “Busy Fool” – Spending time on activities which aren’t important.
Trying to be perfect on the first attempt – imperfect action is better than perfect inaction
Procrastination – you’ll get frustrated and want to give up too. Just keep moving forward and taking small daily actions

Free Ebook Affiliate Marketing Guide

Besides having the right mindset and finding an affiliate mentor who can help you, it’s worth following the right path for you. Everyone comes to affiliate marketing from a different perspective. Someone in a corporate job, for example, will likely have considerably less time and more money than someone who is unemployed. As such they’ll experience affiliate marketing in totally different ways.

A corporate employee can spend money on marketing, they can invest in the best tools and training. While the person who is time rich by money poor will be less likely to be able to afford this.

Affiliate Marketing For The Time Poor

If you’re time poor and wanting to escape a career, you can build an online business very quickly if you’re prepared to invest. Invest in both affiliate products and marketing. With a large value affiliate product range, you can build an income through sales of:

With a good sales funnel like the one above, you can spend your time learning paid marketing strategies. When you have a profitable campaign you can increase your budget and scale up.

Affiliate Marketing For The Time Rich

If your circumstances are different you may not be able to afford to spend money on a sales funnel like this one. Even paying out for marketing might not be a viable option for you.

In this case, your best bet is to use products which offer recurring income but which you don’t need to purchase. Recurring commission affiliate products pay you over and over for each sale you make. They are a far better use of your time than low value physical products or single pay-out products which only reward you once.

Once you’ve chosen your product/s you’ll need to get people to them. Without paying for advertising you’ll need to create content. This can be done in various ways:

Blogging – create written content on a website
Video marketing – upload regular videos to YouTube and promote products from them
Social media – use social media platforms to create a following

Content Creation For The Affiliate

Creating content takes much longer than using paid marketing. With paid marketing, and the right kinds of products, you can be running a profitable business inside 6 months. With content marketing it can take much longer, years even.

This article for example is a piece of content marketing. If someone purchases something from me after reading this article, I’ll earn a commission on the sale. But content like this doesn’t usually get seen by huge amounts of people. I have to create a lot of content for people to start seeing my affiliate products on a regular basis.

Paid marketing on the other hand is much faster. I can run a paid advert and get content in front of people immediately. Of course it takes money to test and measure paid marketing. But once I see a profitable advert, I can leave it running and increase the budget – putting it in front of more people.

With content marketing this is much more difficult. in order to reach the same amount of people you need to create lots of content. Each piece of content needs to be promoted in order to get seen. Just creating content without marketing or sharing it is like putting up a gas station in the desert! Nobody sees your content unless you make the effort to advertise it.

Affiliate Marketing eBook

Are you looking for an affiliate marketing eBook? Before I found affiliate marketing I downloaded an eBook which taught me an eBay business strategy. I wanted to get on the other side of this transaction and sell my own ebooks online. But it’s not easy selling ebooks on your own website and, although I loved the idea of an autopilot ebook sale, I changed tactics to affiliate marketing.

Before I found affiliate marketing though, I spent a huge amount of time creating my own ebooks. In hindsight, this was a mistake. It’s much easier to use other people’s products to generate an income online. An ebook doesn’t sell for much either, and you still have to get people to come to your website in order to sell anything. So, it’s much better if you can sell an affiliate product which is worth much more than your ebook.

Affiliate Marketing Ebook

The ebook idea stuck with me though and I created a number of my own affiliate marketing ebooks to use a lead generation tools. Affiliate marketing is a great business model but however good your products are you still need to get people to see them. Getting website traffic and getting your message in front of people is the number one problem for all affiliates.

There’s several ways to get people to see your affiliate products:

Create content like this article, or video for example
Give away ebooks on your website – to get people onto your email list
Build a list of subscribers and deliver value while promoting your ebooks
Use paid marketing to direct people to your website or landing page

You can of course use a combination of marketing tools to build your source of traffic, leads and sales.

Blogging – Affiliate Tools & Strategies

One of my favourite tools for building traffic to my websites is blogging. Blogging is a long term strategy to build an audience who are interested in your affiliate products. It’s slow but it’s cheap. When I started out as an affiliate, I didn’t have a budget to use paid marketing, nor did I understand which products to use with paid marketing. So I blogged and blogged. It was fairly disappointing in the early days and it took a long time for anything to happen.

But as I persevered, I started seeing some traffic to my website. It was only a couple of visitors but it was something. So I carried on and stuck with it!

Over time I saw more visitors, some leads and eventually some sales too. So I carried on blogging! Blogging isn’t a fast strategy but it does work if you keep at it!

Faster Strategies For Building An Online Affiliate Business

Of course many people build profitable online business much faster by using paid marketing. Paid marketing is the best way to build an affiliate business. But you need to be careful too or you can end up blowing your marketing budget with nothing to show for it.

Paid marketing is expensive too, so unless you have a good business model, it can cost more than you’ll recoup in commissions. For example, you can’t really sell an ebook using paid marketing and recoup your marketing budget. Or, at least it will be very difficult. But with recurring income products and high value digital products it’s much more attainable.

Affiliate Marketing Ebook

As you can see, most of the affiliate marketing ebooks in this article are lead generation tools. You can subscribe to my email list and access all the ebooks on this page. The email list is a powerful tool for affiliate marketers. It allows affiliates to keep in touch with people who have visited their website and build a relationship.

One a website like this one, most people will only spend a few minutes browsing through an article. Once they leave the site, they are gone forever! However, if you can grab your visitor’s email details, you can continue sending them useful information via email and encourage them to look further into your products and services.

A website gives you an opportunity of a few minutes to sell something (an affiliate product). But once your website visitors opt in to your email marketing campaign, you can extend this time period to months, years and even decades!

So if you’re going to become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to build your own email list. You do this by offering something which is valuable and desirable to your audience.

Get Help

If you’re serious about building a long term sustainable affiliate business from scratch, get help. Seriously. I tried to build an affiliate business all by myself for several years and took many online courses. Until I found an online resource with mentors and coaches I struggled. You can access an all-in-one online business system and community of coaches and mentors by clicking on the image below. Access a free video series and learn more.

Residual Income Affiliate Programs

Yes, residual income affiliate programs are key to making affiliate marketing work. Without a residual income coming in month after month, it’s very difficult to get traction with an affiliate business.

Without residual income, you need to rely on selling products over and over again. This takes time to learn and there’s two main strategies for selling affiliate products: creating content or running paid advertising.

When you’re starting out, it’s doubly difficult because you’re probably working a job and juggling your affiliate business in your spare time. If not, and you’re time rich, you may be money poor. This could mean you’ll be relying on creating content for your marketing. This can take a long time and without a residual income product, a single sale doesn’t go very far.

Residual Income Affiliate Programs

With content marketing, sales can be sporadic. But if you’ve used a program which pays a recurring income, your income will compound over time.

Some of the best residual income affiliate programs are software tools which affiliates use themselves. This is because once someone starts having a successful affiliate business, they really can’t do without the software. They need it in order to keep their business alive.

Tools like autoresponders, hosting providers, SEO optimisation tools and training and mentoring programs fit into this category. Here’s a few of my favourites:

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

Residual Income Affiliate Programs – Other Considerations

Any program which offers residual income is far better than one which doesn’t. However, some affiliate programs pay far more than others too. For example, compare a high value digital mentoring course with a book from Amazon. One will cost only £10/$15 so you’ll only make a few cents/pence on the sale. Plus you’ll only earn the commission once. After that you need to sell another item and then another.

But with a high value digital course, you can earn up to 40% commission on a sale of a $10,000+ digital marketing mentorship course, for example, which also offers membership residual income.

As a new affiliate, it’s easy to latch on to doing something, anything, to get things going. But you can spend the same amount of time selling low value physical products which only pay a fraction of the larger value digital products; the same amount of time and effort for a much smaller reward!

Marketing Your Affiliate Program

How you bring your affiliate products to market is an important factor too. It’s not just about choosing the right products for the residual income and those products which you’re aligned with; but also about how you intend to put them in front of people and how you convey your messaging.

The two main marketing strategies fall into two categories: paid and free. Free marketing is usually done through content marketing of some kind. Create great content, build a list of fans and promote your products through your list. This takes time and a lot of patience. You need to be passionate about what you’re doing or you can easily burn out. The money is not a good enough reason for most, who drop out before they even reach 1000 subscribers.

Paid marketing is different because you can build your list very quickly if you have the money. However, you also need to consider the value of your products and your likely return on investment. Anyone with a large bank account can easily blow a fortune on paid marketing and sell nothing. Also, some products lend themselves to paid marketing more than others.

For example, if you’re selling cheap physical products from Amazon, it’s simply not a viable option to run YouTube or Facebook advertising and expect a profitable return.

Time Rich Or Time Poor?

Are you time rich or money rich? Or neither? Depending on your individual situation and circumstance, you’ll need to approach your affiliate marketing business in a different way. If you’re burned out working 60-70 hours a week in a corporate career, you can build an online business very quickly using paid marketing and purchasing some high ticket affiliate products to sell.

If you take the right steps and get the right help you can replace your income within a year. However, if you’re working a part time job and doing affiliate marketing on the side, you may not be as desperate. Perhaps you have the time to spend less and use your time to better effect through using cheaper and free marketing strategies such as blogging or building a YouTube channel.

Get Help

One of the first things you should do as an affiliate marketing is connect with other affiliates who are doing better than you are! It’s the same in all walks of life. If you want to excel at something, learn from people who are further ahead than you.

Affiliate marketing can be tough, especially in the beginning. You spend a lot of time doing many things which simply don’t work. It’s easy to see why so many people quit. But when you can get something working, it gets easier to make sales. Over time, if you stick at it for long enough, you’ll be making sales in your sleep and won’t even have to work anymore!

Access an online business community through this link and learn from people who are already full time entrepreneurs online.

Internet Marketing Mentor

Are you looking for an internet marketing mentor? Join a tribe of internet marketing coaches, teachers and mentors through an online business community here. You’ll also find an online business platform you can use to build an online business from scratch.

Internet Marketing Mentor

But, if you already have an existing business, an internet marketing mentor can help you overcome mental and technical barriers to building your business through online marketing too.

There’s many ways to use the internet to market a service, product or even someone else’s product. With affiliate marketing, affiliates promote and sell other people’s products for a share of the profits. An internet marketing mentor can make a huge difference to your business.

Growing Your Business

Which marketing is suitable for your business and how would you like to market it? Depending on your business model, you can use a variety of different techniques. Some businesses use free marketing and others use paid platforms.

Paid marketing is the best way to market a business because you can quickly find customers and build your business by scaling up your marketing budget over time. But there’s also other marketing strategies which are cheaper such as blogging and using the various social media marketing platforms.

It’s important to stick with a particular strategy for long enough to make it work for you. Once you’ve mastered a particular strategy you can move on to another and then another. Ideally, your marketing strategies will keep bringing new customers into your business and can be compounded on over time.

Marketing Strategies – Blogging

Blogging is a cheap strategies which many marketers use to build an organic presence on the internet. Over time, a good blogging strategy can help you acquire customers for free. However, blogging is definitely a longer term strategy than paid marketing. With blogging, you won’t see a huge impact immediately. It can take months and years to start seeing business growth from a blog.

But if you keep at it, blogging can be a great way to generate a market reach and build your business.

Marketing Strategies – PPC

Pay per click marketing is a form of direct response marketing which many businesses use to great effect. With a PPC marketing campaign, you run adverts and only pay when someone clicks on your advert. Over time, and by measuring the response of your campaigns, you can determine which adverts work best. Many businesses give up too early with PPC because they see only the cost involved. But if you measure your advertising and record how it affects your ability to acquire new customers, you can focus in on what works and make it more affordable.

Over time you’ll be able to automate the process and spend less than you make. Once an advertising campaign is profitable, it can be scaled up. You can also leave a profitable campaign running and move on to your next marketing strategy.

Internet Marketing Mentor – Social Media

There’s many social media platforms available for business owners too. Social media platforms offer both free and paid marketing options for marketers. Here’s a few platforms which business owners can use to build their businesses:

Pinterest
Facebook
Instagram
Linkedin
Twitter
YouTube
Tumblr

There’s literally hundreds of social media sites which can be used for marketing. Here’s some free traffic strategies you can use for your business.

Why A Marketing Mentor Is A Good Idea

A marketing mentor can help you navigate the many strategies to find new customers for your business – or even to start your own online business from scratch. Some people are way too busy with their business to learn how to do all the marketing. They would benefit from hiring the services of a marketing agency. But if you want to learn yourself, a mentor can help you with the various platforms.

Access a marketing mentors group here to learn the various marketing strategies.